Dev: this task is done, can I put it in review and do something else?

Me: sure, of course.

Dev: cool, just be aware I'll make some changes to it later.

Me: ... wait, then it's not done.

Dev: no it is, I just need to re-read it and make some changes.

Me: yeah, so it will be done when those changes are made.

Dev: but I don't know what those changes are.

Me: ... I get that ... but ... ok I'm extremely confused. Why do you think it's done.

Dev: because I've written everything I need to and I'm happy with it.

Me: ok so why do you want to make changes.

Dev: I don't.

Me: ... ... ... ... you ... you are really not being clear. If you don't want to make changes, and you are happy with it, why are you planning on making changes later ... after marking the task as done.

Dev: well if I re-read it and see something I don't like, I would like to change it.

Me: ok, so re-read it as many times as you like and make as many changes as you like. But don't mark it as done until it is done.

Dev: but it is done.

Me: no it's not.

Dev: it is, look.

Me: ... yeah looks ok at a quick glance.

Dev: ok so I can mark it as done?

Me: are you going to make more changes?

Dev: yes.

Me: then no.

Dev: why?

Me: BECAUSE ITS NOT DONE.

Dev: ok maybe I'm not explaining it clearly.

Me: ... we can both agree on that. Ok so to summarise, we don't mark something as done until we have stopped touching it. We don't half finish something and say it's done and comeback to it later. We mark it as done when we are happy with i.....

Dev: but I am happ.....

Me: *raises hand* I repeat, if it's done, we lock it away and stop touching it. If someone reads it and complains, we can come back to it with a new ticket. But it's not done until we think we are ready to send it on.

Dev: I am ready to send it, I just may want to change it.

Me: ... ... ... ... ... due to a new policy implemented just now, we are only allowed to send 1 email to a person each week. So unfortunately we can only send on 1 copy. So when you have that 1 copy, let me know.

Dev: ok, let me re-read it a few more times then.

Me: there you go.

*came in this morning to see this conversation in slack from the remote teams*

Dev: Hey guys, I'm trying to push to the develop branch, telling me its locked. Is there a new process?

Lead dev: Yes I locked it because the repo is now dead, the last release that went out is the last for this year and ever for this app. Were merging this app with another, starting from the last release's code. We'll all have to swap over to the new repo soon.

Dev: ... eh ok I didn't put anything in the last release branch as it wasn't urgent. Normally our process is anything in /develop goes out in the new year. I've been merging to /develop for the last few weeks ... is that code now gone?
*14 question mark emoji reactions*

Lead dev: Yes
*27 angry emoji reactions*

Engineering manager: WHAT? when was this decided? When was it communicated?

Lead dev: oh I assumed my product counterpart had been spreading the messages around, have they not?

Several teams: no, nope, first i'm hearing of it.

Lead dev: Ok, i'll ask them what happened. Be aware then that most of the stuff thats going into develop now, most likely won't be allowed in until March. They want to prioritise releasing this new merged app and don't want anything to impact it.

Dev: So wait, i'm working on stuff now. What do I do? Where do I base the branch? Where do I merge?

<no response>

*My team comes into the office*

Dev: eeehhh ... what does this mean for our past 4 weeks of work? and all the stuff needed to go out in January?

Me: not.a.fucking.clue

Recently had an interview with a company. At some point an SELinux question came up and while I didn't provide the best answer ever (I'm hardly familiar with SELinux and mentioned that as well beforehand so they knew), it was technically correct and the reaction of the interviewers was funny.

TI (technical interviewer): say your php script isn't executed and after a while you find out that SELinux is blocking php script execution, how can you fix that?
Me: setenforce 0...? (essentially disabling SELinux at all)
TI: disabling it entirely for getting php execution to work?! That doesn't sound like a good solu...
HRI (HR (non technical) interviewer, also present): *turns to TI* - but, would it solve the problem?
TI: 😐 well, yes, but... That's a bad thing to do so I wouldn't count is corre..
HRI: *still aiming towards TI* but you simply asked him for a way to solve the php execution issue, would his answer work? Regardless of whether it's the best or worst solution, would it be a solution which works?
TI: well... yes...
HRI: then he answered correctly I'd say, next!

(yes, I'm aware that my answer wasn't good as for security at all but it would have solved that problem which is what was asked)

CEO "If you make costs to build a home office for covid, please be aware that you can fully declare your bills, and you'll retain ownership over the ordered goods. Please all buy some good desk chairs and keyboards, so you can work ergonomically"

6 months later, CFO: "Bittersweet, why did you try to declare €35000? What are these invoices even? Concrete rebar?"

Me: "CEO told us to build a home office. I got permits from the town to dig a souterrain layer under my house. This is just for the foundation, the bills for drainage pumps, sheetpiling, geothermal heat exchangers, insulation, flooring, electricity and of course desk & chair will follow later"

CFO: 😳

(To be fair, I really did make those costs, but was just trolling by uploading all the material bills)

So i've been a dev manager for a little while now. Thought i'd take some time to disambiguate some job titles to let everyone know what they might be in for when joining / moving around a big org.

Title: Senior Software Engineer

Background:
- Technical
- Clever
- Typically has years experience building what management are trying to build

Responsibilities:
- Building new features
- Writing code
- Code review
- Offering advice to product manag......OH NO YOU DON'T CODE MONKEY, BACK TO WORK!

Title: Dev Manager

Background:
- Technical
- Former/current programmer
- knows his/her way around a codebase.

Responsibilities:
- Recruiting / interviewing new staff
- Keeping the team focused and delivering tasks
- Architecture decisions
- Lying about complexity of architecture decisions to ensure team gets the actual time they need
- Lying about feature estimations to ensure team gets to work on critical technical improvements that were cancelled / de-prioritised
- Explaining to hire-ups why we can't "Just do it quicker"
- Explaining to senior engineers why the product manager declined their meeting request

Title: Product / Product Manager

Background:
- Nothing relevant to the industry or product line what so ever
- Found the correct building on the day of the interview
- Has once opened an Excel spreadsheet and successfully saved it to a desktop

Responsibilities:
- Making every key decision about every feature available in the app
- Learning to ignore that inner voice we like to call "Common sense"
- Making sure to not accidentally take some advice from technical staff
- Raising the blood pressure of everyone below them / working with them

Title: Program Lead / Product Owner

Background:
- Capable of speech
- Aware of what a computer is (optional)

Responsibilities:
- Sitting down
- Talking
- Clicking random buttons on Jira
- Making bullet point lists

Title: Director of Software Engineering

Background:
- Allegedly attended college/university to study computer science
- Similar to a technical product manager (technical optional)

Responsibilities:
- Reports directly to VP
- Fixes problems by creating a different problem somewhere else as a distraction
- Claiming to understand and green light technical decisions, while having already agreed with product that it will never happen

Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...

<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>

Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.

So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:

- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole

So lets look at some example of their work:

- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"

- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"

- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"

- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.

- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"

Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them

Thats all the time we have for today,

Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:

- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

Remember the Ububtu mobile OS ?

I remember working on the community UI drive for this project. To know that something as awesome as ubuntu would come down into the form factor of a phone , was just ecstatic.

The first build was out , people liked it. People nagged a bit about the performance issues , but it was going fine. Then the second build .. then the third no one heard about and the 4th that never came.

The interface for this system was unique because after Wondows , this is the only other OS developer that embraced the one ecosystem mantra of design.

Using Ubuntu phone was natural , it was a small desktop OS.

I remember logging on to launchpad one day and seeing the Ubuntu mobile channel with it's last post " Thank you and goodbye "

It was heartbreaking , but i could understand. Like windows phone ( which if you guys weren't aware of , had APK support by the end of its lifecycle ) felt crushed under the weight of android and iOS.

Waiting for a day when there will be a third champion in game. I miss having to see Ubuntu being on my phone , but they seem to be doing great in everything else , so good on that. 😄

Ok done .. thanks

I turned 40 yesterday. Here are some lessons I've learned, without fluff or BS.

1) Stop waiting for exceptional things to just happen. They rarely do, and they can't be counted on. Greatness is cultivated; it's a gradual process and it won't come without effort.

2) Jealousy is a monster that destroys everything in it's path. It's absolutely useless, except to remind us there's a better way. We can't always control how we feel, but we can choose how we react to those feelings.

When I was younger, jealousy in relationships always led to shit turning out worse than it probably would have otherwise. Even when it was justified, even when a relationship was over, jealousy led me to burn bridges that I wished I hadn't.

3) College isn't for everyone, but you'll rarely be put square in the middle of so much potential experience. You'll meet people you probably wouldn't have otherwise, and as you eventually pursue your major, you'll get to know people who share your passions and dreams. Despite all the bullshit ways in which college sucks, it's still a pretty unique path on the way to adulthood. But on that note...

4) Learn to manage your money. It's way too easy to get into unsustainable debt. It only gets worse, and it makes everything harder. We don't always see the consequence of credit cards and loans when we're young, because the future seems so distant and undecided. But that debt isn't going anywhere... Try not to borrow money that you can't imagine yourself paying back now.

5) Floss every day, not just a couple times per week when you remember, or when you've got something stuck in your teeth. It matters, even if you're in your 20s and you've never had a cavity.

6) You'll always hear about living in the moment, seizing the day... It's tough to actually do. But there's something to be said for looking inward, and trying to recognize when too much of our attention is focused elsewhere. Constantly serving the future won't always pay off, at least not in the ways we think it will when we're young.

This sentiment doesn't have much value when it's put in abstract, existential terms, like it usually is. The best you can do is try to be aware of your own willingness and ability to be open to experiences. Think about ways in which you might be rejecting the here and now, even if it's as seemingly-benign as not going out with some friends because you just saw them, or you already went to that place they're going to. We won't recognize the good old days for what they were until they're already gone. The trick is having as many good days as possible.

7) Don't start smoking; you'll never quit as soon as you'll think you can. If you do start, make yourself quit after a couple years, no matter what. Keep your vices in check; drugs and alcohol in moderation. Use condoms, use birth control.

8) Don't make love wait. Tell your friends and family you love them often, and show them when you can. You're going to lose people, so it's important. Statistically, some of you will die young, yourselves.

When it comes to relationships, don't settle if you can't tell yourself you're in love, and totally believe it. Don't let complacency and familiarity get in the way of pursuing love. Don't be afraid to end relationships because they're comfortable, or because you've already invested so much into them.

Being young is a gift, and it won't last forever. You need to use that gift to experience all the love that you can, at least as a means to finding the person you really want to grow old with, if that's what you want. Regardless, you don't want to miss out on loving someone, and being loved, because of fear. Don't be reckless; just be honest with yourself.

9) Take care of your body. Neglecting it makes everything tougher. That doesn't mean you have to work out every day and eat like a nutritionist, but if you're overweight or you have health issues, do what you can to fix it. Losing weight isn't easy, but it's not as hard as people make it out to be. And it's one of the most important things you can do to invest in a healthy adulthood.

Don't put off nagging health issues because you think you'll be fine, or you don't think you'll be able to afford it, or you're scared of the outcome. There will always be options, until there aren't. Most people never get to the no-options part. Or, they get there because all the other options expired.

10) Few things will haunt you like regret. Making the wrong choice, for example, usually won't hurt as much. I guess you can regret making the wrong choice, but my deepest regrets come from inaction, complacency and indifference.

So how can we avoid regret? I don't know, lol. I don't think it's as simple as just commiting to choices... Choosing to do nothing is still a choice, after all. I think it's more about listening to your gut, as cliche as that sounds.

To thine own self be true, I guess. It's worth a shot, even if you fail. Almost anything is better than regret.

Boss: Great news, we are getting another backend dev from another team to help us out.

Me: Cool, hopefully we don’t have the same trouble as the others, not replying, never writing anything down etc.

Boss: No, I’ve worked with her before. She’s much more passionate about doing things right, using best practices and all that stuff.

Me: Oh that’s perfect, great news!

Boss: Yep! ... just be aware she has a tendency to get very easily confused. She delivers the wrong thing from time to time and might need to redo stuff semi-regularly.

Me: ... ... ...

Boss: It’ll all work out. Don’t worry. Ok gotta run.

What seems to be the problem? Oh, is your wordpress site hacked/infected with malware?

So I guess you decided to disable updates because it might break your shitty little site? And I guess you thought those warnings you got from me and multiple colleagues about what could happen when you didn't update your wordpress bullshit weren't that serious?

Hold on, you want *US* to restore *YOUR* hosting backups?

Hahahahahaha-no.

Go clean up your own fucking bullshit. But, before you click that restore button, please take a cactus, carve 'I am a stupid wordpress cunt' into it, dip it in a bathtub of with blood mixed-infected cum and shove it up your ass.

Oh yeah I'm aware that that won't help your situation but it might keep you from reproducing and at least it'll give me some satisfaction.

Manager: *taps dev on shoulder* We need to do B

Dev: I know, you created a ticket for it yesterday

Manager: Yeah but it hasn’t been done yet. It needs to get done.

Dev: I’m currently working on A which is higher priority

Manager: Ok but B needs to be done too

Dev: I know, it’s next on my board

Manager: I’m just making sure you are aware of it

Dev: I am aware of it, it’s next on the board

Manager: Ok but make sure you do it after A

Dev: Yup it’s next up

Manager: Ok, don’t let anyone distract you

Dev: …

So our company hired a new COO few months ago, and he oversees digital department as well

recently he called the digital department into his office to talk about a new campaign for a client, and client's mascot is a ladybug, so he goes like this

COO: So i was thinking, we need to make people more aware about the new branch opening

COO: I have a creative / innovative idea, we probably can get an award for this and I'm sure client will be really impressed with this. Why don't we put ladybug​s on Google homepage, just walking around flapping their wings and stuff, i mean everyone visits Google right ?

Our Team: awkwardly looking at each other
Me: 😐😐😐😐
( I was confused what to think )

Then our designer calmly explained him why it wouldn't work while we were trying our best not to laugh

how the fuck someone like him manage to stay alive all these years and become a COO, i mean he doesn't have to know it all but damn this is common sense

Motherfucker. It's two thousand fucking seventeen. You can get a free ssl certificate for any website.

Then WHY are there still some fucking websites which contain login portals, sensitive information or anything that SHOULD be protected in transit WITHOUT FUCKING SSL?!

I hope that the people who manage those sites and are AWARE that they can get a free cert but don't do that die in agonising pain.

This really fucking pisses me off.

On another note, EVERY site should have SSL, it's free anyways and protects your visitors from a range of threats.-

I worked in the same building as another division in my organization, and they found out I had created a website for my group. They said, “We have this database that was never finished. Do you think you could fix it?”

I asked, “What was it developed in?”
He replied, “Well what do you know?”
I said, “LAMP stack: PHP, MySQL, etc.” [this was over a decade ago]

He excitedly exclaimed, “Yeah, that’s it! It’s that S-Q-L stuff.”

I’m a little nervous at this point but I was younger than 20 with no degree, entirely self-taught from a book, and figured I’d check it out - no actual job offer here yet or anything.

They logged me on to a Windows 2000 Server and I become aware it’s a web application written in VB / ASP.NET 2.0 with a SQL Server backend. But most of the fixes they wanted were aesthetic (spelling errors in aspx pages, etc.) so I proceeded to fix those. They hired me on the spot and asked when I could start. I was a wizard to them and most of what they needed was quite simple (at first). I kept my mouth shut and immediately went to a bookstore after work that day and bought an ASP.NET book.

I worked there several years and ended up rewriting that app in C# and upgrading the server and ASP.NET framework, etc. It stored passwords in plaintext when I started and much more horrific stuff. It was in much better shape when I left.

That job was pivotal in my career and set the stage for me to be where I am today. I got the job because I used the word “SQL” in a sentence.

Hello!
I'm a member of an international hacker group.

As you could probably have guessed, your account [cozyplanes@tuta.io] was hacked, because I sent message you from it.

Now I have access to you accounts!
For example, your password for [cozyplanes@tuta.io] is [RANDOM_ALPHABET_HERE]

Within a period from July 7, 2018 to September 23, 2018, you were infected by the virus we've created, through an adult website you've visited.
So far, we have access to your messages, social media accounts, and messengers.
Moreover, we've gotten full damps of these data.

We are aware of your little and big secrets...yeah, you do have them. We saw and recorded your doings on porn websites. Your tastes are so weird, you know..

But the key thing is that sometimes we recorded you with your webcam, syncing the recordings with what you watched!
I think you are not interested show this video to your friends, relatives, and your intimate one...

Transfer $700 to our Bitcoin wallet: 13DAd45ARMJW6th1cBuY1FwB9beVSzW77R
If you don't know about Bitcoin please input in Google "buy BTC". It's really easy.

I guarantee that after that, we'll erase all your "data" :)

A timer will start once you read this message. You have 48 hours to pay the above-mentioned amount.

Your data will be erased once the money are transferred.
If they are not, all your messages and videos recorded will be automatically sent to all your contacts found on your devices at the moment of infection.

You should always think about your security.
We hope this case will teach you to keep secrets.
Take care of yourself.

>> RE >>
Well f### you, thanks for telling my password which is obviously fake. I have sent your details to the local police department, shall rest in peace. Don't earn money by this kind of action. STUPID!

Senior Management: We are severely disappointed in the timeliness of the two apps you built this year. You had budgeted 3 months for one and it took 4 months and the other was budgeted to take 4 months and took 5 months. We understand that we doubled the requirements halfway through and but that doesn’t take away from our need for you to deliver on time. We provided you with two extra devs on the project! We know they were novices and you had to train them from the ground up during the project, that doesn’t matter. The extra resources should have helped you but your lack of leadership ability is what caused them to hold you back. We know our other team with a budget of 6 months took 2 years on their project and was still unsuccessful but that is a different scenario! That was a pre-built 3rd party ERP plugin, way more complicated and nuanced than simply building and deploying something from scratch. Yes we’re aware your projects were the only successful tech projects at the company this year, that’s just luck and coincidence. The next app we need you to build in 6 months, no questions asked. It needs to consolidate and tie together our 3 different ERPs. Everything that we need out of these products that they don’t do out of the box we need you to wire up. We will decide the exact requirements in a month or so, for now just get started. Yes your apps changed the way we do business and allowed us to complete projects smoother than ever before while saving millions of dollars in wasteful and archaic processes that is OLD NEWS. Stop bringing it up. The successes of yesterday are the status quo of today. Don’t expect any new resources either, you clearly can’t handle them. You will now be giving status updates to 3 different managers as a corrective action to your missed deadlines in order to ensure the timeliness of future deliverables.

Dev: …

Dear people,
please be aware that if you touch my screen one more time I will stab you multiple times with a kitchen knife,
Thanks.

!(short rant)

Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"

For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.

tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).

Disclaimer: kinda non dev related. Just working to pay the bills right now.

The other day I ran for the train to work, don't want to be fucking late, right?

Arrived and this guy asked me this: (I have a sweating/transpiration problem but I'm fully aware of that)

"hey man, ever heard of fucking showers or deodorant?!"

Yes, I was sweating my ass off and you could smell me but I can't FUCKING help that.

It was very embarrassing and humiliating to get that kinda comment in front of like 30 people but I just swallowed it and went to work.

After the first break, a woman from management came to me and pulled me aside. A few people had complained about how that guy from before said some pretty humiliating stuff to me and she said that the guy received a warning and was told to fucking learn to treat people with respect, regardless of their (health) issues/appearance. I also got an apology and a sorry and if I could keep my eyes open for such behaviour in the future.

I'm very glad that she apologized although it wasn't her fault because I know I've got this health issue and I can't do anything about it yet but it can MOTHERFUCKING hurt when someone talks shit about me when I smell and I CAN'T FUCKING HELP IT BECAUSE THIS IS THE WAY MY BODY WORKS TOO BADLY.

I felt protected and safe about my issue for the first time in my life.

Thanks management!

*In teams meeting with client*

Manager: Yes we can do all of that and it will be actioned very quickly. We will make all of these feature requests top priority. We will set aside everything we are currently working on in order to get this done!

Dev: ...Are you writing any of this down?

Manager: I don't need to, I always remember everything!

Dev: Just so you are aware, I'm not writing anything down. You're going to need to create a ticket with requirements spelled out for each one of these promises you're making otherwise they won't get actioned by the team.

Manager: I know that!

Dev: ...

*Later that day*

Ticket Title: Action client feature requests TOP PRIORITY!!!

Ticket Description: *empty*

Dev: ...

Recruiter: We found you resume as a perfect match for this job, my client needs a Junior frontend developer ...., that sounds good to you?

Me: Yes, I’d like to apply but you have to be aware that I’m a Junior.

R: of course, don’t worry about it, please send your resume (ah? I thought you already have it) so we can go on with the process.

Me: ok.

... 5 fucking weeks of interviews later...

R: Hi, unfortunately we cannot proceed with you application, my client is looking more for a Senior FullStack Lord of the 7 kingdoms Master degree developer, sorry.

Me: u kidding me right?

Manager: How come the push to prod didn’t happen?

Dev: We told you at the scrum yesterday. To reiterate, our dev environment was crashing so it’s not safe to push to prod until that is fixed.

Manager: Ok well lets set a goal to fix that and push to prod happens today so that it guaranteed happens.

Dev: That was our goal yesterday and it definitely didn’t happen.

Manager: I AM AWARE OF THAT. The corrective action is that this time compliance with the goal is 100% ABSOLUTELY MANDATORY!!

Dev: We’ll do our best, can’t guarantee anything until we figure out what the nature of what is occurring on dev though.

Manager: NO. I AM THE BOSS. YOU WILL 100% ABSOLUTELY COMPLY WITH THIS. THAT IS AN ORDER. YOU WILL SUCCESSFULLY GET THIS UPDATE OUT TO PROD TODAY. ANYTHING LESS THAN THAT SHALL BE CONSIDERED INSUBORDINATION. I WANT STATUS UPDATES EVERY 15 MINUTES ON WHERE WE ARE AT WITH THIS.

Dev: …

Dev: Can I get you to send me that request in an email?

*Manager leaves the meeting*

// *****************************

Job search is ticking along. It’s tough going though because I currently make ~120k and the best offers I’ve received so far are all ~70k because “You only have 2 years experience so you couldn’t possibly have the skills to be worth 120k. You are are junior level developer and 70K is already overpaying for you. We can pay you more later™. No we will not give you that in writing”. Ah well, the hunt continues.

Working with a client...the resident """sysadmin""" hasn't actually been a sysadmin since the early 90s, the last OS he _actually_ managed was SunOS 5 or something. I can't remember what he said. He hasn't kept up AT ALL with modern technologies/terminologies. He's convinced SELinux is a security hardened kernel. We've explained to him several times that it's not but he sees Linux and thinks Linux 1.0 from the 90s. It's downright embarrassing.

Now this would all be well if I didn't have to interface with him often, but the client WILL NOT give me access to their systems. So I have to go through him to get anything done. Which is over webex. So I get to watch this guy type (and mess up) basic commands over and over (he isn't aware of tab completion of any of the bash features that are super useful). So I'm telling him what to type and the delay is always just enough for him to get too far in the command to back out, so its like SSH-over-incompetence with a 500ms ping. It's truly infuriating.

Every once in a while he'll get frustrated enough to hand me control of his webex session, which isn't as painful but once again the delay is bad enough it's still a pain.

Best part is that he looks EXACTLY like Milton from Office Space. So thats one plus to this whole situation!

Stupid bloody PM.

I asked him for two images a long time ago: a 1x and a 2x ‘0’ monogram for Apple wallets, since we currently have monograms for glyphs 1-9 and a-z. And this is in production, so any merchant whose name starts with a ‘0’ will cause a crash. We’ve been fortunate thus far.

But this PM. He lied about who needed to make the images for three weeks, saying it’s up to the designer, when he actually made them himself. He also said he was going to take care of handing the task off, and never did, and then said designer when on FTO. When I asked the designer about it after he came back, he had no clue what graphics (and even the feature) I was talking about, or even what the requirements for the graphics might be. I had to confront the PM before he admitted he made the originals, and (begrudgingly) said he would make the new ones.

When said PM did finally make the images, the colors were all wrong. They’re not the light teal from our branding, they’re dark blue and the font is different, making them pretty ugly.

Also, after assuring me that the naming convention for the new images is the same, I discover that they’re neither organized into folders nor even named properly. (And yes, he is aware of how it should be.) I can rename and move them around easily enough, but come on, don’t say you did the work and then give me a mess to clean up!

And to top it all off, he completely spaced making the ‘u’ monograms, so I’m still short a fucking glyph!

Asdfjskldf.

How do you do every single thing wrong? Like, how!?

Scariest Web Page i Made:

So i was outside the hotel where my friend works, as he went away to submit work related papers and i sat in the car.

The car was parked in the middle of two others. To pass time i started working on my Web Page..
To me it was just a simple html,css,js source code..(wasn't even client side)...

To the other non-programmer hotel staff (Prying) eyes it was:

A shady guy, dressed in black in a car parked outside the server room. To top that off i had Dark theme on my editor.

So now two staff members are staring at me from outside the car...

I was well aware of what message this whole setup might be sending.

So i got a little anxious and did one thing that i should not have done i.e started looking at them with coy eyes as i typed.

Next minute i was being asked to step outside the car.
I was scared,not by the situation ... i was scared of their ignorance and how would i explain what those many colored lines on a black screen meant.

However it was solved..... but i knew this was the scariest page i ever made.

Be aware of your requests.

A fanfic based on devRant-chan. The character was created by @caramelCase and a drawing by @ichijou.

This is freestyle. I'll think of an image of a scene and go with the flow. I won't remove my fingers from the keyboard and I won't edit or change anything. That's how I come up with my best ideas.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Notes:

B/N = Boss' name (I was too lazy to think of one.)

Anything in between astericks is in italics.
Ex.) *this is in italics.*

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It was an early January morning when devRant-chan was situated in her desk, typing away on her laptop. She was working on a Python script for her barbaric client when she could've been out with friends. Oddly enough, her Sunday was surged with tranquility.

Normally, Sunday is when her irksome boss barks orders at her on the phone.

"This is wrong!"

"What is this?"

"Change it!"

devRant-chan resented her boss but loved her job. After all, "you can't force yourself to like everyone," was something her elder brother would tell her.

She released a slight chuckle, the one she would only display at the thought of her brother.

Her musings were interrupted when a concerning thought crawled into her mind like an undesirable intruder.

Why hasn't her boss called to complain yet? It's not that she enjoyed his complaining, which she didn't. She simply found it odd, since he's done this every Sunday morning, since she was a junior developer.

Unless he found someone else to complain to? In that case, good riddance!

But still, it wasn't a euphoric feeling to be replaced. She was already accustomed to his Sunday morning calls that it feels almost lonely not to receive them.

She should call him... Just in case some situation—or—problem—has emerged.

She dialed his number, waiting patiently for a reply.

"Hello," said her boss.

"Ah, hello," said devRant-chan. "I called, wondering—"

"You've reached the voicemail of B/N, please leave a message after the beep."

"Damn..." mumbled devRant-chan with a sharp exhale. "I always fall for that."

Why didn't her boss answer the phone? It was odd of him, considering he's always answered her calls.

She was about to dial her coworker when she received an email, which stimulated her attention. The subject of the email read:

*Important. Please read.*

She opened the email. It was her boss. The email read:

*Hello.*

*In case you aren't aware, I had quit my job, due to the stress. I've left the manager in charge. Starting tomorrow, he will be your new boss.*

*-B/N*

Before she could rejoice in excitement, she detected a strange change of voice, emitting from the email. Did her boss really write this?

That's when she spotted something. The word "tomorrow."

Her boss didn't write this.

He would never use words such as "tomorrow," or "today." He would use time instead. If this was her boss, he would say "in 24 hours."

She checked the IP of the email. Oddly enough, it was her boss' IP.

Still, the pieces didn't fit the puzzle. Her boss didn't complain, answer her call, or use his style of speaking in the email.

Something happened to him and she knows it. Whatever it is, has something to do with the manager, and she was determined to figure it out.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This was just a quick random fanfic, and I'm not sure if I'll continue it. As I said, I didn't plan anything, since it's freestyle. I might or might not continue it, so I'll think it over.

I’m a .NET desktop fullstack dev these days… Never worked web unless for my own small needs/personal projects.
I started using tech one way or the other by the time windows was version 3.1 and been through quite a bit ground-breaking changes in the industry of software development and the internet but if there’s one thing I cannot understand of it all, no matter how much thought I put into it is: How the fuck did we manage to make it so fucking complicated to develop anything these days?
I remember like it was yesterday that you could stand a website with HTML, CSS and JS, three fucking files and you’ve made yourself a single page site. Then came the word “Responsive”, “Responsive” written everywhere. Fair enough, grid system popped up. All of the sudden jQuery was summoned… and everything that happened after this point has been a fucking circus of high-pitched teens talking on conferences about fucking libraries and frameworks to make integration with real time, highly scalable, eco-friendly, serverless, data driven, genome aware, genderless, quantum technologies to interact with bio dynamically generated organisms, namely fucking users.
Every fucking bit of the process of building a mobile/web application seems to be stopped by yet another incredibly dumb attempt to suicide a developer. Can you go from starting an app and publishing an app without jumping through a thousand VERY specific hoops? No, fuck no.
I fucking hate it… It’s a bit hard to get Desktop dev jobs these days but for as long as I work on IT I will continue to stick to that area, until someone for the love of life comes up with a fucking solution to all this decadent circus of bureaucratic technocracy.
Fuck big industry, fuck tech giants, fuck javascript and webassembly, fuck kids putting ASCII art on console applications that I DON’T FUCKING NEED to install dependencies THAT I DON’T FUCKING NEED to extend functionality on frameworks that I DON’T FUCKING NEED… oh wait, I do need all this because YOU FUCKING MADE IT MANDATORY NOW! FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOU!!!

I just got told on a video meeting that I am far too pretty to be a developer.

To be fair, I am well aware of this, most devs I have met on the wild are some ugly ass motherfuckers.

I is a pretty ass mfker.

Alright, the blog seems to be running again and its not breaking yet which is a good sign :P.

Although nothing has changed on the front end yet, the backend has been partly rewritten to be more efficient and of course, post sorting based on posting date!

I'm aware of most of the front end issues so no need to tell me all of them again, I'll look at that tomorrow as I need sleep right now :(

If you'd find any bugs/security issues, please, don't exploit them but report them instead! I take security very seriously and will try to patch any security bug as soon as I can :)

I shall refer to the client as cunt for the purposes of this rant. All design work signed off. Near completion of project, cunt sends an email moving stuff around and changing the design. I send the cunt an email telling him that I will review his requests and send a quote through detailing cost implications and extra time added to his deadline to complete. Cunt says he wasn't aware there would be extra costs. I refer the cunt back to the quote and contract which clearly distinguishes the design phase and build phase explaining change control. Not heard back from said cunt.

"Big data" and "machine learning" are such big buzz words. Employers be like "we want this! Can you use this?" but they give you shitty, ancient PC's and messy MESSY data. Oh? You want to know why it's taken me five weeks to clean data and run ML algorithms? Have you seen how bad your data is? Are you aware of the lack of standardisation? DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE MISSPELLED "information"?!!! I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW THERE WERE MORE THAN 15 WAYS OF MISSPELLING IT!!! I HAD TO MAKE MY OWN GODDAMN DICTIONARY!!! YOU EVER FELT THE PAIN OF TRAINING A CLASSIFIER FOR 4 DAYS STRAIGHT THEN YOUR GODDAMN DEVICE CRASHES LOSING ALL YOUR TRAINED MODELS?!!
*cries*

These anti AI type news articles are ridiculous. We are decades away from anything like skynet. People have seen too much fiction. Everyone used to dream of flying cars, did that happen? No. Do not be fooled, machines can do clever things but they are no where near becoming sentient beings. You try and build something that has the same IQ of a dog and it will still require a shit ton of power and hardware. Plus as far as I'm aware dogs haven't taken over the planet with their level of intelligence.

At the end of the day machines need power to run and we control the source. If anything futuramas more realistic in how AI/robots will integrate with society than these shit piece newspapers.

As a full-stack dev who has been looking for a full-time role for over half a year now... How the fuck can it be so difficult to land a job as a dev? I'm a passionate, capable, and proven dev; it shouldn't be this hard.

And why the hell are coding/whiteboard interviews the de-facto standard for deciding if somebody is worthy of a role? Whiteboard interviews are as inadequate and unencompassing a means of determining the quality of a candidate as asking a dentist how well they know the organ structure of the human body.

I've applied to an endless number of positions, so far-reaching and desperate as to even apply to international positions and designer roles instead of developer roles (I've been a graphic designer for over 13+ years). Even with this, most don't get back to you, and the few who do most often just notify you of your rejection. On the rare occasion I land an interview, my chances get fucked up by the absurd questions they ask, as if the things they are asking about are at all an appropriate, all-encompassing measure of what I know.

Aren't employers aware that competent devs are able to learn new things and technical nuances nearly instantaneously given documentation or an internet connection? Obviously, I keep learning and getting better after every interview, though it barely helps, when each interviewer asks an entirely new, arbitrary set of questions or problems....

Honestly, fuck the current state of the system for coding job interviews. I'm just about ready to give up. Why the hell did I put myself through 5 years of NYU for a Computer Engineering degree and nearly $100K in student loan debt, if it doesn't help me land a job?

Not to say anyone here is right or wrong about this, but I just do t get the whole privacy paranoia. Yes, I get that our rights are being violated. Yes I know I need to be aware and concerned.

People use specials rims, VPN software, etc... The bottom line is every keystroke, SMS, voice call, search text, historical reference... every piece of digital communication is recorded (At least in the US).

The sad reality is I can be as angry as I want, but unless I forego using tech or leaving the house, there is nothing I can do about it.

I await your comments, both positive and negative.

Was asked to help a team of interns in a remote country, finish an app. Not only were they terrible at literally every aspect of development, but were arrogant and argued their "new" ways were right.

Spent weeks on the project being nice, trying to help them, sending them links to standards and documents, pointing out unit tests shouldn't be failing, everyone needs to have the same versions of the tools etc. You know, basic shit.

Things got quite heated a few weeks in when they started completely ignoring me. Shit was breaking all over the place and crashing, as I thought we were going to build it one way, and they went and built it another.

Was practically begging the team architect and my manager for help dealing with them. Only reply I got was the usual "were aware of the problem and looking into it" bullshit.

Eventually after the app was done, a mutual agreement was reached that the 2 teams would split (I maintain they were kicked out). All the local devs were happy, managers had mentioned how difficult they were and it would be great for us to finally work on our own.

So I thought everything was fine ... until my end of year performance review came along.

Seems I'm quite poor at "working with others" and I "don't try hard enough with others", it was clear I was struggling with the remote team and "made no effort".

WELL FUCK RIGHT OFF

Not being cocky, but I've never had anything like that in a performance review for the past 7 years. I'm a hard worker, and never have trouble making friends with colleagues. Everyone in the country complained about these remote fuckers, even the manager, who I begged for help. And the end result is I need to work harder.

I came in early, stayed late to fit their timezone, took extra tasks, did research for them, wrote docs. And I was told to work harder.

Only reason I didn't quit, was my internal transfer request was approved lol. New team is looking at projects orders of magnitude more impressive, never been happier.

Been reviewing ALOT of client code and supplier’s lately. I just want to sit in the corner and cry.

Somewhere along the line the education system has failed a generation of software engineers.

I am an embedded c programmer, so I’m pretty low level but I have worked up and down and across the abstractions in the industry. The high level guys I think don’t make these same mistakes due to the stuff they learn in CS courses regarding OOD.. in reference how to properly architect software in a modular way.

I think it may be that too often the embedded software is written by EEs and not CEs, and due to their curriculum they lack good software architecture design.

Too often I will see huge functions with large blocks of copy pasted code with only difference being a variable name. All stuff that can be turned into tables and iterated thru so the function can be less than 20 lines long in the end which is like a 200% improvement when the function started out as 2000 lines because they decided to hard code everything and not let the code and processor do what it’s good at.

Arguments of performance are moot at this point, I’m well aware of constraints and this is not one of them that is affected.

The problem I have is the trying to take their code in and understand what’s its trying todo, and todo that you must scan up and down HUGE sections of the code, even 10k+ of line in one file because their design was not to even use multiple files!

Does their code function yes .. does it work? Yes.. the problem is readability, maintainability. Completely non existent.

I see it soo often I almost begin to second guess my self and think .. am I the crazy one here? No. And it’s not their fault, it’s the education system. They weren’t taught it so they think this is just what programmers do.. hugely mundane copy paste of words and change a little things here and there and done. NO actual software engineers architecture systems and write code in a way so they do it in the most laziest, way possible. Not how these folks do it.. it’s like all they know are if statements and switch statements and everything else is unneeded.. fuck structures and shit just hard code it all... explicitly write everything let’s not be smart about anything.

I know I’ve said it before but with covid and winning so much more buisness did to competition going under I never got around to doing my YouTube channel and web series of how I believe software should be taught across the board.. it’s more than just syntax it’s a way of thinking.. a specific way of architecting any software embedded or high level.

Anyway rant off had to get that off my chest, literally want to sit in the corner and cry this weekend at the horrible code I’m reviewing and it just constantly keeps happening. Over and over and over. The more people I bring on or acquire projects it’s like fuck me wtf is this shit!!! Take some pride in the code you write!

Lying bastard of a teacher.

Context:
This is year I'll graduate from my high school. But before that we have to pass the final examination. One part of that examination is presenting a project, which we should complete within this year. Each student has to choose a mentor/supervisor to help him on them on their project. I chose a professor who'll leave the school in January because of her pregnancy.

This is the part where the bastard, who asked me whether I use HTML or CSS for a website, barges in.
Given the fact that he incompetence be matched by his arrogance, nobody would ever choose him. He has to watch while other ring the other professors. He asks desperately for students, but everyone already has a mentor.

Yesterday he told me that my mentor will leave this January and that she already WROTE him an email where she asked him to continue mentoring her students. I was kinda confused, so I told him I would talk it over with my mentor and guve him an answer on a later date.

Today the truth comes forth. She didn't write anything. This bastard invented all of it. She even told us that she is aware of this guy is incompetent and that she would have asked a teacher with a good reputation.

But I'm furious. Not only did he waste my precious time with that conversation, which he follow up with the most basic way of time managing you could think of.

HE STRAIGHT UP LIED TO STUDENTS TRYING TO BOOST HIS NONEXISTENT REPUTATION.

I am not comfortable with a person like that being able to give me marks. Just yeet him out already!

Man I really hate it when people think that coding doesn't take any concentration and can just interrupt you while you're thinking about how to solve problems

So the other day I was working on how to solve a problem with filtering data with JS, and I had to urgently update one of our pages on our website. I had to update that page according to the content of a Word file, which I didn't check how long it was.

About 15 minutes later everything was ready and published, so I set myself back to my problem.

I get an email from her, "you mixed up things" and she showed up in my office. "There are four pages in this word doc and you copied wrong parts", I was like "ok, I'll fix it". Fixed it two minutes later, went back to code.

Received another email, with another subject, again with another problem. Start getting pissed off for being interrupted for nonsense. Fixed it instantly and put my manager in the email loop so she is aware my other colleague pisses me off.

And again, another direct email "can you fix this?!". I started ignoring her requests because I need some work to be done, and I already lost 2 hours. Got again interrupted by her personal visit to point me which things are wrong, repeating everything twice as I am stupid to her. Man I can't code in peace. I fixed her shit, exactly as she wants and decided to pay my manager a visit to tell her I'm really pissed about being interrupted all the time.

Five minutes before the end of the day, she comes panicking in the office about ANOTHER WORTHLESS issue. Told her it's nothing and went away.

Day is over, thought it was over - a whole afternoon spent correcting her fucking page that gets 10 visits a year.

On the next morning, "there is something wrong with your form, can you check it?!!?" with an attached screenshot. FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU STOP ANNOYING ME WITH YOUR FUCKING SHIT CANT WORK ANYMORE. PUT YOUR FUCKING PAGE RIGHT UP YOUR ASS AND FIX IT YOURSELF.

She doesn't have any access to the back end.

Guess I'll have to fix it then...

*Me, sittting in a sprint planning meeting*

PM: We are going to start a 2 weeks sprint and everyone is expected to meet the deadlines no matter the cost.

*Scrum master being an intern doesn't still know how to plan the sprint*

Me: we are having a week long holiday due to elections next week and how do you expect to finish within the deadline when office is closed.

PM: we are aware of that, but who is ready to take this as a challenge and be proactive in completing the tasks?

How many of you have faced this situation where the company expects you to work from home and get the tasks done even during the holidays. The company only values their work and not the employees. They want us to work as slaves without valuing us. They expect us to be loyal to the company through work but they aren't ready to be loyal to us through payments.

DONT DEVELOPERS HAVE THEIR HOLIDAYS TO SPEND TIME WITH THEIR LOVED ONES? ARE WE MACHINES?

Me passing time on the weekend

Random call from unknown number

Turns out it's the manager

M: hey , how is your weekend going ...

Me: nothing much ... Whatsup ?

M : yeah well , we wanted to push some minor adhoc fixes as some clients wanted it urgently

The Devops folks need developer support . Can you pitch in and monitor

Me : I'm not aware of what changes are going , i don't think i can provide support

M : don't worry it's minor changes , it's already tested in pre prod , you just need to be on call for 30 mins

Me : ugh okay .. guess 1 hr won't hurt

M: thanks 👍🏽

Me: *logs in

*Notices the last merged PR
+ 400 lines , implemented by junior dev and merged by manager

*Wait , how is this a *minor* release...

*Release got triggered already and the CI CD pipeline is in progress

*5 mins later

*Pipeline fails , devops sends email - test coverage below 50%

Manager immediately pitches in ...

M: hey , i see test coverage is down , can you increase it ?

Me: and how do u suppose I do that ?

M : well it's simple just write UTC for the missing lines ... Will it take time ?

Me : * ah shit here we go again

Yeah it will take time , there are around 400 lines , I am not aware of this component all together

Can you ask junior dev to pitch in and write the UTC for this

*Actually junior dev is out on a vacation with his girlfriend

M : well he's out for the weekend , but
as a senior dev , i expect you to have holistic understanding of the codebase and not give excuses ,
this is a priority fix which client are demanding we need this released ASAP

Me : * wait wat ?

---

I ended up being online for next 3 hours figuring out the code change and bumping up the UTC 🤦🏾

So today, I managed to make one of my colleagues feel like an idiot. In this contract, I work mostly for ui integration, while he build the pages with angular before I add all the html structure and fancy css.

We are building the front-end/ui for an industrial device with a touch screen. For that last 2 days he was blocked on a bug that when you click the confirm button on a delete popup, it would somehow select an input in the page before it was deleted and would lock the ui when showing the virtual keyboard (the poor thing didn't know what to do and wouldn't close).

During those two days, he asked all the other devs for help, trying to find a pattern or anything that could help, while I was focused on writing my css and stuff since it was my priority and I was hired specifically for that (I was aware of the bug and gave my input but I never saw it being reproduced)

So today, he start his new routine of raging at his desk and he decides to show me on my device for some reason. I immediately notice a pattern. It would always select one of the two fields behind the popup, in the click area of the button (it's a big button). Then, I noticed that I could press a random spot on the screen, drag my finger on the button and let go and nothing would happen.

It's at this moment I knew I had found the bug. The button was set to emit an event on mousedown while the inputs behind it were set to emit an event on mouseup (like it should be everywhere). So the popup closed when you placed your finger on the screen and the input was selected immediately after when you removed your finger (which was usually faster than the page code which was not yet optimized)

After that, it was just an easy fix to change the listener and I had a free beer.

I had a huge epiphany on Friday... not all developers enjoy coding.

Discovered when they brought down 2 of our environments, well told them what was wrong with the changes in their code that caused the environments to break, gave them links directly to the file in the gitlab repo that needed to be updated, and...

They fucking went home. The change would’ve taken all of about 30-45 seconds to update and they fucking left.

This person’s team lead come storming in pissed off because her manager is furious about 2 environments going down and preventing everyone else from being able to deploy their changes.

We provide the exact same details to the team lead about what needs to be changed, and advise that her team member took off....

30 mins later, her manager is storming up to us (devops/sre) livid as hell.

Explain the situation for a third time... manager is like, why can’t you guys fix it?

Look here you dense motherfuckers, we can fix the code. We can be the plumbers that clean up your shit. But what value do you gain as a developer if you don’t understand how the systems work and you keep pushing shit in?

Made the changes, fixed the environments, done right? Wrong.

The original developer made more changes not knowing what would happen and thoroughly fucked the environments again.

This dumb-fucking dumpster fire of a dude then sends us a slack message. “It’s down again, can you fix it?”

Our manager steps in and tells us to send him a link to the logs and have him fix it himself!

Thank goodness we have a badass manager.

Send logs, send repo file links (again), and send line numbers in the logs to try and help just a bit more. Dude goes almost the whole day without fixing it, environments are down, other devs are pissed, we throw this dude to the wolves. His manager starts to head over and was about to talk with my team lead when our manager steps out of his office and tells him the in’s and out’s of the situation and that our job isn’t to play log parser/error fixer for the developers. This dude that’s breaking the environments needs to be the one to fix the issue and his team lead should be aware of the problems and should have been able to correct his errors before it ever came to us.

The amount of hand-holding we do is ridiculous.

(Disclaimer, this one guy making some mistakes doesn’t sound too bad, but this is actually a common occurrence for like 40% of all of our developers)

We literally have interns still in college running circles around some of our full time devs. I know I’m not a developer, but for anyone that’s new-ish to developing, when you see shit like that please don’t lose hope. Those ass-hats got into programming purely for a paycheck, not because of passion.

Stick with it and your greatness will know no bounds 👍

As for you craptastic dipstick lickers, FUCK YOU!!! Go back to school and learn how to give a damn.

Your entire time with the company, be polite and cordial, don't say risky things, basically be a good boy. But importantly, stay social. Just politely social.

After several months of this, enough time that your fellow employees and management are well aware of your personality, go to the PM in private. Threaten them that if they don't leave you alone you're going to break into their house at night, sedate them, dislocate their jaw and take a shit down their throat.

The beauty of this is that they can't reasonably go to anyone over this, as it's totally unbelievable and out of character. And will be so horrified of what they just heard that they will leave you alone.

Help.

I'm a hardware guy. If I do software, it's bare-metal (almost always). I need to fully understand my build system and tweak it exactly to my needs. I'm the sorta guy that needs memory alignment and bitwise operations on a daily basis. I'm always cautious about processor cycles, memory allocation, and power consumption. I think twice if I really need to use a float there and I consider exactly what cost the abstraction layers I build come at.

I had done some web design and development, but that was back in the day when you knew all the workarounds for IE 5-7 by heart and when people were disappointed there wasn't going to be a XHTML 2.0. I didn't build anything large until recently.

Since that time, a lot has happened. Web development has evolved in a way I didn't really fancy, to say the least. Client-side rendering for everything the server could easily do? Of course. Wasting precious energy on mobile devices because it works well enough? Naturally. Solving the simplest problems with a gigantic mess of dependencies you don't even bother to inspect? Well, how else are you going to handle all your sensitive data?

I was going to compare this to the Arduino culture of using modules you don't understand in code you don't understand. But then again, you don't see consumer products or customer-specific electronics powered by an Arduino (at least not that I'm aware of).

I'm just not fit for that shooting-drills-at-walls methodology for getting holes. I'm not against neither easy nor pretty-to-look-at solutions, but it just comes across as wasteful for me nowadays.

So, after my hiatus from web development, I've now been in a sort of internet platform project for a few months. I'm now directly confronted with all that you guys love and hate, frontend frameworks and Node for the backend and whatever. I deliberately didn't voice my opinion when the stack was chosen, because I didn't want to interfere with the modern ways and instead get some experience out of it (and I am).

And now, I'm slowly starting to feel like it was OKAY to work like this.

Not specifically dev related other than being hired as a dev, more a corporate thing.

I have medical issues that mean I can be a bit variable in my starting time. Company was aware and floated flexible hours as a possible solution, but never said it *was* a solution, and just left it there really breezy.

Nailed this down with my line manager a couple weeks later after HR lost their shit, apologised and thought nothing of it.

Few days later I read a blog post about IP clauses in contracts that reminded me I intended to ask, as mine didn’t have one.

Asked HR, no response for like an hour, then “we’ll get back to you on that”

Following week, pulled into a sudden meeting. “Sorry for short notice of meeting, but we’re terminating your employment effective immediately for ‘lack of commitment’”.

Utter. Bullshit.

The day before, the company literally had a company day where they banged on about their values and how they wanted to support their employees and foster an environment for good health and good mental health.

No disciplinary proceedings. My line manager found out 5 minutes before I did.

I emailed a few colleagues afterwards and apologised, and they were stunned it had gone down the way it did.

I was so blindsided and angry in the meeting, especially after I believed I’d found a company that was actually different and cared.

And I did my work, I stayed late quite often, even produced a couple internal devops tools in my time there.

The kicker is that it was within the probation period, so I have literally no recourse for any action against them.

What’s the most bullshit corporate clusterfuck you’ve been through devRant?

TM: Hey, do you have a moment?

Me: not really, I'm already overtime and have enough work for the whole year.

TM: Yeah, we know. Just a quick meeting to discuss something awkward.

Me: Hmkay.

...

Later that day:

TM: Yeah. To make it quick - we're confused and bit dissatisfied with how project X turned out. The staging server is blazing fast, but the devs machines seem to be extremely slow... Some devs complained.

Me: No wonder. I said from the beginning that the devs shouldn't do X and Y, and that the dev machines need to be redone after staging is done - as we need to gather hands on experience first, cause no one could explain to me what resources the project actually needed.

TM: Oh. I wasn't aware of that.

Me: I guessed so. You were on vacation at the beginning and I didn't had the time to lead another team...

TM: Yeah... So the dev machines get replaced?

Me: They _could_ be replaced, but the devs would need to reset up their environment, as I and won't transfer the environment of the dev user.

TM: Ah... So they would have to retransfer their personal modifications, if they made any?

Me: Yes. As always, the basic setup just provides the necessary services, settings etc. - stuff like remote IDE settings on the machine, configuration etc is left out and we don't transfer it as it is usually too much of a hassle and risky, as every dev does have his / her own preferences, and we don't want to support every possible configuration out there.

TM: Just out of curiosity... Staging was ready like... Last year?

Me: Beginning of December, yes.

TM: Sigh.

Me: The jolly of having a kinder garten full of toys that no kid wants to clean up...

TM: No comment. The kinder garten Kids might make me a Pinata otherwise.

Me: If only they'd fill us with chocolate first instead of just beating us.

...

Tales of lazy devs, to be continued...

Why do people have to lie? I am seriously getting tired of it.

Context: While I was on vacation the company hired some guy we’ll call Bob.
Bob is a senior with 10+ years of experience. 5 of those years in React (supposedly).
I got back from vacation and was told I’d be working on a project with Bob.
I’ve worked in teams before so I thought no problem.

Now I am aware that different people have different styles, so that’s why we agreed on a lint config with some fancy git hooks.

I was excited at first because the project actually seems nice, but my excitement soon turned into terror.

First of all, Bob doesn’t seem to understand Git…fair enough, I’ll give him a quick guide…

Mf calls me at 11pm on a Friday because he can’t push because the tests are failling.

Now tests. Bob doesn’t write those. Great.

We had created a few components to use throughout the project.

Bob seems to consistently forget what components are and why you write them and just imports the defaults from the UI library we’re using.

Bob also has a kink for hardcoding values for some reason.

I talked to Bob multiple times about this and he just tells me he’ll change it but in the end the PR stays open for 5 days, before it’s actually me who goes in and fixes it. Oh and yeah this shit keeps happening over and over again.

Now I know some of us devs hate meetings but for the love of God Bob just show up. You don’t even have to speak. Or at least answer a message that corresponds to the working hours and not in the middle of the night.

I am getting tired of this behavior and am seriously holding back from reporting this to the management. It’s been a month and I am seriously worried about the project. I have my own stuff to do but it takes time for me to clean up his absolute mess that doesn’t even pass the CI.

Call me an asshole I don’t care. It’s been a month and I’m legit worried about the future of the project.

TL;DR age != competence

My boss is a fucking computer illiterate self taught programmer.

Don't get me wrong, he can do shit, pretty shitty but it gets done...

But the dude has 38 fucking years old and somehow still searches for keys on the fucking keyboard and struggles to touch type anything...

I sometimes crying the fuck out when I have to help him with something...

I'm having a mini fucking panic attack right now just thinking of it... Fuck

He is our "manager" but doesn't even have the fucking balls to confront his own subordinates when they need to be confronted... Everyone is aware of this and everyone is fucking around... And no one sees any consequences... I wonder why deadlines are always missed...

He is so passive that every fucking thing someone asks he goes and says it is OK...

I was studying same psychology about ignorance and I think he lacks the understanding that shit is hard to do...

We literary had a conversation the other day something like that:

Boss: so, what do you think? One call to the api for it to return all data or multiple calls to return smaller ones?

Me: well... It takes ~180ms just for latency to the server for one call, if you have 10 calls it will take 180*10ms, it is better if we have one call and cache it if necessary on the backend.

( he has no fucking clue wtf caching is, besides browser cache)

Boss: (looking confuse AS FUCK!!) Well, I don't get it... Maybe I'll test it later.

Me thinking: test how you dumb motherfucker? On you fucking workstation with no fucking latency?
There is no fucking test. I'm stating it. IT IS A FUCKING FACT!

Me: well, it takes that for the call to go to the api and come back , its simple math. 1 == 180, 10 == 1800.
Suit yourself.

I love my notebook but still...

Fuck you to the person at Lenovo who thought that it would be a great idea to support 16gb of ram and then put 4gb internal ram into it.
I can add an 8gb stick to it, totalling at 12gb. There are no 12gb sticks (as far I am aware of) so yeah, fuck 16gb "supported" by the mainboard, 12 is the maximum.

A few hours ago I decided it was a good idea to to clean up my keyboard. I did so and took a walk leaving the keys to dry.

After I came back I hoovered the -board and decided to put back the keys. I started with the special keys since they were the easiest to find (and some required a metal thing).

Now, I was quickly made aware of something that I had never known nor noticed before. Bear with me here as I'm not a person that cares too much about hardware unless I need to. (Hardware here meaning stuff like mice, keyboards, headsets, and stuff like that). But I learned that

Not all keys are the same size. They look really similar to someone like me. But I manned up and put the keys back.

A little under 1.5 hours later and I now posses a keyboard that is in uncanny valley. It doesn't feel like it though, and it shouldn't be that big of a problem since I never look at my keyboard anyway.

Messaged one of my m8's about and this was his reply

"nope
one kind per row
usually says the row on the underside"

Now fantasize about the elasmobranch fish which is characterized by a cartilaginous skeleton of which I am the proprietor at what he said. I pulled a key out and, sure enough, "C28 R1".

Now I am not sure about the 28th column, but it did fit in the first row.

Fuck me

Ok, so when I inherit a Wordpress site I've really stopped expecting anything sane. Examples: evidence that the Wordpress "developer" (that term is used in the loosest sense possible) has thought about his/her code or even evidence that they're not complete idiots who wish to make my life hell going forwards.

Have a look at the screen shot below - this is from the theme footer, so loaded on every page. The screenshot only shows a small part of the file. IT LITERALLY HAS 3696 lines.

Firstly, lets excuse the frankly eye watering if statement to check for the post ID. That made me face palm myself immediately.

The insanity comes for the thousands of lines of JQuery code, duplicated to hell and back that changes the color of various dividers - that are scattered throughout the site.

To make things thousands of times worse, they are ALL HANDED CODED.

Even if JavaScript was the only way I could format these particular elements I certainly wouldn't duplicate the same code for every element. After copy and pasting that JQuery a couple of times and normal developer would think one word, pretty quickly - repetition.

When a good developer notes repetition ways to abstract crap away is the first thought that comes to mind.

Hell, when I was first learning to code god knows how long ago I always used functions to avoid repetition.

In this case, with a few seconds though this "developer" could have created a single JQuery handler and use data attributes within the HTML. Hell, as bad as that is, it's better than the monstrosity I'm looking at now.

I'm aware Wordpress is associated with bad developers due to it's low barrier to entry, but this site is something else.

The scary thing is that I know the agency that produced this. They are very large, use Wordpress exclusively and have some stupidly huge clients that would be know nationally.

Wordpress truly does attract some of the most awful "developers" and deserves it's reputation.

If you're a good developer and use Wordpress I feel sorry for you, as you're in small numbers from my experience.

Rant over, have vented a bit and feel better. Thanks Devrant.

1 friend who is currently studying in Canada.
I am not aware if he uses devrant or not.

Met him in a national robotic competition 3 years back.
Somehow, we exchanged numbers and nowadays we talk often whenever we get time (considering our busy life and timezone difference)

He is studying robotics and frequently sends me his designs and output with 3D printer.

About me, I left robotics(to be specific embedded) and got a job and working on backend these days.

Though, it's great talking to him and getting to know how the education goes there and his new works.

He also has a beautiful love story(not yet completed) which is another fun part to listen from him.

I hate people who don't value transparent and assertive communication. I'm saying this thinking about an specific client.

This client is a boss of Web agency, and has some contractors working on their projects. I worked for them for a year, doing Web projects from scratch and also maintenance.

Then, one week, the communication stopped. No answers, no feedback, nothing. For months. They ghosted me.

I tried contact a few times with no luck. After 3 months, they started to remove me from slack, git, base camp.

And that's it. I was discarded and it seems I don't even deserved a message to be aware of that.

I don't mind to end business relationship anytime, for any reason. There are lot of reasons a working relationship would not work, and that's OK. We should have partners that are a great fit for us.

But at least say it. Ghosting is something ridiculous and unethical.

A couple of months back we were discussing sh with a third party vendor for a very large ass fuck system that another department uses. I had been called into the meeting because the entire I.T department counts on me to at least act as an assessor to the many issues that other departments might have.

the department for which i was working with manages the databases that our institution uses, and in this particular question the DBA (my best friend mind you) was part of the meeting.

Mind you, issues that the third party vendor were having were all fixed by our DBA, and he had documented and mentioned these items to me as I provided assistance to him through the 3 weeks prior to this meetings. Once such case was that we needed a transitioning as well as intermediary system for some processes to happen from one DB to the other and a lot of other technical babble. Well, the DBA used to be an excellent (fuck you) VB developer who recently re-learned the language into .net. He had shown me many of his old programs and even by the limitations of the language they were elegant and fascinating. They really are and ya'll devrant fam know that I ain't one to hate on tech at all.

When the DBA explained how he went around some of the issues by generating programs that could assist him, he mentioned the tech stack, I had coached him into knowing that being descriptive about the tools he used would be beneficial to everyone else. While he mentioned VB.NET the vendor snickered and my boy got quiet.

Then I broke the silence, fuck you. "what was that?" and the dude said "nothing, sorry"
So I said "no no, I want to know, I am not going past this point until you, the dude getting paid over $100 an hour for something YOU couldn't fix explain to me the little hehe moment you had"

The mfker went silent. then explained how he was aware that people were moving past vb.net and shit like that, me "imagine that, someone used a tech stack that your ignorance thought obsolete to fix something you could not solve, even though we are paying you for it, were it me or in my hands, and mind you i have direct access to the VP so this foolishness might change, I would have cut you and your little sect loose months ago, I have no patience, or appreciation from leeches like you or the rest of the "professionals" that work for your company or other similar entities, much less, as you can see, my patience runs even less when you people snicker at the solutions that our staff has to take when you all slack"

The entire meeting was uncomfortable as high heaven.

Fuck you, if someone I know manages to run shit on fucking liberty basic then so fucking be it. I will slap you 10 fucking times over, and then fuck your girl, if you try to put someone else down for the tech stacks you use.

I hate neck beards, BUT I hate fake ass neckbeards ever more

*Colin Farrell in true detective mode: FUCK....YOU

LONG RANT ALERT, no TL;DR

* Writes an email to colleague about why I can't create a page on our CMS without at least a H1 title. She wants to me to put up an image with text on it (like a flyer), for multiple reasons, I say I need a textless image. *

30 minutes later:
* Casually plans a frontend optimization project, by looking at files on the CMS, in order to make further development easier and less time-taking*

*** EMAIL NOTIFICATION ***
* clicks *

"Hello, this is [Graphic designer] from the company who created the image with text on it. I do not understand why you can't put display:none on your <h1> tag. Also, being a web company, we are used to making themes and my solution of display:none will work. It's pityful to work on a design only to have it stripped out from most of its concept. If you can't do that, do tell me what resolution you need."

My first reaction:

"Dear [Graphic designer], I am managing our corporate identity, our backend and frontend codebase, I am a graphic designer myself, and am also SEO-aware. For at least 8 reasons (redacted, 'cuse too long), I will need an image without text. As told to my colleagues, I need a 72/96 DPI 16:9 ratio image, 1920x1080 is a good start but may be bigger. Also, looking at the image, it'll have to be in JPG, at 100% quality, exported for the web. Our database software will optimize the image by itself."

Reasons are about SEO issues, responsiveness issues, CMS tools issues, backend and frontend issues.

Instead, I sent following email "We can't. Image please."

I mean seriously. A bit of clarity for you:

In my company, nobody has the slightest idea what I do. They don't understand how a computer works (we all know it works by magic, right?). So of course, when one thinks what we don't know, we know it better than the one who knows, my colleague thought our CMS was like a word document, and began telling me how I should display her bible-length text-infected image, by using some inline css styling display:none.

I tell her "nope, because of my 8 reasons". She transmits that to the agency who's done the visual, now I have this [Graphic designer] not understanding that there are other CMSs than Wordpress on the web, and she tells me, me being one of the most aware on this CMS we have, how I should optimize my site?

Fucking shit, she connects on our CMS for 1 second and she'll get cancer since it's so bad. I'm in the process of planning a whole new rewrite so the website is well designed (currently I am modifying a base theme made by an incompetent designer). I know the system by heart and I know what you can, or can't do.

Now I just received an answer: "so it's only a pure technical problem". NO, OUR WEBSITE WAS CODED BY A CHIMPANZEE WHO THOUGHT WEB DEV WAS AS EASY AS WRITING "HELLO WORLD" ON A SHITTY CMS THAT FORCES DEV USERS TO USE A FUCKING CUM-WHITE-THEMED EDITOR TO EDIT THE WHOLE SITE!!!

I can't just sneeze and "oh look, it's working!"

This morning there was this window cleaner again, that actually made me remember a rant from the old box - my previous account. Repost of that coming in an hour or so :3

Turns out that he came in the morning, and I completely forgot about it. The only appointment that I had today got canceled so I was like, eh fuck it. There's been this family event yesterday that made me so fucking tired... I'll just stay in bed for a little while longer.

Apparently that window cleaner ringed my bell multiple times, haven't heard him do it but anyway.. he and the cleaning lady had the genius idea to ask my landlord whether they can just barge in my home. Way to start the day, isn't it? I thought there were burglars.

In my bathrobe and visibly pissed off (I am NOT a morning person!), I let him do the window cleaning and waited for them to get the fuck out already. Then that cleaning lady, the fucking bitch that called my landlord to break into my home without MY prior permission!!! While the window cleaner was doing his work, she proceeds to ask me this.

Cleaning lady: "I had this technical issue earlier, and since you are good with phones I thought I'd ask you."
Me (thinking): oh, here it comes.. *rolling eyes*
M: "What's the issue?"
CL: "Well my stepson has an iPhone, which he broke and we brought it to a smartphone repair shop. They repaired it twice but an hour after receipt of the fixed phone, it breaks again."
M (t): You went wrong at iPhone, and you went wrong at visiting that incompetent mofo "teknishan" twice.
M: "Well I have no experience whatsoever with iPhones, but continue."
CL: "Well, he replaced the motherboard, and some pin at the bottom.."
M (t): The fucking motherboard of all things. The whole fucking motherboard?! The last thing that I'd look at, he just replaces like that?! Fucking piece of shit. That's even worse than Apple stores. And what's up with that goddamn pin? CAN'T YOU POSSIBLY BE A BIT MORE SPECIFIC?!
M: "Given only this information, I have no idea what's wrong with it."
CL: "But you are good with these things, aren't you?!"
M: "I disassemble my own broken phones, and dick around with their motherboards. That, while I'm fully aware that in the process I can break it beyond repair. That does not make me an expert on every phone out there."
CL: …

Well what did you even expect, fucking bitch. You barge into my home, don't even have the dignity to leave for me to be able to shower and dress myself, and then you go ask shit like that? Go suck my fucking cock, and shove that iPaperweight down your ass!! How about that?!

I just tried to sign up to Instagram. I made a big mistake.

First up with Facebook related stuff is data. Data, data and more data. Initially when you sign up (with a new account, not login with Facebook) you're asked your real name, email address and phone number. And finally the username you'd like to have on the service. I gave them a phone number that I actually own, that is in my iPhone, my daily driver right now (and yes I have 3 Androids which all run custom ROMs, hold your keyboards). The email address is a usual for me, instagram at my domain. I am a postmaster after all, and my mail server is a catch-all one. For a setup like that, this is perfectly reasonable. And here it's no different, devrant at my domain. On Facebook even, I use fb at my domain. I'm sure you're starting to see a pattern here. And on Facebook the username, real name and email domain are actually the same.

So I signed up, with - as far as I'm aware - perfectly valid data. I submitted the data and was told that someone at Instagram will review the data within 24 hours. That's already pretty dystopian to me. It is now how you block bots. It is not how Facebook does it either, at least since last time I checked. But whatever. You'd imagine that regardless of the result, they'd let you know. Cool, you're in, or sorry, you're rejected and here's why. Nope.

Fast-forward to today when I recalled that I wanted to sign up to Instagram to see my girlfriend's pictures. So I opened Chromium again that I already use only for the rancid Facebook shit.. and it was rejected. Apparently the mere act of signing up is a Terms of Service violation. I have read them. I do not know which section I have violated with the heinous act of signing up. But I do have a hunch.

Many times now have I been told by ignorant organizations that I would be "stealing" their intellectual property, or business assets or whatever, just because I sent them an email from their name on my domain. It is fucking retarded. That is MY domain, not yours. Learn how email works before you go educate a postmaster. Always funny to tell them how that works. But I think that in this case, that is what happened.

So I appealed it, using a random link to something on Instagram's help section from a third-party blog. You know it's good when the third-party random blog is better. But I found the form and filled it in. Same shit all over again for info, prefilling be damned I guess. Minor convenience though, whatever.

I get sent an email in German, because apparently browsing through a VPS in Germany acting as a VPN means you're German. Whatever... After translating it, I found that it asks me to upload a picture of myself, holding a paper in my hands, on which I would have a confirmation code, my username, and my email address.. all hand-written. It must not be too dark, it must be clear, it must be in JPEG.. look, I just wanted to fucking sign up.

I sent them an email back asking them to fix all of this. While I was writing it and this rant, I thought to myself that they can shove that piece of paper up their ass. In fact I would gladly do it for them.

Long story short, do not use Instagram. And one final thing I have gripes with every time. You are not being told all the data you'll have to present from the get-go. You're not being told the process. Initially I thought it'd just be email, phone, username, and real name. Once signed up (instantly, not within 24 hours!) I would start setting up my account and adding a profile picture. The right way to ask for a picture of me! And just do it at my own pace, as I please.

And for God's sake, tackle abuse when it actually happens. You'll find out who's a bot and who isn't by their usage patterns soon enough. Do not do any of this at sign-up. Or hell, use a CAPTCHA or whatever, I don't fucking care. There's so many millions of ways to skin this cat.

Facebook and especially Instagram. Both of them are fucking retarded.

1. Hit everything you do. You will learn more faster. Don't accept things at face value, care about why things work.

2. Study and experiment constantly. Be aware of your surroundings and what is going on. If you're not ready with a solution when a power vacuum appears, you will always be a grunt. Or worse, eventually a manager who everyone hates because you constantly tell the people who report to you how "back in your day," your code was amazing, there were no bugs and your shit doesn't stink.

3. Be honest with yourself: If you just want to keep your nose to the grindstone and make manager so you don't have to code anymore:

Quit. Stop now. Do not pass go, do not become a cancer on the industry.

Go get a job as a PM, you'll have a better career and you won't be the weak link holding everyone else back.

Tl;dr When the shit goes down, you better be ready.

Another smartass! Here we go!

Look, I'm an idiot and I'm absolutely aware of it. But you don't get to give an opinion without having the knowledge or skills. I may be young-ish and stupid, but that doesn't mean you're right, or that you know better than me ffs. If I'm down to earth, that doesn't mean you're above me. If you want my respect, then behave yourself. Just because you think you've "schooled me"...doesn't mean you did.

... Aaaaaand those are stuff I'll never say in real life. Gah. I can't lecture people I don't care about, but some do piss me off regardless. And what is with this sharp increase of people pissing me off these day? 🤔 🤔 🤔

The 5 stages of project management:

1 - the Mission:
Receive a project

2 - the Vision:
Over confidence and optimistic time estimation. Tell people how quick you can finish it.

3 - the Climax:
Adding unnecessary features. Try to be innovative. Think different. Feeling like a Rockstar.

4 - the Bargain:
Does not aware deadline is not far away. Reverse all unnecessary or impractical moomshot features. A bit stressed

5 - the Embarrassment:
Unpredicted obstacles or incidents. Late delivery or fail. Feel like a loser.

To people who may not be aware, Steve Ballmer is no longer the CEO of Microsoft. They actually dont suck anymore.

Im getting a bit tired of programming.

I have been struggling for years regarding programming. I did have some moments of perceived success, but most of the time it has been depressing.

I’m not sure if I dislike programming. But there are some aspects of it that make me feel not as passionate about it.

First of, programs are invisible. No one sees your program or you (assuming we’re talking about a non artistic dev job).

People can’t see lines of code executing, but even if they did it would be gibberish to them.

Users can only become aware of bad software and that kind of breaks my heart a bit.

You could write fast, stable, secure, easy to read, easy to update software. People won’t notice. Hell, even your boss/coworkers might not notice.

In fact, sometimes you try to do the good thing, you try to become a better dev, you try to write tests first, you try to i18n, and what do you get? “Uhh, that’s taking too much time and I don’t see the benefit”.

I know some people will say that people noticing bad service happens on every job.

But programming is the ultimate isolation job. No client has ever told me “hey that code you wrote was pretty good”. They can’t even read code.

I don’t know the users, the users don’t know me, and the users can only judge my program by the result, they can only judge the visual interface.

Let’s say you write a cool project at github. The code is great. Guess what, every language’s ecosystem out there is saturated. Everything is already written. GitHub is saturated. Your best project ends up being a just for yourself enjoyment.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t enjoy code for yourself. That’s how I bet most prolific coders start. I’ve been doing that for many years now. But at some point you want to be part of something with humans.

Imagine I’m stranded on an island with nothing no humans, just food, water and a computer. Would I write code just for myself, just for fun? I think I would off myself 3 months in.

Maybe I should do develop a more social talent...

Hired a designer below me.. guy never wrote a full back nor frontend... Used npm shit for all his solutions and worked his way above me just by kissing ass and polluting the codebase in such a way 70% would be open source shitty plugins for shit he could not do by himself code wise...

At some point he assigned some of his tasks to me and I couldn't work with his patchy framework that was non existent within the codebase I worked on ...

At some point between npm installed tantrums I got pulled up to HR because my code quality dropped... And it was this fucktart that accused me of this saying I could not do modern development...

In the end I either had to butkiss after his butts or just quit, so I did the latter... I told him and HR I owned alot more code quality than this asshat but just not his way of working and therefor it was more an issue of code equality I was never aware of ...

A month after that the company got overtaken by some silicon valley bullshit company buying up competition, and he is still working within that shithole dealing with 90's tech...

Was the best thing that happened to me, after that I grew alot in skillset and such by investments from other jobs and projects... If I would still work there today I would consider myself a caveman

After 2 years of applying for jobs and not getting any, I'm beyond tired of hearing employers complain to me and ask: "You have a Bachelors degree in Computer Science, you should be able to find a job without breaking a sweat".

Excuse me? In what world do you live in? Are you not aware that we have been living in an academically oversaturated market for more than two decades now? Nowadays you need a degree, plus a heavy portfolio plus crazy interest in the field (to an obsessive degree) because the competition is fierce.

It's not my fault I don't get jobs. It's always some "no fit", "not enough experience" bullshit.

Sigh.. seriously.

I spent over a decade of my life working with Ada. I've spent almost the same amount of time working with C# and VisualBasic. And I've spent almost six years now with F#. I consider all of these great languages for various reasons, each with their respective problems. As these are mostly mature languages some of the problems were only knowable in hindsight. But Ada was always sort of my baby. I don't really mind extra typing, as at least what I do, reading happens much more than writing, and tab completion has most things only being 3-4 key presses irl. But I'm no zealot, and have been fully aware of deficiencies in the language, just like any language would have. I've had similar feelings of all languages I've worked with, and the .NET/C#/VB/F# guys are excellent with taking suggestions and feedback.

This is not the case with Ada, and this will be my story, since I've no longer decided anonymity is necessary.

First few years learning the language I did what anyone does: you write shit that already exists just to learn. Kept refining it over time, sometimes needing to do entire rewrites. Eventually a few of these wound up being good. Not novel, just good stuff that already existed. Outperforming the leading Ada company in benchmarks kind of good. At the time I was really gung-ho about the language. Would have loved to make Ada development a career. Eventually build up enough of this, as well as a working, but very bad performing compiler, and decide to try to apply for a job at this company. I wasn't worried about the quality of the compiler, as anyone who's seriously worked with Ada knows, the language is remarkably complex with some bizarre rules in dark corners, so a compiler which passes the standards test indicates a very intimate knowledge of the language few can attest to.

I get told they didn't think I would be a good fit for the job, and that they didn't think I should be doing development.

A few months of rapid cycling between hatred and self loathing passes, and then a suicide attempt. I've got past problems which contributed more so than the actual job denial.

So I get better and start working even harder on my shit. Get the performance of my stuff up even better. Don't bother even trying to fix up the compiler, and start researching about text parsing. Do tons of small programs to test things, and wind up learning a lot. I'm starting to notice a lot of languages really surpassing Ada in _quality of life_, with things package managers and repositories for those, as well as social media presence and exhaustive tutorials from the community.

At the time I didn't really get programming language specific package managers (I do now), but I still brought this up to the community. Don't do that. They don't like new ideas. Odd for a language which at the time was so innovative. But social media presence did eventually happen with a Twitter account that is most definitely run by a specific Ada company masquerading as a general Ada advocate. It did occasionally draw interest to neat things from the community, so that's cool.

Since I've been using both VisualStudio and an IDE this Ada company provides, I saw a very jarring quality difference over the years. I'm not gonna say VS is perfect, it's not. But this piece of shit made VS look like a polished streamlined bug free race car designed by expert UX people. It. Was. Bad. Very little features, with little added over the years. Fast forwarding several years, I can find about ten bugs in five minutes each update, and I can't find bugs in the video games I play, so I'm no bug finder. It's just that bad. This from a company providing software for "highly reliable systems"...

So I decide to take a crack at writing an editor extension for VS Code, which I had never even used. It actually went well, and as of this writing it has over 24k downloads, and I've received some great comments from some people over on Twitter about how detailed the highlighting is. Plenty of bespoke advertising the entire time in development, of course.

Never a single word from the community about me.

Around this time I had also started a YouTube channel to provide educational content about the language, since there's very little, except large textbooks which aren't right for everyone. Now keep in mind I had written a compiler which at least was passing the language standards test, so I definitely know the language very well. This is a standard the programmers at these companies will admit very few people understand. YouTube channel met with hate from the community, and overwhelming thanks from newcomers. Never a shout out from the "community" Twitter account. The hate went as far as things like how nothing I say should be listened to because I'm a degenerate Irishman, to things like how the world would have been a better place if I was successful in killing myself (I don't talk much about my mental illness, but it shows up).

I'm strictly a .NET developer now. All code ported.

I've been reading a lots of posts about the "Age of No Privacy" and how our most personal information is spread and abused.
Well, obviously those complaining didn't have the displeasure of being born into an Ashkenazi Jewish family.
I had a small medical procedure, and my entire family (spread across 4 continents) became aware of it, created a WhatsApp group to discuss it (with message traffic that would shame any war room), and then my younger cousins asked that we post photos.
Of what?! My fucking colon? How about I stream the whole process live on Facebook, you crazy little shits?!
My point is - we violate the privacy of our close friends and loved ones daily, giving very little thought to what sort of information should or should not be forwarded. I'm not opposing to the battle against great evils, but maybe we should start by not committing small evils daily.

Trying to plant something:
- be aware of the pH
- the plant loves sun, but not too much
- fertilize it every 2 Weeks
...
Dear Nature, how the hell did you accomplish all these for centuries?

Not directly a dev related rant but needed to write it somewhere. (Also, long long rant, be aware).

I am currently working on a project for a client who is going to launch a new product. He wants us to create the brand and choose the logo, colours, communication... BUT before everything we have to deliver the website design.

We told him several times that the design has to be created AFTER the brand is created, however, he insisted. Then, we offered him to develop the UX/UI patterns but the colors and a few more things would be delivered after, so his 3rd party dev could make the job.

After working on the first draft, we sent it to him and he refused it, calling it "poor designed". We insisted that it was a draft for the UI which he ignored.

He asked for another design by taking as example a website from another (unrelated) company. We worked for another 2 days and delivered a more finished design, which he automatically refused again.

He called us to his office in order to provide us exactly what he wanted in every part of the site. He only gave us the home page and the product page, and ordered us to work through the weekend (Which we didn't as he is being quite petty about everything and bullying us).

We delivered this third draft and he made changes, sometimes going back to things that he refused before.

Now his 3rd party dev has things to work, but he called yesterday today telling us that the rest of the site must be before friday, date in which we will be showing him how the brand will be and what we have created. He didn't care about and demanded the designs.

I helped the designer to develop the designs of the website as I can work in Photoshop (I am mostly front web developer but can design UI) but he is now busy working on the brand and I had to make ALL the remaining designs, knowing that the client will reject them as soon as they are sent to him, since he hasn't given us any indication on how and what he wants.

We developers sometimes make futile work which will be used a few days or months or in order to provide demos, however, the time I wasted today made me get behind other deadlines, which makes me feel bad for not being able to accomplish them.

Got my first Webdev job at a small marketing company, felt very lucky as I didn't have much experience. Turns out I'm the only one that could program. The other guys just use Wordpress. It felt wrong at first, using plugins instead of developing, but we got results and clients were happy. I felt like there was a lot less to this development thing than I'd previously thought! And so we continued.

But I noticed that some of our more plugin heavy sites (not made by me - these were made in some drag/drop Wordpress interface) were running slow. I mean 15 seconds load time slow. I joined devRant around the same time and discovered that no - this is not what normal development actually is. Wordpress seems universally hated. Thank god, because something seemed very wrong!

So with us getting complaints all over the place over page speed from relatively high-profile clients, I've gone and set up a script on a server that downloads the whole front end of these Wordpress sites and serves them up instead of the 'real' thing. Did I mention that there's basically no dynamic content on most of these sites? It works like a charm! I'm now trying to figure out how to get forms and route them into the real, hidden version of the site, as well as automatically updating the html views whenever the client changes anything in the Wordpress backend. Not sure if this has fixed the problem or just enabled bad practice, but I don't think I'm going to be able to stop the others from doing things this way...

For the record, yes there are plugins that do similar stuff but I thought it'd be nice to never use plugins again! And hey, I got to learn all about bash scripting so I can't complain.

For real though, I didn't quite realise how bad the Wordpress thing really was until I came here. Thanks for making me aware, all!

Warning: pretty sad thoughts. If you're having a blast of a day, please skip. It's for your own good.

That feeling when you finish watching a piece of art. Be it a film or anime or anything. You're confused why you feel good, but at the same time you're hurt. You smile but the pain is still there when you reflect on the feelings and the experiences you had and you realise that none of it will ever happen again. No art or any of the past will happen again exactly the same way how you felt and experienced.

You think of the best friend you once had. Think of the girl you held hands with and time stopped. The first time you embraced her and knew you loved her more than anything, even if she didn't know your feelings. Think of your first kiss. Your first serious relationship. The last time you saw your parents, your wife, your children, family.

Now look at the perspective of the future and the past you: blissfully ignoring the certain end to all experiences until they all abruptly end reminding you of this and it hurts. Damn it hurts.

I will never be able to see me best friend again, nor will I ever be able to hold hands with her either. First time I kissed is now long gone. It's almost like you wish you were aware of how valuable and important the experience was and to not just throw it away like the last time and the several times before that. But the sad part is, you don't know which experience will make you realise how much you missed it.

But even if you do realise by placing yourself in the place of your future self, and you cherish the experience, you blame yourself because you could have either avoided it's end or did something better.

Like your break up: could it be fixed? Was it worth the little time you have on this plante?
Like your friends argument you had: could you have done better? Could you have stopped it?
Like your parent's death: could you have been a better son to your now overworked dying mum? Could you see how hard they tried even though you thought they were total dicks?

Now you realise that literally anything you do, you will have a problem with somewhere down the line. You're destined to be sad shattered and broken by every day that is tragedy.

But it's similar to art. After all, your life is a piece of art about how you died. Which is why you smile and enjoy the last second of the experience which you just had. That chest warming feeling will only last a little. You smile through pain, yet you realise its not the end.

Then again, its just my thoughts that i need to vent. Take it with a pinch of salt.

* KISS (keep it super simple)
* don’t try solve a problem you don’t already have
* admit if you messed up. We can solve a problem early and minimise the damage. People should never be scared to admit when they mess up. No one is perfect.
* voice your opinion. You’d be surprised how helpful this can be to your team, as we need to look at things from all angles.
* help your team. If you see something wrong, make the team aware of it.
* ask if unsure, don’t assume

There is a company providing a very speciffic service. And it has a core application for that svc, supported by a core app team.
That company also has other services, which are derivations of the core one. So every svc depends on core.

Now that we're clear on that... I was working in a team of one of the subservices. We very strongly depended on core. In fact, our svc was useless if integration w/ core broke down.

The core team had an annoying habbit. They refused to version their webservices and they LOVED to push api updates w/o any warnings. Our prod, test, other envs used to fail bcz of core api changes quite often. Mgmt, IT head was aware of the problem and customers' complaints as well.

So as a result, once core api changes we're all in a panic mode: all prior priorities are lowered and revival of prod is to be our main focus. Core api is not docummented, the changes are not clear, so we have to reverse engineer the shit out of it. We manage to patch our prod up w/ hotfixes, but now we have tech debt. While working on the debt, core api changed again, in test env. Mgmt pushes debt back and reallocates us to hotfix test. Hotfix is 80% done when another core api breaks. Now mgmt asks us to drop wtv we're working on and fix that new break. By the time we're to deploy the hotfix, another api breaks in another env. The mgmt..... You get the picture :)

2 years go by, nothing has changed so far.

This rant has been one that I've been wanting to rant about for a while now. Me being drunk as fuck right now (mind, stay awake!) doesn't really help, but meh.
At least Wanblows was able to install its "features" properly... Except it wasn't, being the featureful ShitOS it is.

I want to rant about privacy. Not about "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". That's been ranted about plenty by the MIcroshaft-loving folks as well as the privacy-aware opposition. Rather, I'd like to rant about the privacy-concious.

I am a privacy-concious-person, with his current status quo being that he doesn't yet know a privacy-concious solution to every data-intrusive "common solution" out there. So I tend to value privacy next to De Lijn while sharing location data to Google with Google Maps. Point is, I do not know privacy-concious solutions to everything out there yet. So I use the convenient over the privacy-aware.
(after review while drunk I was unable to make sense of this)

In the privacy-aware circles I tend to see that it seems to be black and white. You share your data with Google, yet you oppose data collection by local institutes? WRONG!!! YOU MUST BE A TINFOIL HAT!!!
No, seriously I don't want to share my data with Google. Just that they're the only realtime navigation platform with decent UI out there that I know of right now.

Privacy isn't all black and white here. I block any intrusion that I'm able to, anything else I abide to, while awaiting a good alternative that does respect my privacy which I would gladly use instead. That does not imply that "I have nothing to hide". I do, and I have a lot to hide.

So that makes up the black and white nature of privacy, which is a fallacy. Another one is the whole idea of "I have nothing to hide" to begin with.

If you have nothing to hide, would you be comfortable with sharing your location data (IP address, habits, common trends, etc) with me? To share your information with me, to have your contacts share your info with me, without your consent? Of course you wouldn't. But that's what's happening right now.

!rant

Hey all, I just wanted to spread some aware to mental health issues in this industry since I'm very close to burn out according to my psychiatrist.
I'm not even 25 years old, just worked 1 1/2 years full time and 3 years apprenticeship before that. So, I'm pretty young and "new" as a software developer.
Many projects got wrong horribly and fights with the clients felt as they were carried out on the back of the developers. Timings and specifications were communicated poorly, deadlines were undoable but no one listened.
I thought, this is normal. Now, after weeks of on-off-working because of reoccurring small illnesses, clearly caused by the permanently high stress levels, my psychiatrist, which I visited yesterday for the first time, was totally shocked. She was surprised, I could even handle it so long. That hit me quite a bit. I already expected it to be bad, but close to burn out... That came, I don't want to say unexpected, but quite unexpected.
It was really hard holding the tears back while telling her my story.
And now here I am. I'm currently on sick leave till the end of the year (then my employment at this company ends) and I feel bad for them, to leave them. I know, they could use my knowledge and abilities, but I shouldn't damage my mental health even more.
I will not work for the entire January. If my psychiatrist thinks, I shouldn't work in February as well, I will do so even though my plan was to work again.
I will not work full time again, since my brain seems to not be able to handle it. Maybe some time in the future.

This turned out to be way more sad than expected. I just wanna leave this here. Thanks for reading.

If you people are in such horrible situations, try to break out.

At work we have a....err....pool of usefulness awareness situation.

You see. The school does not know all that me and the lead developer does. Our head of department does. Our manager used to do(fore she left) but as far as the rest of the 2 fucking campuses are concerned, all of our shit works through magical dwarves that live inside the servers in our server rooms.

Normally, we are fine with this. But whenever one of us misses, or decides to take the day off and some shit hits the fan...THEN and only then do our users know what we do.

So we have a "pool" of items that seem to be picked every time one of us is not there. The more it gets picked, the more people are aware of us, the more they figure out what we do...the more they start to ask for customization and shit like that.

Such a funny situation. Wonder if this will get in the way of friday morning coffee and magic the Gathering at the office.

Or me and the cms admin playing videogames together.

Oh well

> Startup: ok listen up, we got this super cool thing we want to do with Twilio. Doesn't get any easier: some calls to book a restaurant, you ask for booking data and save that on some db.
> iHateForALiving: I'm on it. We got a couple weeks of development, never worked with Twilio, but should be easy enough
> Startup: Hold it big guy, we can't just write code like this. There's this OTHER developer with a super cool framework he wrote himself, it supports OAuth2 and multitenancy, written in Huskell, microservices to authenticate several apps all working concurrently in our environment, some orchestrator, cloud computing on AWS, you're going to love it. There's this Postman project with 200-something calls (the ones I need for my project, one and only consumer for those APIs, are 5 including the login)
> iHateForALiving: You are aware you'll have approximately six clients and they'll pay some 30 bucks each per month, aren't you?
> Startup: You don't understand, this infrastructure is CRITICAL for the future of our company
> ffwd 6 months
> iHateForALiving: guys we had this 2 weeks project and it's taking months, I'm ready, what is going on there?
> Startup: someone killed our DB, the OTHER developer pushed on git the access credentials :(

THE FULL MOON IS DRAWING NEAR AND THE FUCKING WERECODERS STRIKE AGAIN!

!dev

A child's mind is fascinating.

I remember how it felt being a kid, just deliriously happy.

Things were magical, mystical and happy.

I knew the world wasn't perfect, I knew bad things happened to good people.

But a kid's mind is so powerful that it can fill in the blanks with the most cheerful and optimistic perspectives.

And at some point in my childhood I was exposed to videogames, and that kinda took me down fantasy lane even further.

I was extremely young and barely retaining any memories when I was exposed to my first console, a famicom.

I have a somewhat vivid memory of my mind being blown away for the first time by watching my brother play New Ghostbusters II for NES.

From then on, we never stopped and played several console and dos/pc games.

When I was 10, someone from the neighborhood brought in a couple of floppys with Pokemon Yellow.

"What? Pokemon? How the fuck is that even possible? This is a pc, not a gameboy".

I didn't know at the time what an emulator was, but I was super fucking stoked to be able to play that.

My dad had a 1 gb laptop from work that he didn't use, so I hoarded that shit, and I would get to bed and play nearly everyday.

The experience was surreal. I was doing pc gaming... not on a chair, on a fucking bed, and I was playing a gameboy game... on a pc.

It was so intense to me, that even after more than 2 decades of that time in my life, I still remember how it feels like.

Like, you know how you can "feel" things if you think about them? like for example if you think about the taste of chicken, you can somehow feel it for a second.

Well I have like an actual physical sensation linked to that experience but I can't explain it at all, because it's just a sensation.

I think people usually say they feel that way, for example, about the PSX (usually refered to as ps one) loading screen. I experienced that too but when I was 12, so it was not as intense (it does make me feel the fuzzies though).

I also remember other things with very high detail, like the texture of my bed cover, the weather, mom cooking, the clunky shape of the laptop, the way I carelessly stored it above a pile of magazines, etc.

I rememeber ofc how it felt looking at the game sprites, interacting with NPCs, and the goddamn fucking glorious music.

It was dreamy.

Years and years later, I grew up and I stopped living in fantasy world and became more aware of the grim aspects of life my younger self was sugarcoating.

So I tried to play pokemon again, again and again, and no matter how hard I tried to revive that euphoria, I could not never do it.

I started to get annoyed at the game.

"Come oooon, I did the tutorial already, let me skip this.
This pokemon is useless, why am I even training it.
Fuck, I'm tired of grinding"

At some point I accepted that the feeling would never return, and that it would just live in my memory.

Ironically, I can recall that memory and how it felt anytime I want to.

And I can actually still feel it, and throughtout these years, it has never wore down.

And eventually I learned how to play pokemon and enjoy it:

I read tier lists at smogon online and just catch and train the pokemons that are higher on the list, which is how i got to beat yellow in like 3 days.

(This is nothing compared to what speedrunners do, but much better than the weeks it had taken me in the past).

That served as an important lesson that when a kid plays a game, his mind is also the game at the same time, filling the blanks with its imagination.

A very similar experience happened to me with harvest moon, which is the precursor of stardew valley.

and that game is faaar more emotional: you talk to people, overtime you befriend them and they open up, you meet a girl, you marry her, have a kid

you get farm animals, you brush them, they become happy

you get attached

that game was also so powerful in me that in all naiveness I thought I wanted to be a farmer.

Eventually I grew up and hit puberty and from then on, I focused more on competitive games, like smash bros, cs and tf2.

and i dunno how to end a post so eat my fucking nuts

“Hi - we’ve done an analysis of the front end codebase and we’ve determined that it would be a good idea to start using Bootstrap. Are there any concerns with this?”

“Hey - no concerns, we actually already use Bootstrap in all those places.”

“I was not aware. So you’re saying there are concerns?”

(From a previous rant I made)
As a note to all of my brothers from India. I am not happy with the current state in which your country is in regards to this bothersome pandemic. I do not feel happy, I am not jumping around singing to the doom you are all facing. I am sad. I know your people are good and your engineers outstanding.

Were it for me you would all be here in the U.S with me chilling with some good bourbon in celebration to how strong you can make our tech be.

My previous post was in regards to scammers, and I am very well aware that you are not at fault.

Be strong brothers, you will all survive this, just as India has survived generations of struggles.

!rant

Had a meeting with the head of my department concerning the status of many of our current projects. Them projects are huge and it is 2 dedicated devs(me and the lead) working on them whilst training our CMS admin in development to help out(dude is talented af and really digs programming) and my manager was so worried about what he was gonna say.

The thing is, she doesn't know how to take a break, she never pushes us, but she does push herself and it pains the team to see her take so much heat. She really is a bomb manager, and we want her to be more at ease.

Well a couple of days ago the vips of the board decided to bombard her with shit since out dptmnt head was on sick leave. The stress they put on her was some military grade bs and even then she never...EVER took it out on anyone.

The head of our department walked in to talk to us about it. Dude is a tall older gentleman, suits up every day(Texas style meaning cowboy boots and everything) and is quite imposing. Has a stern look man, one of them 1000 mile stares and a huge mustache that more than surpasses mine(which mind you, my mustache is fucking outstanding)

Our boss walked into the meeting room, sat down and heard what she had to say, she was not excusing herself. As bomb as this gorgeous woman is she was all about telling him what we were going to show the board on next week's meeting.

He sat there quietly listening to her as well as the presentation that me and my boys had to do.

What happened next blew me the fuck out of this world.

He said that he was sorry that so much stress had come down to her and us whilst he was gone and that he was happy with the leadership showcased by her and the initiative that the team took to put forward a presentation for him and the board. He also said that he was going to make said presentation for us since the vips had no business stressing us out, he asked for our assistance for any of the technical stats since even though he was a programmer he is not aware of all the inner details of our apps. He said that it is commendable that such a small team can hold 2 campus(college level) and that he was aware of the technical proficiency of me and the lead and that he knows that our shit is not something that gets done overnight.

He then said that at any given time that we get antagonized by matters such as timeframes or shit like that that we can direct everyone to him, regardless of what.

.He was also really amazed at the progress we showed him on the current projects(most are on their respective testing phases).
He then reiterated on how proud he is of all of us before biding us a good weekend and leaving to his office

As i sat there watching how the world was lifted from my manager and happy that he enjoyed the progress of my work I could not help but feel a deep sense of admiration and respect for this mysterious man.

I would damn skippy take a bullet for him....just in case my draw gets sloppy that is, ain't no one taking aim at the boss.

Had a mental breakdown a few days ago. Crying like it's the end of the world when computer stopped working. I was a Picasso drawing of the hysteria, basically.

My exams are getting near, I'm really not ready; yet this chick keeps asking me about ten euros I borrowed from her a year and something back when we were going to a club they asked me to go to with them... Given her persistence that I should wire her the money (no PayPal tho) I assume she's up to something super shady. Why does she need my account info for?

Anyways, being annoyed by only ten euros (in our currency, it's not much, btw. It's less than two bags of expensive chips, or 5 dozen of the cheapest eggs on the market) and not studying enough, there is also my work. I feel so incompetent that I may just resign. Like... I'm not smart enough for this project. 😢 And I'm aware of it.

Put that on the side with this uni's project, which is very "Urghhhhh" because of too many people working on the same project, some of who need to be sent back to kindergarten to learn how to cooperate with others.

And in the middle of all of that, I'm trying to stay as zen as possible until the next mental breakdown. 😑😑😐

Thank you for reading this rant.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Okay, I'm feeling a bit better now.
How to stop being a lil bitch? Why does it seem like everyone got the "don't give a shit" patch except me? I'm working hard on getting my shit together, I've made MASSIVE progress, but everytime I'm feeling good and confident and ready to take the world head-on, I just kinda crumble again with the slightest mishap. This needs to stop. I'm really trying SO hard not to snap. Fucking hell, being aware of all this makes it even worse! It's like I'm two people, one is a downer and REALLY good in draining my brain power, the other is the guy who's typing this and knows that life shouldn't be taken this seriously, but doesn't stay in the cockpit for too long. I'm extremely tired and mad. I just fucking hate this.

It’s perfect that this week’s topic is “Most awkward video meeting” because I just had two.

The first one was to demonstrate a software process. I had everything lined up and perfectly (or so I thought) ready to demo, kind of like a cooking show. Except the deployment totally failed. I’m still struggling to figure out why several hours later. Luckily I’m getting a second shot at it soon and they weren’t mad.

Then I went and took a shower. Checking out my eyebrows in the mirror, I decided they were getting overgrown, so I took out a trimmer with a guard on it to thin them out a little. Except for some STUPID and INEXPLICABLE reason I TOOK THE GUARD OFF right before I shaved off the right eyebrow almost to the skin! I couldn’t believe it. It was like my brain sabotaged me knowing I had an important video call coming up where I might be making a ton of money if all went well.

What the hell was wrong with me?! What could I do?! I stood there cursing my existence and making plans to become a hermit in the desert. Well, I couldn’t do that. And I still had a video call in a few minutes. I couldn’t just leave one eyebrow unshaven. So, I did the only thing I could do. I cropped the left one and tried to make it match as much as possible.

It wasn’t terrible, but it was definitely noticeable on HD video and certainly up close and in person when my wife and kids returned home soon. I started panicking and wondering just how I could literally save face after idiotically mutilating my face for all to see.

Then, I got an idea.

Now, I’m a manly man. At least, I consider myself to be. I don’t shave my eyebrows for any kind of metrosexual caché. I do it because if I don’t the grease from my face that gets into my brows eventually transfers to my glasses and then I get annoyed by all the smudges. As a dad who was never comfortable when my girls wanted to put makeup on me, I suddenly became aware that their massive trove of makeup “stuff” might just save my bacon!

So, I snuck into their bathroom and, lo and behold, the exact right shade of color for my missing brow brooms was sitting right on the counter. I dabbed a little on each finger tip and carefully (oh so carefully) tinted the area mangled by my apparent dementia.

It was actually pretty amazing how it all turned out. Even on HD video it was undetectable. And when the true test occurred…i.e. my wife and kids returned home and I had to talk to them face-to-face, absolutely NO ONE was any the wiser!

Now I gotta figure out how to keep up this charade for at least a week, maybe two. I hope they don’t put that makeup tray away somewhere where I can’t…oh, wait, they never put anything away. I’m good.

Stay curious and open-minded. If you hear something new take some 5-10 min and Google it. You will surprise much people even if you know just basics.

And if you're a fast learner, be aware, some people will be intimidated and try to oust you. But stay positive!

OK can we agree the WORST feeling is when you're just sitting around consciously procastinating and you're just overly aware that each second that passes is more time wasted and you like watch hours pass and you're STILL procastinating and you CAN'T STOP and your panicked brain is trapped inside a body that refuses to be productive and inside you're screaming but outwardly you're just eating chips.

You know, one of my fav ranters constantly shits on one of my main languages :P which is Java. But shit I would lie if I said that I have not learned something from what he has to say. Truth be told I am aware of the pitfalls and bad design decissions of a lot of my favorite langs: Python, PHP, JS, Java, Go etc. And I think it is benefitial to everyone to understand the things that our fav stacks fail at doing in order to become better devs.

So lets give a round of applause to those angry mofockas that make us see the shit that is wrong with what we use and learn more from each other.

How I got selected for GSoC'19:
I will describe my journey from detail i.e from the 1st year of the college. I joined my college back in 2017 (July), I was not even aware of Computer Science. What are the different languages of CS, but I had a strong intuition of doing BTech from CSE only?

So yeah I was totally unaware of the computer science stuff, but I had a strong desire to learn it and I literally don’t know why I had this desire. After getting into college, I was learning HTML, Python, and C, also I am really thankful to my friends who really helped me to learn, building logic and making stuff out of it. During the 1st month of joining the college, I got to know what is Open Source, GSoC, Github due to my helpful seniors. But I was not into Open Source during my 1st year of college as I thought it is very difficult to start. In my 1st year, I used to do competitive programming and writing scripts in Python to automate various stuff. I never thought that I would even start doing Open Source development, also in the summer vacations after the 1st year I used to practice programming on HackerRank and learnt an awesome course called Automate the Boring Stuff with Python(which I think is one of the most popular courses for Python) which really helped me to build by Python skills.

Now the 2nd year came, I was totally confused between doing Open Source development or continue with my Competitive programming. But I wanted to know about Open Source development, so I thought to start now will be a good idea. I started attending meetups of OSDC(Open Source Developers Club) which is a hub of my college, which really helped me to know more about Open Source development from my seniors. I started looking for beginner friendly projects in Python on the website Up For Grabs, it’s really helpful for the beginners. So I contributed in a few of them, and in starting it was really tough for me but yeah I continued, which really helped me to at least dive into Open Source. Now I thought to start contributing in any bigger project, which has millions of lines of code which will be really interesting. So I started looking for the project, as I was into web development those days so I thought to find a project which matches my domain. So yeah I finally landed on Oppia:
Oppia

I started contributing into Oppia in November, so yeah in starting it was really difficult for me to solve any issue (as I wasn’t aware of the codebase which was really big), but yeah mentors at Oppia are really helpful, they guided me which really helped me to start my journey with Oppia. By starting of January I was able to resolve around 3–4 issues, which helped me to become the collaborator at Oppia, afterward I really liked contributing to it and I was able to resolve around 9–10 issues by the end of February, which landed me to become a Team Member at Oppia which was really a confidence boost and indication for me that I am in the right direction.

Also in February, the GSoC organizations list was out, and yeah Oppia was also participating in it. The project ideas of Oppia were really interesting, I became even confused to pick anyone because there were 4–5 ideas which seemed interesting to me. After 1–2 days of thought process I decided to go for one of them, i.e “Asking students why they picked a particular answer”, a full stack project.

I started making proposals on it, from the first week of March. I used to get my proposal reviewed frequently from the mentors, which really helped me to build a good and strong proposal.

I must say a well-defined proposal is the most important key for getting selected in GSoC, also you must have done some contributions to the organization earlier which I think really maximize your chances of selection in GSoC.

So after my proposal was made, I submitted it on the GSoC website.
Result Day:

It was the result day, by the way, I had the confidence of being selected, but yeah I was a little bit nervous. All my friends were asking when is your result coming, I told them it will come at 12.30AM (IST). Finally, the time came when I refreshed the GSoC website, Voila the results were out. I opened the Oppia organization page, and yeah my name was there. That was the day I was really happy and satisfied, I was thinking like I have achieved something in my life. It was a moment of pleasure for me, I called my parents and told them my result, they were really happy for me.

I say cracking GSoC is worth it, the preparation you do, the contributions you do, the making of the proposal is really worth.

I got so many messages from my juniors, friends, and seniors, they congratulated me. After that when I uploaded my result of Facebook and LinkedIn, there were tons of comments and likes on the post. So yeah that’s my journey.

By the way, I am writing this post after really late, sorry for it. I must have done it earlier, but due to milestone 1 of GSoC, I was busy.

I'd rather take a swim in a moist human massgrave than fix any more bugs of this cancer-inducing "selfmade" CMS developped by a "company" that shall not be named.
Sadly I am not aware of any such pit in the neighborhood, thus more bugfixing it is... yay ⚰️

A rather happy/neutral post this time for a change. Lol

Firstly the good news: I have successfully recovered from the emotional/mental abuse and have been doing really well. My faith in myself has been slowly restored.

Secondly, I have started to pursue my hobbies again and find joy in them. I spend more and more time listening to music and play video games (CS:GO and AoM).

I have started getting more sun and also spend time outside socialising.

I can sense my happiness and joy get restored in my life.

Now on career front, I have started job hunting again as you all know. The interview process for Product Management is absolutely broken and taxing to go through all the loops.

During all my previous job hunts (three times), I was able to nail down at least one offer in a quarter.

This time, I started in October 2021 and still no success. I have much more experience and skill-set this time yet failures.

Fear not. My optimism is back this time. I am aware of where I am going wrong and sometimes I feel the situation is truly out of my control. The two major reasons I forsee are:

1. Relocation: it can take few months for me to relocate to UK/EU and hence, companies are preferring local candidates.

2. My duration with current employer is just 8 months which could be a potential turn off for many HMs. They might think I am a job hopper and maybe one of the reasons why I got so many calls and opportunities at my previous employer (I was stable with them for 7.5 years).

I feel it's just the matter of time for me now where I must hold my horses and keep the momentum without losing hope.

I will win.

A little over a year into my job at my current company back in January, I have a yearly meeting with my manager to discuss the progress I’ve made and to talk about what’s next. This is the meeting where we are supposed to discuss a potential pay raise but it’s the last topic of a predefined agenda.
So we spend a couple hours talking about how work has been for me. I started there as a junior developer with very little experience in the field but was quickly able to jump into a project with a fairly large codebase to help out the only other developer working on the project. Before long they’re so happy with me that they actually put me in charge of the application, which means my responsibilities evolve toward a whole lot more communication with the client and everything else that comes along with being in charge, including a lot of stress. I also salvaged another application initially developed by another company but that was so bugged it should’ve just been sent to the pits and rewritten from scratch. I was also asked to develop a couple POCs that were satisfactorily delivered.

Anyway, after almost two hours of going over my accomplishments and getting praises from my manager, we finally get to the part where we’re supposed to discuss a pay raise. He immediately cuts me off by saying the subject is not on the table due to the current crisis and our company struggling to make ends meet. I tell him I understand how hard it must be for them but also explain that I know for a fact other companies in the field are still making financial efforts to reward employees they’re happy with. He responds by saying that he’s aware of that, but he also “knows” that those same companies are laying off people that don’t deserve to be laid off despite the fact that they’re receiving government aid to stay afloat.
In the weeks following that meeting, I find out our company is doing the exact same thing my manager was condemning (laying off good people, taking massive advantage of government aid) and all the while not giving anybody a raise.
In any case, I really felt like that meeting was huge waste of time. What’s the point of going over everything I’ve done, congratulating me for my great work and even promising to give me even more responsibility if you don’t want to reward me for any of it? Do you honestly think I’m working hard so I can get a pat on the back or brownie points from you? I’ve got a family to take care of and I am trying to make their lives a little better each day by putting in hard work. But if hard work and climbing the latter of responsibility does not help me achieve that, what’s the point??

So at the old job, i needed support for an issue relating to Amazon S3. We used a third party Python plugin for sending files to our buckets, but had some pretty severe performance issues when trying a 2-way sync.
Naturally, I sought help on StackOverflow, and was asked to share my config. Without much thought, I pasted the config file.
Next comment made me aware that our API id and key was listed in this config (pretty rediculous to keep such private info in the same file as configuration, but oh well).
I edited my question and removed the keys, and did not think about the fact that revisions are stored.

Two weeks later, my boss asks me if I know why the Amazon bill is for 25.000$ when it used to be <100$ 😳

I've never been so scared in my life. Luckily, Amazon was nice enough to waive the entire fee, and I leaned a little about protecting vital information

Stress made me fall into old habits of instead of saying stop and letting my team now that I was falling apart (not realising it myself even) I just kept saying "Yes, I fix that." to every single request that was made in the project.

The closer we got to the deadline, the more I hyperfocused and ignored the signs. I just kept working. The last two days I didn't even sleep.

Of course the launch botched. I finally broke down and both my mind and my body have given up, since yesterday I'm in a mental feedback loop causing continuous anxiety attacks and migraines. I literally CAN'T do anything but trying to not go back into fight- or flight mode and remember to breathe.

I FINALLY made my project manager aware (something I should have done days ago) that I am incapacitated and now I am waiting for medication (Oxazepam) to be picked up at the pharmacy by my husband.

I almost literally worked myself into the ground.

I've been here before. Never again.

This is what happens if you don't listen to your mind and body and put up a white flag in time.

So I have been a fly on the "wall" for last couple of months and never signed up, but now here I am!

Rant is about a serious topic - gender gap in tech industry!!
Couple of months ago Stackoverflow announced developer survey results! I was shocked by demographics results! It was disappointing to see biggest gender gap in general tech industry!
I believe tech industry can be the first one to have equal pay for women!

However.... (bad part)
I was going through my twitter feeds and saw this! Many of you have seen this tweet too.

(ohh!fuck I cant attach multiple images here, I should have created Medium post, fuck it!)

"They" continue, quoting from the tweet.
1)"....bias in society is reflected in AI"
2) "However, I do think it is our responsibility as designers/developers/users to be aware of this bias and do our best to correct it."

I want to rant about 2nd one. Some of you may not like it including grammar naziz!
As a developer/programmer I take 2nd one personally! I am currently at denial phase though!
And I have an OCD so gonna make points here!

1) Seriously tell me please, how the fuck you can write gender bias algorithm which can pass a big crazy amount of test suite?

2) Google has done many things for last decade to overcome gender gap related issues. I have met some of the nicest people from Google, and this is really hard for me to believe that google AI or that team has anything to do with the results!

3) Someone suggests use "they" in google translated result, can you fucking imagine how wrong that would be??? If I am developer working on that algo or even in that team and I see this ticket in jira with highest priority where it says, "make all translated results gender neutral using only they" - I would fucking like to die and may be in my next life ask me to do that, when I am a toddler!

4) I am an advocate for equal pay, equal rights and equal opportunities for everyone to "minify" this gender gap in tech, but showing google translate results of a gender natural language to make a point is wrong, it is simply undermining the efforts of something really helpful thing.

5) Moving on to the core point - What can be done to lower down the gender gap? I have seen amazing women who can code/manage far far far better than what I ever could imagine, and they are at really good place and deserve to be there. Are they doing enough to inspire other women to join tech industry?
Collective efforts are very much required. And need to keep in consideration that tech industry is highly competitive roles are also changing rapidly.

6) Many big companies have women at higher positions(CEO, CFO,....) what are their efforts to bring more women in tech industry?
(Some of you may not like this, as this is implying that it isn't only men's job. )

7) Going slightly political here, everyday we see really disappointing news related to women and their rights and health, I strongly believe women don't have to ask for or even have to mention about "equal rights" about anything. Everyone is equal!!!
This is 2017 and still fucked up!

Thats all for today! Heading for breakfast!

Discovered pro tip of my life :
Never trust your code

Achievements unlocked :
Successfully running C++ GPU accelerated offscreen rendering engine with texture loading code having faulty validation bug over a year on production for more than 1.5M daily Android active users without any issues.

History : Recently I was writing a new rendering engineering that uses our GPU pipeline engine.. and our prototype android app benchmark test always fails with black rendering frame detection assertion.

Practice:
Spend more than a month to debug a GPU pipeline system based on directed acyclic graph based rendering algorithm.

New abilities added :
Able to debug OpenGL ES code on Android using print statement placed in source code using binary search.

But why?
I was aware of the issue over a month and just ignored it thinking it's a driver bug in my android device.. but when the api was used by one of Android dev, he reported the same issue. In the same day at night 2:59AM ....

Satan came to me and told me that " ok listen man, here is what I am gonna do with you today, your new code will be going production in a week, and the renderer will give you just one black frame after random time, and after today 3AM, your code will not show GL Errors if you debug or trace. Buhahahaha ahhaha haahha..... Puffff"

And he was gone..
Thanks satan for not killing me.. I will not trust stable production code anymore enevn though every line is documented and peer reviewed.

Even if you are denied after all your job interviews, don't be sad.
1. you looked promising enough to call you to the interview in the first place
2. you need to work on some gaps in your knowledge/xp. Oh, you didn't know that? Well, now you do! Not even that - you also know what the gaps are!
3. you hear of new technologies, net tricks that are there. Dig in!
4. you become more aware of what positions are there and what requirements could be applied to them in different companies. Makes you build a company profile and make better choices for applications later on.

Now imagine the pressure on your shoulders if they would have hired you while you have so many gaps in your knowledge... It's overtimes every day! It's possibly missed deadlines. It's mishandled tasks. It's bugs all over the place and other devs judging you!

Brush your tears dry, grab candy or a chocolate bar and go improve yourself!

I want to share this story and need your advise.

When I was teaching exisiting team members about git and new iOS development ecosystem. I was changing the whole ios development practices and processes that time. One of my teammates wasn’t listening, when implementing the new ios development practices and standards, he actually screwed all of the projects.

He’s been with us for 2 years and he even don’t know how to use git. He forcefully push his changes without pulling our changes first. I was so angry that I reported him to my manager to address this matter. And then my manager told me, he is aware of my teammate’s incapabilities. He said he was planning to terminate him, and he is been thinking about it for 3 months.

When the judgement day came, we were in the meeting room. My manager told us the bad news that one of us will be terminated. During the meeting he said, “I am sorry, {my teammate’s name}. You will be out of the team due to {reason of termination}. {my name} reported to me that you dont meet the deadline, you are always late with 2 weekly sprint to your tickets”. As my manager keeps talking, my teammate look at me with his eyes so angry together with his girlfriend (her girlfriend is part of mobile team, but she is focused on UI/UX).

After my manager stops talking, her girlfriend started crying and said I was the one who should be terminated. Her reason was that I keep on giving difficult tasks to his boyfriend, that’s why he is always late to report. In my defense, those tasks are not difficult, most of his tasks is just changing the color of labels, changing layouts. If you are an iOS developer you know how easy it is to change font colors, changing the layouts using storyboards. Her girlfriend keeps on rambling that I should be the one needs to be terminated.

After few days, he left the team and surprisingly his girlfriend stayed and we never talk to each other except anything about work.

I am really pissed guys. Now my teammates think I am the bad guy asking my manager to terminate anyone in the team if I feel to. I feel very very not good in my work now. I can’t function what I used to. The termination of my teammate was already planned why am I should take the blame?

Customer requested the implementation of a "Master PIN" Code for accessing their appliances, to be used by field technicians when the users forgot their PIN.
Actually they could also read or reset it via USB using the config utility, but then again it's much more convenient not having to carry a laptop all the time...

Our only contact person at that company - the guy we got all the requirements from, let's call him Mr. L - wouldn't talk only positive about the company and managers, but we never worried as the project was making good progress.

In the final phase of the project, Mr. L was often hard to reach, always seemed to be busy even when we just needed a prototype approved to start production.
He always claimed to be waiting for approval from his supervisors and engineers, still discussing minor things with them.

When he left the company about three months later, it turned out he was pretty much the only person knowing about the details of the project, and his successor would start asking us very basic questions about the appliance,
wondering why we had implemented certain things the way they were.
(Well, how about we implemented everything just as requested by a former co-worker of yours?!)

Somewhere in the preliminary specs previously exchanged with Mr. L, there is even a hint of a "Master PIN", but the value is never specified anywhere on paper.

Today, we are not sure if anyone except for him even knew about it.
Maybe we should ask them whether they are now selling a product that has a 4-digit backdoor PIN nobody at the company is aware of?

Obviously, it is the birth year of Mr. L.

Hey...just wondering...

In Germany its quite common for M$ nazis to call Windows "Windoof" , which means Win-stupid...

I'm not aware of anything similar in English or other languages...And that can't be ;)

Enlighten me please!

When I was in college OOP was emerging. A lot of the professors were against teaching it as the core. Some younger professors were adamant about it, and also Java fanatics. So after the bell rang, they'd sometimes teach people that wanted to learn it. I stayed after and the professor said that object oriented programming treated things like reality.

My first thought to this was hold up, modeling reality is hard and complicated, why would you want to add that to your programming that's utter madness.

Then he started with a ball example and how some balls in reality are blue, and they can have a bounce action we can express with a method.

My first thought was that this seems a very niche example. It has very little to do with any problems I have yet solved and I felt thinking about it this way would complicate my programs rather than make them simpler.

I looked around the at remnants of my classmates and saw several sitting forward, their eyes lit up and I felt like I was in a cult meeting where the head is trying to make everyone enamored of their personality. Except he wasn't selling himself, he was selling an idea.

I patiently waited it out, wanting there to be something of value in the after the bell lesson. Something I could use to better my own programming ability. It never came.

This same professor would tell us all to read and buy gang of four it would change our lives. It was an expensive hard cover book with a ribbon attached for a bookmark. It was made to look important. I didn't have much money in college but I gave it a shot I bought the book. I remember wrinkling my nose often, reading at it. Feeling like I was still being sold something. But where was the proof. It was all an argument from authority and I didn't think the argument was very good.

I left college thinking the whole thing was silly and would surely go away with time. And then it grew, and grew. It started to be impossible to avoid it. So I'd just use it when I had to and that became more and more often.

I began to doubt myself. Perhaps I was wrong, surely all these people using and loving this paradigm could not be wrong. I took on a 3 year project to dive deep into OOP later in my career. I was already intimately aware of OOP having to have done so much of it. But I caught up on all the latest ideas and practiced them for a the first year. I thought if OOP is so good I should be able to be more productive in years 2 and 3.

It was the most miserable I had ever been as a programmer. Everything took forever to do. There was boilerplate code everywhere. You didn't so much solve problems as stuff abstract ideas that had nothing to do with the problem everywhere and THEN code the actual part of the code that does a task. Even though I was working with an interpreted language they had added a need to compile, for dependency injection. What's next taking the benefit of dynamic typing and forcing typing into it? Oh I see they managed to do that too. At this point why not just use C or C++. It's going to do everything you wanted if you add compiling and typing and do it way faster at run time.

I talked to the client extensively about everything. We both agreed the project was untenable. We moved everything over another 3 years. His business is doing better than ever before now by several metrics. And I can be productive again. My self doubt was over. OOP is a complicated mess that drags down the software industry, little better than snake oil and full of empty promises. Unfortunately it is all some people know.

Now there is a functional movement, a data oriented movement, and things are looking a little brighter. However, no one seems to care for procedural. Functional and procedural are not that different. Functional just tries to put more constraints on the developer. Data oriented is also a lot more sensible, and again pretty close to procedural a lot of the time. It's just odd to me this need to separate from procedural at all. Procedural was very honest. If you're a bad programmer you make bad code. If you're a good programmer you make good code. It seems a lot of this was meant to enforce bad programmers to make good code. I'll tell you what I think though. I think that has never worked. It's just hidden it away in some abstraction and made identifying it harder. Much like the code methodologies themselves do to the code.

Now I'm left with a choice, keep my own business going to work on what I love, shift gears and do what I hate for more money, or pivot careers entirely. I decided after all this to go into data science because what you all are doing to the software industry sickens me. And that's my story. It's one that makes a lot of people defensive or even passive aggressive, to those people I say, try more things. At least then you can be less defensive about your opinion.

(first post/rant on here)
So I recently started at a new company. I was kinda aware that the project I'm working on would be rather old school (to put it in a nice way :-)).

Part of my job is to 'industrialize' and update/clean up the existing code so there is less time spent on fixing bugs due to bad design.

One of the first things I had to do was to write a new interface to integrate with external software.

I already noticed some rather nasty habits, like prefixing every variable with m (don't know why), private fields for every property (all simple properties) and a whole lot of other stuff that either is obsolete or just bad practice.

Started writing clean code (simple classes with properties only, no m prefixing, making sure everything is single responsibility, unit tests, ...).

So I check in the code, don't hear much from it again besides the original dev/architect that started the project using my code to further work on that integration.

Now recently I started converting everything from TFVC to Git (which is the company standard but wasn't used by our team yet). And I quickly skimmed through my code to check if everything was there before pushing it to the remote repo.

To my surprise, all the code I had written was replaced by m prefixed private variables used in simple properties. BL classes were thrown in together, creating giant monstrosities that did everything. And last but not least, all unit tests were commented out.

Not sure what I got myself into ... but the facepalming has commenced.

Well , this isn't a rant or a joke , so I just thought I should post it here in case people are going through a similar situation . So I know this guy , who works at this startup , so he had just joined the company and made a huge impression on the boss ( My friend is fantastic in developing ) , so as great as that sounds , it doesn't . After a year or so , he's been promoted and is now kinda a face for the devs of the company and this made his boss very cocky , like he would take so many projects or requirements of his top clients and place them on the shoulders of my friend and give a bad time limit , which is impossible but he always managed to just finish completing it . Naturally it affected his sleep cycle , his daily life and as a result , his mental health . As time went on and as more and more projects were being placed on him..........he finally broke , he used to miss so many days of work , not return any of my calls or texts , miss lunches , have breakdowns . I became very concerned and didn't want him to end it , I went to his place , spoke to him , found out that he had suicidal thoughts . Fast forward a year later , he's still going to a shrink , everyday but he's better now and after forcing him to talk to his boss and now his boss gives him plenty of time to finish the projects and said to be straightforward with how he feels and so on . I know this isn't what you would expect to find here but I just wanted to say after having this experience , please do not keep quiet , be straightforward with your boss and don't overburden yourself , if you're an introvert , tell it to someone you know , to tell your boss , and if you know anyone in a similar situation , do be out there for them . I'm sorry if this kinda spoils your mood , but people have to be aware . Be careful , lots of love people

So about 3 weeks ago I was laid off from my dream job due to corporate bullshit. From the feedback received since then it is clear that the company made a mistake hiring a brand new React dev while they really needed an experienced one. Because the consultants who were supposed to be weren't. And the other in-house front end dev was an elitist asshole. And I never received proper feedback until it was too late. Actually I still don't have proper feedback save for some vague stuff which really sounds like the kind of feedback you'd give someone in the middle of their learning process. They even said eventually given more time I could have made it. But alas they felt they had to make a call in the best interest of the company.

Things moved fast since then, I took a week to recover and then I spent time updating my resume before getting back in touch with the recruiter who got me my last job. Great guy and he was happy to help me again. Applied to some positions, got some replies, first in person interview I go to they are immediately willing to take me on.

So now I'm supposed to start tomorrow but somehow I'm having my doubts. The company isn't an IT company but rather a fashion company. They believe in developing in house tools because past attempts with external companies resulted in them trying to push their vision through. Knowing who they worked with I agree, they tried to oversell all the time. But after talking with their developers I noticed they are behind on their knowledge. But so am I. So there was no tech interview which means I am getting an easy way in. And if they honour their word I'll be signing tomorrow for around my old wages.

So you'd think that sounds good right? And yet I'm worried it's going to be another shit show working on software without proper analysis or best practices. I mean the devs aren't total idiots, they are mediors like me and I think their heart is in the right place. They want to develop a good project but it will be just us 3 making a modern .net wpf application with the same functionality of the old Access based system currently in use. I was urged by the boss to draw on my experience and I think he wants me to help teach them too. But I'm painfully aware for my decade since graduating I'm a less than average .net dev who struggles with theory and never worked a job where I had someone more experienced to teach me. I coasted most of the time in underpaid jobs due to various reasons. But I'd always get mad over shitty code and practices. Which I realize is hypocritical for someone who couldn't explain what a singleton class is or who still fails at separation of concerns.

So yeah my question for the hivemind is what advice would you give a dev like me? I honestly dislike how poor I perform but it often feels like an insurmountable climb, and being over 30 makes it even more depressing. On the other hand I know I should feel blessed to find a workplace who seems to genuinely believe that people grow and develop and wishes to support me in this. Part of me thinks I should just go in, relax, but also learn till I'm there where I want to be and see if these people are open to improving with me. But part of me also feels I'm rushing into this, picking the first best offer, and it sure feels like a step backwards somehow. And that then makes me feel like an ugly ungrateful person who deserves her bad luck because she expects of others what she can't even do herself :(

There was a kid in my programming class that was convinced that in the next 10 years ai would become self aware and seek for the destruction of its creators.

I wasted 20 minutes of my life trying to explain down how ai sentience would have to be an intentional decision by the group creating the ai

Of course, he spun around and tried to explain how secret government organizations are already working on general intelligence that would run on quantum computers to shut down enemy governments.

Maybe with people willing to believe anything the world is doomed after all :/

So I titan Lannister, first of my name, a 21 yr old only child of super extra over protective middle class parents; with 0 social interaction and level 1000 introvert geeky nature, has made up my mind and gathered courage to go on a 3 day event in another state , with no known persons there or by my side, completely on my own.

I am excited as well as hell of scared. I always wanted to teavel places and meet people, but don't had courage to talk to even my coworker girl on the opposite table, leave alone meeting ppl or going out.

Please share your first time alone journey stories , or anything else that i should be aware of

So i am a diabetic and carry an insulin pump. Now being in India, the pump is not covered by insurance (for some god forsaken reason that I don’t know) and therefore is not a common sight here (contradictoraly India has a major diabetes problem). So I was at the metro station going through security check and the security personnel asks me what the pump was and asked me to show it to him. Now since insulin pumps are uncommon here I understood his concern and showed it to him. Now I like to carry the pump under my shirt with a clip pouch. So naturally I had to lift up my shirt to show it to him. But this isn’t the highlight of the story.
The guy behind me rised above and started peeking over my shoulder and constantly repeating like a 2 year old child what is this. And that too with my fucking abdomen exposed. I went into rage mode there and then like wtf dude, none of your business just step back a little.
Now my issue is that I do not understand that in their own curiosity, why do people forget to respect others privacy. And a very big problem with medical equipment manufacturing organisations (yeah you medtronic). Why are you only concerned with sales and why not awareness? I mean spreading awareness will only help your sales as more people will become aware about your product and it will be less awkward and concerning for people like me to wear your device out in the public

I think I will post a notice on my office door that reads
"Be aware that our conversion can become a post on devRant. Request, comment and suggest at your own risk."

Oh gee whiz fellas. I lived through my nightmare. Recently too.

(Multiple rants over last few months are merged in this one. Couldn't rant earlier because my login didn't work.)

I joined a new shithole recently.
It was a huge change because my whole tech stack changed, and on top of that the application domain was new too.

Boss: ho hey newbie, here take this task which is a core service redesign and implementation and finish it in two weeks because it has to be in production for a client.

Normally I'd be able to provide a reasonable analysis and estimate. But being new and unaware of how things work here, I just said 'cool, I'll try my best.' (I was aware that it was a big undertaking but didn't realize the scope and the alarming lack of support I'd get and the bullshit egos I'd have to deal with)
Like a mad man I worked 17+ hours a day with barely a day off every week and changed and produced a lot of code, most of it of decent quality.

Deadline came and went by. Got extended because it was impossible (and fake).

All the time my manager is continuously building pressure on me. When I asked questions I never got any direct/clear answers. On asking for help, I'd get an elaborate word vomit of what was already known/visible. Yet I finally managed to have an implementation ready.

Reviewer: You haven't added parameter comments on your functions and there aren't enough comments in code. We follow standards. Clean code and whatnot. Care for the craft verbal diarrhea.

Boss: Ho hey anux, do you think we'll be able to push the code to production?

Me: Nope. We care for the craft and have standards. We need to add redundant comments to self documented code first, because that is of utmost importance as Nuthead reviewer explained.
(what I wish I had said)

What I actually said: No, code is not reviewed yet.

And despite examples of functions which were not documented (which were written by the reviewer nut), I added 6-7 lines of comments for my single line functions describing how e.g. Sum takes two input integers and returns their sum and asked for a review again.

Reviewer: See this comment is better written as this same-meaning-but-slightly-longer way. Can we please add full stops everywhere even though they were not there to begin with? Can we please not follow this pattern and instead promote our anti-pattern? Thanks.

Me: Changed the comments. Added full stops. Here's a link for why this anti-pattern is bad.

Reviewer: you have written such beautiful code with such little gems. Brilliant. It's great to see how my mentoring has honed your skills.
.
.
.
I swear I would have broken a CRT on his stupid face if we weren't working remotely (and if I had a CRT).

It infuriates me how the solution to every problem with this guy is 'add a comment'.

What enrages me more is that I actually thought I could learn from this guy (in the beginning). My self doubt just made me burnout for little in return.

Thankfully this living nightmare will soon be over.

Back when I used be a junior fresh out of school, my senior used to say, when releasing a first version or a major version of any software, app or website always implement easy to fix bugs.

End users or clients, especially the ones that tasked you with the creation of it, will look for a bug until they find one, if it isn't one you will spent hours trying to figure it out, instead give them one.
You know how to fix it and the client is satisfied they found one.

To this day, i still do that, although mostly not even aware of it. Eg: I know that's a bug but i'll fix that when (not if, when) they complain about it.

I even find myself telling the juniors, i develop with, giving them similar if not the same advice.

And that is what experience means, skill is something they teach you in school.
Experience is what makes you a senior or a junior, not your level of skill or the amount of keywords on your Linked In profile.

Startup-ing 101, from Fitbit:
- spy on users
- sell data
- cut production costs
- mutilate people's bodies, leaving burn scars that will never heal
- announce the recall, get PR, and make the refund process impossibly convoluted
- never give actual refunds
- claim that yes, fitbit catches fire, but only the old discontinued device, just to mess with search results and make the actual info (that all devices catch fire) hard to find
- try hard to obtain the devices in question, so people who suffered have no evidence
- give bogus word salad replies to the press

This is what one of the people burned has to say:
"I do not have feeling in parts of my wrist due to nerve damage and I will have a large scar that will be with me the rest of my life. This was a traumatic experience and I hope no one else has to go through it. So, if you own a Fitbit, please reconsider using it."

Ladies and gentlemen, cringefest starts. One of fitbit replies:
"Fitbit products are designed and produced in accordance with strict standards and undergo extensive internal and external testing to ensure the safety of our users. Based on our internal and independent third party testing and analysis, we do not believe this type of injury could occur from normal use. We are committed to conducting a full investigation. With Google's resources and global platform, Fitbit will be able to accelerate innovation in the wearables category, scale faster, and make health even more accessible to everyone. I could not be more excited for what lies ahead".

In the future, corporate speech will be autogenerated.

(if you wear fitbit, just be aware of this.)

!story

As is the case with many of you, I am also the de facto technology fixer for my family, and usually the first one they call when something goes wrong.

Usually it's a 'something wants to update, should I do it?' simple issue. Other times I have to remote connect to see why Word isn't uploading templates correctly or whatever.

Yesterday was different though.

Me: So whatcha need?
Mom: Well, my office has recently wanted me to be remote-capable in case they need me for something and they don't have the right people to fix it (she's been working at the same office for 20+ years and knows basically everything)
Me: Okay. So I guess they're setting up a VPN for this?
Mom: Yes. And I was calling because they might try and install it on my personal laptop and I wanted to know whether or not I should be concerned about our IT guys being able to look at or steal all my personal data.

I then proceeded to explain how a VPN works and that convincing her company to provide her with a separate computer would be the safest option and whatnot. But I was honestly really surprised that she was concerned to begin with.

For a while now, it seems there's been one story after another of companies being irresponsible with their customer's data, with little to no reprocussion or action that could really make a difference.

But as a direct result, we're now getting to the point where even the tech illiterate are becoming more aware of how this is effecting them.

It gave me hope for the future in an industry where many times there is very little. And I hope it does for you as well.

Thanks, mom. I'm proud of you.

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.

I gotta say, I actually admire the work that content creators must go thru to make quality content.

So as I stated before I’m working on YouTube channel, under the name “TheSoftwareSage” ... to create tutorials and a way of me teaching software the way I believe it should be taught, not how the mainstream methods of today are.

Bottom up approach rather than top down

(Must start with a firm understanding of the foundation.. and build upon the knowledge as we go thru the layers of abstraction but the key concepts must be understood first)

Anyway, I’m working on this in my spare time and I was not aware of how much effort I would actually need todo this right haha. At first I figured I’d just screencast a monitor and have a ppt or text editor or terminal open and that stuff and just do it.

As In person with my interns I never have “planned” lessons or content is all impromptu based on the need at the time and I just go with it, with their computers and a whiteboard lol.

I was wrong for video recording lol... maybe it’s OCD... or perfectionism, I’ll make a video, review it like 5times and then be like shit I forgot to mention this or that or I didn’t like how I explained this or that
OR
I keep worrying too much about colors, and sound levels and quality and transitions and video angles and all this other shit.
And then post editing fuck.... I’m about ready to say fuck it and “do it live .. one shot” and just upload the end result.

I guess this would be in the content world similar to our “paralysis analysis” notion.

!rant, but kinda

My new director wants to buy a solution for a portal environment that my institution currently has. I have no qualms over it. My only issue was the company that sells it to be known to provide close to 0 fucking support when shit arises.

During a presentation we were told that they were using state of the art JAVA technology to render items on the page and that their ApI was easy for devs to grasp. This caught my attention since I know of very few and obscure Java frameworks that work with frontend tech (as in, your frontend logic is legit in Java)

The sales people proceed to show us React. Obviously thinking that no one knows what REact was. The dude continues with "This is new Java tech" all proud and shit prompting me to interject that it is "Javascript" the dude brushes it away saying "same thing" to which I reply with "Negative, please make sure that you properly discern Java from Javascript since Java is to Javascript as car is to carpet, completely different environments" the dude sarcastically says that "oh well, didn't know one of the people here was more aware of our own technology than we are" to which I say "and not only that, but the final say in us adopting your tech is mine, so I would rather you keep the sarcasm and the attitude to yourself, bring in a tech person if need be and learn these distinctions since we don't work with Java"

My new director later on went to talk to me since he apparently thought that Java and JS were related in some way. I can't really fault it, last time the dude touched programming was in the early 2000s, previous boss was a C and COBOL developer, but the previous dude would ALWAYS take my word no questions ask, this dude was there asking me if I was sure that Javascript and Java were really completely different environments asking me to show him.

I do not like to be questioned. I shoot the shit here and don't really involve myself with more technical aspects under this platform unless it involves concrete architecture discussions and even there I really don't care with engaging on a forum concerning that. But concerning my job I really.......really do not like to be questioned by people that know way the fuck less than me. I started coding when I was 17, I am 30 now, with a degree and years of experience. I really hate to be questioned by this dude.

I don't mind Apple marketing themselves as these revolutionary thinkers and innovators, because I figured most people see behind the marketing but appreciate Apple for what it is. It's a big company that makes well built products, that are efficient and give good support to those products.

But I'm sick to death of tech journalists talking about how every new feature is the death of Android. They have to be kidding themselves if they think what Apple's doing is innovating. Samsung's been designing screens for the bezelless market for a LONG time, and their technology in that is incredibly advanced (it's why if you use their iPhone x you'll be looking at a screen from Samsung!)

They finally adopted wireless charging and pretended it was brand new, but I remember when they came out with the Apple watch, marketing it like they'd broken ground when Android Wear watches had been out for a year!

I don't want people to think I hate Apple, I own a few of their products. I think they're remarkably invested in user privacy; homekit imo is one of the most forward thinking implementations of smart home technology that I've seen, and the new processor in the iPhone x is a Mammoth powerhouse. So, I'm not necessarily saying anything about that, but what I am saying is that they're iñcredible at marketing, but fanboys but are not self-aware can enough to recognize when the Designed-by-Apple hype over shadows the actual objectivity or the situation. There are articles already talking about Apple's wireless charging.

TL;DR I swear to god if an apple fanboy comes at me saying the bezelless design was Apple's innovation, I'm going to snap. I appreciate what Apple does well, but unfortunately people can't appreciate a product without needing to identify with it.

* Teams meeting, doing some early testing with the client *

Dev Team: This is an early build, so please be aware that bugs can occur at this stage. (That's why we didn't want to show it but you insisted)

Client: Sure, don't worry.

* 15 minutes later, first bug happens because some state management at the front end was not tunned yet *

Client: Can you solve this bug?

Dev Team: Sure, just let us replicate it and we come back to you as soon as...

Client: Can you solve it now?

Dev Team: ... Okay, let us ser whats happening and we will come ba...

Client: You don't need to hang up, just solve it.

*Dev Team internal chat*

Me: Fuck
Other dev: Fuck
My leader at the time: Fuuuuuck

PS: This happened in two separate occasions. I hated that project.

A (work-)project i spent a year on will finally be released soon. That's the perfect opportunity to vent out all the rage i built up during dealing with what is the javascript version of a zodiac letter.

Everything went wrong with the beginning. 3 people were assigned to rewrite an old flash-application. Me, A and B. B suggested a javascript framework, even though me and A never worked with more than jquery. In the end we chose react/redux with rest on the server, a classic.

After some time i got the hang of time, around that time B left and a new guy, C, was hired soon after that. He didn't know about react/redux either. The perfect start off to a burning pile of smelly code.

Today this burning pile turned into a wasteland of code quality, a house of cards with a storm approaching, a rocket with leaks ready to launch, you get the idea.

We got 2 dozen files with 200-500 loc, each in the same directory and each with the same 2 word prefix which makes finding the right one a nightmare on its on. We have an i18n-library used only for ~10 textfields, copy-pasted code you never know if it's used or not, fetch-calls with no error-handling, and many other code smells that turn this fire into a garbage fire. An eternal fire. 3 months ago i reduced the linter-warnings on this project to 1, now i can't keep count anymore.

We use the reactabular-module which gives us headaches because IT DOESN'T DO WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO DO AND WE CANT USE IT WELL EITHER. All because the client cant be bothered to have the table header scroll along with the body. We have methods which do two things because passing another callback somehow crashed in the browser. And the only thing about indentation is that it exists. Copy pasting from websites, other files and indentation wars give the files the unique look that make you wonder if some of the devs hides his whitespace code in the files.

All of this is the result of missing time, results over quality and the worst approach of all, used by A: if A wants an ui-component similar to an existing one, he copies the original and edits he copy until it does what he wants. A knows about classes, modules, components, etc. Still, he can't bring himself to spend his time on creating superclasses... his approach gives results much faster

Things got worse when A tried redux, luckily A prefers the components local state. WHICH IS ANOTHER PROBLEM. He doesn't understand redux and loads all of the data directly from the server and puts it into the local state. The point of redux is that you don't have to do this. But there are only 1 or 2 examples of how this practice hurt us yet, so i'm gonna have to let this slide. IF HE AT LEAST WOULD UPDATE THE DATA PROPERLY. Changes are just sent to the server and then all of the data is re-fetched. I programmed the rest-endpoints to return the updated objects for a very reason. But no, fuck me.

I've heard A decided (A is the teamleader) to use less redux on the next project and use a dedicated rest-endpoints for every little comoutation you COULD DO WITH REDUX INSTEAD. My will is broken and just don't want to work with this anymore.

There are still various subpages that cant f5 because the components cant handle an empty redux state in the beginning, but to be honest i don't care anymore. Lets hope the client will never find out, along with the "on error nothing happens"-bugs. The product should've been shipped last week, but thanks to mandatory bugfixes the release was postponed to next week. Then the next project starts...

Please give me some tips to keep up code quality over time, i cant take this once more.
I'm also aware that i could've done more, talking A and C about code style, prettifying the code, etc. Etc. But i was busy putting out my out fires, i couldn't kill much of the other fires which in the end became a burning building (a perfect metaphor for this software)

I think the reason why git beginners have a hard time with it is because the api is a bit untuitive.

For example: if you want to "unstage" staged changes, you run git reset, and if you want to "delete" those changes from your working copy, you git checkout those files.

But then, you find out that you can do all of that if you git add . and git reset --hard.
So you're like "huh..."

And then you discover that if you end the resethard with a branch name/commit id then you also make current branch point to the commit or that branch/commit (respectively).
So you're like "huh..."

And also if you add a commit id or branch name to git checkout, you change the current branch to specified/enter detached state with HEAD pointing to that commit (respectively).

Oh and you don't use git branch to create branches, you use git checkout -b because it's a lot shorter.

So here's a rundown: git reset mutates things related to files, but also mutates things related to branches.
git checkout also mutates things related to files and mutates things related to branches too (in a diff way). Also, creates new branches.

I don't think this is intuitive. We users use the same commands for different purposes with just a different flag.
Commands shouldn't mutate different types of things. But don't composite commands (as in, "smart" commands that mutate different things) shoudln't be a flag in an existing command, it should be a single new command of its own.

Maybe if I reread the internals of git now, I'll be able to disgest the dozens of technical terms they throw at you (they are many). And in my mind, the api will cognitively fit to the explanations.

Here's another one that feels weird too.
If you want to make your changes start on top of someone else's commit, you do git rebase.
But git rebase -i can be used for that, and also to delete, modify changes or message of, reorder or combine previous commits of the current branch.

Maybe the reason why several things we do overlap with the same commands is because they internally do similar things, and while not separating those commands might make it less intuitive, it makes them more sensible? i dunno...

disclaimer: I'm not setting this opinion in stone though, and am aware that git was created by one of the most infuential programmers.

Hmm...recently I've seen an increase in the idea of raising security awareness at a user level...but really now , it gets me thinking , why not raise security awareness at a coding level ? Just having one guy do encryption and encoding most certainly isn't enough for an app to be considered secure . In this day an age where most apps are web based and even open source some of them , I think that first of all it should be our duty to protect the customer/consumer rather than make him protect himself . Most of everyone knows how to get user input from the UI but how many out here actually think that the normal dummy user might actually type unintentional malicious code which would break the app or give him access to something he shouldn't be allowed into ? I've seen very few developers/software architects/engineers actually take the blame for insecure code . I've seen people build apps starting on an unacceptable idea security wise and then in the end thinking of patching in filters , encryptions , encodings , tokens and days before release realise that their app is half broken because they didn't start the whole project in a more secure way for the user .

Just my two cents...we as devs should be more aware of coding in a way that makes apps more secure from and for the user rather than saying that we had some epic mythical hackers pull all the user tables that also contained unhashed unencrypted passwords by using magix . It certainly isn't magic , it's just our bad coding that lets outside code interact with our own code .

Group assignment in a software engineering class. Got that notorious lazy kid in my group of four who failed the class in the last term. I was perfectly aware of his reputation, but accepted him in the group nonetheless, because he already knows what needs to be done in the class.

He started to work on his assignment: mostly boilerplate code that didn't even build. He didn't even bother to fix it. I had a lot of time over the Easter weekend, so I decided to just code as much for the assignment as possible for the mid-term submission. I replaced his broken boilerplate stuff with a working solution. I told the others in the group chat about it. Code works and builds, test coverage is high. Everything is fine.

The lazy kid replied to the group chat, that if I'd wanted to code and document(!) everything on my own, I should have told him in the first place. Also got that "fuck off" emoji in the message. So I restored his broken boilerplate stuff using git, even fixed the build errors and told him to explain to me what he tried to achieve, and that I'd be happy to include his code as soon as it worked. Didn't hear anything since. Commits neither.

I guess he was just looking for an excuse for not doing additional work in the project.

In today's episode of kidding on SystemD, we have a surprise guest star appearance - Apache Foundation HTTPD server, or as we in the Debian ecosystem call it, the Apache webserver!

So, imagine a situation like this - Its friday afternoon, you have just migrated a bunch of web domains under a new, up to date, system. Everything works just fine, until... You try to generate SSL certificates from Lets Encrypt.

Such a mundane task, done more than a thousand times already... Yet... No matter what you do, nothing works. Apache just returns a HTTP status code 403 - Forbidden.

Of course, what many folk would think of first when it came to a 403 error is - Ooooh, a permission issue somewhere in the directory structure!

So you check it... And re-check it to make sure... And even switch over to the user the webserver runs under, yet... You can access the challenge just fine, what the hell!

So you go deeper... And enable the most verbose level of logging apache is capable of - Trace8. That tells you... Not a whole lot more... Apparently, the webserver was unable to find file specified? But... Its right there, you can see it!

So you go another step deeper and start tracing the process' system calls to see exactly where it calls stat/lstat on the file, and you see that it... Calls lstat and... It... Returns -1? What the hell#2!

So, you compile a custom binary that calls lstat on the first argument given and prints out everything it returns... And... It works fine!

Until now, I chose to omit one important detail that might have given away the issue to the more knowledgeable right away. Our webservers have the URL /.well-known/acme-challenge/, used for ACME challenges, aliased somewhere else on the filesystem - To /tmp/challenges.

See the issue already?

Some *bleep* over at the Debian Package Maintainer group decided that Apache could save very sensitive data into /tmp, so, it would be for the best if they changed something that worked for decades, and enabled a SystemD service unit option "PrivateTmp" for the webserver, by default.

What it does is that, anytime a process started with this option enabled writes to /tmp/*, the call gets hijacked or something, and actually makes the write to a private /tmp/something/tmp/ directory, where something... Appeared as a completely random name, with the "apache2.service" glued at the end.

That was also the only reason why I managed fix this issue - On the umpteenth time of checking the directory structure, I noticed a "systemd-private-foobarbas-apache2.service-cookie42" directory there... That contained nothing but a "tmp" directory with 777 as its permission, owned by the process' user and group.

Overriding that unit file option finally fixed the issue completely.

I have just one question - Why? Why change something that worked for decades? I understand that, in case you save something into /tmp, it may be read by 3rd parties or programs, but I am of the opinion that, if you did that, its only and only your fault if you wrote sensitive data into the temporary directory.

And as far as I am aware, by default, Apache does not actually write anything even remotely sensitive into /tmp, so...

Why. WHY!
I wasted 4 hours of my life debugging this! Only to find out its just another SystemD-enabled "feature" now!

And as much as I love kidding on SystemD, this time, I see it more as a fault of the package maintainers, because... I found no default apache2/httpd service file in the apache repo mirror... So...

This might not be a perfect place to post this, but we are trying to get help from all possible places.

As you may know, Kerala, a state in India, is going through the worst time of its history. We are exposed to tumultuous and disastrous flooding which have destroyed both our life and living.
All the rivers, streams and lakes are overflowing throughout the states due to heavy rainfall. The shutter of all the dams have been opened and the water rush have washed away the towns and villages on it's flood path. The situation is much more frightening than we can explain.
Over 250000 people are in rehabilitation camps. Even hospitals are under water. The count of the lives that we have lost and people missing are still not confirmed yet. The roads, bridges and homes damaged are beyond repair. Rivers have been spilling over and the hills are crashing down in landslides to thickly-populated settlements. Our government and rescue bodies are doing commendable work for saving each and every life, but are facing severe shortage of funds and resources. This has affected the efficiency of the rescue efforts, which also contribute to the increasing death toll. It is estimated unofficially that the cost of disaster can be up to 100 billion INR, which seems to be a huge fund for our small state.
So hereby we are requesting your kind donation and aid towards relief fund of the state.Your valuable donations will grossly help us to ease our efforts for relief, re-habitilation and re-building.

I'm not posting any links where you can donate, I'm aware that you guys can google it.

Front-end programmers work on all the snazzy Javascript that you may not be aware you rely on so much when killing time on StumbleUpon.

At a previous job, boss & owner of company would waste hours of my time to show me, at his own desk, every small detail of some random feature he had fallen in love with on some random webpage he found, while saying "I don't want to disrupt your plans or anything, this is just something to keep in the back of your minds, as this would be a really nice thing to have, even tho none of the clients have asked for this and I have asked no one else for a second opinion, and I will most likely ask you to remove this feature in the future because I will finally have realized it wasn't that good an idea anyway."

Ok dipshit, what the fuck are we supposed to do with this information? Every week from this moment on you will ask whether we have found the time to implement this feature, even though you are fully aware that our schedule has no room for random, unplanned features and that we are already not able to meet the unreasonable deadline you pulled out of your ass two weeks into a development process that would end up taking 8+ months.

We are already overworked, we already work hours upon hours of unpaid overtime, and yet you still think it reasonable to pull us away from our work every other fucking day to talk about random extra features you want added, but don't want added to the roadmap because you want no delays... Fuck you, fuck your toxic attitude, fuck your meetings where you spend half an hour complaining about features we are still in the process of developing the backend functionality for (on test servers) not having the right font colour for the text, and fuck your legacy desktop software originally written in COBOL that you now want moved to "the cloud".

I would rather be unemployed and live as a hobo on the streets with a "will code for food" sign than work for you ever again.

Story time:

I worked at a firm that had an infernal off the shelf CRM system that they collaborated with the dev company to customise.

They were seriously behind the competition, and didn’t have any app or web presence for interacting with their system, instead relying on people calling (fine for the nature of the business, but competition was leaving them in the dust).

They decided that they needed to redevelop it in-house, with a focus on supporting the web and apps.

I was hired for this purpose.

It was me and one other dev, who was also the head of IT.

He’d built a small prototype, and was new to the whole WPF / MVVM thing for the in-house app, so with my previous experience it was clear it needed to serve as an example only, and that it would need redeveloping.

I was only there three months.

In that time I singularly (he was pulled away to troubleshoot their VOIP installation - yes, for three months as other companies kept dropping the ball) built:

- A WebAPI with JWT auth
- An MVC skeleton frontend
- A WPF desktop app

It had all sorts of cool shit in it, 2FA, Reactive UI, Reactive extensions, server push to desktop, a custom workflow and permissions system.

It was pretty dang cool.

End of the three months rolled around, and the non-technical managers were concerned about time to market, so they decided to drop me as I’d “not made enough progress”.

I’d also had a bit of absence which they were aware of and were supposedly supporting me through.

But MFW three months is assumed to be enough time to build such a system with one dev.

Was just reading some of the OpenVPN scripts to renew a certificate where I forgot to source the vars file first (apparently OpenVPN stores those in a separate file that you always have to source first, and I tend to forget it sometimes).

Reading the revoke-full script that OpenVPN provides, it's just bash so I can read it no problem. But traversing through it and trying to understand it... Horrible! There's a test file in $RT named keys/revoke-test.pem. It's not used anywhere in OpenVPN for anything useful as far as I'm aware. The script however - the script that's running on a production server! - attempts to remove this file. It doesn't exist. Test files do (or at least should) not exist in production. They're not supposed to be there.

It exports empty variables. Some of them are set by the sourced vars file, some aren't. Not entirely sure why it's exporting variables as empty when they're uninitialized, or why it doesn't just unset the ones that are initialized.

And finally it goes ahead and revokes the key file that I'm actually concerned about through regular OpenSSL and verifies it.

Not to mention that the lack of the sourced vars file, which admittedly I should think about in the current status quo, if it *always* needs to be sourced anyway... Why doesn't the script do that itself then? One less thing to go wrong. But hey, proper design?

Gore. I don't have any other words for it.

And before anyone tells me that I should go and fix it if I'm so worried about it. Remember, I am not a developer. That's the job of the developers that made this in the first place.

I don't know why is that everytime you guys find a security bug or a data leak or that someone is saving plain passwords on their database, you try to cover and censor the company name. Listen people, fuck the company and their name and their brand if someone's data might be in danger. Everybody should be aware of what is happening with their personal information.

Also, maybe would be great if devRant would let users to post anonymous rants for this kind of issues or a special thread with latest news about our online security.

A friend of mine just called me to ask if I can help him hack an Instagram account... In my head (He's quite aware I lost my dad less than a week ago even if I was an hacker I'll expect and respect some little remorse atleast around moments like this, I would not be expected to do dirty shit at these times). (*heavy sigh here*) (*Million cause words here*) (*hung up*)

This app seems to be mostly web developers so I have a question that will either spark interesting discussion or a blood curdling flame war. Either way:

I'm trying to build a blog site for myself. I'm not a web developer, for the most part I write C software, but I have written web software before. I want to write it, not use a CMS. What are some techniques and tools I should be aware of, so I don't break my keyboard in frustration?

TLDR;
How much do you earn for your skill set in your country vs your cost of living?
BONUS;
See how much I & others earn.

Recently I became aware of just how massive the gap in developers earnings are between countries. I'd love to calculate a fixed score for income vs cost of living.

I know this stuff is sensitive to some so if you prefer just post your score (avg income p/m after tax / cost of living).

I'm not shy so I'll go first:

MY RATES
Normal Rate (Long term): $23
Consulting / Short term: $30-$74
Pen Test: $1500 once off.
Pen Test Fixes: consulting rate.
Simple work/websites: min $400+
Family & Friends: Dev friends are usually free (when mutually beneficial). Family and others can fuck off, even if they can pay (I pass their info to dev friends with fair warning).

GENERAL INFO
Experience: 9 years
Country: South Africa
Developer rareness in country: Very Rare (+-90 job openings per job seeker).
Middle class wage in country: $1550 p/m (can afford a new car, decent apartment & some luxuries like beer/eating out).
Employment type: Permanent though I can and do freelance occasionally.
Client Locality: Mostly local.
Developer Type: Web Developer (True web dev - I do anything web related from custom HTTP servers to sockets, services, advanced browser api's, apps & more).

STACKS / SKILLSETS

I'M PROFICIENT IN:
python, JavaScript, ASP classic, bash, php, html, css, sql, msql, elastic search, REST, SOAP, DOM, IIS, apache

I DABBLE WITH:
ASP.net, C++, ruby, GO, nginx, tesseract

MY SPECIALTIES:
application architecture, automation, integrations, db's, real time data, advanced browser apps/extensions (webRTC, canvas etc).

SUMMARY
Avg income p/m after tax: $2250
Cost of living (car+rent+food): $1200
Score: 1.85

*Note: For integrity when calculating my cost of living I excluded debt repayments and only kept my necessities which are transport, food & shelter.

I really hope you guy's post your results, it would be great to get an idea of which is really the worst / best country to be a developer in.

Bible verses.

Sorted from "wtf" to progressively more disturbing.

---
1️⃣ One of many contradictions
---

John 4:12
"No one has seen the face of God."

Genesis 32:31
"I have seen the face of God..."

---
2️⃣ All-Knowing God, regrets creating you
---

Genesis 6:6
"And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart."

---
3️⃣ Says to kill all gay people
---

Leviticus 20:13
"If a man lies with a male as with a woman, they have committed an abomination; the two of them shall be put to death; their bloodguilt is upon them."

---
4️⃣ Approval of sex trafficking
---

Exodus 21:7
"If a man sells his daughter as a servant, she is not to go free as male servants do. If she does not please the master who has selected her for himself, he must let her be redeemed."

---
5️⃣ Says its ok to own slaves
---

Exodus 21:20-21
"Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property."

---
6️⃣ Says its ok to kill children
---

Psalms 137:9
"Blessed the one who seizes your children and smashes them against the rock: the children represent the future generations, and so must be destroyed if the enemy is truly to be eradicated."

---
7️⃣ Says a raped woman must marry her rapist
---

Deuteronomy 22:28–29
"If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife, because he has violated her. He may not divorce her all his days."

---
8️⃣ Says incest is ok
---

Genesis 19:32-36
"Let’s get our father to drink wine and then sleep with him and preserve our family line through our father. That night they got their father to drink wine, and the older daughter went in and slept with him. He was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up. The next day the older daughter said to the younger, “Last night I slept with my father. Let’s get him to drink wine again tonight, and you go in and sleep with him so we can preserve our family line through our father.” So they got their father to drink wine that night also, and the younger daughter went in and slept with him. Again he was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up. So both of Lot’s daughters became pregnant by their father."

I'll tell you the only time... The only times I'll fuck up.

When something changes. That's it.

Nothing else causes me to fuck anything up.

My code gets more and more messy the more people go oh change that ,😐 can that be a capital .... Hold on that box should be smaller

😤😡 Messy = I fuck up.

Now that might well be something I need to work on !

But if you send me twenty emails all with minor things that take seconds to change 😡 I will care less about your project , that makes me lazy.

If you want your project to be perfect on launch .. one plan a couple round of amends maybe 3 and your golden

But I can not keep checking if your application is all good after these minor changes 😐 (these are not situation you can write tests for)

Yes it makes me an asshole I'm aware , but I've been awake 40 hours fixing these peoples work, and quite frankly I couldn't give a toss

For some reason, Tableau is really heavy. I mean, all reporting software is a little bullshit, but Tableau... The server we had took 45 minutes to restart (no exaggerating - we timed it).

Reading the log files, yes, it WAS doing shit the whole time. Lots of shit. It seemed to be running just... Tons of software.

Tableau seemed to be aware of this because they have a page where you can check the status of everything. I assume that starts up first.

If you're looking into Tableau, two things to consider:

1) No, your braindead financial manager won't be making their own visualizations, no matter how many times the marketing team writes "drag and drop" on the Tableau website.

2) You'll make some nice visualizations but find that when you try to do more complex things, you run into constant roadblocks. If your manager asks "can you make it do x"? No matter how much experience you have, your answer can never be 100% "yes"... Or even "no" for that matter.

Not the worst experience with enterprise software, but definitely a surprisingly bad experience.

How the Common Lisp Community will eventually die soon:

Clojure is the only main Lisp dialect having some sort of heavy presence in today's modern development world. Yes, I am aware of other(if not all) environments in which Lisp or a dialect of it is being used for multiple things, CADLisp, Guile Scheme, Racket, etc etc whatever. I know.

Not only is Clojure present in the JVM(I give 0 fucks about whether you like it or not also) but also has compilation targets for Javascript via Clojurescript. This means that i can effectively target backend server operations, damn near everything inside of the JVM and also the browser.
Yet, there is no real point in using Lisp or Clojure other than for pure academic endeavours, for which it is not even a pure functional programming language, you would be better served learning something else if you want true functional purity. But also because examples for one of the major areas in software development, mainly web, are really lacking, like, lacking bad, as in, so bad most examples are few in between and there is no interest in making it target complete beginners or anything of the like.

But my biggest fucking gripe with Lisp as a whole, specifically Common Lisp, is how monstrously outdated the documentation you can find available for it is.

Say for example, aesthetics, these play a large role, a developer(web mostly) used to the attention to detail placed by the Rails community, the Laravel community, django, etc etc would find on documentation that came straight from the 90s. There is no passion for design, no attention to detail, it makes it look hacky and abandoned. Everything in Lisp looks so severely abandoned for which the most abundant pool of resources are not even made present on a fully general purpose language constrained as a scripting environment for a text editor: Emacs with Emacs Lisp which I reckon is about the most used Lisp dialect in the planet, even more so than Clojure or Common Lisp.

I just want the language to be made popular again y'know? To have a killer app or framework for it much like there is Rails for Ruby, Phoenix for Elixir, etc etc. But unless I get some serious hacking done to bring about the level of maturity of those frameworks(which I won't nor I believe I can) then it will always remain a niche language with funny syntax.

To be honest I am phasing away my use of Clojure in place of Pharo. I just hate seeing how much the Lisp community does in an effort to keep shit as obscure and far away from the reach of new developers as possible. I also DESPISE reading other Lisp developer's code. Far too fucking dense and clever for anyone other than the original developer to read and add to. The idea that Lisp allows for read only code is far too real man.

Lisp has been DED for a while, and the zombies that remain will soon disappear because the community was too busy playing circle jerks for anything real to be done with it. Even as the original language of AI it has been severely outshined by the likes of Python, R and Scala, shit, even Javascript has more presence in AI than Lisp does now a days.

What are your thoughts on the "save icon", should it be updated?

I am aware of the discussions regarding this but am interested what you guys think.

!rant, !dev, random thought

We live in the past. Everything we call the present has already happened, we just aren't immediately aware of it.

For example, if the sun suddenly exploded, we would live for ~8 mins thinking nothing had happened. On the human scale, this still holds although the delays are much smaller. (also, the sun isn't where it appears to be :D)

Our senses deceive us 😯

Open to criticism :) just thought it was an interesting thought.

!rant
Linux experts, please read if you have time

Seeing all the posts ranting about Ubuntu, I'm starting to wondering : I have a laptop on Ubuntu that I set for my courses at school, I took Ubuntu because I could try at school with VMs, liked it and because between this and Linux Mint, I wasn't aware of all those distributions.

So my reflexion is : Since I've started my internship, which would be the final semester (I'm in last year of studying), I use this computer mostly for personal coding projects, which aren't ambitious and I sometimes use my Windows too, so my computer is a kind of switch-not-so-often.
Should I keep it to Ubuntu or should I try to install something else ?

I've heard of Solus, which got my curiosity, and Arch Linux, but this one is not want I think I need. But seeing all those distributions here made me confuse, I dunno if I should upgrade something that's a kind of placeholder for coding and do stuff when the Windows (which is my main laptop) is busy doing things.

Have any suggestions ?

I think that the time to learn sub communication has come.

I just realized why I kept failing in the previous girls' tests. Besides of that I wasn't aware that I was being tested and kept wondering why they acted in a strange way.

Thinking about to create a "self-defense mechanism" in myself that whenever I feel that I am being tested atm I am going to block it by saying that this type tests fail on me or something like that.

I am done with tests. I hate them. If she is going to keep testing me, I will show her the red card and block her from my life.

I understand that it is in the nature of women to subconsciously test men and why they do that, but tbh they shouldn't be like "Why did he leave me?" when she keeps testing him and he can't do anymore tests.

Life is full of tests. Ain't gonna need more of that shit.

!rant

I would like to present you the story that I tell everyone who is afraid of expectations, stressed to impress interviewers etc. Story about how I got my first job.

A little of backstory:
I always was good with computers, not like expert, but good. Of course parents were against giving me admin rights, so I just played games or such. When time came to choose my path throgh life, I've chosen to go medicine-related way, and chosen high school with such profile. I did my exams terribly, cause I never cared about marks, so I applied to uni for Information and Communication Technology course. I've learned basics of coding there, much stuff I don't really need right now, but in the end it was the best choice I've made.

With that way too long prologue...

I had to do internship for my uni and decided to try and find some year earlier. There was a lecture about multiplatform coding held by company my uni had partnership with. I've filled a questionare and few weeks later they invited me for assessment - event where they will choose who is good enough.
Of course I didn't believe in my chances to win an internship (1st place got full time job). There were 3 stages:
- solo coding (C/C++ own implementation of list)
- group designing (UML and presentation according to specification)
- interview (talking about code from stage 1, some questions, theory)

I failed 1st stage miserably... so I decided to don't give a shit and bravely presented our group project. A guy asked why we did not included a thing on UML, so I told him that it was not in specification - he was suprised but took it as big +. We "won" that part. When it came to interview... I was myself, cool headed, admited when I don't know things.

I thought that was it.

Few weeks later I received email - they invited me for internship.

They put me into Python project, language that noone in our trainee team knew. Told us 2/4 will be hired. At first I was not interested, wanted to finish my degree. But they convinced me. Now I'm here +2 years.

I am aware there are not many companies like that. Here, the people matters - you don't have to know everything, as long as you are getting along with others.

My tip for you though is: BE YOURSELF, NO MATTER WHAT THEY SAY 🎶

And I wish us more companies like that.😉