Alright, I've got a confesstion. It's a confession and a question, combined, get it?

Anyway, I've been a happy Linux user for over 20 years now, and I've used all kinds of graphical envs, from tiling wms like dwm and xmonad (I didn't care for hyprland, sorry if that's weird) to full DEs like kde, cinnamon, gnome, etc.

The "question" here is why do people hate Gnome so much? It's the one environment that I keep coming back to, especially now that my main machine is a beast, and RAM usage is nary a concern. Even then, my system is sipping RAM compared to KDE (running two docker dev environments, three browser windows with several tabs - one of which is streaming music, slack, and steam is sitting on the fourth virtual desktop, chilling), and I'm still at just over 18 GB of ram.Being able to push one single key/key combo, and type anything at all that is vaguely relevant to what you want to accomplish, and having that thing be instantly available (including searching for individual files) is super nice. Easy virtual and multi monitor switching is intuitive; little to no effort needed.

Even when I want to do other stuff, like play a game, or edit a photo, video, or some of my shitty musical-aspirational material - GNU+Linux with Gnome has been and continues to be the easiest, most neato way to get shit done.

Why the hate, gnome haters? Maybe you’re using it wrong?

Fave languages and frameworks, go!

As of now for me, loving these:

PHP8 and Laravel with Livewire*, Django5.1, MariaDB. PHP must stand for PrettyHeckinPCoolasFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUU

*after using React and Vue for quite a while, I've concluded that the best front end is back end. And I like Postgres, I just find that MySQL is fine for most things.

Biggest interview of my entire life is coming up on Thursday. I really need this to go well - it's more than double my current salary, at a time where I'm really starting to struggle to make ends meet. There's an actual "team", and from my interactions with them over the last four interviews, I think they're cool people. It's still a little unusual, because although there's a team or cohort of seniors that I'd be joining, every senior developer is still somewhat siloed, leading their own juniors. I'd also get to be remote 75% of the time, which I think I've realized is a "must have" benefit.

I don't know if it's coincidental or just bad timing then that I've been having episodes of pretty intense vertigo and panic attacks far more frequently than normal lately - even before I had this interview lined up. I realized recently that I must have some kind of anxiety disorder. I don't know if that's from the military, or just from being fucked up via my own missteps. But I can't keep having these attacks.

Anyone who's willing to share - I don't really have anyone to ask. How do you deal with this type of thing? I went to see a shrink last year, but he just gave me pills that replaced these issues with others.

Maintaining shitty code is a lot like playing whack a mole. Fix one thing, something else breaks. I wish they'd just let me replace this garbage already. Could've been done by now.

https://shiftmag.dev/unhappy-develo...

Semi interesting read covering some of the data points gleaned from the last SO survey. I hadn't seen this.

Finally got the last round of god awful bugs in this god awful shit code fixed. I thought I could finally get back to working on the new build, but no. My reward is updating a god damn pdf, because none of the fucktards here know how. I have to work backwards through all kinds of pointless bullshit code that apparently generates it, all to find a mother fucking image that just needs to be replaced. Thanks a lot, to the tryhard motherfucker who wrote this code. I hope wherever you are, you're in complete agony.

Trying out Gnome again, because KDE is "just ok", and Hyprland and DWM are fine, but I wanted to try something different. (Actually DWM is amazing, and Hyprland is sorta weird?)

You know, it's not that bad. Doesn't even seem to be as memory crazy as everyone seems to say either...idk what I did, but it appears to be using around a GB, maybe a little less. Definitely not the experience I remember from the Gnome 2 days. Anyway, I was curious, so I was looking at the source on Github....and why the fuck is there javascript in this DE code? WHY. I do not understand.

Maybe I'm fucking nuts, but I actually kind of like the workflow, once I've applied a couple of "tweaks". But seriously, I am fucking gobsmacked at the JS thing. Why.

Our customers are fucking incredible QA Engineers, holy fuck tits. Every single day, some fucking fuckface finds a way to break this garbage can legacy application that I've spent the last year combing over and patching as I find problems or are otherwise made aware of them.

Honestly, I have some QA background myself, but these types of issues would just absolutely never in a bajillion shitting farting years occur to me to do.

They are masters of breaking shit, I am so FUCKING IMPRESSED. Almost as impressed that this application hasn't been replaced after ten years of bullshit, and that the two massive fucking retards that preceded me didn't just do it the right way by accident or fucking kill themselves out of shame.

In today's edition of "things that I don't see the point of", I've been looking at Obsidian today, after hearing more than one person say that it's great for note taking. I use IA Writer sometimes, and I enjoy it, and I was kind of expecting something similar, but more geared toward notes and development type stuff. There are some nice graph-visual type things, and the ability to hyperlink notes together. It seems nice.

So after using it for an hour, I have to wonder why I wouldn't just make a private git repo full of .md files, and save myself four bucks per month? I get my "private vault", vim keybinds, and all of that good stuff without getting another application. Not trying to shit all over obsidian, I know it has fans, but am I missing something?

I'm pretty familiar with SQL. It used to scare me, but now, years on, I'm super comfortable with it, and I don't really get why anyone would need anything else, generally speaking. Having said that, just tried to play with mongodb for a minute, and holy shit, that is some weird, weird stuff. I read all of the marketing fluff on the site, but I still am at a loss. Is it just that people don't want to be bothered to learn SQL syntax or use an ORM, or make a REST API, so they went off and created a weird JSON thing?

Not trying to be a douchebag, not trying to criticize. I honestly do not get it. Why does this exist?

Man it is nice to be back on Arch after 3-4 years. That install is way easier than I remember too. From USB to pretty much set up and ready to go in about 30 minutes is pretty amazing.

Every single stakeholder in my company tells me that I should be working on something different, every time I talk to them. For example - we've got some issues, that I've ranted on previously. I go to my manager, and tell him that it's going to take longer than I'd hoped, because the author of this part of the codebase wasn't familiar with functional programming or OOP, didn't document anything, and just generally produced an unmaintainable, borderline indescribable mess. The next guy after him made it all so much worse, because they're both a couple of tryhard douchebags, and I hope they fucking die. For real. I hope fire ants are involved.

Anyway, getting carried away there, whew. So I tell my manager that we'd be further ahead just replacing the code, because it's only doing a couple of things, and should not be so complex. He says "cool, but what you really need to be doing is rebuilding this other thing." So I switch gears and work on that other thing until I hit a point that requires the input of another stakeholder. I go to talk to this guy, and all hell breaks loose "why are you working on that, this is higher priority", and I explain the sequence of events. Manager denies having said what he said, I look like an asshole, yet again. Then the old "this should be simple, just change this" from the dudes who don't know code, and don't want to know. I try to explain, offer to show them precisely why their "simple ask" is anything but, but they just start screaming about how they hate technology. Yeah, well me fucking too. I keep hearing about how much "job security" I have, but man I'm going to lose my mind at this rate. I have seventeen motherfucking things that are "emergencies", and as many fucking dumb ass unintuitive workflows to go through to get them changed. All on production, because this place is fucking stupid. Just let me discard this shitty legacy code and be done with it already. FUCK.

Thank fucking fuck it's friday. In about six, seven hours, my goal is to be so fucking wasted that I can't feel my face. Get drunk, play with the dog, install a new distro on the desktop, maybe play a little guitar (the guitar is normal sized. It's not a ukulele or anything). Perfect friday night.

Current task:

Somehow, one of my predecessors made some sort of custom hook tied to woocommerce check out that pipes some data into a nightmarish spaghetti fuck pile of undocumented wild west visual basic bullshit. It does this, presumably, via a set of parameters passed as plaintext in a url. I know this because I found the singleton that declares this. Helpfully, Mr. Fuckass named the class "Default", so I only have around 30k instances being kicked back by my IDE when I search for it. The only reason I "need" to find this, is so that I can just change the button to an href pointing at my own MS for shipping, and I need to change the fifteen params being passed to just one - a customer ID, which should be stored in the session, and referenced by a cookie. Once that is done, I should be able to freely delete a couple of gigs worth of bullshit. Been stuck on this for three days now. God forbid we have a test environment or something.

I'm tired. Can't even get angry anymore really. Can't even think of anything funny to say about it either, I just can't wait until this is done and I can go back to sleep.

I was today years old when I learned about "shadow jobs". This is where companies list jobs without any intention of hiring anyone. You could also call them "fake jobs", or "lies". Why they do this is anyone's guess. Maybe they want to look like they're expanding for their investors or something. Maybe they're harvesting resumes to train AI. Maybe they're just bored, and this is how the sick fucks get their jollies now that it's harder to find snuff films on the public internet. I wonder if HR didn't exist, would asylums still be popular? Is HR as a field just a way to keep prison populations lower?

For me, this is more of a matter of "want" to change jobs, over "need a job". For example, I've got a friend who is a way, way, way better programmer/developer than I could ever claim to be, and he's been fighting tooth and nail to get the time of day from some of these companies. Despite his extensive academic background, professional credentials, and high levels of skill and competence, he's been out of work for months now. At least they're going to "keep your information on file" though, right? Can definitely pay a mortgage with that.

Maybe I don't get it, but if you're hiring, post the JD. If you're not hiring, shut the fuck up and stay off the job boards. Everyone wins, except for the recovering snuff film addicts in HR.

Sorry to keep whining about my stupid fucking job, but y'all, I think I'm nearing my limit.

There's some good...I am pretty much free to resolve issues any way I want to, as the only other person in the company who "codes" only knows one old ass language that doesn't apply to 90% of the rest of the tech stack at all, and some SQL - all of that to say, we may disagree, but ultimately, these matters are always deferred to me at the end of the day, insofar as the actual implementation goes (which is to say I am not micromanaged). At least as far as non-visuals are concerned, because those of course, are the most important things. Button colors and shit, woo hoo**. That's what we should focus on as we're bringing in potentially millions of dollars per month - the god damn button color and collapsible accordions based on data type over the shit ass DB performance bottleneck, the lack of redundancy or backups (aside from the one I made soon after I started -- literally saved everyone today because of that. My thanks? None, and more bullshit tasks) or the 300GB+ spaghetti code nightmare that is the literal circulatory system of the FUCKING COMPANY. Hundreds of people depend on it for their livelihoods, and those of their families, but fuck me in the face, right? I'm just a god damn nerd who has worked for the federal government, a handful of fortune 500's, a couple of fortune 100's, some startups, etc. But the fuck do I know about the lifecycle of companies?

I could continue ranting, but what's the point? I've got a nice little adage that I've started to live by, and y'all might appreciate it: "If everything is a priority/is important, nothing is". These folks just don't fucking get it. I'm torn because, on the one hand, they waste my time and kinda underpay me, in addition to forcing me to be onsite for 50 hours a week. They don't listen to me, couldn't give a flying shit about my experientially based opinions. I'm just a fucking chimp with a typewriter, there to take commands like a fucking waiter. But there's a lot of job security, assuming I don't fucking snap one day, and the job market for devs (I'm sure I don't need to tell you) is hostile atm. I'm also drinking far more than usual, and I really need to do something about that. It's only wednesday - I think...not 100% on that truth be told, and I logged my fourth trip to the liquor store this week already.

**Dear backenders - don't ever learn front end, or if you do, just lie about it to avoid being designated full stack. It's not worth it.

Spent weeks cleaning up legacy code, because my phone was ringing non-stop about errors and crashes, got it done. The CEO has been on vacation for like a month and a half, so I had to make executive judgements, and has just now returned. I got called down to the CEO's office so that I could get bitched at for marginally changing the appearance and behavior of a part of the site. I explain that it was necessary, and the response I got was "it was working fine for five years". All I could say to that was "no it fucking wasn't, are we working at the same company?" When I go to take another job, I might just put all of the old code back in place to remind them of how much "better" things ran before I worked here. Massive headache now, physical and proverbial.

Got a legit question/semi rant for anyone who may know. I want to start by saying that I'm not really a "network" person, at least on MS systems. I can physically plug cables in and shit like that, but the software side of networking is not a thing with which I can claim familiarity. Anyone who's read my recent rants will know that I am forced to deal with IIS, because my boss is an insufferable microshit fanboy of the highest level, and is easily frightened and threatened by the use of a keyboard for anything other than using facebook.

I've got a couple of microservices running under IIS, and our customers thankfully are able to access them with no issues. Those of us in the "IT department" are also able to access it. No one else in the building, on our network can, and despite me not having set up this network, or really having anything to do with it, the rest of my "team" (LOL) refuses to help me solve the problem, because developer = networking specialist and printer fixer. Does anyone here have an idea? I found a think on Stack Overflow about firewall rules, but those are already set appropriately.

So the saga of broken fucking everything continues at work, and I'm managing it, effectively, and doing it correctly on the first go-round. It's a long process though, because the two retards who preceded me were equally inept for completely different, yet equally disruptive and destructive reasons. The first dude was just plain psychotic, probably still is. I'd post some of his code, but I don't want anyone's face to melt off like those Nazi dudes at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I can handle it because I'm constantly inebriated, which is not as fun as it sounds. If you have to ask yourself if you can handle it, you probably aren't, unless you've had to Uber to/from work due to still being fucking drunk. Anyway, enough about that, and it was only like twice. The rest of the times, I was more blazed than Jerry Garcia at a weed smoking contest. Moving along.

UPS shipping labels broke two weeks ago, I fixed it, but these fucking 10xers jointly decided to not only never implement anything resembling error handling, other than EMPTY GOD DAMN "try/catch"es (empty catch, wow so efficient), and instead of using COMMENTS, which I know are a new thing, they'd wrap blocks of code in something like: if 1 = 0 {} FUCK YOU DICKFACES. As I was saying before I got emotional again, they tied the success to all kinds of unrelated, irrelevant shit. I'm literally needle/haystacking my way through the entire 200GB codebase, ALONE, trying to find all the borked things. Helpfully, my phone is ringing all the time from customer service, complaining about things that are either nothing to do with the site, or due to user stupidity, 75% of the time.

A certain department at my company relies on some pretty specific documents to do their job, and these documents are/were generated from data in the database. So until I can find and fix all of the things, I've diverted my own attention as much as possible to the rapid implementation of a report generation microservice so that no one elses work is further disrupted while I continue my cursed easter egg hunt from fucking hell.

After a little more than two days, I'm about to lauch a standalone MS to handle the reports, and it's unfortunately more complicated than I'd like, because it requires a certain library that isn't available on Winblows, so I've dockerized the application. Anyway, just after lunch, I've finished my final round of tests, and I'm about ready to begin migrating it to the server and setting up (shitty fucking shit) IIS to serve it appropriately. At this point, this particular report has been unavailable by web for about 8 days.

A little after lunch, and with no forewarning of any kind, the manager of managers runs upstairs and screams at me to "work faster" and that "this needs to be back online RIGHT NOW", but I also know that this individual is going to throw a fit if things on this pdf aren't a pixel perfect match. So I just say "that's some amazing advice, I wish I'd had the foresight to just do it better and work faster". Silence for a good five seconds, then I follow up with "please leave and let me get back to my work". At that moment from around the corner, my "supervisor" suddenly, magically even, remembers that he has had the ability to print this crucial, amazingly super fucking important document all along, despite me directly asking him a week ago, and he prints it and takes it where it needs to go. In the time that it takes him to go to that other department and return, I deploy my service.

I spent the rest of the day browsing indeed and linkedin jobs, but damn this market is kinda weird right now, yeah?

I've recently been enjoying the music of The Flower Kings while programming. Check em out!

Also, Hall & Oates, Kansas, Camel, Journey, Eddie Money, Van Halen, Megadeth, Spock's Beard, YES, RUSH, Metallica, Al Di Meola, Frank Gambale, Allan Holdsworth, etc. IDK, but that non-modern music where people actually played instruments is resonating with me hardcore. It has for a while, but especially now.

Just want to take a moment to thank Sir Francis Regex (AKA Stephen Kleene) for creating regex. Thank you for making my life easier and better through your efforts. Rest in peace, my friend.

Regex is the shit y'all. We all stand atop the shoulders of giants. Spare a moment to reflect and appreciate.

Happy Monday #4 everyone, hope it's not terrible!

IIS is a piece of shit. Windows is for playing video games and looking at stupid memes, not for real work. Defenders say that wInDoWs SeRvEr Is PoWeRfUl REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE, but it only appears powerful because microshit took all of the things that normal servers can do easily, split it up nonsensically, and hid it in bizarre places in an overdesigned and FUCKING CONFUSING set of config menus. No one can change my mind about this.

FUCK UPS. Fucking dickheads killed our XML api a month ahead of schedule, and now I'm having to quickly implement stuff for their new api, and their docs are fucking dogshit. Seriously, the united parcel service can burn to death in a god damn fire.

Anyone else burned out? I'm fucking burned out. Definitely taking a week off soon. That sort of makes it harder to get motivated though. I was humming along nicely with my new project, but got sidetracked fixing stupid shit in the legacy code and dealing with a moron in customer service, and I guess that kicked me off into a small depression. I feel like I should have worked harder in school, so that I could have gone into sales or something high paying, instead of "software engineering". With all the ass I've been kicking over the last year, I sure hope I get a raise soon.

So this place seems to be relatively inactive, especially compared to how it was back in 2016, 2017. What happened?

Got one right now, no idea if it’s the “most” unrealistic, because I’ve been doing this for a while now.

Until recently, I was rewriting a very old, very brittle legacy codebase - we’re talking garbage code from two generations of complete dumbfucks, and hands down the most awful codebase I’ve ever seen. The code itself is quite difficult to describe without seeing it for yourself, but it was written over a period of about a decade by a certifiably insane person, and then maintained and arguably made much worse by a try-hard moron whose only success was making things exponentially harder for his successor to comprehend and maintain. No documentation whatsoever either. One small example of just how fucking stupid these guys were - every function is wrapped in a try catch with an empty catch, variables are declared and redeclared ten times, but never used. Hard coded credentials, hard coded widths and sizes, weird shit like the entire application 500ing if you move a button to another part of the page, or change its width by a pixel, unsanitized inputs, you name it, if it’s a textbook fuck up, it’s in there, and then some.

Because the code is so damn old as well (MySQL 8.0, C#4, and ASP.NET 3), and utterly eschews the vaguest tenets of structured, organized programming - I decided after a month of a disproportionate effort:success ratio, to just extract the SQL queries, sanitize them, and create a new back end and front end that would jointly get things where they need to be, and most importantly, make the application secure, stable, and maintainable. I’m the only developer, but one of the senior employees wrote most of the SQL queries, so I asked for his help in extracting them, to save time. He basically refused, and then told me to make my peace with God if I missed that deadline. Very helpful.

I was making really good time on it too, nearly complete after 60 days of working on it, along with supporting and maintaining the dumpster fire that is the legacy application. Suddenly my phone rings, and I’m told that management wants me to implement a payment processing feature on the site, and because I’ve been so effective at fixing problems thus far, they want to see it inside of a week. I am surprised, because I’ve been regularly communicating my progress and immediate focus to management, so I explain that I might be able to ship the feature by end of Q1, because rather than shoehorn the processor onto the decrepit piece of shit legacy app, it would be far better to just include it in the replacement. I add that PCI compliance is another matter that we must account for, and so there’s not a great chance of shipping this in a week. They tell me that I have a month to do it…and then the Marketing person asks to see my progress and ends up bitching about everything, despite the front end being a pixel perfect reproduction. Despite my making everything mobile responsive, iframe free, secure and encrypted, fast, and void of unpredictable behaviors. I tell her that this is what I was asked to do, and that there should have been no surprises at all, especially since I’ve been sending out weekly updates via email. I guess it needed more suck? But either way, fuck me and my two months of hard work. I mean really, no ego, I made a true enterprise grade app for them.

Short version, I stopped working on the rebuild, and I’m nearly done writing the payment processor as a microservice that I’ll just embed as an iframe, since the legacy build is full of those anyway, and I’m being asked to make bricks without straw. I’m probably glossing over a lot of finer points here too, just because it’s been such an epic of disappointment. The deadline is coming up, and I’m definitely going to make it, now that I have accordingly reduced the scope of work, but this whole thing has just totally pissed me off, and left a bad taste about the organization.

Productivity hack - For me, it’s mostly a single word - planning. I wasn’t always good at it, definitely not yet a “master” of it, but breaking that proverbial elephant up into smaller pieces, and organizing a plan of action for dealing with them is the #1 productivity “hack” for me. Sorry that it’s not an actual shortcut, or anything…I personally don’t believe in those anymore. Complementary habits to this are thoroughly commenting code, having descriptive commit messages, file names, and variable names, maintaining documentation. Use that Readme.md. This is true of any project, even if I’m the only developer - never underestimate your own ability to totally forget shit.

Being a developer in my country is great. We have Sam Adams fountains instead of water fountains everywhere, triple - double bacon and duck fat fried cheeseburgers with Twinkie buns, massive desktops that burn coal and dump pure toxicity into the atmosphere. We sit on chairs made from the carcasses of soon to be extinct animals, and instead of rubber ducks, we have majestic bald eagles screeching their encouragement as we pound out our buggy ass code. But we have the best bugs, don’t we folks?

Spec meeting with my client: "Accessibility is very, very important to us. We want to be sure that we meet AA guidelines, at a minimum."

Client delivers front end mockups, can do nothing. Not one single element on it is compliant - have to send it back for revisions.

The fact that they were aware of the WCAG and the AA tier guidelines, and still handed me these shitty designs is pretty impressively stupid.

Know what really grinds my gears? The fact that at many companies, PM's and QA people aren't required or expected to have even a basic level of knowledge, making communication pretty unpleasant. Even having a grasp of relevant vocabulary would make things so much easier.

Combine this with the bedside manner of a barn-raised sociopath, an ignorance of human and technical capabilities in general, and we have several good reasons to stay at home "sick". What the hell do I keep getting myself into?