Bf: what you doing?
Me: coding
Bf: do you ever stop working?!
Me: I'm not 'working', I'm doing my own project.
Bf: but you do that at work. Why do you want to keep doing it?
Me: it's fun?

--- a few days later ---

Bf: what you doing?
Me: reading.
Bf: omg you're not coding! What are you reading?
Me: a book about coding
Bf: *faceplam*

A devRant Update!

Hey everyone,

We thought now would be a great time for a devRant summer update on what we've added recently and what we've been working on.

Highlights since our last update:

- We launched devRant++, a supporter program for people who want to help us cover our costs while getting some cool extra features (a supporter badge on rants/comments/profile, reserved spot on our in-app supporter list, ability to edit rants/comments for up to 30 minutes instead of 5, and thanks to immediate user feedback, we also added the ability to post a rant every 1 hour instead of 2, and post comments that are up to 2,000 characters instead of 1,000!) We are extremely happy and thankful for the great response the program has gotten and we plan to continue to improve it using your feedback.

- We added the ability to subscribe to a user's rants. This makes it so you get a notification whenever that user posts a new rant!

- We added an "active discussions" feature (available in the "more" tab on the right). If you're looking to join a conversation happening in the moment, then this feature will help you discover those rants. It shows rants that have recently been commented on so if it's a topic that interests you, you can easily get in on the discussion!

Some stuff we have in the pipeline:

- More fun avatar stuff, including fun new OS/language-themed pets
- More perks for the devRant++ subscriber program - if you have anything you'd like to see, please let us know and we will try to make it happen!
- We will be testing some stuff to help classify rant types (rants, jokes, questions, etc.) in order to create a more personalized experience
- On that note, we're also going to take some more time to do some work on the algo as we haven't done much in terms of improvement since the initial smart algo launched
- Community projects page update - we've been slacking on updating the page and apologize for that. If you have created a devRant-related project and it's not on the community page, please resend it to david@hexicallabs.com (even if you sent it already) so we can make sure it gets added. Sorry about that!

A note on community etiquite regarding voting on content:

We've always believed that one of the most important and awesome experiences on devRant is getting your content noticed and appreciated by others. If you enjoy a piece of content, you should upvote it. If you enjoy 500 pieces of content, you should upvote them all. People really appreciate others enjoying their rants and comments so let them know if you do! If you don't like content, you can downvote it with the relevant reason. What we don't encourage is voting on content that you haven't actually looked at or spamming upvotes in mass for content you're not even actually reading/viewing. While we don't encourage that, it's not explicitly disallowed so we won't impose any penalty for it.

What is strictly prohibited and enforced is using scripts or automated procedures for voting on content. Anyone who is caught doing that will have their account deleted without warning. While very rare, we caught a couple of people doing that this week and both accounts in question were immediately deleted once discovered. To be clear, this is the practice of explicitly using a script or automation to mass vote on content. You will NEVER be banned/deleted for voting on a lot of content manually, even if you vote quickly and on lots of stuff. We just want to make that clear becuase this is not meant to discourage people from voting, it is only regarding votes not placed by humans. So if you're a human voting on content, you have nothing to worry about, we promise!

Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions or feedback on any of this. We love constructive feedback and in the past it has gone a very long way to improving and advancing the devRant community. And as always, thank you to everyone who contributed to the community in any way, we really appreciate it and want to keep making your experienfce better.

Happy ranting,
~David and Tim (Team devRant)
@dfox @trogus

EDIT: since this announcement, collabs have been made free to post for all devRant members!

Introducing two big new devRant features!

First, the one @trogus and I are most excited about - Collabs!

Collabs are an easy way to start projects or work on existing projects with the awesome members of the devRant community. You can post a collab listing for the awesome open source project you started that could use some more contributors, that fun idea you have for a brand new project, or really anything you want to gather some fellow devs for. We think it will be a lot of fun.

Collabs also is a devRant first - it's our first paid feature. For each 2 week collab posting, we're charging $14.99. But we wanted to make sure to thank devRant users who have been with us for a while and anyone who contributes often, so anyone with 2,000 points or higher (now or in the future) gets one free collab listing!

The main reason we see collabs as a great first paid feature is because requiring payment or 2,000 points serves to be a slight barrier in posting a collab. We think for collaborations to be successful it's important to have some way to keep out listings where the poster has no intent of following through and we hope this is a good start to doing that.

NOTE: if the collab you are looking to create is devRant-centric (ex. a devRant Chrome extension), we will give you a free credit especially for that so you don't have to pay or use your earned free one. Just contact us (info@devrant.io) if your project falls into that category.

In addition, after tons of demand from the community, you can now change your username and email address! One important note is that you only get to change your username one time every 6 months, so use it cautiously :) You can access this feature in the "more" tab, then settings, then "Edit username or email."

If you have any questions or feedback about any of this, just let us know! We hope everyone enjoys :)

Interviewer: "Show me a cool side-project you have been working on!"

Me: "No! I do not have a cool side-project to show you! I work to pay the bills, and do other things in my spare time! Like go fishing, or play video games. Why the fuck are you assuming that I spend my weekends coding for fun!? Do you call random people asking them questions every Saturday and Sunday just for the LOLs of it?"

How I went from loving my job to wishing i dont wake up tomorrow just to avoid it.

Ive been a backend dev in the company im at for 2 years now.

First year was a blast, i loved my work so much, I used to get so many random features to do, bug fixes, campaigns, analytics, etc..

Second year i started getting familiar with the part of the code that has to do with Search in our music streaming app. Nobody wanted to work on it, so i wanted to take initiative and start doing a few tasks.

A few tasks turned into sprints, and sprints turned into months worth of sprints. And because the code was the definition of tech debt, and because it was so messed up that changing one thing can blow up everything else, working on Search was not too fun.

However, people seemed to be happy search tasks are no longer piling up and someone is handling them so that used to make me feel good about it. They also gave me so much freedom and i felt like my own manager because no one told me what to do (not even my actual manager) they just let me be and were happy i was handling the part they want nothing to do with. I was also given an intern to mentor and have her work on Search tasks with me which turned out amazing.

During the last few months, I completely rewrote search, made it 10 times more performant in such a neat way, made an inhouse dashboard to automate certain tasks so we wont need to waste developers on them (all of which were extra effort on my own time without being asked), all meanwhile still tending to the fixes of the old implementation.

I felt so accomplished, and in a way, i felt like a lead (even tho im not managing any employees, i had so much freedom and I was literally responsible for everything about Search and if i decide to play with the sprint task order i can even do that).

Then 6 or so weeks ago my manager left the company, and while i thought id be a standalone team / person (single person teams are not uncommon in the company) i was instead put under someone else. Someone who likes to micro manage the fuck out of me. I have been happy working on shit code because it was my baby, my project, no one interferes and no one tells me what to do and everyone would call me the search lead (unofficially). now if i dont report to that guy every two hours he calls to see if im working. preplans sprints i no longer have a say in, and im the only dev who knows the code so all tasks go to me. I feel i got demoted so fucking much. I felt like a lead on a project and now im back to being a normal code minion. From deciding everything about a project to blindly following a some irrelevant manager's opinion. (who btw is making Search worse) And after all the extra effort i put in, after actually caring, after actually embracing Search as my responsibility i get rewarded with losing everything i liked about my job...My Independence. From feeling like a lead to feeling demoted. I am so demotivated.

I love the company, but this is hell for me and this made me hate a job i always loved. I am thinking of talking to the CTO asking to work on other stuff because i no longer want this. If i am to be a code minion at least let it be on code i like, let me go back to dealing with PMs, fuck my new manager I dont wanna work with that guy he can take the project along with all its poopoo.

tl;dr
A former colleague of mine, who used to suck at web development is now a kick-ass who knows how to get things done.

We are of the same age. We got hired on this company at the same time. He was a front-end guy, and I am a full-stack. So, we were like a yin and yang in development roles.

Initially, we have this big gap of skillset. I was solely assigned on a project which I worked on from ground up, while he was barely able to make an HTML table look properly on a separate existing project. My impression of him that time is that he's kind of a simpleton. But, I was wrong.

Few months passed, our seniors left the company, and I was promoted to be a team lead. Eventually, I was teamed up with this guy. I had a hard time working with him, but I was able to share him some of my knowledge.

Every time I teach him something new, he's exploring more. From proper indentation, writing SASS, using streaming build system (GulpJS), etc., he's making sure that he applies it on every project he's assigned to — even practicing it on his personal projects during break time. I can see him improve each day.

After a year in the company, he became so much better. I even ended up teaching him more than just front-end stuff. I shared the gospel of Jesus of PHP community (Jeffrey Way), tought him how to set up his own server, how to configure DNS, etc.. Again, it's tough for him even to write a simple for..loop statements. But, after a lot of consistent practice, he became better and better. We've done quite a number of projects together. He's fun to work with because of his "hungry" spirit.

Unfortunately, he was laid-off from the company, and I worked on the company til the very end. We parted ways.

He went back to his hometown to launch his own e-commerce business — apparently, this was the "practice" project he was working on the whole time during breaktimes.

Another year has passed, that project worked out and got a funding. And now, he's launching his second project. The best thing is, when I lookup his projects on builtwith.com, every damn stack I tought him, he used it. It's like a project built by me.

To be honest, I am a little jealous of him, but at the same time, I am so proud of him. I thought him how to make things work, he thought me how to get things done. He's my inspiration now.

Seven months ago:
===============
Project Manager: - "Guys, we need to make this brand new ProjectX, here are the specs. What do you think?"

Bored Old Lead: - "I was going to resign this week but you've convinced me, this is a challenge, I never worked with this stack, I'm staying! I'll gladly play with this framework I never used before, it seems to work with this libA I can use here and this libB that I can use here! Such fun!"

Project Manager: - "Awesome! I'm counting on you!"

Six months ago:
====================
Cprn: - "So this part you asked me to implement is tons of work due to the way you're using libA. I really don't think we need it here. We could use a more common approach."

Bored Old Lead: - "No, I already rewrote parts of libB to work with libA, we're keeping it. Just do what's needed."

Cprn: - "Really? Oh, I see. It solves this one issue I'm having at least. Did you push the changes upstream?"

Bored Old Lead: - "No, nobody uses it like that, people don't need it."

Cprn: - "Wait... What? Then why did you even *think* about using those two libs together? It makes no sense."

Bored Old Lead: - "Come on, it's a challenge! Read it! Understand it! It'll make you a better coder!"

Four months ago:
==============
Cprn: - "That version of the framework you used is loosing support next month. We really should update."

Bored Old Lead: - "Yeah, we can't. I changed some core framework mechanics and the patches won't work with the new version. I'd have to rewrite these."

Cprn: - "Please do?"

Bored Old Lead: - "Nah, it's a waste of time! We're not updating!"

Three months ago:
===============
Bored Old Lead: - "The code you committed doesn't pass the tests."

Cprn: - "I just run it on my working copy and everything passes."

Bored Old Lead: - "Doesn't work on mine."

Cprn: - "Let me take a look... Ah! Here you go! You've misused these two options in the framework config for your dev environment."

Bored Old Lead: - "No, I had to hack them like that to work with libB."

Cprn: - "But the new framework version already brings everything we need from libB. We could just update and drop it."

Bored Old Lead: - "No! Can't update, remember?"

Last Friday:
=========
Bored Old Lead: - "You need to rewrite these tests. They work really slow. Two hours to pass all."

Cprn: - "What..? How come? I just run them on revision from this morning and all passed in a minute."

Bored Old Lead: - "Pull the changes and try again. I changed few input dataset objects and then copied results from error messages to assertions to make the tests pass and now it takes two hours. I've narrowed it to those weird tests here."

Cprn: - "Yeah, all of those use ORM. Maybe it's something with the model?"

Bored Old Lead: - "No, all is fine with the model. I was just there rewriting the way framework maps data types to accommodate for my new type that's really just an enum but I made it into a special custom object that needs special custom handling in the ORM. I haven't noticed any issues."

Cprn: - "What!? This makes *zero* sense! You're rewriting vendor code and expect everything to just work!? You're using libs that aren't designed to work together in production code because you wanted a challenge!?? And when everything blows up you're blaming my test code that you're feeding with incorrect dataset!??? See you on Monday, I'm going home! *door slam*"

Today:
=====
Project Manager: - "Cprn, Bored Old Lead left on Friday. He said he can't work with you. You're responsible for Project X now."

One day I developed a simple website for a goldsmith who I already new for a year or so.

We discussed everything and agreed on a feature set, price and a deadline when it should be ready. Based on this we signed a contract and I started my work.

Unfortunately at the same time I lost most of my childhood friends. I moved to a new city and started to study computer science, which was awesome on the contrary.

This is where the horror began.

I was totally occupied by the studying, my partner, myself and by the shit of life.

It knocked on my door. The horror decided to pay me a visit.

"Had a look at your calendar recently? Just saying..."

Shit! The deadline came closer and closer everyday and the pile of work undone grew with it. At that point I had to do something. I don't know what it was or how I did it, but somehow I managed to finish the project just in time. I was totally not proud of it, but it featured what was required.

The day before I contacted my client, the horror knocked on my door again. He said:

"You really should have a look at your hard drive."
"Why? everything seems allright."
"Well, then look closer."
"Fuck."
"Right."

Well, there are backups at least, I thought to myself. I'll just recover the last state. That was an annoying thought, but nothing serious. That's just one or two days of w... - Wait, what? Where are my backups? What the actual fuck? Why is the zip file broken? Why doesn't the flash drive work anymore? FUUUCK!!

I was lost. It was a complete nightmare.

Each time my telephone rang the following days, my heart skipped a beat. Finally my client's name appeared on the display. I answered the call, my hands shaking.

"Hey there! I'm calling to discuss the website project with you."
"Well, about that..."
"Yeah, I know you put a huge amount of efford in it so I'm really sorry to say that I on the other hand can't effort the money. Actually I'd like to simply forget about this whole idea."

Seriously? What the fuck just happend? I suddenly noticed a sticky note infront of me reading:
"It was really fun to see you suffer, but I have to go! See ya
- The Horror"

"Hello, are you still there? Do you hear me?", yelled a voice through my phone.
"Uh, yeah. You know, that project was a lot of work and... but you know what? It was actually a pretty fun exercise and I'm doing well over here, so because it's you I'd agree."
I heared a reliefed sigh from the other end of the line.
"Really good! I owe you something! Bye!"

What. The. Fuck.

!rant

The Sound of Typing (an original dev parody of "The Sound of Silence")

Hello caffeine, my old friend
I've come to sip on you again
Because my mind continues sleeping
While overpiled work is creeping
And the deadline that is flashing upon my screen
Can't be unseen
Within the sound of typing

Down the lines of buggy code
I quickly switch to debug mode
What kind of moron wrote this function?
For this unnecessary junction?
Wrapped in a condition that will always return true
I need a brew
To forget the sound of typing

Boss said I you do not know
WordPress like a cancer grows
A one page website doesn't need that
Still I wear my debug hard hat
And when I sleep I still see the same terror
Fatal error
Echoed in the sounds of typing

And every time I leave my home
I must launch chrome on my phone
The constant messages and phone calls
The chiming echoes through the halls
While I frantically fix some FooBar'd CSS
BUT I don't have LESS
Deep in the sounds of typing

And when I think I have it done
Some scope creep ruins all my fun
So now I force through an all-nighter
While I forge on like a fighter
But the project I thought was due on next Friday
Changed to Monday
Within the sound of typing

An intern I was supposed to lead (as an intern) and work with. Which sounded kinda crazy to me, but also fun so I rolled with it. But when I met her I quickly found out she didn't even have a coding editor installed and when I advised one she was "scared of virusses". She had Microsoft Edge in her toolbar, and some picture of a cat as a background. We were given some project by our boss, and a freelance programmer helped us set it up on Trello. Great, lets start! Oke maybe first some R&D, she had to reaeach how to use the Twilio API. After catching her on WhatsApp a few times I realised this wasnt gonna go anywere. After a few weeks of coding and posting a initial project to git I asked her if she could show me the code of the API she made so far..

She told me she was using the quickstart guide (the last 3 FUCKING weeks) which contained some test project with specific use cases.

The one that I did 3 weeks ago that same fucking morning.

AND SHE WAS STILL NOT DONE...

A few days later I asked her about the progress (strangly, I wasn't allowed ti give her another task bcs the freelanc already did) and guess what... She got fking pissed at me

Her: "I will come to you when im done, ok?"
Me: "I just want to see how it is going so far and if you are running into any problems!"
Her: "I dont want to show you right now"

She then goes to my fucking boss to tell him I am bothering her.

And omg... Please dear god please kill me now...

Instead of him saying the she probably didn't do shit. He says to me that the girl thinks im looking down on her and she needs a stress free environment to work in. She will show me when its done. ITS A FUCKING QUICKSTART GUIDE YOU DUMB BITCH.

He then procceeded to whine to me about the email template (another project I do at the same time) which didn't look perfect in all of his clients.

Dont they understand that I am not a frontend developer? Can you stop please? I know nothing about email templates, I told you this!!!

Really... the whole fucking internship the only thing the girl did was ask people if they want more tea. Then she starts cleaning the windows, talk to people for an hour, or clean everyone's dask.

all this while I already made 50% of the fucking product and she just finished the quickstart tutorial 😭. Truly 2 months wasted, and the worse thing is I didn't get any apprication. They constantly blamed me and whined at me. Sometimes for being 3 minutes late, the other for smoking too much, or because I drink to much coffee, or that I dont eat healthy. They even forced me to play Ping Pong. While im just trying to do my job. One of the worst things they got mad at me for if when my laptop got hacked bcs it was infected with some virus. He had remote access and bought 5 iPhones 6's with my paypal while I was on break. I had to go home and quickly reset all my passwords and make sure the iPhones wouldnt get delivered. strange this was, this laptop I only used at the company. So it must have been software I had to download there. Probably phpstorm (torrent). Bcs nobody would give me a license. And the freelancer said I * have to *.

the monday after I still had to reinstall windows so I called them and said I would be late. when I came they were so disrepectfull and didn't understand anything. It went a little like this:

Boss: why u late?
Me: had to reinstall my laptop, sorry.
Boss: why didnt you do this in your own time?
Me: well, I didn't have any time.
Boss: cant you do this in the weekend or something? Because now we have to pay you several hours bcs you downloaded something at home.

Me: I am only using this laptop for work so thats not possible.

Boss: how can that even be possible? You are not doing anything at home with your laptop? Is that why you never do anything at home?

Me: uhm, I have desktop computer you know. Its much faster. And I also need to rest sometimes. Areeb (freelancer) told me to torrent the software. He gave me the link. 2 days later this happends

Boss: Ahh okeee I see.. Well dont let it happen again.

After that nobody at the compamy trusted me with anything computer related. Yes it was my own fault I downloaded a virus but it can happen to anyone. After that I never used Windows again btw, also no more auto login apps.

Juniors are a fun bunch to work with.
Over confident, hero complex of that fresh graduate high, and then thrown in to the real world! Where there hopes and dreams are crushed in minutes when they see what monolithic applications really look like!!

But don't let that overwhelm you, your not going to be changing all of it any time soon, hell some of this code hasn't been touched in 5+ years and still works without fail.

Don't stress about the work load, you can only write 1 line of code at a time anyway, and hell, even seniors make mistakes.

The key about being able to manage this beast is simple, break it! Because the more you break it, the more you'll understand how a project is put together, for better or worse. Learn from the examples in front of you, and learn what not to do in the future 😎

But more importantly, plan your changes, whiteboard the high level logic of what it is you want to add, then whiteboard in the current codebase and determine where to slice this bitch up, then when it all looks well and good, take out your scalpel and slice and dice time.
Don't worry, your changes aren't going to production anytime soon, hell, you'll be lucky to get past the first pull request with this working 100% the first time, and that's a good thing, learn from tour short comings and improve your own knowledge for the next time!

Every step of this project has added another six hurdles. I thought it would be easy, and estimated it at two days to give myself a day off. But instead it's ridiculous. I'm also feeling burned out, depressed (work stress, etc.), and exhausted since I'm taking care of a 3 week old. It has not been fun. :<

I've been trying to get the Google Sheets API working (in Ruby). It's for a shared sales/tracking spreadsheet between two companies.

The documentation for it is almost entirely for Python and Java. The Ruby "quickstart" sample code works, but it's only for 3-legged auth (meaning user auth), but I need it for 2-legged auth (server auth with non-expiring credentials). Took awhile to figure out that variant even existed.

After a bit of digging, I discovered I needed to create a service account. This isn't the most straightforward thing, and setting it up honestly reminds me of setting up AWS, just with less risk of suddenly and surprisingly becoming a broke hobo by selecting confusing option #27 instead of #88.

I set up a new google project, tied it to my company's account (I think?), and then set up a service account for it, with probably the right permissions.

After downloading its creds, figuring out how to actually use them took another few hours. Did I mention there's no Ruby documentation for this? There's plenty of Python and Java example code, but since they use very different implementations, it's almost pointless to read them. At best they give me a vague idea of what my next step might be.

I ended up reading through the code of google's auth gem instead because I couldn't find anything useful online. Maybe it's actually there and the past several days have been one of those weeks where nothing ever works? idk :/

But anyway. I read through their code, and while it's actually not awful, it has some odd organization and a few very peculiar param names. Figuring out what data to pass, and how said data gets used requires some file-hopping. e.g. `json_data_io` wants a file handle, not the data itself. This is going to cause me headaches later since the data will be in the database, not the filesystem. I guess I can write a monkeypatch? or fork their gem? :/

But I digress. I finally manged to set everything up, fix the bugs with my code, and I'm ready to see what `service.create_spreadsheet()` returns. (now that it has positively valid and correctly-implemented authentication! Finally! Woo!)

I open the console... set up the auth... and give it a try.

... six seconds pass ...

... another two seconds pass ...

... annnd I get a lovely "unauthorized" response.

asjdlkagjdsk.

> Pic related.

I finally did it. I finally got rid of that client in a positive, respectful manner.

So basically, my dad has a freelance colleague. For a side project that person asked me to make him a website. My dad mentioned to said person that my sister's boyfriend does web design (he's trained to use autocad for designing the structure of furniture, nothing fancy just straight lines and upside down doors that fail after a while..

So my brother in law charged the guy 400 money for the design. I charged the guy 200 for the programming because my dad forced me to drop down my price to fit the budget because business relationship and he obviously couldn't let my sister's boyfriend not make more money than he deserves.

In the end after waiting on the design for weeks (I literally saw him do it in photoshop all in 2 layers on his laptop in half an hour) I had to rush the project because the due date was coming up. I already had most of it done but I had to redo a good part of the front-end to fit the design structure. I also had to re-do the design in photoshop to get the images and colors I needed, then cut it up into html. So realistically, my sister's boyfriend barely did anything.

Now the deal was that I'd develop the website and perform any updates/upgrades to it. I'd also host it on my webserver for a monthly fee. My sister's boyfriend was to handle any and all content related support.

At first it was all good, I only ever spoke with the guy when he needed a feature added and he paid me well for it. Overall the hit I took in initial development was paying off. As time went by, my sister's boyfriend started ignoring the guy's calls and the guy started calling me instead.

Now, he had this deal with my brother in law where he could charge his time at 35 money an hour. That's about 4 times minimum wage for not doing much.
Then I started to basically take over all support, but I was only allowed to charge 30 an hour. Pretty reasonable still and I wasn't too busy so it was all good.

As time went by I ended up getting asked to do more and more minimal changes. At some point I had done so many minimal changes I had to charge the guy about 2 hours extra that month and he went completely mental saying I can't just work for hours without telling him beforehand. We decided I had to discuss a price before any change. I charged my time on the phone with him twice after that and both times he bitched about me being expensive and once he even said he wanted to leave.

Now comes the fun part. A week ago he had an issue that was 100% support related. He tried calling my sister's boyfriend but the guy obviously didn't pick up. He called my dad about it, and my dad ended up calling my my sister's boyfriend. Now this guy is so slimy, he purposely didn't hang up the phone knowing my dad would use his cell and assume the other party would hang up because calls cost money. The guy heard my dad call my sister's boyfriend and heard him pick up immediately. He went completely mental saying how he wants both of us to always reply and call him back immediately.

This guy was always my lowest priority. He didn't really make me money and his calls and requests were annoying and unnecessary. Add to that that I specifically didn't want to handle support and was forced into it anyway, while all 'design' things (up to figuring out where and how to display a visitor counter) absolutely had to go to my sister's boyfriend..
But regardless of that, I generally replied to his emails within 10-20 minutes and rarely more than 25 hours.

My dad agreed (for us) that we now both had to reply to him within 24 hours. I was now stuck checking my voicemail every couple hours because my sister's boyfriend sucks at life.

During his rant he threatened to leave me, again. That was the point where I said fuck it.

For the past week I've been ignoring his calls. When he emails me I don't take more than 5 minutes replying. This morning I found an e-mail with 4 requests;

He wanted me to make a content-related change;
He wanted me to give him access to the site's Google analytics;
He wanted me to add a feature and write a guide on how to use it;
And fucking finally, he wanted a 'token to transfer his website'.

I promptly emailed him back saying I added his email a week ago and that he'd gotten an email from Google about it then, that I'd changed the content he wanted me to, a price for the last dev task and a token for his domain name, adding that its valid for 35 days and that his new host can contact me to receive a backup file of his website.

Sadly, I do have this on 10-minute dev job to do, but then I'm invoicing him all jobs I haven't invoiced yet and he can find another host willing to deal with his insanity.

The best part is I lose a webhosting client but I'm sure he'll still ask my sister's bitched parasitic boyfriend whenever he needs a photo resized and he'll still pay him 35 money for 2 minutes of work.

Fuck customers.

WTF is up with open-source projects using emojis in their commit messages... FUCKING emojis..

I get it, programming is fun and a hobby to many, but can we also keep at least a minimum level of professionalism here.

WTF is a wheelchair or bento emoji at the beginning of a commit message supposed to mean? Why the hell even bother to use it in the first place? There is no fucking reason for this retarded shit.

Is this what happens when activist developers get out of their way to make programming "inclusive"?

It is your personal project and so if you want to use emojis it is OK, I respect that (not really) but I can't trust your code, your commitment, or the quality of your work if I see those dumb Unicode characters there.

Git commit messages are not a game. Be playful with comments in code or your readme.md file but git messages should be a clear reflection of the changes not what a teenager's phone vomited on the keyboard.

On today's episode of Fucked Up Office Drama-Rama: useless project manager finally gets her desired outcome after 6 months of whining to her boss about a team member being "difficult to work with". She has only been with us for a year and is the only one that has had any "issues" with him, and the problem has simply been that he has called her out when her lack of planning, lack of effort, lack of common sense and lack of technical understanding has caused the team extra work and pressure. His contract gets terminated, she stays on, and on top of it all she's managed to hire a replacement without consulting anyone and therefore has the complete wrong skills compared to what we need. We needed someone with frontend skills, she decided on a senior backend / architect arrogant fuck that after only a few weeks is already showing us it's not going to be fun.

Fuck my life. Time to look for a new client.

Story Time. Inspired by another rant.

Context: I'm In a coding camp years ago, it's the first day.

We're doing introductions (name, why you're here, etc). Always fun to do that....

The folks running the camp are excited to introduce a student who also at one point was a teacher for some sort of girl power coding organization. So this raises questions, why would someone who teaches be a student in this camp?? And even a bigger question is raised when this person introduces themselves for a long time, and as an aside puts down the girls she taught in this program they taught ... like who does that?

horribleLady does that ...

A few hours later horribleLady asks her 12th question of the day (we haven't even started talking about code). Before she asks her question actually says:

“I know, I’m going to be a problem.” -laugh-

🚨🚨🚨 ヽ ( ꒪д꒪ )ﾉ 🚨🚨🚨

Fast forward to group projects and she's this sort of emotional storm, tears, and a sort of angry shouting that isn't angry enough for some folks to say she's yelling at people ... but she is. Fortunately I'm not in the first group project with her, but because we're all working in the same room we all get to see the train-wreck unfold.

The moment she doesn't get something (all the time) everyone in her group has to STOP and figure out what they're going to do about it, then again STOP because she thinks someone is doing something different than what was planned. STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.

In a way, everything had to go through her, she didn’t declare it that way, she didn't present herself as any sort of authority, she would just stop everyone the moment she thought anything was wrong, or she didn't understand it (all the time), and either inject herself or demand help from her team. Everyone around her had to be drawn into whatever problem she had. It was horrific to watch.

Private slack channels would light up like crazy with "OMG", "WTF", "I DON'T UNDERSTAND HER", "FUCK" and "SHE"S HOW OLD!?!?"

So finally it happens to me and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly (capable guy, nice dude, pretty sure he was high all the time).... we're teamed up to work with horribleLady. Thankfully for just one day. I accept this because I figure one day with her is enough penance to try to avoid any further contact later on.

My approach is straight stone face. I refuse to respond to her sulking, or sighing, or general emotional bait she throws out constantly. I saw other students unwittingly take her bait (they were trying to be helpful) only to have her crap all over them with her frustrations or whatever it is is going on.

Still we're teamed up with her her for the day so I'm going to be a good team member and I explain what guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I are doing / trying.... and so forth. But she's just too upset that she's even assigned to work with us, and tells me I'm just not doing it right, and her explanations about how we're not doing it right makes less than 0 sense. I ask her to show me what she means but she won't type anything on her keyboard, she'd just talk about how she’s thinking conceptually in circles and sulk about it rather than listen. I don't respond to any of her shit and say "I'm going to try this." and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I just keep working.

She would later call the instructor over and complain to him for a while and say: "These guys just get it, they're not helping me, I want to be assigned to another group." She doesn't get her way so she just moves to another table in front of us.

After that day I figured it was a great time to ask .... to NEVER be assigned to anything with her because "If I told her what I thought it would just get a lot worse." I got my way ;)

Other students weren't so lucky. Tears, sulking, her special way of yelling at people that somehow never got her in trouble (she should have been kicked out of the program) just kept going on. She refused to even present one group project she deemed not good enough despite the fact that she contributed nothing functional to the project that the TA's didn't write for her...

Amidst the stories she would tell to students was one of how she sued her totally sexist/racist/evil former employer. She never said what came of it, but that combined with her inability to do things reminded me of a rant I read on here.

I sometimes fear being hired someplace and walking in my first day to find I'm assigned to work with .... horribleLady. In this scenario she managed to get hired and they're too afraid to fire her so they assign the new guy to work with horribleLady...

I've no idea what happened to her after the camp.

(I rewrote this rant a few times because it kept circling back to a larger story about the coding camp I wrote about a few years ago, so if this seemed sort of broken up and wonky, yeah it was / is / yeah)

I was only seventeen back then and I was a Java Developer Intern, not knowing much about enterprise oriented coding.

The project leader in our dev team saw a lot of potential and passion in my work, but was convinced I wasn't taught enough to do the right thing.

I was mainly doing shitty mappers and services back then, which were somewhat used but never lasted long and were ditched a few months later, which always bummed me out. I wanted to make an impact on REAL projects that would deploy into production.

So Mister Mentor (GDPR forbid to use the actual name), who was always first to come and last to leave the office, taught me what it means to code for real.

We stayed after 5pm until 7-8pm multiple times a week and he taught me in a deeply understanding and calm way how to:
- Git (SVN)
- Refactor
- SOA
- Annotate
- Deploy
- Unit Test

And most importantly:
- How to debug like an absolute BOSS
(We even debugged native Java Libraries just for fun to see if we could break them)

Fast-forward a month later and little intern me made his first commit on production.

Without Mister Mentor, I wouldn't be half as good of a developer as I am today.

Today I'm going to work on my side project that I haven't touched in weeks.

I want to utilize Angular 2 which means I'll need to learn TypeScript. I also want to use the new .Net Core and EF Core 1.0. Oh and I want to handle authentication using JWT!

Wow, that's gonna be a lot of effort to get things off the ground... maybe instead I'll use this time to learn some new concepts. Maybe watch this episode of Fun Fun Function, or maybe this video on writing Assembly code for an app on Raspberry Pi, that sounds cool!

Actually, you know I should really teach myself dependency injection and unit testing for once. I'm so behind the times.

Well, really I should finish this book on design patterns first. Ok, where did I leave off? Page 20 I think... ehh... maybe I'll just work on my side project.

Tomorrow... tomorrow, I'll work on my side project.

!dev && feelsbadman

I don't know what to think.
All I know is that I just went reaaaaal close to a disaster.

Friday morning, my "scariest" manager (as in, if you have to meet with him, it's usally for something serious) told me that he needed to see me on monday (so today) with the lead dev, the project manager and the dude who recruited me.

The meeting was like an arena of 4 vs 1, where they all 4 had problem with the work I do, as in I make a lot of small but stupid mistakes that wastes everyone's time. As an excuse, I suffer from sleep apnea so I wake up as tired I am when I go to sleep, and I snore loud as fuck. I've heard some records, it's not even human. (I'm 1m85-ish for 125 kg, it's BIG but with my morphology it's not like I'm a ball of fat)

Anyway. And since it's not the first time they're reproaching me this kind of stuff, they were all... really angry. Because I'm a nice guy, competent and all but not productive enough and easily distracted.

So, when the manager asked me to meet me, it was to fire me. However, during the lunch break, the lead dev found a solution: I get out of the current project I was in until this morning, and I write all the functional tests for all the projects, because they all lack quality and we sometimes deliver regresses.

They proposed me this in a way I could refuse, and I'd get fired because they had no other options. Obviously, I said yes, I'm not stupid enough to decline a possibilty to avoid a monstruous shitstorm that would have cut me my studies, the money for taxes, and a lot of fun to find a job as fast as possible.

But what surprised me the most is that they were genuinely glad I accepted, like, even though I made my shit ton of mistakes, they weren't pleased at all to get rid of me.

And in a way, I'm the one who won in this story, since I don't have to work with Drupal anymore, excepted to parse the website to write my tests, but my nightmare fuel is finally gone *.*

I don't know where to finish with this rant, but I needed to vent this whole thing, to write it somewhere so I can move forward.

I wish y'all a nice week.

It was 1999. I was just starting my first real job as a programmer for a major insurance company. We were working on code that would screen scrape legacy mainframe data output and convert it to a web-based UI. REALLY stupid project approach I had no input on. I happened to find a programmer in Germany who had released his code in the public domain that would help with making a certain conversion task easier. I downloaded his code and put it to work.

During a code review, a programmer who was probably about 60 asked me where I got the code and what it was doing. I didn't even get to the part about what it was doing because he made fun of me so badly, in a fake German accent in front of a room full of non-programmers, for using code that today is no big deal due to the prevalence of open source. I just clammed up in humiliation because he got everyone laughing at me. His philosophy was if we didn't buy it or write it ourselves, we had no business using it.

I guess I was just ahead of my time?

So my first job is also my current one. I am a computer science student and for my course we had to do a project for an actual client. The client was a consultancy company and after working my ass off, their software development partner decided to hire me and a classmate.

The company is pretty small (we are now with the 6 of us) and the general attitude is very nice. I've only been working there for a few weeks and I feel very welcome. The work isn't too hard (mainly web development with geographic features/data).
In rough lines the stack always consists of a Java Rest API and an Angular frontend that retrieved the data from the API.
So far I have learned a ton and I am really happy that I have this opportunity. Lunch is provided and we always eat together, we crack jokes, have fun, play games in the break. Coffee machine next to my desk. I'd love to work here all my life :d

Since I'm still in school I can't go to the office every day. Instead I am at the office every Monday and on other days I try to work from school or home.

TL;DR :

"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"

STORY TIME

Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.

As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.

The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.

Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.

It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.

Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.

Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).

The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.

So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.

Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.

So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.

We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.

Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.

So I had a fun week.

It started off with my boss replying to a co-workers email where he sent his new bank account, saying he doesn't need it untill we close off some baddly planned projects, meaning no paycheck.

Needless to say we were working night and days including weekends on it and put our best into it.

For the next part I need to explain a little background. We have this old legacy system I'm working with for the past 3 years. I keet raising the red flag we need a new one. Nothing happened. So every time I worked with it I kept thinking how to improve the parts. Almost two years went into thinking and planning the new system untill I got a green light. It was most satisfying - the day I got to build something good and awesome. I drew all the data structures, laid out the foundations and started building ontop of it. It was amazing and I was really proud of it. Then suddendly client wanted to see something and the decision was made we threw it together quickly with the old legacy system. It was on hold 'till then due to work overload.

Boss wrote me this week if I can put the project from git on a server, where he out sourced the completition into India where they will finish it. On thr question if they can't work on git, he replied: "should they?" -.-

To top it all up, I got a notice at the end of the week if I don't fill his shit time tracking system (that takes me one hour/day to insert all entries) by monday he'll deduct a sizable portion of my paycheck.

I AM WORKING FOR YOU ALL THE FUCKING TIME BECAUSE YOU LACK RESOURCES AND I THOUGHT A TEAM STICKS TOGETHER AND SAVES EACH OTHERS ASS! I DONT HAVE TIME TO ENTER YOUR FUCKING STUPID TIME ENTRIES IN YOUR FUCKING BUGGED SYSTEM EACH DAY ON TASKS THAT DON'T EVEN EXIST BITCH! MAKE IT BETTER FIRST!! OH! AND NO ONE IS MORE QUALIFIED TO FINISH THAT PROJECT THAN ME, I POURED MY FUCKING HEART INTO IT YOU PRICK!

woah.

Germany plans to reduce their VAT from 19 to 16 % from July to December....

I'd guess a lot of old legacy projects will be fucked.

Anyone else remember the fun when you had a project where the VAT was hardcoded....everywhere.... And needed to be migrated?

I had two or three of those... God I'm so happy that I don't work for these companies anymore.

And I guess.... A lot of schadenfreude ... Cause I remember the pain, especially database wise.

Alright so listen to this. I was working on a project, it was a fork of another github repo. So the project is mainly based in PHP, simple enough right?

Anyways I have my version working and I put it up as a website and am doing fairly well with it. I was trying to advertise it a bit on reddit ( pay attention to the trying ) then someone comes along and asks how I made it and all that.

Just trying to be kind I tell them what I used and all that to make it. Then they come back a few hours later explaining that they are trying to make their own version for "fun". Then they proceed to explain that they are having some issues with it, it obviously is something in the back-end (they must've fucked up something).

So I politely ask them to show me the code so I can help them fix it.

He refuses.

So we exchanged a bit. What his excuse for not showing me his code ( Keep in mind he is also taking this from an open-source software same as me he has simply broken something and can't fix it himself ) is he doesn't want me stealing his ideas...

I nearly snapped when he did that, I had already seen the site he made, from that end it wasn't anymore spectacular than mine and no serious changes seemed to have occurred. The best part is that it was broken. He asked for my help and refused to let me see the code so I told him that I simply couldn't help him fix it then. He goes and is just going alright.

Next he then asks me how I solved this issue and that issue and he wanted the code that I used to fix each of these little issues. Pretty much to the point that it would've been a clone of my site. So I just didn't give him anything.

Didn't hear from him for a few hours, next thing I know he messages me asking if he can fix my site so it is mobile friendly...First off my site is mobile friendly and works pretty well. I have been spending a lot more quality time to work on this than him.

Moral of the story is, some people are retards.

writing library code is hard.

there are sooo many details that go into writing good libraries:

designing intuitive and powerful apis
deciding good api option defaults, disallowing or warning for illegal operations

knowing when to throw, knowing when to warn/log
handling edge cases
having good code coverage with tests that doesn't suck shit, while ensuring thry don't take a hundred years to run

making the code easy to read, to maintain, robust
and also not vulnerable, which is probably the most overlooked quality.

"too many classes, too little classes"

the functions do too much it's hard to follow them
or the functions are so well abstracted, that every function has 1 line of code, resulting in code that is even harder to understand or debug (have fun drowning in those immense stack traces)

don't forget to be disciplined about the documentation.

most of these things are
deeply affected by the ecosystem, the tools of the language you're writing this in:

like 5 years ago I hated coding in nodejs, because I didn't know about linters, and now we have tools like eslint or babel, so it's more passable now

but now dealing with webpack/babel configs and plugins can literally obliterate your asshole.

some languages don't even have a stable line by line debugger (hard pass for me)

then there's also the several phases of the project:

you first conceive the idea, the api, and try to implement it, write some md's of usage examples.

as you do that, you iterate on the api, you notice that it could better, so you redesign it. once, twice, thrice.

so at that point you're spending days, weeks on this side project, and your boss is like "what the fuck are you doing right now?"

then, you reach fuckinnnnng 0.1.0, with a "frozen" api, put it on github with a shitton of badges like the badge whore you are.

then you drop it on forums, and slack communities and irc, and what do you get?

half of the community wants to ban you for doing self promotion

the other half thinks either
a) your library api is shitty
b) has no real need for it
c) "why reinvent the wheel bruh"

that's one scenario,

the other scenario is the project starts to get traction.

people start to star it and shit.
but now you have one peoblem you didn't have before: humans.

all sorts of shit:

people treating you like shit as if they were premium users.

people posting majestically written issues with titles like "people help, me no work, here" with bodies like "HAAAAAAAAAALP".

and if you have the blessing to work in the current js ecosystem, issues like "this doesn't work with esm, unpkg, cdnjs, babel, webpack, parcel, buble, A BROWSER".
with some occasional lunatic complaining about IE 4 having a very weird, obscure bug.

not the best prospect either.

Indian web dev companies suck ( for developers )

when I finished 3 year grad program in computer application here in my country (India), I thought life's gonna be fun working as a developer. Oh boy, I was so wrong.

I started out working for a small service based IT company, followed by 2 more. I realized really quickly that they're nothing short of a scam. If your company's only agenda to somehow survive in the market and showing no signs of growth in 8 fucking years, then I'm sorry you're working for scamsters.

Now I'm not saying that all of them are alike. But most of them sorta are.

They don't give a shit about quality, not one bit. Quality means no money in the short run. And they haven't been able to develop any strategy to deal with that. Hence, no growth.

They promise 100 things on their website but only provide shitty services in 10.

There is no pair programming, no code review, no code quality check, no architect, no database designer. They won't give you extra time to write test cases. They use git as a storage device.

They don't put their developers (especially the ones who are learning) under any sort of managed development framework to ensure smooth work.

At the end of the day, their main objective is to somehow NOT deliver a project but finish a milestone and make money out of it.

After cashing out for a milestone, they want you to put your current project on hold and start working on a new project until you have like 10-15 projects in the pipeline and you're severely overwhelmed and you just wanna fucking QUIT.

They would say YES to literally every fucking thing, only to disappoint the client later.

I can't believe someone in the US, or UK thought it'd be a good idea to approach these companies
for their brand new app ideas. They're so fucked.

They're rarely finishing any project.

I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings. I had to get it out of my system.

Free breakfast before work starts
Overtime if working on weekend
Decent coffee
Quick meetings
New and fun challenges for every new project

- Project for a 40+b$ company.
- No business analysis.
- Only some 64 pages tech paper dividing the project in 4 iterations (pretty well written).
- « Please estimate the first iteration ».
- Can we do it in 2 weeks? Only items in first iteration, I think we can but we need a BA before we accept the project.
- Confirmed by senior dev front. 10 days, says we need a BA before we accept.
- Confirmed by senior dev back. 12 days, says we need a BA before we accept.
- UX/UI senior designer says he can't estimate such a technical, says we defo need a BA before any estimations.

PM, who is actually the department manager, says OK we can do it. No BA and estimations are halved, UI/UX 2 days.

He fucking signs the contract.

SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER, WE NEED STUFF FROM FUTURE ITERATIONS IF WE DON'T WANT TO THROW AWAY ALL THE FIRST ITER WORK.

PROJECT BECOME A CLUSTERFUCK.
NOBODY UNDERSTANDS ANYTHING. THE CLIENT HAS NO CLUE EITHER.

The fucking dep. mgr assigns another PM and says he don't have time anymore.

NOBODY HAS A CLUE WHAT THE PROJECT IS AT THIS POINT.

We have 3 days left.

Whole team came to a conclusion: the only sane thing to do is to give our grouped resignation letters.

Thanks. It was fun while it lasted. Your dep. can go to hell.

I'm really happy today. I'm not sure why, my life is in ruins on many levels, but at work I'm having fun and getting a lot more responsibility now. I even get to lead a meeting on Monday and be part of the management of a project which means I'll have people reporting to me. I suspect it's a sneaky way to get me more invested in the company so I'll want to stay after my studies but I enjoy it regardless. I finally have enough I need to keep track of to warrant carrying a notebook around and it makes me really happy 😂Hope you're all having a great day too!

I just lost faith in the entire management team of the company I'm working for.

Context: A mid sized company with
- a software engineering departmant consisting of several teams working on a variety of products and projects.
- a project management department with a bunch of project managers that mostly don't know shit about software development or technical details of the products created by engineering.

Project management is unhappy about the fact that software engineering practically never sticks to the plan regarding cost, time and function that was made at the very beginning of the project. Oh really? Since when does waterfall project management work well? As such they worked out a great idea how to improve the situation: They're going to implement *Shopfloor Management*!

Ever heared about Shopfloor Management? Probably not, because it is meant for improving repetitive workflows like assembly line work. In a nutshell it works by collecting key figures, detecting deviation in these numbers and performing targeted optimization of identified problem areas. Of course, there is more to Shopfloor Management, but that refers largely to the way the process just described is to be carried out (using visualisation boards, treating the employee well, let them solve the actual problem instead of management, and so on...). In any case, this process is not useful for highly complex and hard-to-predict workflows like software development.

That's like trying to improve a book author's output by measuring lines of text per day and fixing deviations in observed numbers with a wrench.

Why the hell don't they simply implement something proven like Scrum? Probably because they're affraid of losing control, affraid of self managed employees, affraid of the day everybody realizes that certain management layers are useless overhead that don't help in generating value but only bloat.

Fun times ahead!

Post Anger Rant (Beware, Long rant ahead)

So there is this project we have been working for months, most of the devs involved are jr students so I was leading them in the architecture and what to do and they were doing it, the progress was slow but safe and fun.

On the team there was this guy, someone I trusted and in who I had special interest for his skills, so I let him own the github repo.

So the day of the first demo I pull the backend changes ( I had been working on front end ) and I realize that the code was different, so I started using my super awesome forensic skills to find what happened,and when I say different I mean a totally different architecture different database connections, different service pirts, basically other project, so during my criminal investigation I found out this guy I trusted had never really worked with us, from the beginning he went solo working on his own project and changing everything because of some tutorial he found on the internet, so I decided to reset to the previous version just to find out that he had already deployed the code and that a lot of fixes that we should have were only on his version.

So I went and confront him telling him that he did wrong and he had to learn team work and that I was trying to teach them good practices and he waits and asks me "so, my code was wrong?" Seriously what da hell dude? I'm talking about team work and all you can think about is your code.

Finally he admitted his mistake and repented (I think), but seriously how arrogant must you be to ignore a whole team, specially when on your first real project.

Sitting down for an entire weekend with a couple of friends, just to work on a side project.
No deadline, just fun. And beer, lots of beer 😅

This is going to be a rant, but personally, I'm pleased with the outcome of my life now.

I was part of a community for a few years and decided to help them out with my knowledge of programming Lua nearly 2 years ago since they lacked developers for the project itself.

Since it was sort of a custom language that they modified how Lua worked on it, it took me a bit to adapt, but within a few weeks, I was pretty fluent in this so-called custom language they had. Began working on some major updates, additions, removals, and just optimizing this code base. It was a pretty old code base and needed a good chunk of love.

A few months later, I've implemented loads of features, optimized the base whenever I could, and then things start taking a turn for the worse. We get new 'developers' who haven't ever coded the language, and worse they couldn't afford to provide them development servers thus they ended up breaking my servers. I helped them and they learned, they were decent, but now the Seniors and CEO's of the project began to take a toll on me.

I was told that this community had a reputation of driving out developers, ruining their reputations, and that is what started happening. I started getting questioned if I was loyal to helping them, that I've become lazy, even though they were explained I've had mental health issues for a few years and have been hospitalized multiple times.

These sort of attacks kept happening for months, and then they finally pushed my buttons, where I was talking to another Senior of how we should redo the base since it's just so massive and a few tiny updates to the base take a few days to implement across the entire code. What instead happened was that I went to sleep, and this Senior told the CEO I was going to steal the code base and go sell it...

I woke up to messages of how the CEO is all pissed off, and that this what the Senior said. At this point, I started responding with, fuck it. I was so sick and fucking tired of their bullshit. I was the only fucking competent developer, and I did more work in the few months I was there then some people did in 2 or 3 years.

A few hours later I decided to go chat with the CEO and explained what was truly brought up, and he just brushed it off like I was lying. At that point, I lost it. I told him why the code base was horrible since he hired stupid ass developers. He didn't know how to code. People wanted certain items, and he wouldn't be able to add them for fucking months and players sit there making fun of it. Some people state the only differences they see within the code is the code I've done. Basically, he was an incompetent fuck that said he knew what he was doing, and had all these big plans for the future yet couldn't listen to the only competent developer and fucking claimed bullshit.

Now a few months have gone by, I'm looking at their community and it's basically dead with no proper updates except for copy and paste updates claiming to be custom coded. While I'm working on my real life businesses (Which are currently being a headache, but within the year should resolve its issues), starting University for my Computer Science degree here soon, and even considering building my own game here.

Basically, karma is a bitch and that's why when you get loyal people in your life, keep them. (Writing this at 3 am after a few drinks, hopefully, it made sense, I think it does.)

Anyways, goodnight everyone.

I spent four hours just getting my dev environment working again today.

Whenever I switch branches on this project, I keep to run a script that does migrations, seed data, test db setup, static test info, etc. etc. etc. It takes 12-15 minutes to run.

Today, that script failed.

Apparently one of its steps requires running some of the project's code to produce valid objects. Makes sense. However, my ticket involves breaking a crapton of models (removing accessors) which I've already done, and then patching the behavior, which I haven't. Which means a lot of things are currently broken. Makes sense why the script fails.

However, I can't run the script on a different branch and then switch back because that simply doesn't work (for reasons), so I needed to find some workaround. I eventually did, but every attempt cost me 12 minutes.

Today was not fun, and certainly not productive.

I wonder when they're going to fire me 😅

Everytime I hear "there's a problem" in my office I cringe so bad I have the impression I'm making holes in my teeth.

I hate this "janitor" / "plumber" role I have here, so insulting in terms of brain power.

** randomly codes something **
** colleague breaks silence **
C: Phlisg? There's a problem.
Me: what now?
C: Well when I enter a title that is 500+ characters for my blog post, it breaks the layout.
Me: obviously the title is too long. Shorten it.
C: I can't because [reasons] (unfortunately true reasons)
Me: ** deep sigh ** yeah, will look at it... ** proceeds to hide anything longer than 10 characters **
C: perfect!

--- 3 days later
C: Phlisg? there's a problem.
Me: mh?
C: the text is too short, can you make it longer
Me: ** FFS ** guys, you should've asked for a "Word-type" website if you just wanted to do any kind of layout. No, can't, sorry. Choose either between broken layout or shortening your damn text.

-- 1hr later, pm comes in
PM: Text is too short
Me: Yep. Any longer will break everything visually
PM: can't you fix this?
Me: Yes I can, but it'll be a whole CSS revamp because it was not MEANT that texts should be so long.
PM: How many hours?
Me: ** overestimating ** 10 hours (2.2 days of work)
PM: nah, okay, just add it as a side project

** me, inside : WOW, WHAT A FUN PROJECT OMG **

[long]
When searching for internship via school I found this small startup with this cute project of building a teaching tool for programming. There were back then 2 programmers: the founder and the co-founder.

Then like 1 week before the internship started, the co-founder had a burnout and had to get off the project, while the company was so low on budget the founder, aka my new b0ss, had to work separate jobs to keep the company alive. (quite metal tbh)

It's funny because I'm a junior developer, 100%. I've been coding as a hobby for around 8 years now but I've never worked in a big company before. (No exception to this workplace either)

First project I get: rewrite the compiler. The Python compiler.
"But wait, why not just embed a real compiler from the first case?"
-nanananana it's never simple, as you probably know from your own projects.

The new compiler, as compared to existing embedded compiler solutions out there, needed these prime features:
- Walk through the code (debugger style), but programmatically.
- Show custom exceptions (ex: "A colon is needed at the end of an if-statement" instead of "Syntax error line 3")
- Have a "Did-you-mean this variable?" error for usage of unassigned variables.
- Be able to be embedded in Unity's WebGL build target

All for the use case of being a friendly compiler.
The last dash in the list is actually the biggest bottleneck which excluded all existing open-source projects (i could find). Compliant with WebAssembly I can't use threads among other things, IL2CPP has lots of restrictions, Unity has some as well...

Oh and it should of course be built using test-driven development.

"Good luck!" - said the founder, first day of work as she then traveled to USA for **3 weeks**, leaving me solo with the to-be-made codebase and humongous list of requirements.

---

I just finished the 6th week of internship, boss has been at "HQ" for 3 weeks now, and I just hit the biggest milestone yet for this project.

Yes I've been succeeding! This project has gone so well, and I'm surprising myself how much code I've been pumping out during these weeks.

I'm up now at almost 40'000 lines of source and 30'000 lines of code. ‼
( Biggest project I've ever worked on previously was at 8'000 lines of code )

The milestone (that I finished today) was for loops! As been trying to showcase in the GIF.

---

It's such a giant project and I can honestly say I've done some good work here. Self-five. Over-performing is a thing.

The things that makes me shiver though is that most that use this application will never know the intricates of it's insides, and the brain work put into it.

The project is probably over-engineered. A lot. Having a home-made compiler gives us a lot of flexibility for our product as we're trying to make more of a "pedagogic IDE". But no matter that I reinvented the wheel for the 105Gth time, it's still the most fun I've had with a project to date.

---

Also btw if anyone wants to see source code, please give me good reasons as I'm actively trying to convince my boss to make the compiler open-source.

Cheers!

✅ Fun project
✅ Salary
✅ Code ownership and leadership
✅ Appreciation at work
✅ WFH
✅ No overwork
✅ Sufficient time for relaxation/hobbies
and other things

Frustrated, tired and a bit lost.

I'm a "Senior PHP Backend Dev", which includes not the greatest tech stack nor the best job title, but it pays fine, and the company is awesome to work for.

I suck at writing features, but I'm great at bitching, and I easily put complex abstract concepts into usable models. So I'm also QA, tester, tech lead, database architect, whatever.

That makes writing PHP less annoying, because I create the rules, and whip devs around when they forget a return type definition or forget to handle an edge case. But I don't write a lot of code anymore, I mostly read (bad) code.

Lately I REALLY feel like doing something else... problem is that I know JS/ES6, but really dislike React/Vue and the whole crappy modern frontend toolchainchootrain of babelifyingwebpackingyarnballs. I know Python/Tensorflow/etc, but don't feel like I want to go into data science or AI. And then I'm awesome at the shit no one uses, like Haskell, Go and Rust (and worse).

I got a job offer which combines a very interesting PHP codebase with a Java infrastructure, where I could learn a lot... and I'm kind of tempted.

Problem is, everyone always shits on Java. I always made a bit of fun of Java myself. Don't even know exactly why, probably some really cruel instinct which causes kids to bully the least popular kid.

I know the basics, I've written the hello world, and a small backend app for a personal project. I know how strict and verbose it can be. I love the strictness in Haskell and Rust.... but those are both also quite terse.

Should I become a Java dev? I'm not talking about Android SDK, but an insane enterprise codebase at a life sciences corporation.

To the pro Java devs: What are the best and worst things about your job, about the weekly processes, about the toolchains? Have you ever considered other languages? Do you unconditionally love and believe in Java, or do you believe Swift, Kotlin, Scala or whatever will eventually make it completely obsolete?

Will Java hasten my decline into the cynical neckbeard I was always destined to be?

There are a lot more fun langauges, but looking at realistic demand and career value...

i genuinely like programming. it's like solving logical puzzles for me, challenges on a smaller or bigger scale, and this is fun.
i always feel this when working on something on my own, i.e. a full stack project where i take care of everything.

but i'm so sick and tired of corporate software development.
i'm tired of scrum, all these scrum meetings, it feels like they are sucking my life energy away. if at least i had the feeling that i work in a team where everybody contributes, the team work is nice and also project management is aligned.
i'm tired of having too many different tasks in too many different areas or projects and never having the feeling to be able to really concentrate on one thing, to be able to do a job well enough so that i'm content with it.
i'm tired of this feeling that what i'm working on is not meaningful. the feeling that my team is not part of a bigger story where everyone contributes their part and where there is a sense of productive collaboration between teams. the feeling that mismanagement will result in a lot of money being burned, because of work being thrown away or becoming irrelevant, or because of miscommunication, making promises that can impossibly be delivered on.
this feeling that i cannot really improve or fix the ship we are sailing with, but rather being handed a bucket and being told to constantly remove the leaking water and put it back in the ocean, but always at multiple sites of the ship all at once.
i'm tired of being the only female dev and altogether feeling so different from the rest of the team, feeling that i do not belong there.

even though i need to make a living, i just can't imagine anymore to spend so much of my lifetime for something that makes me feel so bad...

I have a project at work that involves learning a bunch of AWS stuff and rewriting a couple credential-generating scripts. I don't even know what the ask is, apart from some high-level "make this SSO" so ... idfk.

I am so incredibly bored of it (and burned out in general) that I can't even look at it.

I would rather see how many times it takes to beat my head against the wall to make a hole than think about this ticket again.

"Oh, I thought you would find that fun" No. No I do not. I can't even bring myself to look at it anymore. "Well, try to push through it and get it outta here!" Ughhhhh

I hope Russia nukes the bloody company.

First day on my first job ever, the boss asks me what I want to do. I indicated that I had some experience with php and the yii framework (which was at some point very cool xD), so I wanted to start with something like that. And so it goes: after two days of watching laracasts (which is an awesome platform by the way! :O) I got assigned to a project.

Now the company I work at uses some kind of self built system that tracks how many hours are spent on which project, and compares that to how many hours was estimated implementing a feature would take. That's cool, but then I saw that for the project I was working on the time estimated was 5 work days. This was the estimate for both designing the interfaces and implementing both front and backend. I knew in advance that this was probably way to little time for me, but didn't want to come over as the new kid who can't do shit x)

Anyway, I started on the project and was having fun, but the biggest time consuming aspect of the project was not necessarily that I didn't have enough experience: it was that the developer who started this project and made most of the design choices had written some very messy code, without tests or apparently any refactoring. Also, everything was extremly inconsistent and not according to all the best practices I just watched in my laracasts spree.

So fastforward a little: we're way over the estimated hours. Yay. Now suddenly the boss comes by with an almost angry face that the client is becoming angry and we need to finish soon. He makes it entirely our (me and the front end guy) problem and I just decide to say nothing and try to work faster.

Now I'm stuck writing fugly code on top of more fugly code and when I mentioned to my front end guy that I was almost finished with feature but I only needed to finish up the tests, he said something like "oh just don't write tests, that'll take too long"... Is that really the mindset of this company?! No wonder the project I work on was in a very bad state.

Thanks to devrant I see now that I just need to say something if I know that I won't be able to complete something in a certain amount of time and that other people are just like me (thank god). :) I think I'll need to post more rants to vent my frustrations x)

Big rant.
Just finished my first year of uni. I took an extra course on c# (mvc, entity framework) and android development in java. We learned a lot of stuff and at the end of the semester they held a contest. We had to develop an app respecting their specifications and add something from ourselves for extra points. Problem was that we were supposed to work on the project during our finals, which we didn't, finishing uni is on the first place. But we had a week after finals to work on it. I, like many others, slept very littlre during that week, only to work on that app, I worked for more than 13 hours a day to finish it (it was a pretty big app) and I was pretty happy with the end result. Today they were supposed to announce the apps that made it to the final. They just announced that no app deserves to be in the final. They know that we had finals, but that we could still do better. They just peed on our work, probably threw our code away, fucking +13 hours a day, 5-6 hours of sleep everyday, almost no fun for a whole week after finals, and they think no one deserves to win. Fuck them, fuck their shit contest. Fuck you essensys, I hope your devs read this, fuck you bell ends.

Tl;DR; version:
French designer, Mexican PSD -> HTML converter, Indian VueJS developer, Spanish project manager and a Taiwanese back-end developer. Application was made like an tower of pizza from bullcrap held by boogers and constantly licked by an orangutang to keep it standing.

Longer version:
We had to take a "half-finished" project from one of our clients, received the code for full-stack project. The css/design was so unbearable that it mostly broke on anything that had higher than 720px wide screen, structure was full of tables/divs and no fucking flexbox/grid... Then the fun part - we saw it's conversion to vueJS - a single fucken App.vue file that had shitton of conditions for pages.... yea, not even multi-component/routed app, just conditions!!!! And then... A back-end (in which I mainly specify myself) - it was made by a developer that had to mainly use Java/C# as their daily driver while all being build on php and Laravel. 0 Fucken laravel functions used, 0 of models, logic and so on.... Most of the page was running on RAW sql queries. Names... Oh my god the function names....
`getTheUsersThatHasAtLeastOneSpaceAssignedToThemByGivenCompanyId(int $id)`
And it held an RAW sql that was coming from a model....

All of this was managed by a random spanish manager who couldn't really understand what our client needed and what he actually wanted so from 100% of the site, only 20% was correct in logic....

And yet, according to the whole "package" (team) - they did everything correctly, saw no issues and our client was ungrateful fucker that refused to pay 10x the amount that we asked in order to completely re-do the application....

Morale: Remote teams are great... As long as all of them can work remote in TEAM.

Just wanted to leave a little encouragement that can be hard to find on a 'rant' board: As a 40 year old dev doing this for 16 or more years... I'm not jaded, I still have a burning enthusiasm for software dev, I'm lucky to be able to pursue this career. Have I been in some shitty situations and health damaging levels of stress? Yes at times, and I've ranted about them here. This career isn't an easy ride, ultimately there's a reason it's well paid - for all of its physical ease it's mentally and often emotionally hard. But, I still find the highs match the lows, there's still thrill in the chase to make the project and product work right. Only advice I would give is be prepared to shift down a career gear for a while when you have kids. That shit is hard. Keep having fun people, we work with machines that extend and force-multiply our minds, what a time to be alive!

I'm thirteen, and we have an excel unit in our computer class. When she's want to teach us something, she'd deploy her screen on ours and we couldn't do anything. It took me until the third time (yes, that long) to remember the connection was wired via Ethernet. I took the cord out and my computer was free! During the boring "lesson," I opened Code::Blocks to work on a fun side project. When she notice she wasn't connecting to my computer, she walked over to my chair and saw Code::Blocks on my screen. Then, I noticed her behind me. I quickly pressed ALT+TAB. She walked back to her chair. To this day I swear she thinks Im a hacker.

A coworker and me did together a "hackathon by choice" this week to finish a project. We did it only because we thought it would be cool and be able to finish the thing. Well it was surprisingly fun to stay awake 36 hours, coding all through, having a good flow. After that, our boss came and was very proud of our work and he was able to send it for inspection to the client. I stayed a bit longer to fix a few minor bugs, but after 42h I was finally in bed. 😁
Our boss gives us the following Monday off.
But I think on other projects, often deadlines take the fun out of it, if they are not estimated well... I mean you do great, high-professional work but in the end you feel bad, useless, slow and incompetent because of the pressure.

oh, it got better!

One year ago I got fed up with my daily chores at work and decided to build a robot that does them, and does them better and with higher accuracy than I could ever do (or either of my teammates). So I did it. And since it was my personal initiative, I wasn't given any spare time to work on it. So that leaves gaps between my BAU tasks and personal time after working hours.

Regardless, I spent countless hours building the thing. It's not very large, ~50k LoC, but for a single person with very little time, it's quite a project to make.

The result is a pure-Java slack-bot and a REST API that's utilized by the bot. The bot knows how to parse natural language, how to reply responses in human-friendly format and how to shout out errors in human-friendly manner. Also supports conversation contexts (e.g. asks for additional details if needed before starting some task), and some other bells and whistles. It's a pretty cool automaton with a human-friendly human-like UI.

A year goes by. Management decides that another team should take this project over. Well okay, they are the client, the code is technically theirs.

The team asks me to do the knowledge transfer. Sounds reasonable. Okay.. I'll do it. It's my baby, you are taking it over - sure, I'll teach you how to have fun with it.

Then they announce they will want to port this codebase to use an excessive, completely rudimentary framework (in this project) and hog of resources - Spring. I was startled... They have a perfectly running lightweight pure-java solution, suitable for lambdas (starts up in 0.3sec), having complete control over all the parts of the machinery. And they want to turn it into a clunky, slow monster, riddled with Reflection, limited by the framework, allowing (and often encouraging) bad coding practices.

When I asked "what problem does this codebase have that Spring is going to solve" they replied me with "none, it's just that we're more used to maintaining Spring projects"

sure... why not... My baby is too pretty and too powerful for you - make it disgusting first thing in the morning! You own it anyway..

Then I am asked to consult them on how is it best to make the port. How to destroy my perfectly isolated handlers and merge them into monstrous @Controller classes with shared contexts and stuff. So you not only want to kill my baby - you want me to advise you on how to do it best.

sure... why not...

I did what I was asked until they ran into classloader conflicts (Spring context has its own classloaders). A few months later the port is not yet complete - the Spring version does not boot up. And they accidentally mention that a demo is coming. They'll be demoing that degenerate abomination to the VP.
The port was far from ready, so they were going to use my original version. And once again they asked me "what do you think we should show in the demo?"

You took my baby. You want to mutilate it. You want me to advise on how to do that best. And now you want me to advise on "which angle would it be best to look at it".

I wasn't invited to the demo, but my colleagues were. After the demo they told me mgmt asked those devs "why are you porting it to Spring?" and they answered with "because Spring will open us lots of possibilities for maintenance and extension of this project"

That hurts.
I can take a lot. But man, that hurts.

I wonder what else have they planned for me...

First time rant here, and I'm just gonna let fucking loose because this seems to be a good place for it.

My uni can't teach programming for shit. It's the reason people sign up for the course. They want to know how to program. I'm self-taught and unhappy in college as it is.

I joined CS because I thought they'd assimilate work in the real world, which is experience I need. I realized early on that programming is like art, and I love the rush I get of something finally working right.

That said, they sucked the fun out of it. It's too structured. Everyone trying to get the same goddamn result. In the real world, we'd be working on a larger project that involved planning, design, communication, teamwork, and the ability to complete each of our own pieces of the puzzle and subsequently put them together in a project that works for the end user.

I'm paying to be a fucking sheep, people. Why do employers give a shit about a degree instead of talent? Welp, fuck society for this. You can tell me I can drop it and still get a good job, it'll just be harder. That's the fucking problem. I can't get a job if these incompetent fucking bastards will throw out my resumé the moment they see "self-taught."

If we could hire based on GitHub contributions, I think many of us here would be relatively better off. Programmers program, not socialize. We do socialize, but in our own little groups. We team up as needed. The moment the jackass in HR realizes that, the better off we'll be.

Sorry, just the way I'm seeing shit right now. I'm going through some OCD-induced depression and this might be a result of that, but I'm passed the point of giving a fuck.

When your team's hard work receive such a mail from the client and still your Project Manager treats you like shit :|

A little back story

Me (hybrid app guy), backend (php api) guy and ui guy (html-css) worked fuckin day and night, to chase the fuckin less than 10 days deadline for this App

We hard to create the App for all 4 platforms including win mobile and blackberry (god bless UI guy and me :|) ~ 2013

Those were the coolest days of our lives , we had a super blast - working (slogging) + drinking + just having fun cursing + not giving fuck to anything and anyone + more drinking..

Cool thing is, our client was in an impression that full backend and front end TEAM is working on this App 😀

This mail still makes us laugh
"professional team" 😁😂

Unfortunately I got paid only half of the salary for next month and left the company shortly
(because official company timing was from 10:00 AM or else half day paycut and I am a night guy, I used to come at around 12:00 noon)

Well, I was Always into Computers and Games and stuff and at some point, I started wondering: "why does Computer Go brrr when I Hit this Button?".

It was WinAPI C++ and I was amazed by the tons of work the programmers must have put into all this.

13 year old me was Like: "I can make a Game, cant be too hard."

It was hard.
Turns out I grabbed a Unity Version and tried Things, followed a tutorial and Made a funny jet Fighter Game (which I sadly lost).

Then an article got me into checking out Linux based systems and pentesting.
*Promptly Burns persistent Kali Live to USB Stick"
"Wow zhis koohl".
Had Lots of fun with Metasploit.

Years pass and I wrap my head around Javascript, Node, HTML and CSS, I tried making a Website, worked Out to some extent.

More years pass, we annoy our teacher so long until he opens up an arduino course at school.
He does.

We built weather stations with an ESP32 and C++ via Arduino Software, literally build 3 quadrocopter drones with remote Control and RGB lighting.
Then, Cherry on the top of everything, we win the drone flying Contest everyone gets some nice stuff.

A couple weeks later my class teacher requests me and two of my friends to come along on one of their annual teacher meetings where there are a bunch of teachers from other schools and where they discuss new technology and stuff.

We are allowed to present 3D printing, some of our past programming and some of the tech we've built.

Teachers were amazed, I had huge amounts of fun answering their questions and explaining stuff to them.

Finally done with Realschulabschluss (Middle-grade-graduation) and High school Starts.
It's great, we finally have actual CS lessons, we lesen Java now.
It's fuckton of fun and I ace all of it.
Probably the best grades I ever had in any class.

Then, in my free time, I started writing some simple programs, firstvI extended our crappy Greenfoot Marsrover Project and gave it procedural Landscape Generation (sort of), added a Power system, reactors, Iron and uranium or, refineries, all kinds of cool stuff.

After teaching myself more Java, I start making some actual projects such as "Ranchu's bag of useful and not so useful stuff", namely my OnyxLib library on my GitHub.

More time passes, more Projects are finished, I get addicted to coding, literally.
My days were literally Eat, Code, sleep, repeat.

After breaking that unhealthy cycle I fixed it with Long Breaks and Others activities in between.

In conclusion I Always wanted to know what goes on beneath the beautiful front end of the computer, found out, and it was the most amazing thing ever.
I always had constant fun while coding (except for when you don't have fun) and really enjoyed it at most times.
I Just really love it.

About a year back now I noticed that I was really quite good at what I was doing and I wanted to continue learning and using my programming.
That's when I knew that shit was made for me.

...fuck that's a long read.

I hate some parts of this company.

They literally have a "Designer" which made a mockup for our new UI and honestly when I first saw it I almost threw up.

Having made a lot of designs myself for personal projects and for fun I LITERALLY SAW he barely put any effort into it he just threw some stuff together took a shit on it and called it a UI.

For that interview we were actually expecting wireframes and not mockups since we were not sure what workflow we wanted for the UI.
Of course this would have come with feedback from us and then would have been reiterated and this was clear from our last talk with him.

Maybe he didn't know what wireframes were ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If this wasn't enough, he was also consistently misspelling words all over the place, not aligning parts of the UI, misplacing common UI elements and stupid stuff like having a GIGANTIC + button for adding a object to a list for a NO TOUCH SCREEN UI.

(The plus button was all the way to the bottom left of the screen as far away from the list so users get a good hand workout).

But everyone just loved it because "We have known him for a long time and he has a big portfolio so he must know what he's doing".

I couldn't bring in anything, you truly notice the difference between "I don't agree with your opinion but you are heard" and "Shutup my buddy the designer is amazing".

I was not being an asshole I was giving critique on specific parts of the UI and not just saying "it's shit" hoping we could improve on it. Still having naive hope for the future of this project.

He even looked kinda mad and irritated by my opinion and just looked at the people previously mentioned.

I truly hate people who just keep using the exact same worthless piece of garbage people because they have known them for a long time.

Personally I wanted to grab him off his chair and throw him out through the window, 2 floors down, straight into the garbage bin, making damn sure he doesn't accidentally fall into the recycle bin.

Never ever would I enjoy or like this application's UI if I had to work with it as a user.

This is a story of me trying out maintaining a game server and eventually making a mistake, although I do not regret experiencing it.

A month ago I set up a small modded minecraft server because I wanted to experience a fun modpack together with some people from reddit. Besides this, I also wanted to see if I was capable of setting up a server with systemd and screen running in the background. This went great and I learned a lot.

The very next day I was playing with $annoyingKid on the server and everything was well. However the second day, $annoyingKid started pushing the idea to start up a normal minecraft server to build a playerbase.

I asked $annoyingKid 'What about financing, staff management and marketing?'

$annoyingKid: "I don't know much about that, but you can do that while I build a spawn!"

He also didn't want to reveal his age, which alerted me that he's young and inexperienced. He also considered Discord 'scary' because there were haxors and they would get his location and kidnap him, or something. So if he was supposed to become owner (which he desired), he had no way of communicating with a community outside of the game.

He also considered himself owner, while I was the one who paid for the server. 'Owners should be people who own the server', no matter how many times I told him that.

$annoyingKid also asked if he could install plugins on his own, I asked him if he knew anything about ssh, wget or bash because I used ssh to set up the server (I know rcon exists, but didn't want to deal with that at the time), he had no idea what any of those terms meant and he couldn't give proper arguments as to why he should get console access.

In the end, he did jack shit, he had no chance of becoming co-owner or even head-admin because he had no sense of responsibility or hard work. I kept him around as an admin because he was the one who came up with the idea. I banned him on day one after he started abusing his power when someone tipped him of. Even after me ordering him to ignore an annoying player he kept going, of course I could have prevented all this by kicking him earlier since all the red flags around him had already formed a beacon of light. He tried coming back, complaining that he should at least have his moderator rank back, but he never got in again.

A week later I got bored, I had had enough fun with ssh and the server processes to know that I didn't want to continue the small project, so I shut it down and went on to do stuff on GitHub.

Lesson learned: Don't let annoying kids with no sense of responsibility talk you into doing things you aren't sure you want to be doing. And only give people power after they've proved to you that they are capable of handling it.

When my boss acknowledged my effort in creating an in house scripting language. Makes me feel really really proud! 😁

I'm out of my mind bored. I'm an unemployed person with a great job. You'd think this would be awesome. It's torture.

I work for a consulting company. I get paid whether or not they have work for me. They haven't for several months. I'm not hearing anything. I don't know when it will change.

I'm a skilled developer in a few very popular languages - nothing remotely in the ballpark of old or obsolete. I hear that's in demand. I spend most of my time answering questions on Stack Overflow. I really like to help people, but it boggles my mind that the people struggling with the stuff I help them with all have actual work to do and I don't.

I like to learn about new stuff, but I'm just not interested in learning another framework or anything else to add to the giant pile of stuff I'm already not using. It's not fun anymore.

I don't want to do another side project, either. I have a job as a software developer. That should, at some point, involve developing some software.

This is sucking the life out of me. It's harder and harder to get out of bed and come to work. I've held off looking for another job because I'm hoping this will change. The people here are great. I could go somewhere else and it could suck for completely different reasons.

Ironically, this is close to the reason why I left my last job. Ten years ago I went through a spell where I just gave up and stopped coming to work for over a month. No one noticed. Other people were stressed about getting laid off. Some of them were. Not me.

Am I part of some weird experiment to see how insane someone can go in this totally screwed-up circumstance? Are people following me around with cameras?

I'd love to find something else, but by all outward appearances I had already found an awesome place to work. There's only one thing missing - the work.

Thanks for listening. I'm just going to put my head on my desk for a while and despair. What is wrong with this industry? We're a mess on so many levels.

I was hoping to work on my project this weekend. Turns out, the kindergarten gave all the parents a task - to make a Christmas-y house with their child.

Damn it!!

Well, I didn't work on my project, no doubt about that. But I found some other place to overengineer the shit out of it. And, frankly, I LOVED it.

2 days wasted. Not even sorry.

EDIT: all the materials are from the trash bin. That makes it even more fun!
EDIT2: Paint job is my wife's :) I'm too sloppy for it.

I joined (still under probation period) in a startup founded by an 18 year old.

I work after my full time job for them and thought itd be fun but the kid made a slack channel and asks for progress updates everyday and feels a bit in a haste to get the product up and running. He seems to think I will be working every weekday from the second i come back home till i sleep. I have a party today that im going to and im sure he will ask for progress updates and when I tell him im out and wont work today he’ll probably say something like “the faster we do the project the better”.

Im not sure if i should leave now while its easy or i should stay for the money ($900 a month). Like i really dont feel like tolerating a demanding kid who cant wait for his app plus id much rather be working on other things just for fun like making rust crates. but at the same time the extra money is nice.

Thoughts?

I'm making a renderer but I can't work on it right now so I'm reading about different algorithms and stuff and I'm so hyped to carry on with it tomorrow - such a fun project!

It began when I was tasked with creating a better and more engaging experience for our new Facebook page. This was in Facebook's early days, so there were not really any "best practices". We were making it up as we went along. I decided one way would be to game-ify things, since gaming, at the time, was a Big Deal on Facebook and people were starting to use it to build customer funnels.

Grasping for low-hanging fruit, I decided a Tetris variant around our topic would be fun. I had to hire a dev because at the time I was a static HTML web developer just getting into social media management. I knew nothing about game development or how to use Facebook's API for such things.

Long story short, we got about $10,000 (FB app devs came at a premium then) into the project when I came across a very recent article about the history of Tetris games. It said that even though Tetris had once been considered for all intents to be public domain due to it being created by a Russian coder during the Cold War, it had just been acquired by an IP protection entity that was charging royalties for any variant of Tetris created from a specific date onward and paying the original developer. So, even though I thought I had been thorough in my initial permissions checking, it turned out we were gonna be in deep doo-doo with licensing fees and restrictions if we released this game to the public.

I had to call my boss and admit my error. She was FURIOUS and really gave me an ass-chewing over it. I then had to call the marketing person whose budget I'd been slaving away at wasting. She was a bit more forgiving (her budget was in the millions). Then I had to call the corporate legal department and explain what was going on. They told me to immediately pay any outstanding hours, then fire the dev but not before getting him to send me all code and assets, deleting his copy, and then, upon my receipt of those assets, deleting MY copy so that nothing of it ever existed. And I was supposed to say _nothing_ to the dev about why he was being let go, so that there would be no "trail" leading back to this fiasco. (The dev hounded me for weeks asking what he'd done wrong. It killed me that I was bound and gagged by corporate legal and couldn't tell him.)

I was in so much trouble. I was literally in tears over it. I'd never wasted that much money in my life. That incident pretty much sealed my fate as far as any trust my bosses ever put in me again (not much at all). I was a bit of a pariah in a lot of ways for the next 5 years whereas I had come onto the team as a young social media rockstar at first.

After that, and a couple of other bad scenarios that were less my fault and more due to a completely dysfunctional management and reporting structure, they eventually "transferred" me to another team. Which was really just a way of getting rid of me by sending me to a department that was already starting to outsource overseas and lay people off. It was less messy that way. I was in the first set of layoffs.

Since then, I've had a BIG fear of EVER joining a large corporation EVER again. I prefer to work for small businesses now, even if I get paid less. Much less stressful from an office politics and impact of mistakes standpoint.

I need to invent time travel so I can go back to Friday morning and slap my past self for thinking that Linux From Scratch might be a fun weekend project. I should've gone to bed four hours ago and instead I've been shouting at LLVM.

It really makes me appreciate the hard work that Linux distro maintainers put in to keep all the pieces up-to-date and compatible with each other. I already want to put my fist through my monitor and I'm only trying to maintain a single virtual machine.

Ok here's the story,
There is this girl older than me by 5-7years and I worked with her for 2 years in the past...
She's fun to be around, and lights the mood in the workplace...
However one day I found her CV in my machine so I went through it. (It's no crime and it was there in my machine idk y)
And as I went through the list of projects, I was surprised and taken back to see she listed one of my solo project which I managed and developed from scratch as if she contributed to it. 🤯
The management specifically handed me the whole project and I singlehandedly carried it out and finished it and that was one of the projects I was super proud of and elaborated in my interviews.😎
But since she was sitting beside me and she knew basic requirement and the solutions I developed she had the knowledge on the project.
I was bewildered to see she has mentioned that project in her CV which she had zero contribution. I didn't feel like confronting her thinking when someone asks full details on the projects she would have to lie in the interviews cz she wouldn't know much details on it. And hey not everyone has my ethics and lets see how far she goes with hers.(may be this was stupid but I just thought hey we go our own ways lets see how far you go with lies and I forgot about it completly)

But now she's trying to apply to my current workplace where I dreamed of joining and finally succeeded and happy, here they value trustworthyness and quality work ethics above anything else... and without even telling me she has added me as a reference person to get more points to get an internal recommendation.
I certainly don't want to put a good word on her work ethics. Her team spirit and everything is fine but I just CANNOT with correct conscience ignore her bad ethics and recommend her.
What should I do? I don't want to loose her as a friend but I will not and do not want to recommend her to any place knowing she cannot be trusted with work related stuff. I know if I just tell the truth to the company when they ask she will definitely will not be chosen and I might feel guilty knowing I stopped it from happening.... but I don't want to recommend her truly knowing her bad qualities which in my openion cannot be overlooked also.
Should I just overlook it and help, or should I just tell the truth to the company... errgggh

Alright lads here is the thing, have not been posting anything other than replies to things cuz I have been busy being miserable at school and dealing with work stuff.

Our manager left us back in February. Because she was leaving I decided that I wanted to try a different path and went on to become a programmer analyst for my institution, if anything I knew that it was going to be pretty boring work, but it came with nice monetary compensation and a foot in the door for other data science related jobs in the future. Thing is, the department head asked me to stay in the web technologies department because we had a lack of people there and hiring is hard as shit, we do not do remote jobs since our work usually requires a level of discretion and security. Thus I have been working in the web tech department since she left albeit with a different title since I aced the interview for the analyst position and the team there were more than happy to have me. I have done very few things for them, some reports here and there and mostly working directly with the DBA in some projects. One migration project would have costed my institution a total of 58k and we managed to save the cost by building the migration software ourselves.....honestly it was a fucking cake walk, if you had any doubts about the shaddyness of enterprise level applications regarding selling overpriced shit with different levels of complexity, keep them, enterprise is shaddy af indeed. But I digress.

I wrote the specification for the manager position along the previous manager, we had decided that the next candidate needed to be strong with development knowledge as well as other things as to properly understand and manage a software team, we made the academic requirement(fuck you, yes we did ask for academic requirements) to be either in the Computer Science/software engineering area or at least on the Business Administration side. We were willing to consider BA holders in exchange for having knowledge of the development process of different products and a complete understanding of what developers go through. NOT ONE SINGLE motherfucker was able to satisfy this, some of them were idiots that I knew from before that had ABSOLUTELY no business even considering applying to the position, the courage it took for some of these assholes to apply would have hurt their mothers, their God if they had one, and their country, they were just that fucking bad in their jobs as well as being overall shit people.

Then we had 1 candidate actually fall through the cracks enough to get an interview. My dude here was lying out of his ass through the interview process. According to him he had "lots of Laravel experience and experience managing Laravel projects" and mentioned repeatedly how it would be a technology that we should consider for our products. I was to interview him alongside the vice president of our institution due to the head of my department and the rest of the managers for I.T being on vacation leave all at the same bloody time.

Backstory before the interview:
Whilst I was going over the interview questions with the vice president literally offered me the job instead. I replied with honesty, reflecting how I did not originally wanted him but feeling that our institution was ready to settle on any candidate due to the lack of potentials. He was happy to do it since apparently both him and the HOD were expecting me to step up sooner or later. I was floored.

Regardless, out of kindness he wanted to go through the interview.
So, going back to the interview. As soon as the person in question referenced the framework I started to ask him about it, just simple questions, the first was "what are your thoughts on the Eloquent ORM? I am not too fond of it and want to know what you as a full time laravel dev think of it"
his reply: "I am sorry I am not too familiar with it, I don't know what that is" <--- I appreciated his honesty in this but thought it funny that someone would say that he was a Laravel developer whilst not knowing what an ORM was since you can't really get away from using it on the initial stages of learning about Laravel, maybe if one wanted to go through the hurdle of switching to something like doctrine...but even then, it was....odd.

So I met with the hod when he came back, he was stoked at the prospect of having me become the manager and I happily accepted the position. It will be hell, but I don't even need to hit the ground running since I have been the face of the department since ages. My team were ecstatic about it since we are all close friends and they have been following my directions without complaints(but the ocational eat a dick puto) for some time, we work well together and we are happy to finally have someone to stop the constant barrage that comes from people taking advantage of a missing manager.

Its gonna get good, its gonna get fun, and i am getting to see how shit goes.

Have an idea for a fun little side project coding a game. Install Unity and read up some samples.
Remember I'm awful at any kind of creative design work.
Get sad and go back to Overwatch.

I'm feeling like writing this down...

So today I got told off by my boss. Why? Because my job bores me.

My current title, "webmaster", is quite similar to "plumber" where I work. I fix holes on our websites, and I tell "qualified" people (external providers) how a project should be made. Nothing exciting, nothing creative, boring.

So I got told off today for being "laid-back" in a newsletter project (GDPR, looking at you) and not being thorough in my procedures of testing and configuration. Fair enough, I didn't care and I admitted it. It's a boring drag-and-drop done in literally 5 minutes, there's no added brain-value here. Plus I got told off by my IT Manager because our Exchange server would not let me receive test emails. Still doesn't work after a day. Yay.

Then she said "we're doing exciting things here, it's not always the case anywhere else you'd work". And I'm like: "really? I love writing code, seeing things coming alive, investigating why things don't run smoothly, writing efficient code (both in performance and in readability)". I hear many friend devs telling me they're doing that and what they do during their "dev-day"... All I'm doing here is "maintenance" (a.k.a boring) stuff that apparently is "exciting". Adding a <script> to handle google tag manager is hell fun, going through compiled CSS and change color values is also thrilling, finding out if a PDF handler application can handle PDF files, re-plugging a computer monitor to make it work...

I think she meant that I'm not at my place here.

Didn't want to tell her that I have no motivation in doing things I don't enjoy making, i.e, my job.

Good thing I have an interview in two weeks

I've been a programmer for almost 19 years but I actually think the best code I've ever written is something that while it provides value to other people I'm the only one who actually uses it. In the company where I work we have major events that have to be supported by a number of different teams across about 5 time zones and each engineer has a limited set of roles that they can perform during the event. Anyway it was painful just watching people trying to create a schedule so I wrote something with Linear Programming to automatically generate the schedule. It ensures that people don't work for longer than 4 hours in a row, don't work from more than 8 hours from the first hour to the last hour on call, get 12 hours rest between engagements and the work load is evenly distributed across the team. Creating conditions in Linear Programming is weird, imagine trying to turn a series of linear equations into boolean logic, it can be done and once you can wrap your head around it it's really fun. It was my first time writing anything in it and I don't see it coming up a lot in my career. My favourite part of this project is that the end result was that engineers were less exhausted. I really hope that doesn't remain the best code I ever wrote, I don't think it will but it will require a conscious intention.

It's fucking never worth it, to be decent to colleagues. I got prove of that just this evening. Sorry, this rant will be a bit longer.

A colleague of mine inherited some legacy project that I worked on in the past. He clearly hates working on it. And tbh. I can't blame him for it. It's not very fun. He also makes virtually no effort to become more proficient in it.

This usually leads to him calling for my aid, whenever any problem arises, that would require any kind of effort to solve. I would normally cave in and help him. Mostly due to the fact, that without any intervention from me, it would end on my desk sooner or later.

That changed in the last few months, as I simply couldn't make free time to help him. anymore. I was working overtime and the associated project barely got done on time. During that time I would, as politely as possible, deny him. He knows fully how stressful the project was getting.

Today he asked for help again. I denied again, as a task was due very soon. He didn't reply to my message afterwards. After a few hours suddenly I got a bunch of his jira issues assigned to me.

The motherfucker simply shoved _all_ of his support issues to me. Not only that, he also assigned the issue he was asking for help for earlier as well. All without consulting me or anything. Then he pissed of into his vacation.

Some of his support issues have been created last year! And they are still not solved. He simply isn't replying to questions in those issues or just assigns them to others colleagues without any instructions.

Fuck him. Other colleagues don't even respond to him anymore. He fully fucking knows that I have a tight deathline on my current task. And still he chose to dump all his work on me, so that I have to waste time to reassign it and report it to our superior.

Fuck him for creating more stress in this already stressful situation. Enjoy your vacation you fucking leech. I will have quite a "nice suprise" waiting for you, when you return.

I worked on a game jam last year, and for the first time I managed to finish a full software project that wasn't for a job or university. It was really fun to work on, and seeing my vision come to life, even if compromises had to be made, as well as applying all the programming and project management knowledge I'd picked up until then was an experience unlike anything I'd had before.

The community aspect was great too, everybody shared and discussed each other's games and were super friendly and encouraging.

So you have an organization that flirts with scrum and wants to be agile. You have non-crossfunctional teams who don't know what agile is. You have product owner who doesn't want to do backlog, but instead acts like project manager and asks for statuses and assigns tasks to peple. He wants the teams to find out what needs to be done and fill the backlog themselves - and then raport to him. You have business owers who noone knows who they are. You have project managers, who don't fit the whole scrum hierarchy. These project managers insist calling scrum masters "team leaders". Also these project managers think scrum is silly and don't want anything to do with it. And then you have higher program management that think this whole scum thing is better than sliced bread and everything is going just dandy!

Oh yeah, also highest organization management thinks that we are on the right track. We just need be more agile but less agile and work more efficiently whitout really saying, what the hell are we supposed to do.

Basically every day is like going to the zoo. Without the fun part.

So lets start here, as i have been preparing myself for a while for that rant. I have been putting it off for a while, but today I had enough.
Fuck react-native and fuck facebook react-native team. Bunch of lazy incompetent twats.
The all amazing framework that suppose to be speed up your development process, since you don't have to compile your code after each change. SO FUCKING WHAT if the god damned framework is so fucking buggy and so fucking shit that you constantly have to fix build, dependancies etc issues. Every day since I work on this project that is using react-native I have to deal with some of the react fucked up behaviour. You got an issue ? don't worry google it just to find out that 100 other people had the same issue. Scroll through down the bottom of the page just to find out that facebook devs have closed the issue as resolved (without fucking fixing it) because there wasnt recent replies to the post. Are you fucking kidding me? It's ok thou, create a new issue just to get an automatic reply from the bot that locks the thread and keeps it locked till you update your React-native version to the newest one. You do that and guess fucking what? Their newest version fucks up remote debugging on iOS(fucking android been broke for over a year) so say good bye to debugging your js code. Documentation is fucking trash. You found a nice function like autoCaptialise on your text input? Great! Ah wait, its not fucking working, what is wrong? You google this just to fucking found out it, function never worked on android, so why the fuck you still have it exposed and still have it in your docs? You want to add package? So fucking ez, just type npm install <name of the package>. Ha! fuck you, you still have to go and add them fucking manually in gradle in android and in pod in xcode, because obviously react-native is a one big fucking bullshit. Oh and a scroll view is a fucking glorious highlight of that framework, try add some styling to it, you gonna have loads of fun. Fuck react-native. And fuck the fucking idiot who convinced my boss that framework is so fucking great and now I have to work on this shit. Sincerely Xamarin Developer.

When you, being severely understaffed, ask your boss and the president of the company to hire another embedded dev and a technical QA to work with you at the minimum, with hard proof of the need, because you work alone on a project that was initially poorly designed even though it is the core business of the company and that it bottlenecks literally almost every other sphere of the company...

and instead, he propose you to find by yourself 4 offshore unpaid interns to help you develop an EMBEDDED SOFTWARE that requires specific EXPENSIVE HARDWARE to run and test...

because paying new employees or even an intern is too expensive even though we had record sales the last few months and that the government pays 50% of salaries until the pandemic is gone.

Fuck this shit I'm out! I'm tired of not being paid enough to fix other people's mistakes. Have fun with your failing business. Btw, this is all your fault.

Next week I'm starting a new job and I kinda wanted to give you guys an insight into my dev career over the last four years. Hopefully it can give some people some insight into how a career can grow unexpectedly.

While I was finishing up my studies (AI) I decided to talk to one of these recruiters and see what kind of jobs I could get as soon as I would be done. The recruiter immediately found this job with a Java consultancy company that also had a training aspect on the side (four hours of training a week).

In this job I learned a lot about many things. I learned about Spring framework, clean code, cloud deployment, build pipelines, Microservices, message brokers and lots more.

As this was a consultancy company, I was placed at different companies. During my time here I worked on two different projects.
The first was a Microservices project about road traffic data. The company was a mess, and I learned a lot about company politics. I think I never saw anything I built really released in my 16 months there.

I also had to drive 200km every day for this job, which just killed me. And after far too long I was finally moved to the second company, which was much closer.

The second company was a fintech startup funded by a bank. Everything was so much better than the traffic company. There was a very structured release schedule, with a pretty okay scrum implementation. Every team had their own development environment on aws which worked amazingly. I had a lot of fun at this job, with many cool colleagues. And all the smart people around me taught me even more about everything related to working in software engineering.

I quit my job at the consultancy company, and with that at the fintech place, because I got an opportunity I couldn't refuse. My brother was working for Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wallstreet, and he said they needed a developer to build a learning platform. So I packed my bags and flew to LA.

The office was just a villa on the beach, next to Jordan's house. The company was quite small and there were actually no real developers. There was a guy who claimed to be the cto of the company, but he actually only knew how to do WordPress and no one had named him cto, which was very interesting.
So I sat down with Jordan and we talked about the platform he wanted to build. I explained how the things he wanted would eventually not be able with WordPress and we needed to really start building software and become a software development company. He agreed and I was set to designing a first iteration of the platform.
Before I knew it I was building the platform part by part, adding features everywhere, setting up analytics, setting up payment flows, monitoring, connecting to Salesforce, setting up build pipelines and setting up the whole aws environment. I had to do everything from frontend to the backest of backends. Luckily I could grow my team a tiny bit after a while, until we were with four. But the other three were still very junior, so I also got the task of training them next to developing.
Still I learned a lot and there's so much more to tell about my time at this company, but let's move forward a bit.

Eventually I had to go back to the Netherlands because of reasons. I still worked a bit for them from over here, but the fun of it was gone without my colleagues around me, so I quit last September.

I noticed I was all burned out, had worked far too much, so I decided to take a few months off and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I even wondered whether I wanted to stay in programming.

Fast forward to last few weeks. I figured out I actually did want to work in software still, but now I would focus on getting the right working circumstances. No more driving 3 hours every day, no more working 12 hours every day. Just work close to home and find a company with the right values.
So I started sending out resumes and I gave one recruiter the chance to arrange some interviews too. I spoke to 7 companies in the span of one week. And they were all very interested. Eventually I narrowed it down to 2 companies and asked them for offers. And the company that actually had my preference offered me significantly more than I asked for, which settled the deal.

So tomorrow I'm officially signing with them, and starting next week I'll be developing in Kotlin, diving into functional programming and running our code in serverless environments. I'm very excited!

We were a small startup with only 5-6 developers. I had to design the UI and develop most of the Android frontend, It was quite an easy and fun job for me because I don't get to see people rant about the design that needed to be implemented so, usually I design something that can be easily implemented.
We got 2 projects with a tight deadline and I took care of both project's design part and after completing the design I took the entire frontend of one project and rest of em started working with the other one. Usually we were a strong team and was able to deliver things real quick because we were expert in our intrested fields, I had a fast start in my project where the other project lagged a lot because of the desifn which was hard to implement by them, and the frontend was bo where near to get completed by the deadline and I couldn't help them out because it was all messed up shit handling both projects together.

Finally we were in a situation where none of our project are ready and the deadline was about to hit within a week, so we halted the other project and asked them to join me to complete the project am Working on, I had built most of the Android part and these fellows had a hard time figuring out stuff I made up (yeah, documentation was shit while you go agile), and finally things messed up and I had to work 2 continuous day and night without any sleep just to get the app ready 10 minutes before the official proto presentation.

The best part is I couldn't even get up from my chair and had a headache, fainted instantly when I took a few steps, but the product launch went good.

We fucked uo the code and both the projects just because we weren't available for each other considering the size of the team. Anyway we completed the project but It was a huge failure for us being first time to manage a startup.

Learned a lot of lessons,
Always make a team with people who are good at each of the aspect of development and never divide it to get shit done faster.

Work is fun when every time I finish editing a project I have to wait 30 mins for it (solution) to compile :D

Regain work life balance.
The last few years especially with COVID I've started to do way to much for the company's I've worked for. Working while I was coughing my lungs out when I had COVID. Working during my holiday because it was finally a fun feature to develop. Working in lunch breaks because people would call me all the time (remote there are no boundaries)

I left that company on a good note, started actually healthy as the new company actually understands flex working. However as I gained responsibly more meetings started to appear also causing rushed lunches no more walks of sport activities. Than I was lead in a project and because of some personal circumstances (death in the family) that was running long. Again started to work overtime trying to catch up.

I need to stop doing this. Caring is fine but I just give to much when I feel responsible. Good thing is that my current company actually wants to help me with this.

Hi ppl of devRant! I’m not really a dev but I love reading your rants :) I decided to post my first rant because I think I could use some advice from you.

Background: I’m a student just finished my first year at uni. Earlier I applied for a developer intern just for fun and somehow magically got in. However, I'm a statistics major (not even CS!) and only know basic java stuff. I guess they hired me because I speak ok english and a little french? I live in a non-English speaking country but the company has a lot of foreign customers.

The problem is, the longer I stay, the more I feel that they only hired me out of charity *sobs* There isn’t much for me to do, and most of the time I couldn’t understand what my co-workers are doing so I can’t really help them either. Plus, they don’t seem to need my language skill as much, so I kinda feel useless here.

It’s my 5th (maybe already 6th?) week here and the only thing I did was fixing an itty bitty bug that literally needed only one additional line of code. Yes it took me a while to set up the environment, learn js from scratch since they use js for this project, and locate the issue but I’m pretty sure it’d probably take someone who’s familiar with the project, like, 3 mins? And now that I’ve fixed it and the merge request was passed, I’m out of work to do again. I talked to the lead and he pretty much just said “read more of the code”. Guess I can do that. I’ve spent like 4 days going through the code but is this really promising?

I want to spend time on learning actual stuff rather than yet another resume ornament. So what should I do? Should I ask for more help/more work to do, or keep learning on my own (I’m quite interested in algorithms, maybe I could make use of my time to study that?), or even leave?

Sorry for the long rant. I know ass-kicking devs probably hate useless, underqualified ppl at work in real life but believe me it really hurts to be one and I hate myself enough already so I’d appreciate any thoughts/advice :/

Day 2 of devWholesome...

Have another great day! Have fun and do something productive! It is always a great feeling when you finish something that requires a lot of time and effort. Finish that project that you started but never finished, clean your room, or maybe just catch up on school work! Make sure you are also taking care of yourself with your hygiene and to eat all your meals and drink plenty of water. If you are feeling stressed today, take a break and relax! And again, make the most out of your day!

In my last year of high school (for those familiar with the Indian education system, that's Class 12), for my final project I made an image compressor/decompressor in Turbo C++ that used a discrete Fourier transform (DCT, actually) to work on 8x8 px blocks of images. I based it off some stuff I found about how JPEG compression works. It worked even better than I'd hoped even though it was slow as molasses (I programmed a naive Fourier transform instead of using a FFT variant). I remember jumping with joy all around my room at 3 o'clock in the morning like an excited gas molecule in a box. Fun times.

Biggest one is dealing with idiots who break everything. Can’t space anything properly. Oh you needed that function? I got rid of it because it broke my code, and it was easier. Oh yes, just perfect, get rid of a core fucking function you retard that multiple parts of the code rely on. (Luckily it wasn’t pushed to the main, otherwise everything would’ve broken...)

Another one is finishing a damn project, I have like 20 by now... all in different languages that I want to learn. Time comes to work on it? Oh wait, let’s make this because it’s more fun! Just adding more projects to my graveyard.

It's funny how you start feeling bad for the next dev taking over your project because it turned into a total spaghetti code shit show that will be impossible to maintain in the future with new features coming in.

Honestly... if a projects starts out with a certain scope which then gets extended EVERY FUCKING WEEK with requirements that can't even be met in the initial timeframe it's no wonder the code quality will decrease over time.

This just reminds me daily how important good project management (and I'm not talking about suit wearing pain-in-the-ass-managers) and the inclusion of devs in the planning process really is.

It's so fucking crazy that companies run like that with people up front that have NO FUCKING CLUE what they are doing, nor do they understand the mechanics, tech and effort that go into certain features. They're like "beep, boop, it's done by Friday you fuck!".

The funniest part of this stupid charade is that the closer we get to a new "deadline" (we will not meet the deadline anyways) the more nervous the "managers" get. WHY didn't you properly plan this shit in the first place? WHY didn't you care for the last six months where all this fucking bullshit could still have been prevented?

Meanwhile I'm just so sick and tired of this shitty project and this sucky company that I just don't have any motivation left to keep on working. It's so fucking hard and painful to work on projects that suck ass, are poorly designed. I just got to the point where coding is no fun any more. Thank god I'm out of here soon... fml

It's been two months since I've left my previous job, after 1.5 years. I never had the feeling my boss trusted his dev team, since he was checking up on us regularly, even though we had planned out a sprint and work for us was "clear". I say "clear", because every single feature on this project was pretty much half-baked, since they were just ideas our boss/PO (same person) on the spot and were labeled as "the next big thing" without every properly writing them out as user stories. Every demo came with a bunch of criticism, because features weren't implemented "as he imagined", because what do you know, the user stories weren't properly described anyway. Bringing that up as counter-argument also made him angry every time, so that didn't help much either. The launch of the platform was also postponed every time because of vague reasons, so that didn't make the project any more interesting either.
It took a while before I got sick of this of this pretty hopeless situation and toxic environment. Mind you, it was my first job since I graduated, so I was a bit naive thinking the working environment would improve and aforementioned company issues would be resolved over time. Eventually, I ran out of patience and motivation, so I finally bit the bullet and handed in my resignation letter.
From that moment, I at least had an end in sight, since I was still obliged to do my four-week notice period, which felt like an eternity. The borderline childish and sociopathic behaviour of my boss didn't make it any better (e.g. checking up on me even more, more mistrust, randomly accusing me of ruining the working atmosphere because I shared a meme with a colleague of mine and didn't involve him, going lunching with all of my colleagues but explicitly asking me to stay at work, ...). Being forced to work from home the last 2 weeks as part of the country's lockdown measures at least helped my sanity a bit, since I had the comfort of my home office and not the frequent "looking over your shoulders to check if you're still working".
By the last day of my notice period, I was bitter, exhausted, lost confidence in my skills and had completely lost my joy of being a developer. I had to physically meet with my boss one more time to hand in the company laptop. He thanked me for my service and said that we'd keep in touch. I hope I won't keep that promise (he made a lot of false promises before, too), because I'd rather never encounter him ever again. It felt like a huge relief to finally close the door of this bad experience behind me for good.

Now, 2 months later, I've got a new job and rediscovered my joy for coding, mostly thanks to the complete opposite of a toxic environment here, management which actually has respect and faith in me and a challenging but fun project. My mental state has made a complete turnaround compared to two months ago. I have absolutely no regrets of switching jobs. If only I had made that decision sooner.

I need to get this out there because you guys and gals are honestly the only people I can vent this to.

I’m working on a program for fun that’ll transfer files over sockets. Nothing too special. But this project is just boring me. I’m not getting any motivation even when I’m getting started. Which didn’t happen last project.

I have a general idea how I’m going to do it but I just can’t sit down and do it because I start overthinking about everything. Like how am I going to do this or that. How am I going to handle feature a, feature b, etc. And I’m just getting a headache and I’m not writing code and I’m JUST FUCKING STARING LIKE AN IDIOT. I don’t even know why it’s not inspiring me because I’ve always wanted to program a file transferring application of some kind and I still do.

I keep doing a bunch of small patches when I work on it and they work and improve it but I am hard on myself because it’s not one big feature or I didn’t work on it for hours. I’m always so fucking hard on myself fuck.

I want to do so much other stuff but I just wanna tough it on through and finish but it’s so uninspired because I don’t even feel like what the final product will feel like others. Like any service that involves transferring files I feel like they don’t function like how I’m thinking they do like I’m trying to make this function.

I feel like everything I’m making is just subpar and not good and I’m trying and I’m trying to improve but I feel like I’m not getting anywhere. And I want to learn a lot of stuff I have shit planned but I can’t get to it because I have to go through uninspired bullshit hell.

Idk

How do I help my colleague in fighting harrassment?
This is the story of a helpless employee facing everyday harassment. Im trying to help. Seeking for your thoughts

Backstory fast forwarded: My company acquired another company. So we handle all their projects and clients now, but its a completely new domain. So we needed new people. Hired 4 employees + 1 team lead to start with. But the project process got delayed and they were free for a month. So i took 2 of them in my project and gave them some small tasks to help us over. They loved working with my team and were learning new stuff apart from what they usually did. And we were also happy of their contribution. We became good friends. All of this was in March 2020 before covid-19 was taken seriously.

About my company: I love this company. I have been in this company for more than 4 years now. People are really nice. Parties and fun events. Lot of smart and ambitious people. So company and people are awesome.

Coming back to the story. Lets call the team the 4 and team lead T. The 4 were happy that someone like T was in their team. This T had all the best knowledge about stuff and life was going to be awesome for the 4. Or was it?

Story starts: So I talk to one of these 4 on daily basis. Lets call this friend F. F is a real gentle person. Intelligent and dedicated to work. F is awesome to work with. And always enjoyed working. F is a team player and very very soft person. F is fking workoholic. So few days after project starts, F tells me work was not going well. F is getting real frustrated at work and not able to deal with it or find solution.

What happened:
This person T, who was supposed to help these 4, is real piece of shit. He is impatient, arrogant and MFing dick head. Aaaarggggg.
All the good qualities of a leader like supporting the team, boosting confidence, guiding team when they make mistakes, teaching them, were all missing from this person. T was a machine with no emotion and only clock working jerk. I have no idea how T cleared interview process, because one of the interview round is also about cultural fit into company. I know this because i take interviews for other domains. We have rejected lot of such well qualified but arrogant candidates.

So whats the problem now: this team of 4 are learning new tools and taking over the clients requests from old company. Most of the stuff is new for them. So in tat case people need lot of time to understand and figure out shit. people make mistakes while learning and you know have to deal with it. Person T abuses these 4 when something goes wrong. That's one.

Second, the T definitely knows more than these 4. So if these guys dont understand certain stuff they ask T. But T does not help them learn. T will either say busy or run away by saying thats simple and ull know when time comes. REALLY MF???

Third, T does not talk nice. T is rude and does not listen to team members. For eg, If F says some task cannot be done for some reason T will say, "y cant u do it? U r capable of doing it. Tats y u r in this job". And then point number one and two happens. Never responds to emails and messages. But if someone else does the same will not tolerate that and abuses them. List goes on.

So y not escalate and deal with that T:
This person F and other 3 are still under probation and they think complaint or escalation will back fire. These people do not want to lose job in between all this pandemic shit. They are scared.

So this was happening for a while. And i was giving lot of tips on how to handle certain situations. And how one should communicate these.

But being a gentle, soft and workoholic person, F focussed on work and assumed things will get in place as time goes by.

Today, F could not meet a requirement. So T told some shit which got F all sad. and F called up me late night and started crying explaining what happened. I felt real bad. I asked F to file harrassment case. F refused saying it was F's mistake on not completing requirement. WHO THE FK CARES. PEOPLE CANNOT TALK SHIT. I told ill file harrassment case against T. (We have a policy where others can also file if person is not courageous enough). But F did not allow me.

Then after calming down, I told F that telling the problems to me wont solve them. You have to talk to T directly and tell him on face not to talk like this. Or tell the manager about whats happening. Or tell the the HR about this. F said tat cant be done. I was like Y THE FK NOT.

Because the other 3 are not ready to talk about this to anyone as they fear they'll lose job. So if F talks and people question other 3 they might bail out. WAT THE HOLY SPIRIT.

so after lot of convincing F is still not going to
Talk to anyone about this.

So i have decided ill write an anonymous email to HR, the manager and other senior people in the organisation about whats happening.

I really dont know how itll go. Ill keep updating you guys. Feel free to share ur thoughts.

So we’ve taken over from a project team that disbanded... read: “cut their contracts because fuck this, I can earn more working for better people”.

Me and one other guy have been tasked with saving this heap of shit.

Obviously the project guys left saying “it’s nearly done, just this one feature”. Because cut contracts are easier to deal with if “everything is almost done”.

We jump on and find that’s not the case at all... this thing, is a beast, a big old stats analysis program... so we’re like “cool, let’s see what’s going o...OH MY GOD”.

The “recalculation” function was core to this POS. The contractors had done it in C# through entity framework... it took 24 hours to run, over a reasonably small data set that was due to double every 2-5 years.

So... here’s the deal, it ran over night.... then failed. And no cunt had noticed. Entity framework “can’t commit because I’m muddled up as fuck, did you really just put the whole db in EF in memory to work with it?” Exception.

Que 6 months of me and my lead doing the job properly.

Anyway, the failure: I ended up in Hospital again with a Crohn’s flare up... about 5 months in.

Fuckall to do with all this nonsense I just wanted to tell a story. it was an interesting/fun project to fix and my lead was a legend... so happy days.

Similar story, different set of contracted devs... they’d been defining requirements with the business users using the term “Risk” which the business users knew as a group of risks.

The domain model had been written RiskGroup<>—

Just my luck that I get the best wk76 story ever on wk77. Either way:

So some of you may know that the current project I am on has some shared code components with one of the other projects in the product line. And we have some differences in our processes. This leads to a lot of fun.

So, I was working on converting one of our shared components into a more modern language. It would save us time, money, and sanity by allowing us to more easily maintain our product. Sounds like a win-win right? That's what I thought. Until I had a meeting with the other team. THEN THE QUESTIONS ROLLED IN. Well who is going to integrate our product with yours? (You?) Are you changing the interface? (Not really.) Are you going to generate a design document? (Absolutely not especially since the interface isn't changing for the most part.) Well you are changing the type of one parameter in one method from an undocumented unmanaged type to a well documented managed type that we control. Shouldn't you generate a document to document that change? (Again absolutely not.)

So first they basically browbeat my lead into putting me in charge of their integration effort. Its fine though, as they gave me an account to charge. However, when I was finally able to get a machine with their build environment on it (at least two months later), they then told me that that account was closing and I had to wait until next quarter. So fuck me right. And because of their process I would break them if I were to check my changes in.

So fast forward to today. They are translating some shared components for the same reason that we are. However, they are changing code that while shared is technically "ours" and that will DEFINITELY break us if they do this work since this is the code that controls our algorithms. And while we have a fault tolerant process, or at least more fault tolerant than the other group's, we are currently doing a huge amount of development in the part they want to change. And when we ask them "who is going to do this work to integrate our product with your changes?" they stare at us slack jawed. Like "um, you right? it doesn't affect us." Like MOTHERFUCKERS!!! YOU LITERALLY JUST FOIST ALL THIS WORK ON US TO INTEGRATE WITH YOU BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T HAVE THE PEOPLE TO SUPPORT IT!!! BUT YOU CAN PAY THIS GUY FOR SIX MONTHS TO DO ALL THIS WORK THAT WILL BREAK US BUT CAN'T SPARE HIM TO INTEGRATE WITH US!?!?!? EVEN IF WE'RE PAYING HIM AND NOT YOU!?!?!

I will let you know how this goes when we have the discussion. I am drinking right now because it it easier and better for my emotional and physical health than bum fights.

So...
I had to do a minor project for this semester. It was to be made in a group of two people and everything ( work ) was shared between the both of them.

I had a friend who was my partner ( faculties decided who will be in each group ). She doesn’t like programming nor does she come to college but I hoped she would do fine and be helpful ( she is a decent person actually ).

She never bothered to come to college, or even ask how the project was going... except one day before presentation 😒😑.
Thankfully, my guide removed her as my partner... she was detained because of extremely low attendance... and I had to work alone... that was much better though 😁.
Minor project was kinda fun by the way... and since I did it alone, I was able to do it at my own pace and without any issue of synchronization between partners ☺️☺️

The best happened today.

These past 2 weeks have been shit. People wronged me big time, got thrown under the bus for shit that the people behind refused to own up to it. Took that shit because I just couldn't be bothered to fucking argue.

I'm the only dev on this project and we're so close to release so I bit my tongue and took it on the chin but it's been eating me alive since then.

The tipping point was yesterday. 5 people failed to communicate shit properly amongst themselves on all channels got me forced to be the last one finishing work yesterday 4 hours after everyone left. I had every right to refuse and leave on time but again, we're so close to release and I don't want to see this project fail.

But see, I got angry. So fucking angry that nothing else has been on my mind since yesterday.

I don't take out my anger at others, that's not who I am (moslty) so today I was at work and secluded myself from everyone else otherwise I would've exploded in someone's face.

I was also supposed to meet up with friends tonight but with all this shit going on I decided not to go because I would not have been fun to be around.

Left work on time today, fell asleep on the train because I am too exhausted.

When I was about to walk into my house I noticed this little super cute puppy following me. I had no idea where or how long he's been behind me as I was walking home but he seemed way too happy when I saw him. His tail wagging like he's excited to see me even though I have never seen him. I petted him, played a bit with him. He seemed to be the happiest dog ever 😁. He managed to put a smile on my face for the first time in the last few days.

He then ran away.. I guess he got bored 😅

I am feeling so much better now all because of this little puppy 🐶. I'm so glad I ran into him because I've been smiling since then.

I wish I had took a picture of him 😥

Doggo, you probably won't read this, but thanks mate you made my month in those few minutes 🤘

If you have a dog, go pet him and appreciate how much happiness they bring in your life. If you have a cat.. Uhh I don't know... Uhh pray it doesn't kill you in your sleep I guess?

Thanks for reading

That moment you're coworkers are going to continue at home after because the project is fun, and you're like.. I'm going to game tonight and feel a bit ashamed because you like to do something else than work

I am able to work 15 hours on my pet project then take a short walk outside and feel like a balanced man, but even just an hour on a commercial project is a massive effort even though the code is clean, the stack is modern, I'm good friends with the client and I also like the concept. The mere fact that I'm doing it for money takes the fun out of it.

"I look for three things in a project: 1) Compelling work; 2) fun client; 3) astronomical fees. However, to have a successful project, I really only need two out of three. For example, I’ll do great work with fun people for nothing and still feel rewarded. Or, I’ll do great work for a mean, stupid client for outrageous money. Or, I’ll do boring work with somebody I like a lot for more money than one can imagine. Anytime I’m faced with only one of the three it’s time to rethink the relationship. Actually, it’s time to move on." - Lowell Williams

So i informed my intent to leave the job in few months in pursuit of learning something new in tech. Boss is trying to convince me to not leave and said i should consider learning it after work hours. In fact, in his opinion, the best way to learn is just going ahead and learning it while doing it in the project ( which usually has impossible deadline and fugly code by colleagues who never thinks of good coding practices when typing their shit ).

Well guess what boss, I don't want to just live a life staring at monitor all day. I don't want to kill my eyes either.

Following his advise and not quitting would mean living a slave life.

I have other plans actually. Like being self employed and traveling the world which would be impossible if i follow the routine life.

Fun fact: he claimed he made an AI car back in 90s!

He also thinks I can't sense BS!😏

I don't know my problem is. I lost my motivation to code, my enthusiasm and excitement to read a code and solve a problem. My love of my life for 6 years whom I thought she's the one, gave up on us. It was a long journey, lots of ups and downs, but really worth the time and sacrifice. Now, she's doing good, very happy on her life judging from her social media. Can't believe she just moved for 2 months. To be honest, i want her to be happy but quite bitter that she just moved on quite fast. And I don't if this is the reason why I lost my motivation and enthusiasm to code. Or maybe I just don't like the project we're working on. Well, I really don't like it since it's a mobile game, I really want to build webapp or mobile app but it's too late to change the project.

I'm not like this, I used to code until morning without noticing the time, excited to solve a problem that stuck on me for quite a while. I really became a lazy person right now. I feel the pressure to finish the project but I don't see myself working on it, I don't feel interested reading a code. I just play computer games instead of working on my project during my free time. I don't know if I'm depressed. I socialized with people, have fun, happy when I'm with them, but when I'm alone, sadness starts to creep in. I feel like there's an empty void in myself. I don't know, i just want the motivation and energy to work on my project. Im tired, lazy, and feeling burnt out. If you read until this very last sentence, thank you and I'm sorry for reading this nonsense.

So ya its almost mid April, deadline is end of April and 20% of APIs are not yet ready and mobile app has barely 50% of pages done.
This is going to be a fun project to work on, I was asked to join the team couple of weeks ago

What is even more funny I still have no clue what this project does, I'm just creating UI based on what the designer (that started a month ago) delivered just a week ago -- Three weeks before final deadline

This week was one of those weeks were it feels like it's never ending
Monday, delayed trains and the legacy project's new update went live

Tuesday, not a lot of work so I did some self study (best day of the week)

Wednesday, again train delay, and some funny little sh*t ripped the valve from my bike... I mean sure if you let the air out, haha little fun but completely removing the valve? That's just f'n low...

Thursday, the legacy project had a weird bug that I can't reproduce but has to be fixed before the end of this week...

Friday... To be continued... I hope it will be a quiet quick and easy day... 😟

Anyone else here hardly code in their free time? I'm a professional developer yes but I tend to leave work at work. Maybe if I found something fun to work on with others... Or a personal project I really wanted to do for me.

Got a Student job during July. When I arrived the first day they gave me the project they need me to work on.

They want me to create an intranet for the department based on a SharePoint infrastructure.
After 3 days of working on it, I'm starting to realize how hard it'll be since I don't have any admin access (would have been too easy). It's a multinational company so I have limited access to everything. No access to Sharepoint designer, neither to Sharepoint Admin Center and on top of everything, I don't even have the right to embed scripts to the pages.

Oh, and did I mention that I'm learning Sharepoint from scratch ?

It's fun to learn and to try to overcome problems and limitations but I'm really starting to stress about the final result ...

This is more of a story than a rant, but it has some rant-ey elements, so whetever...

I work for a pretty big company. Several departments, teams, many different markets...so it's a big orchestration. The programming department (aprox. 5% of all employees) is the core of the whole company, because everybody else uses software we've written...(a bit off topic, the point is there are a lot of people)

So today, I got assigned with a side-project. The project spec arrives, and as I read through it, I start realizing that upper-management whats me to build an app to fire people instead for them. The app is supposed to track salary, connect with Trello (for departments that use it) to track finished tasks, track sick days, work attendence...a lot of stuff, and at the end, if the situation requires, spit out a person that is of least benefit to the company, to be fired...

Now from coding perspective, this will be very interesting and fun to build, but from a moral standpoint, I'm a bit woried...simply because, indirectly, I'm firing those people. Because, the way I tune the the app(specifically the algorithm that weighs the value of an employee to the company) will cause certain people to get fired...

So I'm woried I'm gonna have a small breakdown when the app goes live and I see someone saying goodbye to theie colegues of something similar...heck, the app might even spit out my name some day(I should probably add a tiny if statement somewhere in there :) )
What do you guys think about this, from a moral standpoint? Would you be okay with building something like this?

(Sorry for the long post :/ )

my boss some months ago: so there is this new project, and we're planning to slowly fade in and gradually increase the time you guys work on this project

new pm last week: welcome to the project, you're now 100% allocated to the new project, that's your highest prio now
me: ...what about the other projects? they might have questions xD
pm: don't worry about that, dealing with that is not your job

my boss this week: yeah no, the other releases are most important for our company. the new project needs to be subordinated and has lower prio, at least lower prio than critical and highly prioritized bugs.
me: so.... who decides which items from which projects i shall prioritize higher than the new project and how much time i shall spend on them?
my boss: it is your job to talk to people, give them estimates and tell them how many items you can work on, so they can decide which items they pick

so basically i'm having the feeling that i need to manage myself here. it will be fun to attend the new project daily standups and tell the new pm all the time that i couldn't do anything because i had no time. anyone else with this experience? is this normal? actually i liked our new pm's attitude "dealing with that is not your job". i should have known it was too good to be true ^^'

Heyyy DevRant Fam! It’s definitely been quite awhile since i have posted in this amazing community and I apologise, i’ve been extremely busy with my uni work and just life caught up to me 😅, also as always I really hope everyone is doing very well wherever you may be as always :-).

I’d love to ask you guys a question that has been on my mind for a while now 😊, I’ve been thinking of making my own password manager for a side/fun project. What I’ve been doing is I’ve found a open source project on github and downloaded it , loaded it up and read through some code, from memory the project is called ‘keepass’ and its written in c++!.

I’d love to get some advice from you guys, how do i go about learning and understanding open source code :-)? What is some advice you can give to me? Anyways I’d be very grateful for any piece of advice :D once again as always hope everyone has an amazing Sunday night and long weekend, wherever you may be!.

Thank you for reading my very long post sorry for rambling on 😅.

Kind regards,
Milo ☺️

As a teacher myself, I will always advice young people to go to school. Though I imagine it differs on the quality of education in your country.

I live in the Netherlands and here it's quite good overall. It's no Ivy League and there are plenty of exceptions but overall any technical study here is a good study.

I also teach at a small school (220 software engineering students) so I actually know my students and what generally need to get ahead.

But my main reasons for actually doing a study instead of going the self-taught route:

1. You spend +/- 4 years in presence of peers that are more or less in the same life phase as you are. You will make friends for life.
2. Companies value a diploma. Good for you that you landed a job on your 19th. Just wait until your 25, wanna switch jobs and don't even get to the second round of any application process because your CV does not list a diploma. This might change in the future but not for the next 5-10 years.
3. You will learn foundational stuff about most thing IT-related. Some things you'll never use. Some thing you'll use unknowingly every single day
4. It teaches discipline without major impact on your life if you fail something. OK, you failed a course. So what? Take it next year and take the time to do a side-project or internship during your study delays. It will teach you some life lessons without it costing you a job or your life savings, and you get some extra time to learn as well!
5. Retirement age by the time you retire will be 75. There's plenty of time to work. Why not spend 4 years with peers in a relatively safe and fun environment first?

TL;DR - small schools are actually fun, attend one

Best co-worker is my elder brother, he is electronics & communication engineer. Working on robotics project is too much fun. He handle the haredware i.e electronic circuits design in PCB where as programming work is left for me.

As always with group projects, one or two people barely do anything and end up getting a passing grade because 1-3 r group members do all the heavy lifting.

Why do they always get away with this? From the two persons that profit from other peoples work in my current project, at least one is trying to make up for it now.

You would hope at least some of the useless group members would have washed out by the end of second year because of tests, but no.

Gonna be fun when everyone has to point out a part of the code made by them, not simply going to let them take credit for my work at least.

New day. New legacy project that needs triage.

The project has existed since before 2000 so it all "works" and has no known business logic bugs. It does however have performance issues which sure I can have a look. It can actually be quite fun and rewarding to optimize performance.

This is a titanic dotnet framework leviathan consisting of over 12,000 cs files using razorpages, entity framework, and... nhibernate? I have my gripes with both EF and NH but they are both fine if used correctly, like any other tool. I've never seen them used together however.

As It Turns Out™, NH was implemented first and at a time when NH did not support async operations. It made sense if you look it up and it's meant to delegate commands via a separate layer, but different story.

Then for... reasons... EF came in and gradually took over.

Because of the way this is all set up, everything will faceplant if you try doing anything async, even if it has nothing to do with calling the db. Any attempt in making this work leads you down a slippery slope of having to rewrite the entire thing, which is out of the question in terms of their budget and expectations.

Sometimes it's a detriment when it works in spite of its issues.

The universe has taken a cactus.

It proceeded to gift the cactus with a toxin that greatly enhances the stimulus of pain.

After the universe watched it's miraculous creation it decided to shove it up so far my arse that my gag reflex turned on and I puked a lot of cactus.

Didn't sleep well, weekend hardware migration finish, today an old server got moved.

Some part, most likely the redundant PSU, had a short circuit - decided to take the switches out... Which are the only non redundant hardware...

There was only one critical system in the whole rack, that was one redundant firewall.

Guess what happened..... Naaaa?

*drum roll*

For whatever reason, the second firewall didn't kick in, so large part of internal network unreachable as VPN was on the firewall.

:thumbsup:

That's not cactus level yet.

Spontaneously a large part of the work at home crew decided to call, cause getting an email wasn't enough.

So while all the phones were ringing and we had the joyful fun to carefully take apart a whole rack to check for possible faulty wiring / electric burns / hardware damage and getting firewall up and running again...

Some dev decided to run a deployment (doable as one of the few working at the company at the moment -.-).

I work from home, but we had a conference phone call running the whole time so I could "deescalate" and keep others up-to-date. So me on headphone with conference call, regular phone for calls, while typing mails / sms for de-escalation.

Now we're reaching cactus level, cause being tortured by being annoyed out of hell by all telephone ringing, the beeping of UPS (uninterruptible power supplies), the screaming of admins from the server room and the roaring of air coolers…

Suddenly said dev must have stood in the midst of the chaos… and asked for help cause "the deployment broke, project XY is offline"...

I think it was the first time since years that I screamed at the top of my lungs.

Bad idea (health issues)… but oh boy was it a pleasure to hear my own voice echo through the conference speaker and creating an echoic sound effect.

It was definitely worth coughing out my loungs for the next hour and I think it was the best emotional outburst ever.

I feel a bit sorry for the dev, but only a tiny bit.

After the whole rack thing, the broken deployment fixing and the "my ears are bleeding and I think I will never be able to talk again" action...

We had to roll out several emergency deployments to fix CVEs (eg libexpat).

This day was a marvelous shit show.

I will now cry myself to sleep with some codein.

proxying youtube

today I thought writing a quick project, a youtube proxy server, as in, you browse localhost:<PORT> and youtube comes in the response.

this is not rocket science as proxy servers have around for a long time.

I thought it'd be interesting to code it in userland, as opposed to "systemland".

And 50 lines of code and some minor hurdles later I see youtube "running" in localhost.

Although youtube didn't just work as usual since the videos don't actually come from youtube.com, but from googlevideo.com instead. And my browser, expectably, enforces CORS and forbids any requests to it.

At that point I started to think of ways to somehow proxy googlevideo.com too. But the solutions are not at all trivial.

Then I thought what was the payoff of all this. I tried to proxy serve youtube out of curiosity, and sure thing, you can do it.

But what problem would proxying youtube solve? Maybe I should think in a fuller way what are the problems I have with youtube.

One issue I have is the exposure, discoverability. To explain it, let's say I have been watching a very, very big amount of videos as of today.

Personally I would expect youtube to understand very well by now what my tastes are, what do I want to watch and what I do NOT want to watch.

Notice that I am very black and white, and I do not have much interest in watching certain types of videos.

It could be true that if my expectations of how youtube should work became reality then youtube recommendations would become polarizing or echo chambering.

But that is my decision though, and the problem with youtube is that it's seemingly forcing a single recommendations algorithm onto everyone.

Some people are more open minded and want to watch EVERYTHING, and a lot of people don't.

But users aren't deciding what they should get recommended. Youtube is making that decision for them. And it sure feels like it's trying to maximize ad revenue.

I for one don't give two flying fucks about pranks or diva youtubers. Yet youtube is adamant in presenting some of these to me.

Now, trying to come up with a solution for this is really non trivial. It would definitely require some youtube mining, or some kind of network so as to not get rate limited when mining, and even then you still have to think of how a good recommendation system would work.

I think the implementation of all that would be too much for me (time and skill wise). But I think it's fun to at least try to outline how recommendations could work.

I would very much prefer that when youtube recommended something, at least it has some number of confidence meaning how much would I like that video, so at least I know what to expect.

It should also have some indicators like what is the mood of the video. As in, sometimes I watch youtube in the mood of learning, like programming videos, but most of the time I watch to get entertained.

These ideas are just brainstorms and could be terrible on reproduction, but I'd like to hear what ideas can some of the people here can come up with.

I need help!

This is gonna be a long question/story.

I'm a Syrian based in Malaysia working as a lead web dev in a good company.

I have a friend in trouble and I want to help him.

Here's a summary:

My friend is a project manager at a gaming studio he happens to be an Iranian atheist with around 2 years of experience in the game making industry.

He worked on and delivered a couple AAA games at his current place of employment as a project manager in one of the teams that made those games.

He stood up for his team when the management was overworking team till after midnight sometimes and forcing them to work on weekends without any tangible compensations ( basically they gave them things like free lunches, movie tickets, etc).

The result of his standing up to his team was the management handing him a notice telling him that he'll be fired within 2 months due to "underperforming".

This was a month and a half ago.

He looked around in Malaysia for a job that can get him a working visa, but his niche background couldn't help.

After his termination in few weeks he can extend his stay at Malaysia for approximately 2 - 3 months.

Now the reason why I mentioned that he's an "Iranian atheist" is the fun part of this story (sarcasm), Iranian government considers him as an "infidel" and he's banned from Iran.

His Iranian passport can't get him anywhere where he can make a living.

So basically he has close to no options.

Now to where I come into all of this:

I want to help him.

I'm going to dedicate my free time for the next 2 - 3 months teaching him web development, the problem is, I don't know how to teach web development in such a short time, in fact I've never taught anyone programming from scratch.

If he can show promising results I know that I can make a case for him get him a position in the company I work for.

I already convinced him today to try and learn web development because I can tell that in Malaysia there's always demand on good web developers.

Now to my request:

how can I best teach web development to someone with no programming background ? I'm thinking about teaching him front end development, so: HTML, CSS/SASS and JavaScript. maybe react js as well if possible ( high demand is usually on React/ Angular front end developers)

Did anyone here teach programming to someone else before?

Did anyone here learn web development in such a short time?

If you've read all this... Thank you :)

Hardware Developing.

My current school project where I build a gps thief lock for my moped had me realized one thing. I don't want to go into Hardware Developing. The first problem took me about 4 months until I finally gave up and solved it differently. And this goes on and on and on. You fixed something and the next day it doesn't work anymore for some reason. I never had this problem when coding. It's fun to do stuff with electronics but coding is just way more rewarding. Anyone else had the same experience?

Anything i try in this life, it fails. I have done hundreds, and have 0 successful projects. When someone asks me "what have you done in these 1/4th of a century existing on this useless floating space rock?" ...... I have nothing to say. It would appear as if I've done Nothing. I have nothing to showcase of projects because its not running live on production. It's all on private repositories. The more i try the harder i fail. I am energy drained. I am uninspired. I am unmotivated. Seeing how some 19 year old NOBODY kid just comes out of nowhere, makes NFT project, scams people for millions of dollars and haves fun in his life and doesnt have to work anymore, is fueling me with RAGE. This is starting to become madness. Am i having too high goals and ambitions and that's why i percieve myself as if im unsuccessful? But how is that possible if a 19 year old nobody is capable of becoming a multi millionaire by scamming people in web3? If i lower my goal expectations, then I have no reason to live. I wouldnt care if i die tomorrow or continue living. I wouldnt bother looking left right while crossing the road because I Do Not Care. What must i do to succeed just Once and meet my goals and expectations? I dont understand. I hate life. Life is empty and meaningless. I have became a Nihilist and i believe in that religion more than anything. It makes no sense that someone scams millions by doing jack shit at a young age while someone struggles and tries hard his whole life and still isnt successful even 0.01% of what the 19 year old is. IT. IS. NOT. FAIR.

So,
Im coming from PHP. I feel comfy around PHP.

I needed for other project GO lang (there is no library for what I need to do in PHP, and it's low level thing anyway)

I need dependency that is in form of modules.

Okay, so importing it (just writing import "github.com/blah/blah/v3/blah" as suggested in docs did not work. something something, not found)

Some googling later, I created go.mod file.

And all the hell broke lose. So I am trying to fix that using random stack overflow, IDE highlights entire project on red, go complains it can't find "./" while it looks for it in gopath not project files and claims it's remote repository.

Among other WTFnessness after adding go.mod it suddenly stopped fetching ANY dependencies (including stuff like github.com/pkg/errors ), so, that's fun...

I added go.mod before 9 AM.
It's 13 and Im still wrestling with this

I fail to connect the dots why go lang get's so much praise for it's apparently awesome or something package managment... I find "composer install", and have pretty much guarantee it will work, much easier to wrap my head around.

[edit]
forgot to mention that Im literally starting to learn go. Just cherry on top

So, it's been a while since I've been working on my current project and I've never had the "luck" to touch the legacy project wrote in PHP, until this week when I got my first issue.

And damn, this goddamn issue. It was a bug, a very strange bug, that only happens in production and that nobody has any idea what was happening, so yeah, I didn't have anyone to ask and I got less time than usual ( because Thanksgiving ).

And thus, I have no starting point, no previous knowledge on PHP and less time! I expected a very fun week 😀 and it was beyond my expectations.

First I tried to understand what might be causing the issue, but there wasn't any real clue to star with, so no choice, time to read the flow on the code and see what are they're doing and using ( 1k line files, yay, legacy ). Luckily I got some clues, we're using a cookie and a php session variable for the session, ok, let's star with the session variable. Where it's that been initialize ? Well, spoiler alert, I shouldn't start with that, because my search end up in the login method of the API that set a that variable and for some reason in the front end app it was always false and that lead me to think that some of the new backend functions were failing, but after checking the logs I got no luck.

Ok, maybe the cookie it's the issue, I should try open the previous website on the brow...redirect to new project login, What? Why ? I ask around and it's a new feature push on Monday, ok I got Chrome Dev tools I can see which value of the cookie it's been set and THERE IT WAS it has a wrong domain! After 2 days ( I resume a lot of my pain ) I got what I've been looking for, so now I should be able to fix the bug. Then where is the cookie initialized ? In the first file the server hits whenever you tried to enter any page of the app, ok, I found the method, but it's using a function that process the domain and sets it correctly? wtf ? Then how in heaven do I get the incorrect domain ? Hello? Ok, relax, you still have one more day to fix this, let's take it easy.

Then, at the end of the Wednesday, nope I still have no clue how this is happening. I talked with the Devops guy and he explain me how this redirection happens and with what it depends on, I followed the PHP code through and nothing, everything should works fine, sigh. Ok I still have 2 days, because I'm not from US and I'm not in US, so I still have time, but the Sprint is messed up already, so whatever I'm gonna had done this bug anyhow.

Thursday ! I got sick, yay, what else could happen this week. Somehow I managed to work a little and star thinking in what external issue could affect the processing, maybe the redirection was bringing a wrong direction, let's talk with the Devops guy again, and he answer me that the redirection it was being made by PHP code, IN A FILE THAT DOESN'T EXIST IN THE REPOSITORY, amazing, it's just amazing. Then he explained me why this file might be missing and how it's the deployment of this app ( btw the Devops guy it's really cool and I will invite him a beer ) . After that I checked the file and I see a random session_star in the first line of the code, without any configuration, eureka ! There was the cause and I only need to ask someone If that line it's necessary anymore, but oh they're on holiday, damn, well I'll wait till Monday to ask them. But once and for all that bug was done for ! 🎉

What do I learn ? PHP and that I don't want any more tickets of PHP 😆.

I need help.
I love software and hardware development but over a period of 4 years now i have lost motivation. I hardly finish anything i have started and if i finish, it's never rewarding.

I also feel like i live a very boring life. Staring at the screen all day and doing very little.

What do you guys do for fun? What activities or books do you read to keep yourselves busy or entertained?

I have been having this desire for someone to love but something makes me think that it's just a reaction to a soul that has lost purpose and only feels like loving someone will be a source of happiness. Luckily, nobody has been available for the mess i have been.

I really admire busy people. People who are passionately working on something they have chosen to do and still have fun.

I think talking to someone about how bad i feel about myself will help a little but what i really need is help on how to restore the motivation i had 4 years ago.

Can someone give me a fun project i can work on? Not for making money but something i will do, learn and feel happy about it.

I will also appreciate if someone can recommend a good book that will help me learn. Get me motivated and also hide me from this reality.

Thank you.

Why are most projects only fun at the beginning? I feel like there should be a "first half" and a "second half" during development.

So if I have worked the whole of first half someone else should work the other half with full bar and zeal just like a football match because honestly most times I feel like I'm gonna die towards the end of the project hoping for another developer to come on as a substitution.
However, in this case instead of going to seat on the bench after being substituted, I am willing to play another match immediately.

at one point in time, i had to work with a really junior backend team, they used javascript and neo4j as the database for an in-house developed community forum because "graph databases made sense" in the eyes of their tech lead

turns out that the team struggled quite a bit with it, and had some "unexpected complexity" problems when i asked them to add filters and sorting on the post endpoints

in the end, the "solution" they gave me was an endpoint that spewed ALL the posts so i could sort it in the front end

had they kept the same relational database they were using for the rest of the whole project, i'm quite sure it wouldn't take much to implement that (and their architecture was really performatic)

as a side project i rebuilt the whole forum in a weekend, but using postgresql as database, and it worked nicely, i even added some unit tests just for fun

gave myself a really big slap in the face after that, though

I just came home from opening of the fiscal year of a small drivers' club and it was quite an amazing life experience.

I got about a 5-times "rise" for a first, small, post-due-time project.

All of the members were so relaxed in one of the most serious moments of an association. We ate, drank beer and had as much fun as possible without break the law and other rules.

The story goes like this:

I was an intern in a website development company as students tend to do. In middle of the internship my teacher asked me if I'd be willing to develop a website to the before mentioned organization.
School will help with the money by being as a middle-man. It wasn't going to pay much, about 120€ or so, it's nothing really for the job, but I said yes for the experience. We organized a meeting, school provided the space, and went straight to the business.

The development went quite well: I got the final design requirements late (there weren't too much), research a lot about CMS:s, ended up with a beta version CMS (a risk), learned it, developed some plugins (not published yet), kept copyrights for most of the work and so on.

I was done _relatively_ quickly with the project and was quite happy with it. Only things still pressing my mind was bugs of the beta CMS, support for the plugins and my somewhat inexperienced graphical design.

Then it hit me, the world. Hosting, domain transfer, certificates, registry agreements. Arrgh. Most of things were fine, I know them. I had luck that I had a technical contact for the club. It would have been a nightmare of it's own otherwise.

We had problems transferring the domain, again, as you do. The other hosting company was to blame. They were the n00bs here. I went trough the law, technical guidance, etc. I was having heavy messaging with my technical contact about it, who was a middle-man for me and the hosting firms.
After a long while loop of waiting, reconfiguring, researching and messaging, until he transfer was finally over.

We had a long while of radio silence after some bug fixes. Until the Christmas came and I was invited to a Christmas party in a cottage, third Christmas party that year. It was great fun. We ate, drank, talked, went to sauna and had a playful adult stiga or sledging competition, etc.
I updated the site yet again, a stable version of the CMS were published. Yess!

Another radio silence came and year changed. It was broken off by a call to the opening of the fiscal year, the same day. This is today, or yesterday by now. This was just after my current company's board game night. I was really busy that day. A whole afternoon of second-hand shopping around the city with a bike. I counted 35 kilometers. Yes I go by bike, don't own a car or have an driving license... Yet.

I wasn't horribly late, around 30 minutes. I started eating and drinking. Free food and beer! They was also late, they should've got trough the business before I got there, before eating. So I ate and listened. Learned more about having business or an association in general. Until my matter came to be heard. They thanked me of the co-operation and made public the change of my reward sum, I WAS GRANTED 500€ REWARD for the work. It's still not an amazing sum in a larger point of view, but I can imagine that it's big deal for a small non-profit organization, which was loosing money. Everybody applauded, every 25 members of the club. I was greatly pleased. I will have to update their site a bit still, but they are going to pay the reward ASAP.

Did I mention that the school works around the taxes, legally. Taxes for the reward, if it were assumed as a wage would be 15%, for me, at the worst case scenario, only for getting the money to my hands.

I was offered another gig at the event, but didn't promise anything yet. I left before sauna, so we didn't get to change contact details. He will find a way to reach me if he really wants so. I'm a busy free man.

Last week: Build out a landing page and contact form in Pardot. Deliver to client after a quick QA pass through.
Friday: Get nasty message from client via basecamp about how the entire page looks like complete crap. We're also very unprofessional and can't deliver a simple request, while we charge a premium for our services.

So I, wondering what I managed to screw up so horribly, hop on to the test page I sent them. Except, its different and looks like crap.

They edited the page after it was sent to them and are pissed it doesn't match the comps they sent over. So I edit it back - except for the form. The one they added selects and textarea boxes to. Fields they didn't include in their comp and there was no mention of them wanting to use.

Today: Phone call with client. Every single complain they have about the page template they delivered all goes back to one of 3 things.
1. Their designer doesn't know how to use their global styles in his designs. So when things match their global styles (as they specifically asked for) they don't understand why they don't match the comp in a side by side view.

2. They change their mind on a design after the page was built. They won't admit this is the case and want to blame someone else for it not looking the way they want it. You know, "Spirit and Style of their current site"

3. They're idiots.

So now, I put aside a much more fun React project for an Amazon owned grocery chain and work on this nonsense.

Isn't it fun when you are given a library or framework and that in order to debug it you have to use some hacky way of hooking the code to a special instance of the project?

Even more fun: the developers by default don't debug the project with tools, but rather with logic. Ok, that's a good way to debug but it shouldn't be the only way to debug. I don't want to go back to the age of coding on paper. At least give me a stacktrace that's halfway clear on what's happening there. Even worse is when the framework doesn't document its own problems! stacktrace.someMagicalMethodNoOneKnowsWhatItDoes(). Having to read the even more mystic and overly verbose documentation! You're just left there trying and guessing shit, even for the senior devs!

And do you know what's more fucked up?! Fucking using println() to debug!! And they take this shit seriously! I don't understand how these people call themselves programmers. No breakpoints? What the fuck, man!

Just give me Visual Studio for fuck's sake. I don't want to code in a broken IDE with a broken framework. Development on its own is already hard enough, so don't make it harder by giving me crappy frameworks and crappy IDE's that only work half the time.

Debugging without a debugger, with broken IDE's, with broken frameworks, I'm sorry but that's just not for me. And then the framework dares advertise that it 'lets the developer focus on business code!' (how many times have you heard this crap before?). Right, the only thing I focus on constantly is trying to figure out why their broken framework doesn't work.

Arghhh.

Finally done with school. It were three years of ups and downs.

The downs were plenty and mostly in the way school material was organized.

We've spend years learning web development where the course should have been more broad (application development)

So by the time my first internship period of half a year approached I searched for a company outside of web development and ended up at a company which did serious games using unity C#. Those were the best months of my 3 years. I managed to push the company into a direction for a future even though it was reletively small.

After that I took up .net and got the MTA C# Fundamentals certificate from microsoft itself. (School offered the exam).

Then there was the 2nd internship.
Worked for a company who sold intranets to other enterprises and I developed a mobile app which connected a user's phone to their account on their intranet. Allowing to seperate work and their private life.

That project was fun but the company itself was terrible. 4 people at the office and the owner treated us as objects rather than people. The company was too small for such an environment and most of them were irritated 9 times out of 10. Glad to be rid of them.

Now I'm in the process of looking for a job and have a meeting with a recruiter tomorrow

Wish me luck.

So I work at a big IT company. Keep in mind you could say I'm lucky to be here my last job was as a mechanic. So they put me on this team filled with the most draining kunts I've ever seen.

I have been here for about a year and I am yet to be put on a project, so im just training. They asked me to get certified to be on a project which is complete bullshit because every other fuckwit is on a project and noone is certified.

ONTOP of this, there's no work to be done anyway, yet they keep hiring fucking Grads. LIKE FUCK OFF, get work for the rest of us first you fucking IDIOTS.

Anyway, the cert is the driest fucking content, like kill me now, I try to read about it and I just want to blow my fucking brains out.

Like is IT all like this? I used to work at a web design company and that shit was fucking fun, but paid like $2 an hour the cheap fucks.

Anyway that's my rant, I'm sitting my exam tomorrow for this cert and honestly, I don't even know why. I literally know ZERO. fucking going in to guess this shit. would rather go down to bunnings buy the coarsest piece of rope and just dangle like a fat dick.

Anyway cheers lads. have a great day

The most fun I have while programming is when I work on something that I enjoy. Even if it won't be a huge project in the end, working on an interesting idea is always the most fun I can have.

I am sure most people can relate, too.

We had one group project where we made game. We had like 3 developers, one guy to do some artwork and one to do most of the project management. And at that point in the project I had done most of the work so far (but not because the others didnt do anything, I just had fun coding).

One day said artwork guy managed to accidentily revert 100 of my commits without even opening a single code file. He didn't know git and issued random commands. I wouldn't know how to fuck up a repository like that even if I wanted to. Usually I am rather calm but at that point I was a little bit pissed.

!rant

So, when I was young, I wanted to be a freelancing nomad. You know, live the live, work remote and travel.

But I didn't have the bones to pursue that. After 10 years of struggling as a normal "programmer", I did a little of everything. I did normal boring "erp maintenance" in C#, Oracle and some legacy stuff called Visual WEB GUI , which was fun, but required a full 9,5 hours work day, 8:00 am to 6:30pm, and the bosses where squares, and I was young and wanted to try something out of the corporate world.

Then I did some work for a newly funded consulting company that used python, Django, and postgresql, but the bosses promised a lot and delivered none, (I was supposed to work backend and have frontend support, which I did not have, and that hurt my productivity and bosses instead of looking at what they promised but did not deliver, they just discounted my salary 3 months in a row, so Bye bye MFs!!

Then I did some remote work for some guys, that, I managed to sustain for a whole year, the pay was good, the stack was simple, just node.js and pug templates, that gig was good, but communication with the bosses was hard, and eventually things started to get hard for them and me, and we had to say farewell to each other, I miss those guys. This is the only time I remember having fun working, I could work whenever I wanted, I only had to reach the weekly goals, and then my time was mine, I could work from home in the odd hours, or rent a chair in a co working space if I wanted to socialize.

Then fate got me one big gig with a multinational company, and I could hire some people, but I delegated too much and was asking too little of myself, and that project eventually died because I did not know how to negotiate.

So, I quit the whole entrepreneur idea, and got a public job at my University, I was a public employee with all the perks, but none of the fun, I just had to clock-in, work, and clock-out. That experience led me to discover a lot of myself, I worked as a public employee for a year and a half, and in that time, I discovered more about myself than what I learnt in 27 years of previous life experience.

Then, I grew bored of that life, and wanted some action, and I found more than enough fun in a VC funded startup ran by young narcissists that did not have a clue of what they were doing, I helped them organize themselves into "closing stuff", you know, finish the things you say you have finished. Just to give you an idea of what it was like before I got there, the were working for 3 months already on this project, they had on paper 50% of the system done and working, when I tried to use the app, I couldn't even sign-up without hacking some database commands, (this was supposedly done). So I spent a month there teaching these guys how to finish stuff, they got, Sign Up, (their sign up was a mess, it is one of those KYC rich things, that financial apps have), Login, and some core functionality working in a month, while in the previous 4 months they only did parallel work, writing endpoints that were not tried, and an app that did not communicate with the backend. But the bosses weren't happy with me, because I told them time and time again that we were not going to reach the goal they needed to reach to keep receiving funds from the investors, and I had to quit before it became a mayhem of toxic employer/employee relationship.

So now I decided to re-engage with life, I have funds to survive about a month and half, I have a good line of credit in case I need some more funds, and the time of the world.

So wish me luck!!! And I'll be posting often, because I would like opinions, hear from people with similar life experiences and share anecdotes.

Next post, it's going to be about how I discovered taskwarrior, and how implemented my first weekend following some of the aspects of GTD to do all my housekeeping chores, because, I think that organizing myself will be key to survive as a freelancer nomad.

I work as part of a small international team in a big corp , we work product quality of sorts but work closer to dev than qa , last week we found several giant issues and reported them in . Dev and Qa teams of said project are Indians . Meeting starts , two of my colleagues are indian as well , so dev , qa and all the other involved parties from india decided they should join in from the same conference room . My manager(he's a brit) presents the issues . Dev manager starts talking , qa manager talks over him , they start to formally yell at one another . One of them (couldn't figure out which one) started asking my two colleagues which one of them found these issues . At this point I had already passed a headphone to my ex-colleague who still sits next to me , he looks at me when he hears the question . I panic . Colleagues say they don't know (*phu* I didn't CC them in emails and my manager didn't tell them ) . My manager tells them to calm down , take responsibility and find solutions else he'll veto the product back into fullblown development . Other managers start growling and fighting again (more than 10 people were in the same room arguing) me and my ex-colleague decide to go take a coffee since I didn't have a saying in the meeting . We get back 10 minutes later , indians are still arguing over my manager trying to explain the issues a 4th time . I IM my manager and ask to drop the meeting , he gave me the ok and I dropped out, my head was hurting after an hour long meeting of angry indians arguing in a conference room and it kept hurting the whole day...yeah...meetings...fun time...

3d printer
I only assembled it from prusa parts but still it was lots of fun, learned a lot about how 3d printers work.

Then it was printing trex using 3d printer and it was funny to because it took me about a month to do so just because of amount of parts and the problem with parts that were broken and needed to be fixed.

From software projects, once I build a browser plugin in 2-3 hours cause I was pissed off with those shitty popups all around. I published it on browser store, made code opensource and forgot about it.

Recently I got some survey from a german university about it and I was like wtf ?
I looked at a statistics and my plugin had about 500 daily users and I was amused because the ui is shitty as fuck and the ux is even more shitty.

I plan to update this plugin but since I am focused on a bigger personal project for almost half a year now I have no time to do it.

Work on a fun project
Or play generals zero hour :D

Tech lead: so for this sprint, please implement this HTML page in Angular

Me: do we know what kind of Angular table we are using yet?

Tech Lead: just use the Angular UI one

Me: do we know if that supports drag and drop and custom filters?

Tech Lead: that's not needed for this page

Me: yeah but like 5 other pages of this web app does

Tech Lead: so? We will find a different table then.

Me: but they will look and feel very different and it will be totally obvious that it's patchwork, and we will need to rewrite this page you want me to write now...

Tech Lead: so what if they look completely different. Stop thinking about future sprints. can you have it done next week?

Me: ummmm.....

... this is going to be a fun project. Oh, not to mention I'm only supposed to work on it for 20% of my time....

So macOS Sierra introduced the ability to sync sort-of important folders like 'Desktop' and 'Documents' between machines.

Nice idea until I forgot that the default of a lot of programs is to set up your project in the Documents folder, and that the project I was checking out from git had two 20G files. Okay, the machine I was working with at home had plenty of disk space.

Turns out my machine at work did not, and happily synced itself out of disk space, which has been causing all sorts of no-not-fun-at-all busy work this morning.

So I get to work on building a client at work for industrial automation. I am building a mini hmi to show customers how our server works. The code uses opcua. The reason I am making a client is because all the opcua hmis on the market are really expensive. There is nothing less than $600. There are hmis for free out there, but none of them say they support opcua. opcua has become a major protocol in the industrial automation industry.

It took me about 2 days to gin together a client that is pretty much abstracted and will be easy to maintain. A lot of that was just learning the opcua library client code.

Now I want to create servers and clients geared toward home automation for fun and profit. I want to take sensor data from arduinos using a simple serial protocol like modbus or other protocols that are supported. Then have an opcua server that collects this data. Then finally have an opcua hmi that I develop talk to these servers. The security model is much better and would be compatible with other vendors clients/servers. I already have a game engine I want to use for the hmi portion. It has tons of widgets for displaying data, graphs, lists, text, etc. It does both 2d and 3d.

This sounds like a project that could really fun, meshes with my work learning, and provides value to people that want to automate their lives.

The other side effect is that the next time I go looking for a simple and cheap hmi that supports opcua, there will be one.

So i was putting finishing touches on an android game i was building in Unity3D as a fun side project - implementing google play leaderboards and google ads.
Luckily google is nice enough to include 2 unity plugins for ads and leaderboards/achievements however, THE FUCKING PLUGINS AREN'T COMPATIBLE. TWO PIECES OF SOFTWARE THAT ARE LITERALLY MEANT TO WORK TOGETHER HAVE COLLIDING .JAR FILES PREVENTING ME FROM BUILDING THE APK.

i had to spend fucking days trying to figure out how to unpack the jar files and what to remove from them so they would stop colliding.

WTF GOOGLE?

Man, I enjoy the work I do and my boss is a great guy, but being rushed is never fun. And it's hard to say "it'll be done soon" if there's still some major features missing and the implementation is still unclear.

Can't a junior just take his time to make some decent code that won't end as spaghetti? I have enough PTSD of the first project I did here, which I still have to bugfix at least once a month 😂

Not 100% hackathon, but I was once in one of those weekend coding challenges - aka: have idea, implement MVP, present to a Juri and get a chance to win a prize.

So, to start things off, you had a few months to prepare the idea, gather a team (minimum of 2, maximum of 5 per team) and register.

I gathered a few friends from university, that was cool. We were 5, I had the idea already, they agreed. I started talking business with some partners/governmental stuff (no time to explain all, ask in comments if you want to know).

2 weeks pass by after registering, still 1+ month before the event, 2 of the team members let me know they want to focus on university, so they cannot spend a weekend on this competition. Well, ok, still 3 people, no worries.

Fast forward, 1 week before the competition, another one says he won't be in town, we're 2. Still enough, we meet the requirements, it's just for the fun anyways.

Day 1 of the competition, I'm there waiting for my other teammate. Call him countless times, doesn't pick up. Later tells me he's sick.

I tell the organization about it. They asked: You can continue, but it's fine if you give up now.
> Yo, dafuck you mean give up? I'll die before I give up. It's for the fun anyways, worst case scenario I spend a nice weekend doing what I like *shrug*

So there I am, all alone, doing a first MVP of the mobile app in Android (without any prior android experience, and don't ask me why I chose to do mobile app for that project, was stupid back then).

Lots of nice things there, overall a good weekend, networking, food, gadgets and stuff like that.

Juri day, put on pretty clothes to present my super idea alongside my super MVP of the ugliest mobile app I've seen.

Judge 1: likes the idea, ugly app.
Judge 2: likes the idea, ugly app, could improve and work on the concept, etc
Judge 3: Lots of business questions, to which I came prepared with already potential clients and partners, liked that part although seemed a little confident of it working or not.
Judge 4: "Yo, that's the most stupid thing I've heard, not even gonna ask questions, that's just stupid"
Judge 5: A teacher in my university, the one to actually tell me about this competition, kind of like that meme from "How to train your dragon" where he does the thumbs up thing. Obviously the app sucks, but understandable, no one in the competition has much experience, bla bla bla

---

Final decision: No prize, fuck the idea, got a participation amazon voucher of like, $10 usd. *shurg*

--

Fast forward a few months, my aunt who shared the idea with me and who i was working with before the competition, sends me a link for an article on FB messenger.
The company where that MF judge worked at build a system exactly like the one I presented, claiming it was a very innovative idea. Never heard of them again, it was a consultation company (Deloitte), so I assume they didn't sell it well and dropped it also.

Moral of the story: I guess there's no moral, just have fun.

A customer has this project that smells ... like it could be not fun.

They're doing business with walmart (actually a walmart satellite company, even worse).... I've seen this story before. They're super excited, they're seeing $$$... seen it not work out so many times.

Anyway they're having us rush out these forms and documents and so on and I can see there's a lot of data that is going to be required missing.

My contact is super peppy and happy and so sunshiny that my concerns are going over her head... she just sends emails to people, like FW, RE RE ... this is gonna be a mess of last minute / 'where is this?!?!?!' kinda work...

Granted I work at a good place, this won't have any blowback on me... but god damn guies listen to coder guy that the data that will be needed isn't there and there is a SHIT ton that I'm pretty sure isn't ... anywhere.

So asked to help out on an extra project that another Dev ( who is a senior developer ) is working on and I go to clone the repo but find 15 or so commit messages on the master branch saying "Work on feature x" (not an actual x). This is going to be fun...

I'll answer this seriously, since every other answer just jokes about having no social life.

I used to introverted as fuck long ago. Now I enjoy a fairly decent, balanced social life. Here's some points that may help.

1) This is the most important point. Schedule your time with discipline. Especially if you freelance on the side like me. If you decided to finish a project, mark your calendar and get to it. No dawdling. If you decided to watch a movie, mark your calendar get to it. Decide that you will spend an X portion of your time with entertainment and Y with work. Don't let them overflow into each other.

2) Don't hate Facebook, instagram, WhatsApp and other tools. Okay facebook is shit. But he rest are just tools. You can use them to connect meaningfully or to follow shitty things and make your feed toxic. If this isn't your cup of tea, at least try using them on the weekends, you'll make new friends.

3) If your work requires you to work long hours and weekends ok often just quit. You decide what your limits are. I quit a similar toxic job and it's made a world of a difference.

4) If you have a significant other, establish communication rules and boundaries with them. It's perfectly fine to tell your spouse or boy/girlfriend that you're busy at the moment. It is equally all right to tell your work that ou aren't available because you're busy with family/friends.

5) Visit a gym and get your stamina up. You'll meet fun people. It takes a healthy body to have a social life or you'll just be permanently tired.

So here I am coming to the end of the week after getting The Porcupines big web project into production. Pulled a 38 hour straight from Sunday to Monday chopping wood to make the thing fly. Pulled in other programmers and content creators to get the site full of something we did not have a week before. The fun part was having the account manager right there for 30 plus hours and actually seeing what it take to save a project when the client just thinks "it's just code". Now the boss has is asking for a list of all the work out of spec as they are bitching about the extra cost. These were the clients who did not read the functional spec and raked me over the coals after release that the home page did not match the design (the home page matched the design). I warned my team this would happen. They get all swept up in the hype and We can win! frame of mind and you can bet when the bitching starts it will come back to the paperwork you did at the beginning and the change requests and productions systems reports so you can wave it in front of ungrateful clients and not end up sad. Make sure you keep notes and document all of the requests and changes from internal and external even if you do not have to. one day it will save your ass and you will be able to whip it out and be a smiling motherfucker.

!rant
Just started a side project, helping a friend make his Android app more stable and add a couple more features. We'll release the sources sometime later.

Gotta say, his code is just terrible. And it runs on top of some code written by someone else, and that's even worse.
But I don't know how I got the motivation to spend the whole Saturday cleaning it up, fixing warnings, making abstractions, extracting features to separate classes, converting some stuff to Kotlin, even adding a couple coroutines. It felt good fixing bad code.

Maybe because I have some coding freedom I kinda miss at work.
Maybe because the project is not that big.
Maybe because I know the guy has many skills, coding is just not one of them.
Maybe because that project has some cool in it I can't even describe.
Maybe because that's entirely within my skills but challenging enough to have fun working on it.
Or maybe is just the mood of the moment, and in a week or so I'll lose all the motivation, as it happened too many times.

🤷‍♂️

This is just me throwing out my thoughts from the past few weeks.

edit: this is long

> Working on a C# project. its going well Its teaching me a lot about SQLite and file IO. I'm having a lot of fun with it, even the debugging as much I want to slam my head on the wall but I'm not asking for help so far and I'm very proud of myself because it feels so much better. like I don't mind asking for help but its so much more rewarding and I learn more from it.

> I need portfolio of software I can show off to employers and the current project I'm working on is the first programs in the portfolio. The place I want to apply to uses C#, but I still wanted a few other programs in other languages such as Python or JS just to show what I'm capable of.

> I was looking at what ASP.NET Core offers and it impresses the fuck out of me, and confuses me. The parts that confuse me, like for example the normal asp webapp is a very impressive hello world app. and it has so many different files and such but how or what do they expect me to add? how am I supposed to work with it? and if I delete any files I don't need (the premade js, bootstrap, jquery, html, and css) it produces errors because of the project files are pointing to those. and i know I can use the empty project (I do) but does that question my ability as a dev since I don't want to use it for my projects?

> On that note I love using Intellisense and debuggers and auto complete and I can go without them I just don't want to rely on them. idk I've just been a little more stressed these past few weeks.

This was a project for school, we had to simulate an app that traced bus routes over a map.

All the teams but mine do it in Java (desktop app), we took another approach and did it on Android with the Maps API.

I had fun coding a parser, this parser job was to read a file and load the bus routes and draw them on the map.

It was structured like:

NAME
COLOR
<lat, long>
<lat, long>

The fun part was coding and telling my teammates "chill out, it will work", so we finished, built and run and... done! First code working smooth AF.

I know it's a simple parser and a simple app, but it was a nice feeling not having to debug the app.

[semi-rant, kinda-story]

Day two: Managed to persuade IntelliJ IDEA into, uh, functioning.
Although it still does funky stuff like trying to force JDK v6 for bytecode compiled from Kotlin (the project's not even legacy spaghetti and JDK v6 isn't even installed).
Still had a few problems while setting up the rest of the local dev environment of the project I'm assigned to (which has been caused by documentation accidentally being followed in the wrong order, which I updated in turn, in order to prevent other people from doing the same mistake), but now I can finally work on tickets!

I love that not all tickets are marked as urgent or important, only a few!

Now the fun begins 😎