Three computers, a picture of my parents, a mostly empty whiskey bottle, a magic 8 ball, some hard drives, a Sigmund Freud action figure, and a shitload of recording equipment for the album I've been making off and on this summer.

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?

Sometimes I wonder if the real purpose behind putting touchscreens on laptops is to encourage or discourage (those god damned) habitual screen-touchers.

10:15 on a Friday and already...

- accidentally nuked dev copy of htdocs (fucking fuck!!! shit!)
- remote work for the summer has been cancelled
- irritating client (with a bunch of incorrect assumptions and pedantic requests) believes they deserve top priority and instant service and are blowing up my phone/email
- construction workers in and around office being disruptive
- other projects stalled for no reason

I’m looking forward to booze and sleep.

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?

Pretty much all of them now, thanks to the unfettered access to everyone's data on the one hand, and the crazy PC ass-kissing "censorship" ban hammer that gets dropped for absolutely any arbitrary reason on the other.

They make strange bedfellows don't they?

Shower thoughts:

Golf may be the perfect Dev sport.

Arguments for:

- Takes a relative degree of either skill or patience, usually both
- most people suck at it
- you need to practice
- alcohol
- haters gon hate

Arguments against:

- Takes a relative degree of either skill or patience, usually both
- most people suck at it
- you need to practice
- alcohol
- haters gon hate
- you have to be outside

Also applies to musicianship, I guess.

As someone who works with front end stuff regularly, know what I love about safari? Specifically mobile safari?

Not a god damn fucking thing. If safari was a band, it'd be Nickelback, featuring Kenny G and Michael Bolton.

Oh my God I'm a failure. Been working on this booking system backend for two weeks, refactored some code, and now it doesn't work at all.

I've gone back through the entire thing, and I can't find the problem.

Open up indeed, start browsing for low-skill jobs. Maybe the carnies will have me back!

*Re-reads error message, adds missing underscore to function call.

Had an interview the other day for a fullstack role. They told me I'd have to whiteboard stuff, of course. No big deal.

They had me whiteboard css though. Totally off guard. Pretty sure I got it, but WTF. Is this normal?

Next idiot who starts talking about all the "freetards" who use open source software, how "terrible" FOSS "obviously" is - is going to die a humiliating death as I bludgeon them with a steel box full of Linux distro thumb drives.

Don't bother bailing me out either. I'll do it again and again.

Recruiter
[ri-kroot-urr]

noun

1. an individual who attracts interest to a cause through evangelism and enthusiastic promotion.

2. an occupation in which knowledgeable specialists seek out qualified individuals to fill technical positions on behalf of another organization.

3. an unholy union of the worst qualities of both an ignorant cold call salesperson with those of an apathetic human resources employee. See 'chimera'.

As both a developer and consumer of a cellular phone service, the latest Sprint slogan "works for me" is unintentionally hilarious.

Browsing job postings, and some of these requirements are just crazy, and/or wtf. Here's an example:

Front End developer wanted, junior to mid-level. An ideal candidate will be an expert in PHP, C#, and Java. Minimum experience of 10 years. Estimated compensation 30,000 per year.

Entry level full stack developer. Must be an expert in SQL. 5 years experience, BS in computer science required.

Web Developer intern - must have 3 years of experience. Must be an expert in x, y, z. This position is unpaid.

Sheeit.

Just got off the phone with a (no longer) prospective client. Dude claimed to have an amazing idea that's going to make millions of dollars. Says he got the idea from watching "Shark Tank". In other words, he stole someone else's idea.

Anyway, I listen to his pitch. He tells me to go to zoosk.com. The dating site. I don't say anything yet, wait for his offer, which is the best part. 25% equity. Twenty five percent. I get 25% of something that I'd build, based on a stolen idea. Not even stolen, really. Just fucking unoriginal. A dating site. Yep, the internet needs another one of those, alright.

Where the fuck do these fucking assholes come from

Sins? I don't want to keep you up all night, so here are some highlights.

Fucking with clients and employers who fuck with me first, or waste my time.

Occasionally not documenting my code (I'm actually pretty good about this), then bitching about poorly documented code.

Honestly wishing other people in the office would *actually* explode, or die engulfed in flames.

Working drunk and/or stoned.

Getting pissed off when I have to do something in a stupid way, or use a workflow that I don't like.

Seriously fucking up out of either arrogance or stupidity, then blaming it on something else.

Zoning out, skipping work, or sleeping in and billing for it (see sin #1).

But my greatest sin? That honor's got to go to becoming a developer in the first place.

I wasn't always a professional asshole, but I fucking am now.

Got a call from a recruiter today

Recruiter: I'm trying to fill a full stack position in Charlotte.
Me: not interested
R: why
M: I hate NC
R: what can I do to make you reconsider
M: I want 120k
R: Ok, well please pass this opportunity along if you know someone who is looking

I *actually* just moved from there.
Guess someone didn't read my job history.
Convo was seriously less than a minute.

I had a pretty good day today. Things are coming together at the new job, and I'm a little less afflicted with impostor syndrome.

Hope everyone else had a pretty good one too.

That awkward moment when you realize you haven't been editing the file you should have been.

"kin ewe hack muh ex-wahf's face-book?"

Trying to use docker for the first time, and getting nowhere. I think I'm actually unlearning how to use a computer.

Hey @dfox, @trogus, the birds on the shoulder are super pimp, but would you be interested in making a parrot? You know, to go along with a Hawaiian shirt, an eye patch, and a pirate hat?

That'd be metal af \m/\m/

Gave my two weeks, two weeks ago. Today was my last day. The designer finally asked to see how I go about doing my job, and was blown away at how "hard" it is. Smug satisfaction +1.

I leave the office at 5, go home, get packed, and start driving to my new city/state. An hour into the trip, my phone rings. My boss, on vacation out of the country acts surprised that I'm not going to be there Monday. I personally gave her my resignation. Exactly two weeks ago. "Are you going to be at the meeting Monday? We still have some stuff up in the air."

WHAT FUCKING PLANET DID I JUST LEAVE?

Interviewing other devs (for job placement) totally sucks. I never realized what a shitty process hiring people can be.

More than half of the applicants are totally unqualified (good fucking job TekSystems), and those who are seem to be only *just* qualified enough, or have really bizarre portfolios and personalities. I'm glad I'm not in HR.

Finally got a new job! Outta here!

Just got out of a meeting that I drove half an hour for (that could easily have been a damn phone call), for hand off stuff with the agency my company has hired to replace me.

I've talked to their senior dev a few times in the past, and he always struck me as an arrogant asshole. I assumed this meant that he had some level of competence to justify this attitude, but evidently not. Turns out he and his employees are a bunch of fucking idiots who don't even know how to use the command line, or anything but a cms with stock themes.

I'm taking all of the specific public stuff I've done for my employer off my resume as soon as I get back, because these dudes are going to fuck it up worse than a soup sandwich.

Say what you want about imposter syndrome - I just realized why I'm cut out for this line of work.

My intelligence is artificial.

Know what really grinds my gears?

People who refer to "ajax" as though it's a separate programming language, instead of what it is, which is an old shitty method in an old shitty library. What I do enjoy is people thinking it's dish soap. That will *never* not be funny to me.

Examples:

1. *generic job description*...5 years experience. Desired skills: HTML, Foundation, PHP, Ajax, Fortran, Assembly, Tagalog, smoke signals.

2. Someone in "marketing": "Do you know Ajax?"

3. Jackass in a coffee shop who uses moustache wax: "I'm an ajax programmer. Yeah I've heard of [any recent band], like twenty years ago. They suck."

Go die, and take ajax with you.

When your code is uglier than homemade sand, but you're done, and you dgaf anymore

Backstory: A few months ago, I wrote an inventory management web app for internal use by the sales team, logistics, and whoever else might need to use it.

Earlier this week: A few minutes before I usually leave, my phone rings. It's some dude I've never heard of. No idea what his function at the company is, still don't, probably never will, don't care. He's never used the app before, and says he's having problems. His cube's on my way out, so I swing by.

I'm not making this next part up. This dude is probably 60 years old, and he's using a very old looking gateway desktop (with the cow print logo thing on the chassis), running Windows XP (not a typo), using IE7.

I don't know what to say, so I just stare at the desktop, look at dude, laugh, and eventually explain that he's never going to be able to use the system via the web app until his rig is replaced.

What the fucking fuck is this. How could this have happened. How do our it people still fucking have jobs. Better question, how did this thing survive the y2k bug?