My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server

I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.

It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.

One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.

Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.

Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.

Then, next week, it happened again.

My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.

(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).

Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.

I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."

My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.

Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.

Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.

My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.

This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...

So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.

So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.

The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.

One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.

The cleaning staff came in.

Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.

Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.

We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.

You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.

How do you call a sick developer?

A Devil.

Well that joke was shit

So this other senior dev got seriously ill a couple of weeks ago and the project he was working on was assigned to me. His code was so aesthetic, loved his work, the structured code helped me a lot in meeting the deadlines. He returned a few days back and now the company has given him two weeks notice because "his pace is slow". I am frustrated, PM is frustrated. The guy is such a gem that he is still helping with all the new requirements client is throwing at us.

I hope they make an anime about being a dev and the enemy is the deadline.

Dev: ill use this coding technique number 111

Deadline: impossible

Insert explosion effect here

Worst client request.
Craziest client.
Worst accident.
Accident you thought were impossible in the dev world.
Story time, that one time where you f*cked up really bad.
Best boss.
Nicest client.
Most satisfying hobby project.
Best dev food.
Most helpful accident.
Your favorite project you had to trash, explain why.
Weirdest thing someone asked you to fix because you worked with computers.
Most memorable thing from devRant.
Best thing to happen to you because of devRant.

Its 6am and i feel productive, its not even my app got dammit.

Project you took too far.
Best/worst drunk coding experience.
Weirdest thing you ever ended up fixing because you know stuff about computers.
Worst setup you have seen someone have.
Worst treated hardware you have ever seen.
Best skill to have picked up because of your interest for development, but isnt completely dev related.
Best/worst choice in your carreer, what happened.
Sketchiest email a coworker, friend, boss or client sent.
That one accident that prevented you from using your computer or the internet.
Moment when you thought your dev environment would get a huge boost, but ended with a plot twist.
Worst disturbance while working.

If i come up with more ill either post again, or comment here. This was all i could get off the top of my head, believe it or not.

Edit, gotta add this one: Cable porn

OK.
1. So i tindered.
2. I got a really nice girl.
3. We chatted really long and good.
4. We tried to meetup it did not work because of our schedule. New
job on my end, she is a student.
5. I thought its over. Fine whatever.
6. She gives me her number.
7. We continue chat on whatsapp
8. Blablabla 3 days long, she gets bored and tries to friendzone me
9. I revert the shit and state i wanna be serious and there wont be a
friendzone/nice guy comin from me.
10. She happy and continues to chat.
11. I get emtionally invested in her.
12. We exchange thoughts dreams and music.
13 We want to meetup at weekend. I cant. Got a family wedding all
weekend.
14. We want to meetup the second week.
I cant. Im off on a company trip. Again new job here.
15. So we say in the week after I get back.
15a. Before the weekend we need to deliver an rc and go all out to hold
the deadline.
15b. We deliver, but shit happens on the customer side. His fault but we
get the blame.
15c I go onto the company trip.
16. We chat and i send her pictures of the trip over the weekend so she
sees I care.
17. She seems fine. And happy.
18. I come back from the trip late night and need to work the next day
jetlag style.
19. I work jetlag style. And try to fix the shit from last week.
20. I come home really tired and looking forward to date day tomorrow.
21. I cant do anything. My home looks like shit and the bag still
unpacked. I just eat and fall asleep.
I feel bad bcs my home will turn her down instantly if we make it to my
place.
Need to hope that it does not come to this.
22. Date day comes. Today.
23. I wake up at 6 early to plan ahead to make sure my clothes are fine
and i arrive on time in the office to exit early.
24. I expect to check what goes on today in the city and give her the
location to meet and time.
25. I enter office and immeadetly get caught up in meeting planning, dev
questions and the meeting itself because the project is on edge.
26. We have a 5hours long meeting where people go on and on and on.
27. 3h later in the meeting:
my brain was fried and around 12 i go to lunch with some people.
28. Meanwhile the city is turning into a rainy mess of a shitty day. No
way I can have a nice walk with her like that. Bars and coffeshops are
just to boring.
29. So i eat to regain some sense and we go back to the office.
Meanwhile I am thinking all kinds of locations and stuff in my head.
30. Havent given her any update since a good morning in the morning.
31. We reenter the meeting. Things continue like before. The project is
on impossible demands and impossible timelines. Still we try to do our
best.
32 3h later on 3pm I tell her i am in a long meeting and working on a
meetingspot.
33. shes not happy.
34. I get a call from a relative
35. i need to go out and take the call. not good for the collegues.
again new job here.
36. family trouble,  money trouble, goverment demands. I promise to
handle that tomorrow. Before work.
37. i get back into the meeting.
38. still super slow and no results.
39. need to focus but start to check for locations on my phone.
40. she asks me where i am
41. I send her my location.
42. she thinks i am saying she should pick me up!
43 i joke and say no definitly not.
44. shes pissed.
45.  I decide for a coffeeshop. after work. and send her the location
46. She says to call it off.
47. I go all in and go romance style. I say ill wait there even if she
does not come to show her how much i care.
U know to avoid the lets do it some other time fuckery and then it never
happens.
47. She goes quiet.
48. 2h later we finish the meeting. Meanwhile QA foudn a bug we need to
fix because why not.
49. I got 30 minutes to find the bug and fix it before I need to go to
uphold my word.
50. I find out what to do, but it might break a lot of other things
without careful test and implementation. Collegues says he takes it.
51 I feel bad but I need to go. I even leave earlier because otherwise I
would not be on time.
52. I arrive 15 minutes early. I grab two coffee2go and wait outside,
53. Shitty weather, sometimes rain, sometimes sunny, cant decide what it
wants.
54. The weather is just like how I feel.
55. I wait 1 1/2h
56. I think I should feel stupid, For gods sake its tinder. People dont
give a crap, Enough people around why should I Invest so much into this?
But I dont feel stupid. Because this is how I want it. I dont want
appointments, I dont want safety. I decided for her and I went all in.
57. I send her pics from the sceneray as proof that I waited,
58. I think I blew it. She is still quiet.
59. Friends are asking me for plans for the weekend. I wish I could say
I already have some with her.
60. I feel lost right now. But my head says I put too much stress on
her, And i fucked up with the planning. I should have been more precise.
My head also says that i am putting myself into the victim role, which
is wrong always. Should I continue to reach out to her? Is there
something I could do still?

Fellow developers,
For all people asking u to be partners of their "billionaire" idea, and to be paid from revenue ONLY when the plateform goes live or shit like this, BEWARE.
For all of them i had the same answer: "ok, ill share with you the project, but until it goes live, i am the only one who is giving sacrifice, and since we are partners, i want us both to do same level of sacrifices in order to deserve later the share of revenue... That being said, u have to pay the hours of devlopment, all of them, and when it goes live, from the revenue ill get, ill pay you back what you paid on dev cost"

It is the only way to be really even...
And if he refuse, ask them again "why? I taought u where 100% sure that your idea will work and become a billionaire why u think it is risky tp pay few thousands????"
... Now he is having second thaughts

Back in the day, I joined a little agency in Cape Town, small team small office with big projects, projects they weren’t really supposed to take on but hey when the owner of a tech business is not a tech person they do weird things.
A month had passed and it was all good, then came a project from Europe, Poland to be specific. The manager introduced me to the project, it was a big brand - a segment of Lego, built on Umbraco (they should change the name to slowbraco or uhmmm..braco somewhere there) the manager was like so this one is gonna be quite a challenge and I remember you said you are keen on that, I was like hell yeah bring it on (genuinely I got excited) now the challenge was not even about complexity of the problem or code or algorithms etc you get my point… the challenge was that the fucking site was in polish - face palm 1 - so I am like okay code is code, its just content, and I already speak/familiar with 13 human languages so I can’t fail here ill get around it somehow. So I spin up IIS, do the things and boom dev environment is ready for some kick ass McCoding. I start to run through the project to dig into the previous dev’s soul. I could not relate, I could not understand. I could not read, I could not, I could not. - face palm 2 - This dude straight up coded this project in polish variable names in polish, class names in polish, comments in freaking polish. Look, I have no beef with the initial guy, its his language so why not right? sure. But not hey this is my life and now I should learn polish, so screw it, new tab - google translate, new notes, I create a dictionary of variables and class etc 
3 days go by and I am fucking polish bro. Come at me. I get to read the previous devs soul through his comments, what a cool dude, his code wasn’t shit either - huge relief. So I rock on and make the required changes and further functionality. 

The project manager is like really, you did it? I am like yeah dude, there it is. Then I realise I wasn’t the first on this, this dude done tried others and it didn’t go down well, they refused. - face palm 3 -

Anyway, now I am a rock star in the office, and to project managers this win means okay throw him in the deep - they move me to huge project that is already late of course and apparently since I am able to use google translate, I can now defeat time, let the travelling begin. - face palm 4 - I start on the project and they love me on it as they can see major progress however poland was knocking on the door again, they need a whole chunk of work done. I can’t leave the bigger project, so it was decided that the new guy on Monday will start his polish lessons - he has no idea, probably excited to start a new job, meanwhile a shit storm is being prepared for him.

Monday comes, hello x - meet the team, team meets x

Manager - please join our meeting.

I join the meeting, the manager tells me to assist the new dev to get set up.

Me: Sure, did you tell him about he site?

Manager: Yes, I told him you knocked it out the park and now we just need to keep going

Me: in my head (hmm… that’s not what I was asking but cool I guess he will see soon enough -internal face palm 5 - )

New dev is setup, he looks at the project, I am ask him if he is good after like an hour he is like yeah all good. But his face is pink so I figured, no brother man is not okay. But I let him be and give him space.

Lunch time comes, he heads out for lunch. 

1hr 15mins later, project manager is like, is the new dude still at lunch.

We are all like yeah probably. 

2hrs pass 

3hrs pass

Now we are like okay maybe something happened to him, hit by a car? Emergency? Something… 

So I am legit worried now, I ask the manager to maybe give him a ring. 

Manager tries to call. NOTHING, no response. nada.

Next day, 8am, 9am, 10am no sign of the dude. 

I go to the manager, ask him what’s up. 

Manager: he is okay. However he said he is not coming back. 


Pm: we want responsive design
Dev: okay, sure, ill make it fit on all screen sizes

Result:

My company just did its first delivery to a new big customer , got the acceptance docs signed etc.

Was pretty funny to see management and the business-tards furiously emailing one another with company wide replyAll
Congratulating one another over an excellent job they had done in particular,

for example :
Gavin : Ahh capital , well done john for your undertaking in this tremendous accomplishment

John: oh and thank YOU for your guidance Gavin, couldnt have done it without you, we really exceeded outselves with the hard work we put it, also a big mention to (insert another inbred manager's name)

And that keeps on bouncing on and on

( absolutely no fucking mention of devs who did the actual Work, nooo nooo just a brief reference to us as "the boys in london"....)

Kinda glad they aren't in office most of the time else this level of back-patting would have probably turned into a circle jerk in the board room.

Almost thought of getting the dev teams to join the storm of emails and start randomly congratulating one another too with company wide replyAlls but that kind of prank would likely be ill received by out high and mighty leaders.

( on the flip side maybe they would actually learn out names)

Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.

I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.

With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.

I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.

They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.

But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.

So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.

Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...

And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.

I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.

My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.

Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...

This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.

Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.

He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.

That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.

I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.

On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.

My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.

I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.

So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.

I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.

We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.

That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.

They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.

They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.

We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.

The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!

Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...

Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.

On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.

Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.

Then said yes!

The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.

I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.

Final thought: middle managers are taints.

Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer

Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....

Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while

But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...

The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm

He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.

I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.

Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.

My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"

I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)

He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)

Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.

Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.

I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.

Am really Fed up with it all

I just had another shitty idea, yall know cards against humanity. I wanna make a hearthstone-yugioh-CAH -esque game where the cards are all dev-related. Like say [c++] {onSummon: 'shuffle 2 pointer cards into your deck'}. Ill probs start a collab here, dunno, if ya steal my idea then dont be a bitch about it and say so in the comments.

I got an interview with a big multinational software company as a senior dev - the kind of place I never thought I would be privileged or knowledgeable enough to work for and wasnt expecting to get In to...

I aced it. They gave me an offer but - FOR DEVOPS 😬

basically my skills fit in perfectly with the server/ scaling issues they have and are far more valuable there. I know they do, I also know I can fix the issue and will have alot of fun coding it - I just dont think I want to monitor it or anything else.

I mean I do devops stuff all the time in aid of anything I code but their stack is a full time job- im scared that once the toolchain is automated ill be pulled towards sys admin like duties and lose touch with my craft... what do you guys think? Anyone shifted from dev to devops?

== Internship Interview Rant ==

This is the weirdest interview I've been to to be honest because it wasn't really ABOUT ME. It's like the boss is not really interesting in knowing what I can do, what I am capable of doing. He asked me about my educational background for 5 minutes and started explaining about the startup for 45 minutes. He explained how he came up with the idea like it was a children's bedtime story. He explain what the job is, BUT he didn't mention what programming languages they use. All he said was it required knowledge about different programming languages. I tried asking but he seemed to dodge the question for some reason by saying everyone needs to know a little bit of everything. (Srsly i don't even know what to start learning for this) After listening to him talk and talk and talk and talk, he finally said "hey, think about it and send me an email if you are willing to take it up!"

He works with STUDENTS. The team is composed of him and 5 students. o.O They all seem so..... quiet in the office. Is that normal ???? Or like shouldn't everyone be kinda "interactive" sometimes?

So there is a girl working there too for 3 weeks now but SHE IS IN ROMANIA like wtf, gr8 then i guess ill be the only girl there but hey perks of being a girl, u get to be spoiled sometimes XD it happens a lot !

Internship ad ----> Main language: English
Me: *rages internally during the interview and thinks: BRUHH WHY ARENT U SPEAKING IN ENGLISH i prepared what I was gonna say in english for an hour*
I wonder if the code is in english or maybe its not :(( But I wish it were because it would be soooo much easier in english.

And there you go, I guess I have one week to find a better internship or decide to deal with this talkative boss. This isn't exactly a story of my last job cause my last job is totally non-dev related. This is a story of (maybe) my future job unless I actually find a better internship.

This week I got a promotion after being a junior for a year. Boss said Im a medior now and my monthly salary raised with 400 euro per month

Feels good but what feels bad is that a coworker of mine which has been contracted recently without any development experience is still making 400 more a month..

The thing is that this "developer" wanted to become a Java developer, he has been given time during work to study Java and in the meanwhile join the team thats working on a saas product (my team, where im lead dev)

During the 3 months ive counted a maximum of 10 commits and i was done with him which conflicted in a very bad vibe at the office.

During a refinement I asked if everybody understood what needs to be done, no questions asked. Next day when i was working at a clients office on another project 9 am i git a Skype message "Can you tell me What to do? I have no idea" where I replied "you should have asked me yesterday, i am not going to help you unless u come up with a question that makes sense.. what have u tried urself?".. Well then he got mad and stopped doing what he was trying to do.

The next morning i talked with him and we agreed to have a 1hour session to talk him through the user story. When we were done, he said that he understood and was going to work on it.

Next day I check, no commits, so during stand up i confronted hmj with this and he admitted hes been lacking and wanted to talk with the boss and me after stand up.

Well he admitted things were going to fast to keep up for him because he is doing some sysadmin stuff aswell.. the plan of becoming a Java dev was now history and he left the team..

Now he is just doing some sysadmin stuff but its been 3 days that hes been saying today ill setup a tomcat on the servers and give you SSH acces to deploy your .war files, today I finally gained access but he couldnt figure out how to move the war to the webapps folder.. And i wasnt allowed to transfer it to there..

its seems like ill lose my gf if i start my cs study cuz ill not earn money in this period.. wtf!?
is this dev life?
console.log ("fuck you") ;

Tomorrow i have school starting.
Which inspires me to rant about how school fails. Ill omit the "arguments" - feel free to append arguments for my words in the comments. Lol

Dont get be wrong. I LOVE acquiring knowledge. And this is where my first point starts : PACE. My class is basically an assortiment of dumbfucks who dont understand anything without "learning by heart over the course of several weeks"

Ill give you a concrete example.
Our maths teacher wanted to make us think scientifically. So he invented a new type of numbers "root 6 numbers" that are formed like so:
a + b * sqrt(6)
Now he wants us to find out wether the sum of two root 6 numbers is also a root six number. this is all dandy, BUT CLASSMATES STILL DIDNT GET WHAT ROOT 6 NUMBERS ARE, EVEN AFTER SEVERAL EXPRANATIONS. Worse: they went to the main teacher to blacken the math teacher.
Another example would be the time our class needed to understand functions(x) : 4 weeks. Ik, as a programmer i have some ease, but four weeks is a bit too much.

Because of this slow pace, i am irreversibly bored of and in school.
And this leads to another problem: homework. Since i know most of the stuff (the few things i dont get at school, i research at home) the homework are useless to me and since the others dont get much, the homeworks are often more than abundant {in a negative way}.
So i dont do them - but that makes teachers disregard me. Which im sickened of.
Worse: often i dont get overly good grades (i honestly have no clue why. I know everything and go over most of the stuff with my menthor),which empowers teacher of the argument of "you are not good enuff, so you cant read in class".

It would be JUST FINE if the only problem were teachers - but my peers are horrible too.

I know our brains are growing, but thats no reason for being stupid.

I literally get told that i need to stop wearing shorts because they look horrible.

Yep. Also, most people think they are empowered of teaching me and talking about my defaillance - because they do their homework. Even though they know i know stuff better than them.

Now to one of the worst issues: a group work where we had to de a Radio report. The guy (the one who thinks he is intelligent BECAUSE he has good grades) invited himself and his gf to me, he wanted me to translate 22 pages from german to english (because he was too lazy to write in german), wanted me to do audiorecording, audioediting and writing of a report. When i left the group because i was called "weakest link" he spread the word that i he had done everythinh and that because i left his group had failed (noticed the flow in logic?)

NOW everybody thinks of me as stupid weirdo. And honestly - i think i will stop listening to them. Ive always hated people, i dont need a significant other.

Even though this will come with the secondary effect of me being gossiped at.

But honestly its fine.

You might have noticed my elojquent way of expressing myseld. I did that in order to show that i am, despite my grades, overly proficient in english

Ok. So now comes the conclusion. What should i do? Do you Think that i am like that because im pubescent myself? How can i stop having nightmares of every possible social situotion that could occur?
Does this have to do with me being a dev?

Well. ありがとう for reading.

I realized something. No matter what tech i use to code a project there will always be a dev to take a shit on it

someone will recommend to use redis, after i use redis some other dev will trash me for having such a poor choice and recommend me socket.io

Then if i use socket.io some 3rd dev will trash me cause thats not the right way of building stuff and recommend me kafka

If i use kafka some 4th dev will trash me and say why i dont use angular

If I use angular 5th dev will trash me for not using react

If i use react 6th dev will trash me for not using nextjs

Tired of this bullshit

I'll use whatever tech i need. If i dont know what to use ill ask and take the first suggestion. I'll just build a saas and when it starts earning money ill pay other devs to refactor and scale the hell hole (which wont be cause i write good code following solid principles and not spaghetti). Much simpler solution than wrecking my head with decisions of tech stack

Being Ill and a dev is the worst... Not being able to think straight and focus for more then 2seconds really kills any sort of work you can do

Im having a sort of dilema. I recently started taking freelance work for web developement (and design ack) and Im uncomfortable with the state of the industry. Ill explain: Say if I bid a client for a simple 1-3 page site w contact form (a new page, not migration) My suggestion is to use djangocms, django, or just static html/css/js (ie bootstrap), which produces clean, fairly secure, and fast sites. Of course I can throw a templated unoriginal wordpress site together in a few hours 2 days latest, so I offer that option as a sidenote on the bid, charging almost 2x more. For some reason I dont understand they choose the wp shitshow. I explain all the reasons that not the way to go( which I wont list, if u dont know, u never used it. google up) but they dont care abt the details, they rather pay more for shit job. OFC I reluctantly deliver what they want, but as a result my portfolio is full of unoriginal shit Im not happy showing off. I have a few sites Ive done on the side my prefered way, but they not deployed and sit in my github for all intents n purposes unviewable to potential clients.
I want to be proud of my portfolio, and it to be a representation of what Im capable of. BUT, I gotta eat, and work is better than no work.

There are so many "wordpress designers" oversaturaring the field and it lowering the overall standard of what we are capable of. I just begining my dev journey, but if I cant have a body of work Im proud of, theres no way I can see doing this the rest of my life, and that makes me really sad. My love of developing, coding, and IT/computers in general drove me to change careers from audio engineering to web development, and the fact that this fucking mr. potatoe head of a CMS is slowly turning that love into hate really pisses me off. So Im ending this !rant looking for hope.
Your thoughts?

I called the hack "blow up bunny", was in my first company.

We had 4 industrial printers which usually got fed by PHP / IPP to generate invoices / picking lists / ...

The dilemma started with inventory - we didn't have time to prepar due to a severe influenza going round (my team of 5 was down to 2 persons, where on was stuck with trying to maintain order. Overall I guess more than 40 % ill, of roughly 70 persons...)

Inventory was the kind of ultimate death process. Since the company sold mobile accessoires and other - small - stuff.

Small is the important word here....

Over 10 000 items were usually in stock.

Everything needed to be counted if open or (if closed) at least registered.

The dev task was to generate PDFs with SKUs and prefilled information to prevent disaster.

The problem wasn't printing.

The problem was time and size.

To generate lists for > 10 000 articles, matching SKUs, segmented by number of teams isn't fun.

To print it even less. Especially since printers can and will fail - if you send nonstop, there is a high chance that the printer get's stuck since the printers command buffer get's cranky and so on.

It was my longest working day: 18 hours.

In the end "Blow up bunny" did something incredibly stupid: It was a not so trivial bash pipeline which "blew up" the large PDF in a max of 5 pages, sent it to one of the 4 printers in round robin fashion.

After a max of 4 iterations, bunny was called.

"bunny" was the fun part.

Via IPP you can of course watch the printer queue.

So...

Check if queue was empty, start next round with determined empty printer queues.

Not so easy already. But due to the amount of pages this could fail too.

This was the moment where my brain suddenly got stuck aft 4 o clock in the morning in a very dark and spookey empty company - what if the printer get's stuck? I could send an reset queue or stuff like that, but all in all - dead is dead. Paper Jam is paper jam.

So... I just added all cups servers to the curl list of bunny.

Yes. I printed on all > 50 printers on 4 beefy CUPS servers in the whole company.

It worked.

People were pretty pissed since collecting them was a pita... But it worked.

And in less than 2 hours, which I would have never believed (cannot remember the previous time or number of pages...)

Dev chat:

Been a while since I asked one of these questions, decided it's about time to bring them back, so what was everyones latest 'fuck it' moment, whether it was an 'ill do it myself' or a 'fuck this shit' moment...

Currently I am going through a fuck it moment, sick of complaining that GameMaker is not available on Linux, so I'm jumping head in and building an IDE that will hopefully use mono to run the GMS compiler... Despite me having barely any major knowledge in the language I'm using nor the knowledge to easily build a code editor on its own...

this.post != rant

Just had my first job interview for backend dev position. Hopefully, it went well. Not that much technical questions but the interviewer sure did verified all the things I wrote on my cv. Good thing I included my side projects, that way we have a topic to talk about. Hope ill get the offer. Yaaaaas!!!

Tried to work in a corporate setting. Failed. After so many fights, product manager was constantly rejecting my work until I had no choice but to throw in the towel. Spent the next few years slaving away as an open source dev. Not begging for donations. Just decorum when I eventually launch. Instead, I get repudiated by the community, get my account banned at the location where I could have accessed the largest pool of relevant audience. No influencer or dev rel/advocate will respond to my supplication or say beyond a compliment

Barely pick up the pieces, to reimmerse into employed labour. Dozens of applications sent out. My inbox is silent as a graveyard. I start putting more effort into tailored cover letters for each opening, across multiple job boards. One finally rejects me

Even tried changing stack by applying for internship roles in nodejs. A dead end

So, I can't read cuz I was researching for my magnum opus. Now it has gone belly up, that's no more worth it. I also cannot work because my work is complete. It's just sitting on github like a mummy. No interactions, no stars or issues.

Posted on show HN. Not even a single upvote. The funny part is that even when I tried to lament my woes on devrant, their site has been down for hours

To think I was among those who trolled ronaldo with the "rejectnaldo" gimmick. Karma has turned around to bite me in the ass. Rejectnmeri

What to do with this enormous amount of empty time? I neither go out nor watch movies

Even though I'm not terminally ill or gnashing my teeth in physical agony, This is a rare moment when I wish not to have been born. There is no joy in life that makes unpalatable suffering worth it. Why does everything I do have to be contingent on the whims and choices of others? And I have to keep living like that, otherwise I'll return to my village to become a subsistent farmer, cultivating produce to eke out a living. Or seek unskilled labour, earning peanuts for waiting tables. It's a pathetic state of affairs.

All of this sucks tbvh

while(true) {
$us->me();
}

Damn it. I'm stuck on an infinite loop and can't get out. I'm starting to feel unmotivated on our first project as a team. No financial support from client. Disastrous planning phase. I really do want to drop this project. But I won't because of my dev friends, we started this together. Another thing that frustrates me, they don't know how to use Git. If there are changes on the system, we have to transfer it through flash drive. [ill teach them]. I don't wanna go to the point that this project becomes toxic. So frustrating. This too shall pass.

Does every start have to be this hard and frustrating?

Didn't imake it through my first telephone interview, lack of experience :((

Monday ill have a face to face with another company though ^^ wanna go jr py/django dev

Rant 1
---

I have so much shit to talk about and its annoying to wait 2+ hours between each rant just to rant so ill start off by ranting about not being able to rant as often as i want to rant

Rant 2
---

What is ORM doing under the hood if it makes the queries so much slower than compared to writing raw sql?

Rant 3
---
Im thinking of creating more accounts just to be able to say what i want to say without waiting these dumbass 2+ hours. Who tf even made that and thought it was a good idea. Ur not saving ur bandwidth storage by making devs wait to rsnt bro itll be the same shit

Rant 4
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Now by writing 3 rants in a row i forgot what i wanted to rant about more and its an enitrely different topic so ill rant about not remembering what i wanted to rant about because of devrants dumbass 2+ hour wait logic

Rant 5
---
Wow this new york company looking for senior devops dev requires a lot less shit to know compared to the saudi arabian shithole company for the exact same position. But how do i learn all of what they require fast so i can apply for this position since the recruiter has contacted me

Calling QA/ Test managers for help !

Im a junior dev at a company where im slowly transitioning into also being our test lead. I just got my ISTQB foundation and im starting to write out the test strategy for our company.

Currently we’r doing alot of reactice testing, and to implement more proactive testing i wanted to implement a risk strategy as well.

Problem is that i feel this strategy takes too much time for our organization (doing risk analysis for each story we’r implementing just isnt possivle) , and we don’t have time for me actinh as a full time Test manager while also doing software dev tasks.

Question is: what good proactive strategies can we implement that doesnt require too much time investment - or could we use risk strategy only for specific stories implemented / custom orders / etc and stick with a reactive strategy solely ?

Later this yesr ill be sent on ISTQB test manager course to better qualify my position but until then id really want to get a test strategy somewhat implemented

Any help is MUCH appriciated!