So because of the sheer number of interviews I’ve been doing I’m starting to get a bit brazen with them since I’ve started to really not give a fuck about most of them and I’ve started to notice patterns in common lines of questioning resulting in this unexpected gem today:

Interviewer: So we always start our devs off on the bottom end of our salary band.

Dev: Either give me the top or I’m not interested.

Interviewer: 😡. But if we start you at the top of the salary band we’ll have nothing to give you later. 🥺.

Dev: No need, I’ll take the money up front. Companies don’t give raises these days anyway, it’s just a carrot to dangle in front of the naive.

Interviewer: 😡. Well if all you care about is money so focussed on money you’ll just leave if a better offer comes around!

Dev: All the more reason to give me the highest number possible to defend against that possibility.

Interviewer: 😡. But there are other devs on the team with similar experience that will be making less than you.

Dev: Sounds like they fell for the negging and guilt tripping you are currently attempting on me in order to save a buck. Salary is not based on your skills or experience anymore, it’s based on your ability to negotiate. Here’s mine.

Interviewer: ………………. I’ll pass you along to the hiring manager.

Dev: ???? wtf

HOW THE FUCK DID THAT ACTUALLY WORK ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME I WAS TRYING TO GET THEM TO HANG UP FOR SHITS AND GIGGLES AND NOW I’M LOOKING AT A 20K RAISE ALL BECAUSE I CONTINUALLY TOLD THEM TO GO FUCK THEMSELVES??? THIS IS ACTUALLY WHAT IT TAKES TO BE TREATED PROPERLY BY A COMPANY???

I saw similar question on reddit, so I decided to ask it here.

What purchase has improved your quality of life and work? Especially those working remotely.

In an effort to deal with the number of “top priority” tickets, management has come up with a new priority level, “urgent”, to help differentiate between tickets that are “top priority” and tickets that are actually “top priority”.

So as you can guess all tickets are now codified as “urgent”.

I’ve suggested management downgrade some tickets back to merely “top priority” as we’re clearly right back where we started with it being difficult to determine which order to do tickets in.

They’ve ignored my request as the bletherings of a clearly unenlightened peon, and have instead came up with a new priority, “mission critical” which will be reserved for the most hallowed of emerg— oh no wait everything is now “mission critical” who would have guessed?

So “Top priority” is the now lowest priority a ticket can have…Naturally.

!rant

It's been a while since I posted here. My previous workplace was a 101 on how to burn out people.

But now I am working at a place where:

- People are 0 toxic.

- Sprints follow the premise "under promise, over deliver."

- I was having trouble sleeping (for reasons) a couple of months ago, and my boss literally told me, "If you can't sleep at night, take a few days, or if you can fall asleep in the morning, just sleep in the morning until you manage to do otherwise. Talk with your team and rearrange the meetings if you have and rest. "

- All pieces of the company (sales, narketing, product, data, devs) have a clean roadmap.

- Product and bizz understand when something can't be done on the next sprint and why sometimes some features are delayed.

- They pay well, even raising the pay twice to account for inflation.

- Full remote, If I want to go to the office, Its my choice.

I need to keep this job no matter what!

NFTs explained

Theory:
The least experienced developers write code with the higest complexity.

Dude! We have toilets on each floor. Why do you push shit on git?

Dear people who complain about spending a whole night to find a tiny syntax error; Every time I read one of your rants, I feel like a part of me dies.

As a developer, your job is to create elegant optimized rivers of data, to puzzle with interesting algorithmic problems, to craft beautiful mappings from user input to computer storage and back.

You should strive to write code like a Michelangelo, not like a house painter.

You're arguing about indentation or getting annoyed by a project with braces on the same line as the method name. You're struggling with semicolons, misplaced braces or wrongly spelled keywords.

You're bitching about the medium of your paint, about the hardness of the marble -- when you should be lamenting the absence of your muse or the struggle to capture the essence of elegance in your work.

In other words:

Fix your fucking mindset, and fix your fucking tools. Don't fucking rant about your tabs and spaces. Stop fucking screaming how your bloated swiss-army-knife text editor is soooo much better than a purpose-built IDE, if it fails to draw something red and obnoxious around your fuck ups.

Thanks.

My own personal hell was a html page that had a script tag that called a rest endpoint that sent back a text block of JavaScript that was then dynamically executed to redirect the user to a php 3 page that was the exact same thing as the original page but with an extra bit of css to make the buttons blue and slightly rounded

You can’t make this shit up

“Yeah but you’re not a *real* developer”

Fuck. you.

I wrote 80% of this code base. I do 80% of the tickets/storyboard points. I do all of the QA. My nose is to the grindstone every fucking day honing this craft and sweating my balls off like a blacksmith staring into the red hot kiln while the sores of previous mistakes scream bloody murder from the unrelenting exposure to heat. I saw this amazing industry of opportunity, freedom and self examination and wanted in no matter what it took. I glued myself to every pithy resource I could possibly get my hands on and crawled through the muck and filth of it all until I could keep myself warm with the smallest spark of my own making. I stoked that spark until it became a fire and stoked that fire until I could set entire forests ablaze. I listened to the ungrateful people keeping warm by my combustion saying it “wasn’t hot enough” or “would have been a nicer colour if they did it” or “could have warmed up just fine jogging on the spot”. I made painstaking alterations to my ignition and watched my undeserving benefactors gradually be silenced and begin to sit quietly by the heat. I jumped into that inferno daily, was reduced to ash daily and emerged reborn daily. But you are right! I didn’t get scammed out of $40k+ studying technology in an archaic institution from instructors who don’t give a shit and answering “D all of the above” for 4+ years straight therefor my opinion doesn’t mean shit. Push your bullshit to prod and watch the server come burning out of the cloud as the apocalyptic swarm of angry tickets come flooding in why don’t you? Bet they didn’t teach you that in school. You’ve never poked around inside an open source codebase in your life. They are just a mystery boxes of magic that unless someone holds your hands with finely crafted instructions containing a 50/50 picture to word ratio you throw a hissy fit. Every problem that comes up instead of working to solve it you reflexively point to the first person in the room while thinking with your pea brain how you can possibly scapegoat them into taking the fall for whatever it is that’s come up today you couldn’t possibly understand.

Not a real developer?

Fuck. You.

1. I join a company.

2. I get deeply involved in "how to run the company", and get nice compliments from both coworkers & management about my skills in conveying startup/scaleup advice & necessities to upper management.

3. With my ego inflated through all the sweet talk, I think "ah, what the hell, let's do this again", and I accept a Lead/CTO promotion. I have to join board meetings, write reports on quarterly plans and progress.

4. I get unhappy/stressed/burned-out because I really just want to be a developer, not a manager/executive.

5. Upper management understands, I give up my lead position, lock myself back into my coding cave.

6. I get annoyed because the requirements I receive become more and more disconnected from reality, half of the teams seem to have decided to stop using agile/scrum, the testing pipeline breaks all the time, I get an updated labor contract from HR by mail which smells like charred flesh, etc

7. The annoyances become too much to do ANY work. I yell at the other devs outside of the entrance of my cave. There is no answer, only a few painful moans and sighs.

8. I emerge from my cave. The city has turned into a desolate wasteland. The office is a burning ruin, the air sharp and heavy with black soot. Disemboweled corpses of developers litter the poisoned soil.

Product Managers dressed in stained ripped suits scream at each other while they try to reinforce concrete barricades with scotch tape and post-its. *THUMP* Something enormous is trying to break through. "Thank God, bittersweet, you're still alive! The stakeholders! They have mutated! We couldn't meet the promised deadlines! We've lost the whole mobile app department, and that kid there is the last of the backenders and he's only an intern! You're here to save us, right? RIGHT?".

In the corner, between the overflowing coffee machine and a withered cactus, a young boy has collapsed onto the floor. His face is covered in moldy coffee grounds, clasping on to his closed macbook for dear life, wide-open eyes staring into the void, mumbling: "didn't backup the database, and It's all gone" over and over.

A severely dented black Tesla with a dragging loose bumper breaks through the dried up vertical herb garden and the smoothiebar, and comes to a halt against the beanbags in a big cloud of styrofoam balls.

The CEO limps out, leaking blood all over the upholstery. He yells to the COO: "The datacenter is completely flooded with sewage! I saved the backup tapes though", holding a large nest of tangled black magnetic tape mixed with clumps of mud above his head.

9. I collect my outstanding salary and sell any rewarded options/shares for a low dumping price, take a 5 month holiday, and ask a recruiter about opportunities in a different city.

Today i made my first money as a PROGRAMMER, I sold my laptop

My practice Java teacher sends us songs each Friday (after class).
He's such a cool dude.
Here's the last:
https://youtube.com/watch/...
You RESTful API developers / consumers will enjoy it.

I am learning CS for like four years and creating some cool stuff, in the meanwhile, one of my friends learns to play the piano for two years or so,
whenever he sees a piano he starts playing and everyone is amazed (me too actually), but if I show some project I'm working on for a month the reaction is usually: "Oh, nice bro" and that is it.

I'm not jealous (I really am not) but I personally think that this is really sad... :(

To be a good developer, you must thrive in chaos, and have an insatiable desire to turn it into order.

All user input, both work tasks and actual application input, is pure fucking chaos.

The only way to turn that input into anything usable, is to interpret, structure and categorize it, to describe the rules for transformation as adequately as you can.

Sometimes companies create semi-helpful roles to assist you with this process. Often, these people are so unaware of the delicacy of the existing chaos, that any decision they make just ripples out in waves leaving nearly irreparable confusion and destruction in its path.

So applications themselves also slowly wear down into chaos under pressure of chaotic steak-holders which never seem to be able to choose between peppercorn or bernaise sauce for their steaks.

Features are added, data is migrated between formats, rules become unclear. Is ketchup even fucking valid, as a steak sauce?

The only way to preserve an application long term, is refactoring chaos into order.

But... the ocean of chaos will never end.

You must learn to swim in it.

All you can hope to do is create little pools of clarity where new creative ideas can freely spawn.

Ideas which will no doubt end up polluting their own environment, but that's a problem for tomorrow.

So you must learn to deal with the infinite stream of perplexed reactions from those who can't attach screenshots to issue reports.

You must deflect dragging conversations from those who never quite manage to translate gut feeling into rational sentences.

You must learn to deal with the fact that in reality there are no true microservice backends. There are no clean React frontends. There are no normalized databases. Full test coverage, well-executed retrospectives, finished sprints -- they are all as real as spherical cows in a vacuum.

There is no such thing as clean code.

There is only "relatively cleaner code", and even then there are arguments as to why it would be "subjectively relatively cleaner code".

Every repository, every product, every team and every company is an amalgamation of half-implemented ideals, well-intended tug of war games, and brilliantly shattered dreams.

You will encounter fragmented shards of perfect APIs, miles of tangled barbed documentation, beheaded validator classes, bloody mangled corpses of analytical dashboards, crumbled concrete databases.

You must be able to breathe in those thick toxic clouds of rotting technical and procedural debt, look at your reflection in the locker room mirror while you struggle yourself into a hazmat suit, and think:

"Fuck yes, I was born for this job".

Hey everyone,

We have a few pieces of news we're very excited to share with everyone today. Apologies for the long post, but there's a lot to cover!

First, as some of you might have already seen, we just launched the "subscribed" tab in the devRant app on iOS and Android. This feature shows you a feed of the most recent rant posts, likes, and comments from all of the people you subscribe to. This activity feed is updated in real-time (although you have to manually refresh it right now), so you can quickly see the latest activity. Additionally, the feed also shows recommended users (based on your tastes) that you might want to subscribe to. We think both of these aspects of the feed will greatly improve the devRant content discovery experience.

This new feature leads directly into this next announcement. Tim (@trogus) and I just launched a public SaaS API service that powers the features above (and can power many more use-cases across recommendations and activity feeds, with more to come). The service is called Pipeless (https://pipeless.io) and it is currently live (beta), and we encourage everyone to check it out. All feedback is greatly appreciated. It is called Pipeless because it removes the need to create complicated pipelines to power features/algorithms, by instead utilizing the flexibility of graph databases.

Pipeless was born out of the years of experience Tim and I have had working on devRant and from the desire we've seen from the community to have more insight into our technology. One of my favorite (and earliest) devRant memories is from around when we launched, and we instantly had many questions from the community about what tech stack we were using. That interest is what encouraged us to create the "about" page in the app that gives an overview of what technologies we use for devRant.

Since launch, the biggest technology powering devRant has always been our graph database. It's been fun discussing that technology with many of you. Now, we're excited to bring this technology to everyone in the form of a very simple REST API that you can use to quickly build projects that include real-time recommendations and activity feeds. Tim and I are really looking forward to hopefully seeing members of the community make really cool and unique things with the API.

Pipeless has a free plan where you get 75,000 API calls/month and 75,000 items stored. We think this is a solid amount of calls/storage to test out and even build cool projects/features with the API. Additionally, as a thanks for continued support, for devRant++ subscribers who were subscribed before this announcement was posted, we will give some bonus calls/data storage. If you'd like that special bonus, you can just let me know in the comments (as long as your devRant email is the same as Pipeless account email) or feel free to email me (david@hexicallabs.com).

Lastly, and also related, we think Pipeless is going to help us fulfill one of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve heard from the community. Now, it is going to be our goal to open source the various components of devRant. Although there’s been a few reasons stated in the past for why we haven’t done that, one of the biggest reasons was always the highly proprietary and complicated nature of our backend storage systems. But now, with Pipeless, it will allow us to start moving data there, and then everyone has access to the same system/technology that is powering the devRant backend. The first step for this transition was building the new “subscribed” feed completely on top of Pipeless. We will be following up with more details about this open sourcing effort soon, and we’re very excited for it and we think the community will be too.

Anyway, thank you for reading this and we are really looking forward to everyone’s feedback and seeing what members of the community create with the service. If you’re looking for a very simple way to get started, we have a full sample dataset (1 click to import!) with a tutorial that Tim put together (https://docs.pipeless.io/docs/...) and a full dev portal/documentation (https://docs.pipeless.io).

Let us know if you have any questions and thanks everyone!
- David & Tim (@dfox & @trogus)

Ah yes, progress...
Why do SJWs have to infiltrate everything and project their own racist views of the world onto non-problematic terms?
Slavery has existed for as long as humanity and abolishing the terms will definitely not solve slavery and opression.
I am not against Git changing the default name but I am against them doing it in the name of "inclusivity". The technical world exists by merit and not inclusivity. Why make everything about color, race or slavery level?

Watching the Social Dilemma. Interesting quote.

Anyone else seen it? or addicted to social media?

I'm wondering maybe because we're all tech... we sort of develop a natural immunity? or is it just me that has all social media apps' notifs turned off?

And rarely use social media... except devRant.

The way 90% of the population wears their face masks really explains a lot about their approach to using software, apps & websites as well.

I feel like giving up.

I am not a developer for the salary, or just to solve analytical puzzles. Those are motivators, but my main drive is to make the world more comfortable and enjoyable, better optimized, build ethical services which bring happiness into people's lives. I want to improve society, even if it's just a tiny bit.

But if users invest absolutely zero percent of their limited brain capacity into understanding a product that already has a super-clean design and responds with helpful validation messages...

...why the fuck bother.

I used to think of the gap between technology and tech-incompetent people as an optimization problem.

As something which could be fixed by spending a fortune on UX research. Write tests, hire QA employees, decrease tech debt, create a bold but unified & simple design.

But the technologically incompetent just get more entitled with every small thing you simplify.

It's never fucking fool-proof enough.

Why can't I upload a 220MB PDF as profile picture? Why doesn't the app install on my 9 year old Android Froyo phone? Why can't I sign up if my phone number contains a  U+FFFC? Why does this page load so slowly from my rural concrete bunker in East Ukraine? WHY DO I HAVE PNEUMONIA, HOW DID I GET INFECTED EVEN THOUGH I WAS WEARING A MOUTH MASK ON MY FOREHEAD?

This is why I ran away from Frontend, to Backend, to DBA.

If I could remove myself further from the end user, I would.

At least I still have a full glass of tawny port and a huge database which needs to be normalized & migrated.

Fuck humans, I'm going to hug a server.

You know it's bad when Github finds it necessary to tell you your code is trash

Most memorable coworker? Definitely one of our devs in the first company I worked at. He was around fifty, quirky as fuck but damn knowledgeable about pretty much everything. Think some kind of uncle Iroh who could build his own compiler.
I haven't learned as much from university as I learned from our talks during smoking breaks. He never judged anyone for not knowing something (even really basic stuff) and was actually happy if he could help. Now, a few years later I still find myself applying techniques for conceptualizing software he explained to me on the balcony and I have to say I wouldn't be half the dev I am today if I'd have never met him so I guess that counts as memorable.

Oh Godd!!!!

Guess I'mma go fuck myself :)

My poor collection. :D

Code review titles by year:

1990 - your code is using to much memory
1995 - your code is not running on window 95
2000 - your code is slow
2003 - your code don't have tests
2005 - your code is not 64 bit
2009 - your code is not using mvc patters
2010 - your code is not horizontal scalable
2011 - your code should be written in js
2015 - your code is not mobile ready
2020 - your code is racist

"Started playing around with C scripting, can you give me a hand with x?"

"Sure. Errr... this isn't C."

"Yeah it is, like the new C scripting stuff!"

"C scripting stuff?!"

"Yeah, the coffeescript stuff! You developers always shorten it to C right?"

😬😬

Nice try ad-people

What’s the most efficient algorithm to find duplicates in a set?

An SO moderator

When your specs simply won't run new code no matter what you do, non-conditioned (and unmodified) calls don't get called, and 2+2 somehow equals Q, you know it's time to give up and restart the simulation by going to bed.

Except it's early afternoon and the project deadline is tonight. 😔

Back to debugging reality.

Had a dodgy stomach. Muted the mic & let out an almighty fart.

Only, as you'll have guessed (and I quickly guessed from the silence that followed), I'd missed the mute button.