Support has today gotten the bug report that a user cannot make phone calls from Antarctica

lol

If you are going to maintain empty directories in your git repo then use the strategy of placing a file inside the directory called .gitkeep. Searching on this filename will lead you to a discussion of the same topic (hopefully, maybe not). Which includes a lengthy discussion on how the semantics of the file name is somehow more important than the answer of keeping the directory in the repo. My favorite part was someone claiming the file name .gitkeep was the standard way of maintaining a directory and others jumping on this person saying not it is NOT the standard way, and that in fact any filename would work. Misunderstanding that saying it was the standard probably only referred to placing a file and not choosing that exact name.

Basically it seemed to turn into an autists semantics fistfight in the comments.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions...

Someone is that discussion claimed .gitkeep would lead to confusion if it was a standard git filename. I then found this:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions...

Is it wrong to find so much humor in this?

My TEN YEAR OLD twin girls came to me with a TIMESHEET and PIE CHARTS to explain to me why "Our household would benefiter (sic) a Nintendo Switch".

They... actually did what for an intern would be a passable data storytelling job (orthographic errors aside).
They explained how they would share the videogame between themselves (because it is not allowed at their school, not that we would let them bring it there anyway) in a colorful timesheet spanning four days a week.
They even put a pie chart showing how most of the time nobody will be using it.

I feel at the same time immensely proud, scared, and a wee bit freaked out that they came with all that to me but with their mother they just talked. Do I seem so distant that they feel they can't convince me without data? I gotta watch out for using work jargon at home.

Anyway, first "interns" that I have ever seen using a pie chart with the appropriate number of classes (even if highly biased).

I thought my code wasn't great until I saw this project marked for decommissioning by end of 2024.

Holy shit.

These people basically wrote their own JS full stack framework because they don't like frameworks.

In one of the files, there are over 150 console logs.

I also found two database names. I wonder if I keep digging, I might find a full database query string with login credentials in plain text.

I have to provide support if needed because they're firing the contractor. Wise Decision, methinks.

Story time...of how HR actually did its job of taking care of employees.

So, I started at this new gig on December, the boss was all sunshine and promise (big red flag now to think back). Then as time passed, he started seeming...off. To a point I considered quitting my boss just after 2 months of working for him.

Then one morning we had a project meeting. He started verbally abusing me, calling me incompetent, bashing my work (of which he knew ~nothing, his experience 30 years back). Earlier in the week he demanded me to make a presentation which he in this meeting told is complete bullshit without actually reading any of it. He told me 'I am your boss, you do exactly as I say' when I told him something is technologically impossible in the situation we're in. He *actually* told me to break the law with data protection...

This was like wtf dude. That's not how you manage people. So, I made an HR ticket about his behaviour. They were *shocked* and escalated the matter.

Long story short: he was a bully, he's getting fired, my team has a new manager. My workplace actually appreciates my expertise.

Bad thing in this is, now I actually need to continue doing my job. ;_;

the more time I spend in this industry, the more I come to realize that it's a very blurry line between PROGRAMMING and CONFIGURING.

How much programming do you do these days, really? Isn't it just configuring your frameworks and libraries and engines to do what they do in the way you want?

Does it still make you programmers...?

And then what are these .conf files for your application? A declarative configuration for your... imperative configuration...?

Debugging an assertion for hours that keeps failing on 19 == 20 , and you just cannot figure out why it returns 20, until you realize that it in fact returns 19 and the constant in the test case that you screwed up at the start reads 20.

Well, I thought "hey, I need to urgently update my own infra for a change, been neglecting this way too long, but should not be longer then a day."

I spent the whole weekend dependency resolving, modulesyncing and ensure deps are met ... And every single goddamn time it's stdlib causing a whoupsie on another module...

Oh at least I am having fun. Sort of.

-10C winter is unpleasant. -20C winter is dangerous.

-40C winter is cruel. This was the reality of living in Komi Republic — the place I was born in.
Winters there combine extreme dryness with extreme cold. Steel on steel always sparks — gotta be careful at gas stations. Because there is no wind, you don’t actually feel like you’re freezing until it’s too late. If you’re drunk — and everyone there was drunk — you’re walking home, you see a bench, you think: “I’ll just rest for five minutes, no big deal”, and you’re found frozen to death the following morning.

My grandpa once forgot one year old me on the street at night, while — you guessed it — going to get something to drink. I spent something like three hours out there.

I barely made it. Now, my legs don’t feel cold anymore.

Websites requiring recent browser versions indirectly puts control into the hands of browser vendors.

If users are forced to update, they are at the mercy of browser makers Google and Mozilla. Google and Mozilla can deliver whichever malicious feature they feel like, like mandatory add-on signing with updates.

Add-on signing is the thing that caused all extensions to be remotely disabled on May 3, 2019.

Also, Microsoft can disable your computer through an update if they wanted to.

Jody Bruchon video: https://youtube.com/watch/...

why do you have,...

well...

Just stir the pile...

Why are people from Norway so good at editing files in Linux?
Their ancestors are vi-kings.

Who else is frustrated/burnout at building products that never gets into production?

When I work for a company I always tend to do everything with good practices, spend a lot of time thinking on the best ways to build x feature, and then the company falls into the infinite loop of adding stupid features, and then I've been working for 2 years and 0 paid customers. Funny that we've Sentry, GA, Hotjar sitting there doing nothing.

I'm honestly hating the startup environment rn. Good thing is that I've learnt a lot and salary is good. But also I lost all motivation.

Any recommendations for a tired dev?

The never ending cycle 😩

I expect a feature where it says “90% of this meeting should have been an email instead!”

I’m getting really tired of all these junior-turn-senior devs who can’t write simple code asking ChatGPT to solve everything for them.

I’m having to untangle everything from bizarre organization/flow to obvious gotchas / missed edge cases to ridiculously long math chains (that could be 1/10th the length), or — and I feel so dirty for this — resorting to asking ChatGPT wtf it was thinking when it obviously wrote some of these monstrosities. Which it gets wrong much of the time.

“ALL HAIL CHATGPT!” Proclaims the head of Engineering. “IT’S OUR PRODUCTIVITY SAVIOR! LEVERAGING AI WILL LET US OUTPERFORM THE ENTIRE INDUSTRY!”

Jesus fucking christ.

fuck it. I'll become a cashier

> worst coding procrastination story

worst and best at the same time:

If you wait long enough things might resolve themselves.

My team inherited an ancient site. Hosted on an old host that the org wanted to kill, using an old log service the org wanted to kill.

A ticket was written in 2021 to migrate that site's hosting and logging to the new services our org started using.

My team kept avoiding it since it was a cheap unimportant site.

in 2023 we were about to finally take action - then we hear "Turns out the new hosting platform and logging platform are way too expensive - I know all of you have migrated to these new services but you gotta revert and go back the old ones til we figure this out"

We didn't have to do squat.

Problem solved by procrastinating ✅

Does any of you write notes about what you learn in your day to day job? I recently covered a colleague that went on vacation because the product was going to be shipped during his vacay and I was assigned to do some tweaks, since I am the only one on that team that also knows frontend apart from him. My job is computer vision and he is a frontend dev, so when I sat to take a look, I started to learn new tricks for frontend and I felt the need to write them down because when I go back to my routine, I will forget them since I won’t use them for computer vision. However, knowing frontend is always handy.. do you guys take notes on stuff you might not touch again but it’s useful to keep somewhere?

Oh man... I fucked up. I spent almost 36-40 hours in 3 days trying to fix a bug, that was quite literally a single, two word fix.

Change `Key` to `Value.State`

I burned that time into the weekend. I'm both satisfied and dissatisfied with this decision.

Managers when a developer misses something on a project: “we need to go red fucking alert and schedule several meetings on why this developer inadequacy can never happen again and make sure to record this and make sure the stupid ass devs read all the requirements and use this mistake to offload more of our work onto the dev team”

Managers when they or any other team member misses something on a project: “oh we just made a slight woopsie, just a tiny little miss on our part, a lil fucky wucky, no need to worry”

Reject original specs. Do the bare minimum MVP that works and solves problems people actually have, and not problems you think people have.
Improve it if needed.

In my experience, software projects don’t live long enough to outgrow the MVP. If they do, it happens way down the road. At that point, business will change, and the original spec will become irrelevant.

It’s a paradox: 90% of the spec was discarded, but the business is happier than if we followed the spec word by word.

Also, static typing and unit testing solve nothing. I’m sorry.

Probably the most awkward feeling call happened to me just recently.

I was to interview a guy that's like 10 years older from me with 10y more experience in mostly unrelated tech. I was prepared to have some respect for the guy, and was a bit anxious, but that changed quickly.

The first fucking thing he says, on the fucking job Interview is essentially "I've worked in tech for 20 or so years, and I don't appreciate being tested" great start .. needless to say, I tried to reformulate all my prepared Interview questions so they sound as casual as I could while still trying to get him to tell me *anything*. Most of the time I just felt like "why are we even here dude, you clearly don't care about any of this"...

About 12 or so questions later It was finally clear that none of his experience is useful, and even the exp he has sounds like past companies kept him around as a number...

I want to try a few more edge cases, hoping to find anything we could work with, when he calls me out on it and says "Well now you're testing me, I don't like being tested" at which point I pretty much gave up on the dude and let my HR colleague talk.

Then out of nowhere the guy brings up his mortgage, and how he needs money, and how no one wants to give him a job, and that if we don't want him, we should just tell him now.

Then he starts asking how many people we're interviewing, which is obviously stuff we can't answer, I just said "normal amount" to dodge the question at first, but that just made him more closed off and he just silently remarked "so you can be picky..."

That was one of the most painful interviews I had so far. Me and ny colleague pretty much instantly agreed that he's not a good culture fit for us. Probably not a fit for any company really, not with that attitude.

PS: it was a video call, though he had his camera turned off at first, so it was only me with a camera for half the call. He turned it on just about as I had enough of him.

I'm done with f/e. I so fucking hate it .
I fucking hate implementing weird highly animated websites designed by gurus
I fucking hate making them accessible.
I hate working on weird code generated by my coworkers and jump on projects with 0 specs.
I fucking hate this whole bloatware called javascript.
I fucking hate morons who think they know it all.

I'm fucking disgusted by the job market with their whole job specs ( Oh you don't have 5 year experience in some fucking stupid library I don't give a flying fuck. Too bad, we can't hire you )

And most importantly I fucking hate the day I chose f/e development instead of smth else.

Now at 29 I'm fucking stuck with this shit with no energy and patience to learn something else or at least jump on b/e or anything that is not related to web dev or js.

Sorry for so many fuckings but I had a breakdown.

Love ya.

AWS icons quiz!
If you get it all right, you're a monster.
https://app.awsiconquiz.com/

> TheSmartGuy: listen, IHateForALiving, I know you're a frontend developer, but here in the backend...

Just so we're clear: I'm NOT a frontend developer.

I'm a full stack developer.

I just so happen to always end up working on the frontend because you bunch of handless monkeys wouldn't be able to write a webpack config file if your life depended on it.
It's not you taking care of my inability to work on the backend, it's me being relegated to using only half of my skills because you ugly things refuse to evolve. I could take your job in a breath, I wouldn't trust you with writing a css selector.

Nothing's as fun as unraveling the mystery of how a certain dependency got pulled in transitively....

In a monolith.

With over 1000 dependencies.

Kinda like sorting rice by the size of each grain.

Things that make a friday entertaining.

💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩

#1 life lesson I learned from coding?

Maybe not coding specifically, but I learned the difference between problem solving and solution finding.
Its helped me in a lot of areas of my life. Made friends and made enemies.