When you look back on your github activity and just think "Wow, we have really created something special. This is really going to help the world." It just... It gets me. That's why I do this day in and day out.

There is this salesman right across from me that always brags about how rich his parents are and how lucky us tech guys are for having such an easy job. He told me one day that he was going to quit and make his own software company currently having no developing experience at all because "I've seen some of these developers. If those guys can do it, it'll be a breeze." I convinced him that the best language to learn in order to make your own websites/apps is Linux command line. Hilariously enough, the other 2 devs heard me say that and when Glenn the sales douche followed up with them one of them told him "Yeah, If you think you're really going to be quick with it then Linux will be your best bet, but if you have trouble just learn C++ instead and you'll still be able to make websites." Best of luck on your new Venture, you spoiled jizz stain.

When you're a sql request that has done it's job

A random number generator

Alias coworker = high school classmate

This kid wore a trench coat to school every single day and I guess he had a chronic masturbation problem because the guy was caught 3 different times IN CLASS jerking off.
Most people would catch a sexual harassment / indecent exposure / public masturbation charge, but this kid was breaking all these national math competition records and was working with a local university doing research and had a 4.5+ GPA (in high school in U.S. that's possible) so the school decided to do 2 things.

1. Not punish the kid, and in fact nothing of this was ever put on any record at all.
2. Write him a note from school administrators saying that this student can leave class whenever he would like no questions asked, and that the teacher must notify the office so they could send a security guard in order for this masturbation obsessed student to literally occupy a bathroom as his jerk off chamber uninterrupted.

So if in the past 6-7 years you've been in a high caliber university studying computer science and there was a kid in a trench coat "feeding some geese" near you, you can thank my high school.

I did not create this and could not find a link to true creator. Still pretty funny though

Co-worker: "We would appreciate it if your future commits weren't so ignorant and bigoted"
Me: "Excuse me?"
Co-worker: "You made the gender variable a boolean"
I... But... Okay...

The number of product people who want software to be built in an 'intuitive and simple manner' when they cannot even explain the problem domain in a intuitive and simple manner is quite incredible.

One way to resolve tickets quickly

The joy that happens when the QA intern knows how to program and tells you which lines in the source to check out

When you work on a side project intoxicated and look at the dev comments the next day.

When dev rant is the devil but you're cool with it because the memes are relatable.

Clients keep asking if our software will support XYZ format.

XYZ format is a proprietary format that we are not the proprietors of. Unfortunately, it has become something of a de-facto standard in our industry.

It is not practical to support the format because being able to figure it out is difficult, time consuming and not even a certainty. In fact while we have historically done so for previous versions, it has been upgraded several times so this becomes something of an arms race for us (whether intentional or not).

Responses from clients when we try to explain this vary, but a not insignificant number of them intimate that this is a failing or fault on our part.

It is pretty annoying, and considering the damage in perception it can do, is a pretty interesting and subtle form of economic moat I had not previously considered.

Memory just came up from reading another rant about static keyword I wanted to share. Involved a network programming assignment in Java back in my heyday.

Fellow student was told that a static member was shared between every object in a class and decided that they could use that to implement network communication (i.e. if they ran the same java program on different machines, they'd be able to communicate by reading to and writing from the same static fields).

Have a memory of sitting in corner of lab overhearing tutor lose their mind trying to (unsuccessfully) explain why this didn't work.

The evolution of a developer

Working with a developer from another company, nominally called Jo. I had a programming session with Jo today.

Sometimes it's hard to succinctly describe an individual developers level of aptitude in highly technical fields to outsiders because it often requires a lot of context relating to the problem being solved and their attempts to solve it.

In this case I think it could be pretty accurately summarised in this little anecdote: there was a 10 second pause in our work today while Jo was trying to figure out how to type '<'

Had an issue running through someone else's buggy code and my PM told me to "use a goto to fix it up, those always used to help me in school". Can a recruiter on here throw me a bone and get me out of this place?

It is amazing how "we should be working on X instead of Y" can mutate into a situation where "we are working on X as well as Y"

Ahh Amazon, no support via email, you condescending pricks.

Chasing information for software crash from a user:

Dev: Are you getting warnings when you open the model?
User: Not when I open the model.
Dev: Huh what's weird, normally there's a warning that looks like this when you open it that looks like this *screenshot*
User: Oh, yes I got that warning

Tell me you don't want to do technical support without telling me you don't want to do technical support

Betrayers freeze for all eternity

Medically prescribed senzu beans.

Oh my dear internet,

FUCK THIS FUCKING SHIT
I AM SICK AND TIRED OF IT, WHO BUILT THIS HACKED TOGETHER ORWELLIAN SWAMP PIT?

Fuck the same fucking Envato template on every content page with 70 layers of sidebars, inline ads, popups, cookies and content shifting as if I was playing CATCH UP WITH YOUR FUCKING CONTENT.

FUCK the same fucking annual upselling 'plans' on every 7-day trial overengineered scam app that requires me to sign up for 1 fucking, falsely advertised task where my fucking password generator doesn't even recognize the input as a password field so I have to cmd+, to my FUCKING BABYLONIAN PASSWORD ARCHIVES PROMPTING ME FOR THE MASTER PASSWORD.
Thank god I can at least CREATE A BURNER CREDIT CARD THAT FREEZES ITSELF BECAUSE I CANNOT BE BOTHERED TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM YOUR FUCKING STEAMING CRAP.

FUCK every fucking step I take being recorded by our CYBERPUNK OVERLORDS REQUIRING ME to sign up for 5 different fucking privacy protection tools' annual plan or duct tape some open source shit onto my browser just for some BASIC PRIVACY WHILE TRYING TO NAVIGATE ALL THE OTHER 5000 annuals plan naval mines like A FUCKING FRENCH SUBMARINE IN 1940 GERMAN WATERS.

FUCK my walled garden scam ecosystem not being compatible with your walled garden scam ecosystem prompting me to reactivate my old SATANIC GOOGLE DON'T BE EVIL ACCOUNT from 2012 sending me on a DANTE ALIGHIERI STYLE ODYSSEY THROUGH THE 9 LAYERS OF PASSWORD RESET QUESTIONS, UNEXPECTED ERROR, 2FA MY PHONE DIED HELL to come out on the other side as a broken man.

Thank GOD I have your useless SUPPORT PAGE to aid with my signup problems that is actually just an FAQ with a hidden EASTER EGG HUNT for your support form CRISP AI BOT THAT IS ALSO 'currently experiencing high demand due to COVID' which is peculiar since that has been 3 years ago, but fortunately for you enabled you to fire ALL YOUR SUPPORT STAFF AND REPLACE IT WITH THIS BANNER.

I might as well just SCRAPE your fucking content, it'd be faster.

And although it is quite funny, FUCK THIS PAGE TOO for having me create another of 10.000 accounts to write this shit, where my browser firmly placed a newly created burner email into the PASSWORD FIELD.

I do not know how we managed to create something that is even more unwieldy than 56k DIAL-UPS, but I know that if this shit continues I'll have to train my own AGI to proudly interact with of all this STUPID SHIT on my behalf or I'll have to move into THE FUCKING MOUNTAINS AND LIVE WITH THE DEER.

Quotes are paraphrased (unless *) to protect the incompetent and stupid (or more the case: client and I'm reducing risk of exposure)

Situation: We have a program that opens sqlite database files. Occasionally new versions of the program needs to upgrade these files.

Program UI: To proceed you need to upgrade your database. It is recommended you backup your database before proceeding. Hit Yes to continue or No to abort.

Client: How do you back up a model once it has upgraded? If I hit No the program closes leaving me no option to backup the model.

Support: *The easiest way of backing up a model before upgrading is creating a copy of the file and keeping it in a separate folder*

Client: *Haha forgot about being able to do that outside of* <program name>

TL;DR: engineer in technical role who is probably getting paid $150k+ forgets it is possible to make a copy of a file.

When the monthly scrum retrospective reaches the 90 minute mark...

You know when people are being stress tested and they break by getting up, run around screaming and ultimately knock themselves unconscious by running into a wall?

That. I felt like doing that.

I swear someone activates some sort of gravity well when these meetings begin because time beings to stretch on and o........n....... while they meetings happen.

I began to list things I think I'd rather be doing than be in that meeting.

1) Tax returns.
2) Prostate exam (not old enough to need one yet but at least I'd be out the meeting).
3) Visiting the dentist.
4) Assembling IKEA furniture.
5) Watching soccer at least they have the decency to give you a break in the middle and I find sports as engaging as a dog turd on the sidewalk.

So bored was I that I began to notice notches and holes in the ceiling tiles and when I remarked upon them others became engrossed in them and began to speculate upon their origins.

I don't know who a speaker is, what department they are from, what product they're working on or what's so important about the algorithm they're working on. There is no context, no explanation and half way through a show and tell I had to check we were still in a show and tell.

I was bored shitless. I actually felt physical pain from boredom, I've not felt that way since I was a child.

I really, really hate that scrum is implemented in this way.

It left me with only half an hour of coding time left and really it sapped my energy and motivation to the point where I just went home early.

Excuse my language, but:

Fucking bloody cunting waste of time, I've had more productive moments in the restroom. They need to piss off or committed seppuku, ideally both. Dante got it wrong the seventh level of hell is this. I'm usually a very calm and balanced individual but yesterday, yesterday I just... Fuck! Argh! Fuck you meeting, fuck you.

If you are the type that schedules meetings like this:

May a thousand Jabberwockies plague your nightmares and be it that the next seventy seven times you lay with a human shall ye experience bitter failure! I hope Cthulhu himself visits his "enlightenment" upon you and you fear sleep henceforth.

I'm bringing a rubix cube or juggling balls into the next meeting so that I can say at least I learned something and it wasn't time wasted.

Yesterday I told an intern that was supposed to be shadowing me that he'll need to download visual studios with apache Cordova plugin for multi platform app design. I gave this assignment to him first thing in the morning (around 9:30 am) and told him to head home for the day thinking I was giving the kid a break to download and make sure the build was proper and to play around with it maybe. I check my inbox this morning to find that, alongside numerous expletives, this intern has quit as of 3:40 AM last night. I... I didn't see that one coming.

Open my Windows 10 laptop and the night light is still on from last night. It's 10am.

Go to night light settings and they're disabled.

Move on and keep working.

After an hour, had enough so google the problem. Looks like it's reasonably common and and there's a registry fix to enable the settings again.

Apply settings. Go to settings and they're all enabled!

However, they don't do anything anymore. Night light is still on.

TL;DR:
Problem Night light settings widgets are disabled.
Solution: Enable night light widgets, but don't make them change night light

Was testing an editor for writing technical documentation. Asked their support:

Hey ___, am I right in thinking you can't paste images directly from clipboard into a document?

Couple of hours later:

Hi ___, yes, you can add images by uploading them: <url>

The URL they provide has no examples of being able to paste images directly from the clipboard. provides Trying to figure out if this is yes-but-no or no-but-yes.

We have decent linting on our codebase which covers off code quality and style.

We also have a developer who insists on making code reviews about formatting and spacing rather than functionality even tho we've tried in multiple ways to say:
- our linting covers it, if that's happy we should be (and the rest of the team is)
- it's a waste of time doing it
- it wastes the time of the team reading it
- the noise it generates makes it hard to see any legit comments

I swear to god if I see another comment saying "new line" i will scream.

Harari said of the idea of Data-ism:

---

In its extreme form, proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system — and then merge into it.

We are already becoming tiny chips inside a giant system that nobody really understands. Every day I absorb countless data bits through emails, phone calls and articles; process the data; and transmit back new bits through more emails, phone calls and articles. I don’t really know where I fit into the great scheme of things, and how my bits of data connect with the bits produced by billions of other humans and computers. I don’t have time to find out, because I am too busy answering emails.

---

I was initially entertained by the punchline, but that was soon followed by the rather depressing realisation that my only value to greater society is essentially as a data processing unit

Two weeks ago this literal statement from client:
I reckon <Your Product> is almost at the point where we can bypass <Competitor Product> altogether, just need <Feature X>

After various much back and forth email, drilling into <Feature X> and asking pointed questions:

At the end of the day because of <Reason Y> I'm going to need <Competitor Product>'s <Feature Z> anyway.

While I appreciate this was necessary, valuable and saved my organisation a great deal of time, it is supremely annoying that it is necessary at all.

95% of of product management seems to be about preventing dolts from being dolts.

The hotly debated topic that anybody can learn to code is always seems to devolve into a definitional or even epistemological argument to the point of being valueless. But I like to think about it like this:

Anybody can learn to code in the same way anybody can learn to drive. The most rudimentary of searches for 'dash cam fails' should provide some valuable context for the practical implications of this.

Has anybody else gotten to the point where people who need to mansplain how language models aren't truly sentient/conscious/intelligent are now more annoying than people who think language models are sentient/conscious/intelligent?*

While it has been a tight race but I think I have just about hit the inflection point.

The amount of time I've wasted because of someone condescendingly barging into a conversation with a iamverysmart 'actually you see they are just automata trying to predict the next text tokens'. When in actuality, everybody in the discussion is aware and that is not the point.

And to further exacerbate it, with a good number of them it is really difficult to get this through their thick little skulls. They just keep parroting the same thing over and over. Ironically, in their singleminded ego driven desire to be the Daniel Dennett of the chat they actually come across as less sentient/conscious/intelligent than a language model.

(*this should not be taken as endorsement for or against that idea - it is actually mostly orthogonal to this rant)

What is it with people revealing their support requests like some sort of incremental escape room riddle?

Internal operations escalates an issue to development regarding an error importing a binary file format.

Confusion ahoy and blows out to 5 developers (3 senior) before the OP originally comes back 24h later to note that the client requesting this also added a note to say that the software that produces this binary may have changed formats. But they didn't think seem to think it was relevant enough to include.

Honestly unsure what measure of this is lacking basic common sense or basic human decency. And further astounding that for once the client did the right thing and this was occluded internally.

I've worked at a small business for the last 10 years. We used to do all our IT provisioning services in house because originally you could count the number of employees on a mutilated hand. The nice thing about this was that we could get a new employee up and onboarded in a couple of hours.

In the last 6 months we've now moved to Microsoft stack for credentials and managed by a 3rd party provider because it's not worth our time. The problem is that 4 days in, our new employees still have no access to their email or the fileserver.

I've heard about the power of positive thinking so just wanted to celebrate how I've made it to big enterprise!

(Also Microsoft Teams is utterly horrific and IMO successful only because big enterprise organisations need to fulfil statutory compliance/accreditation requirements. It is the definition of economic rent seeking)

Colleague at work gets pissed of when I 'tell' them what to do.

Change tack to suggesting things. These suggestions don't get followed and explosions ensue.

Colleague gets pissed off that I did not prevent these explosions. Simultaneously I get criticised for being angry that my suggestions were not followed, when what I'm primarily trying to do is defend myself for being blamed for the explosions in the place.

You can have your cake and eat it too folks!

Question for Support:
What are the recommended system specifications for [X]. We have a client using a laptop with an [BEEFY-CPU] and 32 GB of RAM and your program hits 100% on both resources when this program is used.

Answer by Support:
Those specs look above our recommendations. Programs using 100% of computing availability is a good thing and it means that it is functioning correctly. Of course if they have a more powerful computer it will run faster, but I would say that they are well positioned.

Off by one counting errors

How many fellow developers are going to be at E3 and want to grab a beer?

Are there any IDEs out there that have a ribbon interface?

Just install visual studio...

When the final card is checked off and you realize the past year and a half has been spent making this absolute monster of a service. There really is no better feeling.

Lead developer tells me to hang tight while he works on an issue and investigates.
PM tells me to make more cards for this section and fix it while the lead developer works on the same exact part.

So... I guess I'll go take a 2 hour lunch?

When people hate SAP and then they want you to take something and turn it into SAP by adding inane and poorly designed or even thought out feature after feature

Settle an argument for our development team. We have infrastructure to report crashes when they occur, via a simple online form submission. The form provides basic fields for a description and an email address, and also posts some basic telemetry (rebuilding what it can of call stack, variables etc). Currently the email address is optional (you can submit the form and leave it blank). The form is not mandatory (the user can hit 'send' to submit online, 'save' to save the crash report to transfer in other ways, or 'cancel' to just ignore it entirely (irregardless of their choice, depending on where the crash has occurred, they may be able to continue using the application or it might exit).

A suggestion has been put forward to make the email address mandatory. Surprisingly, this has kicked off an incredibly polarising debate, so I thought I would put it to devRant to see what is the consensus here.

I'm trying not to bias the discussion by stating with the considerations at play, but would encourage you to think about them before chiming in!

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