Forced to take a "course" on agile. "Course" meaning 6-7 150 minutes sessions of uselss blabber. Fucking hell this is exactly like the worst of college courses.

Such a massive waste of time.

Giving my honest, somewhat filtered opinion in the dev group, I am in the minority it seems.

"But it's such a great opportunity!"
"<MANAGEMENT GUY> really pulled some strings to get us this course and I am fully confident in <MANAGEMENT GUY>'s criteria."

FFS, he's not in this chat. You won't get a raise by brown nosing him this hard you twit.

Mail: Meeting about new benefits from working at <COMPANY>. Estimate duration: 1 hour.

Me: Alright, I'll bite. Might even be something I can use.

HR person in said meeting: At <COMPANY> we'll reward you for being healthy by giving you a better life insurance.

Me: Sounds good and reasonable but you also said this didn't require a physical so how...?

HR: Install <APP> on your phone to keep track of all your healthy habits

Me: Wait wha-

HR: Generate our own brand of crypto currency by linking in all your other health apps like google health, and (lists 4 others), goes towards your life insurance and you can even donate water, food or books to the less fortunate! You DO want to help starving children, right?

At that point I just disconnected. I'm not paid to take part in a corporate crypto scheme.

Cake PHP's ORM is shit. SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT

People really don't understand what 'no strings attached means'. I've tried laying completely bare my thoughts about commitment and why it doesn't work (and won't work) for me at this point in time but people just pretend to understand only to start pestering me at work hours the next day.

What am I supposed to say? In what language? What's the key word I'm missing?.

Already hate everything about this job. Not even a week has passed.

PHP5, CakePHP 2, No git, no nothing.

First day at new job. It's literally meeting hell.
1 hour meeting followed by 1.5 hours meeting followed by lunch followed by 2.5 hours meeting.

Couldn't get anything done. About 15 minutes out of all those meetings combined was actually relevant to me.

Never had one of those but the teacher that was in charge of the Databases 101 course at my college was very memorable and supportive.

Got me through my graduate thesis and into a few gigs that gave me precious experience and confidence.

THIS SHIT IS NOT OKAY

What even happened to node 13? So many packages won't even install because of it.

Django's folder structure is garbage

How much does HR really believe in personality surveys?

How the hell does wikihow manage to eat all my ram to the point where nothing but a hard reset will get my pc working again?!

I fucking hate subscription services that start with a free month but still require you to input your credit card information.

"It's just so we can bill you for the following month! You can still cancel the subscription before the following date to not be billed anything."

No, there's no reason why you can't offer a free month WITHOUT having my credit card information. The REAL reason is because you're hoping I'll forget to cancel. Fucking predatory bullshit.

For the first time in over 5 years. I have updated my linkedin account. It was a soul-effacing task that drained most of my energy.

I even did some aptitude tests for the heck of it and somehow managed to get a badge for every one of them, despite how backwards, outdated and irrelevant some of the questions are.

Job posting: Backend Developer ruby-php
Question 1: Please describe your experience with Java and J2EE.

It's amazing how uncluttered you can make sites by just blocking elements from rendering.

If you're going to allow people to have bright yellow as a background color, at least make the text dark.

Example: https://devrant.com/rants/4663851

Stupid tab characters in excel sheet imports....

If I said I'd be available 3 specific days per week in a specific interval of time, don't flood my phone with messages in the other 4 days.

I don't care how messy and unorganized your processes are. You're paying a pittance so you're only getting 3 days per week support.

I finally understand what mobile first means in bootstrap/tailwind.
I feel dumb lol

I'm gonna decline the next time someone asks me "hop in chat with them" to discuss their stackoverflow problem.

I'd already given my two cents about the problem in question and I thought something was unclear about that so I say okay what the hell, made a chat room and invited him in.

Him: So I have this OTHER problem with [insert JS plugin]
Me: ... I don't know enough about it. I've used that specific plugin maybe once. The question I offered you my help with was PHP.
Him: Yeah but can you take a look really quick?
Me: I'd have to reread the documentation. I literally don't remember how to use it.
Him: No problem, here's the documentation. I want to do X, Y and Z.
Me: I don't think you can X without doing A and B first.
Him: I was told not to do A, so how can I do X, Y and Z?

Fucking hell I'm not gonna do your job for you. You know english. There is documentation available. Just read it and at least try things.

do GDPR compliance pop ups actually do anything?

When a website obstruct 70% of my screen with one of those I just remove the div element from the html and everything seems to work fine.

Some sites are so transparent with their sponsors. My browser is currently crashing a lot so I googled common fixes/suggestions, landed on a to-do-list kind of site.

"What to do if %BROWSER% keeps crashing?"

"Step 1: Install a bug free browser, like Opera!"

Symfony's book tutorials starts out way too invasive. For example:

Their CLI has a specific command for you to clone the book project's repository. This command won't run unless you have all their dependencies installed (including docker and yarn). In the end a good old fashioned git clone does the trick.

Next, before even writing a single loc, the book urges you to create a symfonycloud account and give them your credit card number.

Seriously what the hell.

Should I mail you a drop of my blood as well so you can check out my ancestry while I'm at it?

I wish some sites weren't designed "mobile-first" as in "fuck desktop users and people who don't want to bloat their systems with our app".

1 "Even though we divide our developers in cells (actual word used), our company's hierarchy is very horizontal."

2 "Sometimes we have to stay until later to get the job done"

3 "Covid has taught us that we shouldn't think of life and work as two separate things. They're one and the same"

4 "You can rack up points in the company to cash in for things like headphones!"

5 "We use this house as an office for our meetings. It's a big house."
----
1. That tells me you have no structure
2. Probably because you have no structure and you can't plan things out right.
3. you havin' a laugh? I'm all for not being a dick and socializing with colleagues every now and then but my free time is my own.
4. I'd rather you gave me more money.
5. Offices are a bit of a scam, but if you actually use a house as an office for a company that is supposed to have a presence in 3 different countries it makes me question how good you're doing at the moment.

---
I think I'm gonna pass if they don't ghost me.

Does anyone have a strong opinion (good or bad) towards CakePHP? Trying to learn new php frameworks and that one has popped in a few job ads.

SQL queries related questions in SO are so full of redundant LEFT JOINs.

Most of 2020 was a bad dev experience for me. I was paid to remake a system because it was

a ) insecure
b ) inconsistent
c ) hard to mantain (spaghetti code)

I thought I could focus on the backend and just reuse the front end but even that was unusable.

Basically had to redo it from scratch and since I made the fatal mistake of letting THEM estimate how long it would take, I worked most of the year instead of just 2-3 months.

Never again. After being done with the project I still had to be 'reachable' for the coming weeks if anything happened.

I turned off my phone during one weekend and then the next thing I know the only other dev at that small company is asking me for details on the project (meaning they just decided to offload everything to him). Never heard from them again and I'm hoping that won't change.

Beware small dev companies with less than 5 actual devs.

Best: Dev wise this year has been bad or not-bad but nothing 'great' comes to mind.

My fun times and enjoyments were not derived from dev activities.

Another year, another Advent of Code I drop halfway through.