The first time I realized I wasn't as good as I thought I was when I met the smartest dev I've ever known (to this day).

I was hired to manage his team but was just immediately floored by the sheer knowledge and skills this guy displayed.

I started to wonder why they hired outside of the team instead of promoting him when I found that he just didn't mesh well with others.

He was very blunt about everything he says. Especially when it comes to code reviews. Man, he did /not/ mince words. And, of course, everyone took this as him just being an asshole.

But being an expert asshole myself, I could tell he wasn't really trying to be one and he was just quirky. He was really good and I really liked hanging out with him. I learned A LOT of things.

Can you imagine coming into a lead position, with years of experience in the role backing your confidence and then be told that your code is bad and then, systematically, very precisely, and very clearly be told why? That shit is humbling.

But it was the good kind of humbling, you know? I really liked that I had someone who could actually teach me new things.

So we hung out a lot and later on I got to meet his daughter and wife who told me that he had slight autism which is why he talked the way he did. He simply doesn't know how to talk any other way.

I explained it to the rest of the team (after getting permission) and once they understood that they started to take his criticism more seriously. He also started to learn to be less harsh with his words.

We developed some really nice friendships and our team was becoming a little family.

Year and a half later I had to leave the company for personal reasons. But before I did I convinced our boss to get him to replace me. The team was behind him now and he easily handled it like a pro.

That was 5 years ago. I moved out of the city, moved back, and got a job at another company.

Four months ago, he called me up and said he had three reasons for us to meet up.

1. He was making me god father of his new baby boy
2. That they created a new position for him at the company; VP of Engineering
and
3. He wanted to hang out

So we did and turns out he had a 4th reason; He had a nice job offer for me.

I'm telling this story now because I wanted to remind everyone of the lesson that every mainstream anime tells us:

Never underestimate the power of friendship.

You know what?

Young cocky React devs can suck my old fuckin LAMP and Objective-C balls.

Got a new freelance job and got brought in to triage a React Native iOS/Android app. Lead dev's first comment to me is: "Bro, have you ever used React Native".

To which I had to reply to save my honor publicly, "No, but I have like 8 years with Objective-C and 3 years with Swift, and 3 years with Node, so I maybe I'll still be able help. Sometimes it just helps to have a fresh set of eyes."

"Well, nobody but me can work on this code."

And that, as it turned out was almost true.

After going back and forth with our PM and this dev I finally get his code base.

"Just run "npm install" he says".

Like no fuckin shit junior... lets see if that will actually work.

Node 14... nope whole project dies.

Node 12 LTS... nope whole project dies.

Install all of react native globally because fuck it, try again... still dies.

Node 10 LTS... project installs but still won't run or build complaining about some conflict with React Native libraries and Cocoa pods.

Go back to my PM... "Um, this project won't work on any version of Node newer than about 5 years old... and even if it did it still won't build, and even if it would build it still runs like shit. And even if we fix all of that Apple might still tell us to fuck off because it's React Native.

Spend like a week in npm and node hell just trying to fucking hand install enough dependencies to unfuck this turds project.

All the while the original dev is still trying TO FIX HIS OWN FUCKING CODE while also being a cocky ass the entire time. Now, I can appreciate a cocky dev... I was horrendously cocky in my younger days and have only gotten marginally better with age. But if you're gonna be cocky, you also have to be good at it. And this guy was not.

Lo, we're not done. OG Dev comes down with "Corona Virus"... I put this in quotes because the dude ends up drawing out his "virus" for over 4 months before finally putting us in touch with "another dev team he sometimes uses".

Next, me and my PM get on a MS Teams call with this Indian house. No problems there, I've worked with the Indians before... but... these are guys are not good. They're talking about how they've already built the iOS build... but then I ask them what they did to sort out the ReactNative/Cocoa Pods conflict and they have no idea what I'm talking about.

Why?

Well, one of these suckers sends a link to some repo and I find out why. When he sends the link it exposes his email...

This Indian dude's emails was our-devs-name@gmail.com...

We'd been played.

Company sued the shit out of the OG dev and the Indian company he was selling off his work to.

I rewrote the app in Swift.

So, lets review... the React dev fucked up his own project so bad even he couldn't fix it... had to get a team of Indians to help who also couldn't fix it... was still a dickhead to me when I couldn't fix it... and in the end it was all so broken we had to just do a rewrite.

None of you get npm. None of you get React. None of you get that doing the web the way Mark Zucherberg does it just makes you a choad locked into that ecosystem. None of you can fix your own damn projects when one of the 6,000 dependency developers pushes breaking changes. None of you ever even bother with "npm audit fix" because if security was a concern you'd be using a server side language for fucking server side programming like a grown up.

So, next time a senior dev with 20 years exp. gets brought in to help triage a project that you yourself fucked up... Remember that the new thing you know and think makes you cool? It's not new and it's not cool. It's just JavaScript on the server so you script kiddies never have to learn anything but JavaScript... which makes you inarguably worse programmers.

And, MF, I was literally writing javascript while you were sucking your mommas titties so just chill... this shit ain't new and I've got a dozen of my own Node daemons running right now... difference is?

Mine are still working.

I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.

So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?

This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:

1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!

2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...

3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.

But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.

4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.

There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.

After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.

So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".

So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".

So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.

So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.

If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>

Not only in my work, but in my life.

My biggest inspiration is the popcorn seller that patiently stays outside the subway exit, standing, every fucking day, from 4-5pm until 0-2am.

He stays until after the subway closes, and only leaves after everyone waiting for their Uber or their ride do.

In the rainiest day of the year, he was there.
In the coldest day of the year, he was there.
In the worst crisis of our country in the last decades, the region became temporarily infested by bandits and beggars. Sometimes I had to work overtime until 11:30pm and I had to be very cautious with all the robbers in the empty dark street. But guess who was there, sometimes calmly saying "get out, go work" to the bad elements bothering him?

I find it reallybfunny and refreshing when everyone is inside waiting for the rain to settle down, while he is standing in the middle of it. Or when I'm coming home really late, and he is still out there freezing cold.
There is no excuse for not doing your best. Life sucks sometimes, but there are no excuses. Just work hard, and laugh at the bad times.
Every time I saw him there, I thought "my day was hard, but I could've worked even harder". At the same time he made me feel better for having a better job, he inspired me not to bitch about any little things.

Then you might ask: "isn't he dumb to stay until 2am even though he is probably not getting any costumers after 11pm?" or "how can someone so unsuccessful be so inspiring?"

Well, I don't know. He just is.
Do almighty, genious people like Steve Jobs inspire me at work? Of course. More than this man? Certainly not.

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

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

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

This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.

Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.

I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.

The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).

Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.

He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.

After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".

I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.

So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.

I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.

And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.

And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).

I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.

I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.

With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!

I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!

"devRant has changed" "I'm so fed up with this site" "Its a bunch of hate and memes, it was so much better before"

A rebuttal.

devRant is approximately the same as it was when it was just a newborn. Remember the days of semicolon jokes being unironically funny?

Look at the top rants of all time, for fucks sake. #2 ever is:

"A different error message! Finally some progress!"

Posted three years ago. That's the second most upvoted rant in history (Remember, this was a "rant" because the joke/meme category didn't exist back then), it made it's way into the app store screenshots, and was a welcome post.

Now imagine that posted today. It would probably go over okay, in fairness, but it's certainly at risk of any number of pretentious pricks complaining about how this is "devRANT not 4chan" or how they had seen the joke before and it's a shitty repost.

And sure, the repost bullshit is fair. I'm not saying that all the reposts are good content. What I'm saying is devRant has always been full of reposts - they just weren't reposts in the early days. The quality of content is the same.

There's also the common misconception that your posts need to be directly related to tech to post on devRant. This is a myth propagated by 0 IQ heathens that don't read any further than the name of the application. Your posts can be anything that isn't prohibited, like porn, spam, and, importantly, politics (commonly overlooked rule)

"All the memes are just too much". Oh you poor fucking baby, let me pour you a healthy serving of pity juice. First of all, you can turn off the memes category, and while they will still find their way to your feed, the concentration will be much lower and it will once again be bearable for your pitiful, weak little soul. Do you seriously get annoyed that severely by shitty posts that you need to leave the app altogether, or do you just want the attention of being a "cool hipster that hates on xyz"?

"This place is just filled with hate! Why can't you just respect xyz technology, it isn't actually that bad!"

This is probably the most stupid fucking thing you could possibly ejaculate from your fingers into whatever device you are using to type. Welcome to devRant, we hate on shit. That's at our core. No, xyz technology ISN'T actually that bad, you're correct. But we're here to tear it apart because it probably has frustrated us in the past. I fucking hate JS because it was my first language and it confused the shit out of me. JS is a great language. But I still talk shit about it, and that's what we're here to do.

Like seriously, I know a lot of people post stuff they're proud of here, and then they're met with "Would be great if you didn't use xyz tech", and that hurts, but holy shit, this is devRant. If you're sensitive to criticism, or even just straight up being made fun of, don't post shit that you're proud of. You won't have a good time. It's just not what we do here.

Quick interlude before the conclusion, "My girlfriend dumped me after I named a class after her. She felt I treated her like an object." is also on the first page of all-time most popular posts.

In conclusion, devRant has not changed. Reposts have been a nuisance since day 0, and just because reposts look different these days doesn't mean the quality of content has decreased in any manner. The two main sources of your frustration are the volume of low-quality posts (Mind you, not the concentration of them, but the volume of them) and your own prejudices about the platform. You're looking back with rose-tinted glasses.

Here are some tips for a more enjoyable experience:

-Make sure you have the "Hide reposts" setting ENABLED in settings. Any posts marked as repost will be hidden in your feed, pulling down the concentration of low-quality posts.
-Keep to the algo sorting method. Obviously, algo is a bot, and there's still gonna be some shit content in there anyways, but if you're in recent, you are absolutely guaranteed to see low-quality posts. It's unfiltered.
-Keep in mind that what you consider a "quality" post is not what others consider a "quality" post. Just because you don't like memes doesn't mean memes are poor content. There are people here who have never seen the bobby tables comic. And they deserve the same experience we got when discovering dev humor.
-Don't be a prick. And if you cannot help yourself, leave. Ironically, you're making the site worse by complaining about how bad the site is. You can always come back if you aren't a prick anymore. And you can leave permanently if you choose as well.
-Downvote and move on. You're not doing anything but making yourself more aggravated by leaving a shitty comment about how shitty the shitty post is.
-Think critically. Obviously optional, and I know not many people like to use their brain when a phone is suspended between their hands, but if you want a better experience, remember to use your head and not to lose it.

Was at my sisters place a little ago and somehow we came at the subject of her laptop.
For everyone who thinks I'm posting this solely to hate on windows, I'm not. This really happened and if you don't believe it, well, so be it, I guess.
Also keep in mind that's she's using a stock version without anything except for word and itunes installed.

She got it a couple of years ago and I dual booted it for her (windows + ubuntu). I fully expected her to use windows because of office and outlook etc.

Asked her anyways:

Me: So, you've got dual boot, although I think already know the answer, what system do you use mostly? (I didn't even consider that there was a possibility that the answer would be ubuntu or linux)
Sister: Ubuntu!
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me: 😵
Me: Sorry, what? You're not using windows as primary system?!
Sister: No. It at first takes that motherfucking system about 5 minutes to reach the FUCKING LOGIN SCREEN.
Me: Ow, that's bad :/
Me: *turns laptop on and indeed, it takes a fuckton of time*
Me: Is the password still the same as when I set it up for you?
Sister: Yesss.
Me: *types the password, it's working, loading screen appears*
Sister: Would you like a coffee?
Me: Uhm.... sure? But that would take you about 10-15 minutes to make.......?
Sister: Yes. And that's exactly how long it takes before that fucking piece of shit called windows has finally loaded the FUCKING DESKTOP.
Me: 😅
Me: Okay but it can't be that bad, right? I mean, I hate windows but you mostly need it for studies and such and as you know I'm not judging you for tha......
Sister: YES IT IS THAT FUCKING BAD. WHEN I'M IN CLASS, IT TAKES HALF THE FUCKING CLASS TO LOAD BEFORE I CAN OPEN WORD OR WHAT-THE-FUCK EVER.
THAT'S WHY I USE UBUNTU PRIMARILY, BECAUSE, ALTOUGH IT'S NOT MY FAVOURITE SYSTEM, IT. JUST. FUCKING. WORKS.

Well, I did definitely NOT see that one coming!

There is some bloatware on there but definitely as bad as what would cause this. Virus scan turned up empty. No. Fucking. Clue.
It's not a gaming laptop or anything but come on, it should run either windows or linux very well.

Just found out the backend developer I’m always complaining about. The one who:

- Can’t implement OAuth, and we have to have app users login every 24 hours because we have no way to generate new refresh tokens.

- Who used the phrase “your time zone is not my concern” to avoid building something that would let us inject test data.

- Who’s been debugging a critical bug affecting many users since December.

- Who can’t conduct API tests from external internet (you know, like the way the app will be in the wild) because it takes too much time.

- Who replies to Jira tickets only on a blue moon.

- Who has been 90% of the reason for my blood pressure situation

... is a fucking principal engineer in this company. In pecking order, his opinion should be considered more valuable than mine and everyone on my team.

I’ve just lost the will to live. How are big organizations THIS bad. Seriously, what promotion discussion did he go into

“So, you are a complete and utter bastard, nobody can stand to speak to you and you’ve yet to deliver anything of worth that actually works, over the course of several years ... ... ... interested in having your pay doubled??”

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

First rant, please take pity on the noob! 😐

Recently I've secured many of my user accounts spread throughout the internet. Using the same old password for everything is bad for security and for mental health! 😫

Since I was on the mood, I've tried to do a 'break glass' scenario, simulating an attacker that possessed my Gmail account credentials. "How bad can it be?" I've thought to myself...

... Bad. Very bad. Turns out not only I use lots of oauth based services, I also wasn't able to authenticate back to Google without my pass.

So when you get home today, try simulating what would happen if someone got to your Google or Facebook account.

Makes you consider the amount of control these big companies have over your life 😶

For my passionate coders out here, I have some tips I learned over the years in a business/IT environment.

1) Don't let stupid management force you into making decisions that will provide a bad product. Tell them your opinion and why you should do it that way. Never just go with their decision.
2)F@#k hackathons, you're basicly coding software for free, that the company might use. Want to probe yourself? Join a community and participate in their challenges.
3)No matter how good you are, haters are common.
4)Learn to have a good communication, some keywords are important to express yourself to other developers or customers. Try crazy things, don't be shy.
5)Never stand still, go hear at other companies what they offer, compare and choose your best fit. This leads me into point...
6)if you've been working for over a year and feel that you have participated enough in the companies growth, ask a raise, don't be afraid...you're wanted on the market, so either they negotiate a new contract or you find another job.

I'm sharing these with you as I made many mistakes regarding these points, I have coded for free or invested so much time in a company just to prove myself. But at the end I realize that my portfolio is enough to prove that I'm capable of doing the job. They don't like me? Or ask me stupid questions that I can google in 5 minutes. I'll just decline the job and get something better. Companies end up giving me nothing in return compared to the work I have put into it. At the end after some struggles you'll find a good fit and that's so important for your programming career. Burnouts happen quite often if you're just a coding puppy.

If some of you still have additional tips be sure to post them under here

Let me preface this by saying I'm not a designer.

While I can make individual bits of a site look good, and I'm actually pretty skilled with CSS/Sass, overall design completely escapes me. I can't come up with good designs, nor do I really understand *why* good designs are good. It's just not something I can do, which feels really weird to say. but it's true.

So, when I made the Surfboard site (that's the project's internal name), I hacked everything together and focused on the functionality, and later did a branding and responsive pass. I managed to make the site look quite nice, and made it scale well across sizes/devices despite being completely new to responsiveness. (I'm proud, okay? deal.)

After lots of me asking (in response to people loudly complaining that the UI doesn't have X feature, scale properly on Y device, and doesn't look as good as Z site), the company finally reached out to its UI contractor who does their design work. After a week or two, he sent a few mockups.

The mockups consisted of my existing design with a darker background, much better buttons, several different header bars (a different color) with different logo/text placements, and several restyled steppers. He also removed a couple of drop shadows and made some very minor styling changes (bold text, some copy edits). Oh, he also changed the branding colors. Nothing else changed. It's basically the same exact site but a few things look a little better. and the branding is different.

My intermediary with the designer asked for "any feedback before finalizing the designs" -- which I thought odd because he sent mocks for two out of the ten pages (nine plus a 404 page). (Nevermind most of the mocks showed controls from the wrong page...).

So, I typed up a full page of feedback. Much of it was asking for specifics such as responsive sizing on the new header layout, how the new button layout would work for different button counts, asking for the multitude of missing pages/components, asking why the new colors don't match the rest of our branding, etc. I also added a personal nitpick about flat-looking controls because I fucking hate them. Everything I wrote was very friendly and professional.

... His response was full of gems. Let me share a few.

1. "Everything about the current onboarding site looks like a complete after-thought." (After submitting a design basically identical to mine! gg!)

2. "Yes [the colors match our current branding]." (No. They don't. I checked. The dark grey is different, the medium grey is different, the silver is different, the light blue is different. He even changed the goddamn color of the goddamn LOGO for fuck's sake! How the fuck is that "matching"?!)

3. "Appreciate the feedback [re: overlapping colored boxes, aka 'flat'], design is certainly subjective. However, this is the direction we are going." (yet it differs from the rest of our already-redesigned sites you're basing this off. and it's ugly as shit. gg again :/)

4. "Just looked at the 404 page. It looks pretty bad, and reflects very poorly on the [brand name] brand. Definitely will make a change here!" (Hey! I love that thing. It's a tilted, dotted outline of a missing [brand product] entirely drawn with CSS. It has a light gray "???" underlay and some 404 text inside. Everyone I showed it to, coworkers and otherwise, loved it. "Looks pretty bad". fuck you.)

I know I shouldn't judge someone so quickly, but what the fuck. This guy reminds me of one of those pompous artists/actors who's better than everyone and who can never be wrong, even while they're contradicting themselves.

just.
asfjasfk;ajsg;klsadfhas;kldfjsdl.

Modern software has gotten so bad that it even gets sluggish at times on late 2018 flagship devices. Slow, cheap hardware like is usually developers' and fanboys' excuse, particularly when it comes to Windows stuff? Like hell it is.

Software "engineering" has become so.. terribly inefficient. I'd dare any developer worth their salt to rewrite their program to make it work on an early 2000's machine. After all, those can run pretty advanced GUI's, have a reasonable amount of hardware (just think about how large a gigabyte of RAM really is) yet should be able to make for a reasonable limitation set.

Hardware limitations are the mother of optimization. Not every person on the planet has a 32-core Xeon workstation with 64GB of DDR4 RAM and a GTX Titan in it. Whether your application performs reasonably well on your machine shouldn't be the metric. Try deploying it on that laptop you tucked into a shelf years ago and reevaluate.. please.

And definitely you Slack!! Slacking off, is that what inspired the name of that pile of junk?! 😡

So I finally got my head out of my ass and decided to install some OS on that 500MB RAM legacy craptop from earlier.

*installs Tiny Core Linux*

Hmm.. how do I install extra packages into this thing again? *Googles how to install packages*
Aha, extensions it's called.. and you install them through their little package manager GUI, and then you also have to dick around with some TCE directory, and boot options for that. Well I ain't gonna do that. Why the fuck would I need to dick around with that? Just install the fucking files in /bin, /var, /etc and whatever the fuck you need to like a decent distro. I'll fucking load them whenever I need them, BY EXECUTING THE FUCKING BINARY. But no, apparently that's not how TCL works.

Also, why the fuck is this keyboard still set to US? I'm using a Belgian keyboard for fuck's sake.. "loadkeys be-latin1"
> Command not found.

Okay... (fucking piece of shit) how do I change the fucking keyboard layout for this shit?!
*does the jazz hand routine required for that*
So apparently I need to install a package for that as well. Oh wait, an EXTENSION!! My bad. And then you can use "loadkmap < /usr/share/kmap/something/something" to load the keyboard layout. Except that it doesn't change the fucking keymap at all! ONE FUCKING JOB, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!!!

That's fucking it. No more dicking around in TCL. If I wanted to fuck around with the system this much, I'd have compiled my own custom Linux system. Maybe I can settle with Arch Linux, that's a familiar distro to me.. I can easily install openbox in that and call it a day. But this is an i686 machine.. Arch doesn't support that anymore, does it?

*does another jazz hand routine on Arch Linux 32 and sees that there's a community-maintained project just for that*

Oh God bless you fine Arch Linux users for making a community fork!! I fucking love you.. thank you so much!! Arch it'll be then <3

I'm trying to sign up for insurance benefits at work.

Step 1: Trying to find the website link -- it's non-existent. I don't know where I found it, but I saved it in keepassxc so I wouldn't have to search again. Time wasted: 30 minutes.

Step 2: Trying to log in. Ostensibly, this uses my work account. It does not. Time wasted: 10 minutes.

Step 3: Creating an account. Username and Password requirements are stupid, and the page doesn't show all of them. The username must be /[A-Za-z0-9]{8,60}/. The maximum password length is VARCHAR(20), and must include upper/lower case, number, special symbol, etc. and cannot include "password", repeated charcters, your username, etc. There is also a (required!) hint with /[A-Za-z0-9 ]{8,60}/ validation. Want to type a sentence? better not use any punctuation!

I find it hilarious that both my username and password hint can be three times longer than my actual password -- and can contain the password. Such brilliant security.

My typical username is less than 8 characters. All of my typical password formats are >25 characters. Trying to figure out memorable credentials and figuring out the hidden complexity/validation requirements for all of these and the hint... Time wasted: 30 minutes.

Step 4: Post-login. The website, post-login, does not work in firefox. I assumed it was one of my many ad/tracker/header/etc. blockers, and systematically disabled every one of them. After enabling ad and tracker networks, more and more of the site loaded, but it always failed. After disabling bloody everything, the site still refused to work. Why? It was fetching deeply-nested markup, plus styling and javascript, encoded in xml, via api. And that xml wasn't valid xml (missing root element). The failure wasn't due to blocking a vitally-important ad or tracker (as apparently they're all vital and the site chain-loads them off one another before loading content), it's due to shoddy development and lack of testing. Matches the rest of the site perfectly. Anyway, I eventually managed to get the site to load in Safari, of all browsers, on a different computer. Time wasted: 40 minutes.

Step 5: Contact info. After getting the site to work, I clicked the [Enroll] button. "Please allow about 10 minutes to enroll," it says. I'm up to an hour and 50 minutes by now. The first thing it asks for is contact info, such as email, phone, address, etc. It gives me a warning next to phone, saying I'm not set up for notifications yet. I think that's great. I select "change" next to the email, and try to give it my work email. There are two "preferred" radio buttons, one next to "Work email," one next to "Personal email" -- but there is only one textbox. Fine, I select the "Work" preferred button, sign up for a faux-personal tutanota email for work, and type it in. The site complains that I selected "Work" but only entered a personal email. Seriously serious. Out of curiosity, I select the "change" next to the phone number, and see that it gives me four options (home, work, cell, personal?), but only one set of inputs -- next to personal. Yep. That's amazing. Time spent: 10 minutes.

Step 6: Ranting. I started going through the benefits, realized it would take an hour+ to add dependents, research the various options, pick which benefits I want, etc. I'm already up to two hours by now, so instead I decided to stop and rant about how ridiculous this entire thing is. While typing this up, the site (unsurprisingly) automatically logged me out. Fine, I'll just log in again... and get an error saying my credentials are invalid. Okay... I very carefully type them in again. error: invalid credentials. sajfkasdjf.

Step 7 is going to be: Try to figure out how to log in again. Ugh.

"Please allow about 10 minutes" it said. Where's that facepalm emoji?

But like, seriously. How does someone even build a website THIS bad?

Last week, someone contacted me, he said he needed me to fix the existing code on a new WordPress website because the developer did a messy job, so I thought to myself, it can't be that bad, requested for the SSH access and got into the server.

Guys.

Guys..

Guys...

I was wrong, some people really know how to fuck shit up.

I don't want to go into details but there were legit more than 50 plugins installed and activated on the website for no good reason and all the pages took about 45 minutes each to render if not more, so you can literally request a new page, start making coffee and use the washing machine and if you are lucky to have spent 45 minutes, return to a fully loaded page.

For a new WordPress website, it seemed really old.

It was almost as if this developer had a line of code that looked like this:

@Import 'all the bad programming practices ever and the ones yet to be invented';

it's funny, how doing something for ages but technically kinda the wrong way, makes you hate that thing with a fucking passion.

In my case I am talking about documentation.

At my study, it was required to write documentation for every project, which is actually quite logical. But, although I am find with some documentation/project and architecture design, they went to the fucking limit with this shit.

Just an example of what we had to write every time again (YES FOR EVERY MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT) and how many pages it would approximately cost (of custom content, yes we all had templates):

Phase 1 - Application design (before doing any programming at all):
- PvA (general plan for how to do the project, from who was participating to the way of reporting to your clients and so on - pages: 7-10.
- Functional design, well, the application design in an understandeable way. We were also required to design interfaces. (Yes, I am a backender, can only grasp the basics of GIMP and don't care about doing frontend) - pages: 20-30.
- Technical design (including DB scheme, class diagrams and so fucking on), it explains it mostly I think so - pages: 20-40.

Phase 2 - 'Writing' the application
- Well, writing the application of course.
- Test Plan (so yeah no actual fucking cases yet, just how you fucking plan to test it, what tools you need and so on. Needed? Yes. but not as redicilous as this) - pages: 7-10.

- Test cases: as many functions (read, every button click etc is a 'function') as you have - pages: one excel sheet, usually at least about 20 test cases.

Phase 3 - Application Implementation
- Implementation plan, describes what resources will be needed and so on (yes, I actually had to write down 'keyboard' a few times, like what the actual motherfucking fuck) - pages: 7-10.
- Acceptation test plan, (the plan and the actual tests so two files of which one is an excel/libreoffice calc file) - pages: 7-10.
- Implementation evalutation, well, an evaluation. Usually about 7-10 FUCKING pages long as well (!?!?!?!)

Phase 4 - Maintaining/managing of the application
- Management/maintainence document - well, every FUCKING rule. Usually 10-20 pages.
- SLA (Service Level Agreement) - 20-30 pages.
- Content Management Plan - explains itself, same as above so 20-30 pages (yes, what the fuck).
- Archiving Document, aka, how are you going to archive shit. - pages: 10-15.

I am still can't grasp why they were surprised that students lost all motivation after realizing they'd have to spend about 1-2 weeks BEFORE being allowed to write a single line of code!

Calculation (which takes the worst case scenario aka the most pages possible mostly) comes to about 230 pages. Keep in mind that some pages will be screenshots etc as well but a lot are full-text.

Yes, I understand that documentation is needed but in the way we had to do it, sorry but that's just not how you motivate students to work for their study!

Hell, students who wrote the entire project in one night which worked perfectly with even easter eggs and so on sometimes even got bad grades BECAUSE THEIR DOCUMENTATION WASN'T GOOD ENOUGH.

For comparison, at my last internship I had to write documentation for the REST API I was writing. Three pages, providing enough for the person who had to, to work with it! YES THREE PAGES FOR THE WHOLE MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT.

This is why I FUCKING HATE the word 'documentation'.

> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job

I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.

My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.

Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.

I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.

On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄

I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.

I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.

I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.

I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.

But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.

I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.

But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.

So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.

So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.

Beware: this is me expressing how I feel about my programming/my skillset, and so on. It might be imposter syndrome but I am having a fucking bad episode right now and I just need to get this the fuck out.

I work at a distribution center right now. Can I provide for myself? Yes. Do I even slightly like my work? No I fucking hate it to the point. I hate going there every day, doing shit I don't like, not being able to focus on the shit I love but that's it for me for now.

In my free time I still am able to program a little but then the (I will call it imposter syndrome for now as I have no clue how to call it) imposter syndrome comes looking around the FUCKING corner.

*What the fuck are you doing? For real man, someone else could do that like way fucking better*

*Wow man your code..... there are so many people who would write that a million times better*

*You have re-written this for 10 times now. But seriously, this still sucks fucking balls*.

Fucking hell. Yes, at programming level I am still a junior, I fucking know that. But it fucking sucks feeling like anyone but you would do the shit you're making better anyways.

How fucking down can you get yourself. How bad can you make yourself feel through just a few fucking words/thoughts.

The only thing I am happy about right now is the fact that a very good friend is able to keep me at least slightly sane right now.

It's fine if you're 'not good with computers' and need help. Ask me politely and sure I'll see how I can help and teach you what you need so that you can do it yourself in the future.

It's not fine, however, if you refuse to fucking learn after the millionth time I've taught you how to do the exact same thing because 'It's too hard' and 'I won't understand anyway'. And then proceed to call me a bad and ungrateful friend because I can't come to your rescue the very second you need me and don't seem 1000% enthusiastic to help at 1am in the morning when I'm still doing my own work.

Sure, I'm the 'tech person' amongst our friends. I *do* understand the frustration you experience when something isn't working. But that doesn't mean I'm obligated to be your 24/7 IT support, while listening to your complaints of how I was probably the one who fucked it up in the first place when I helped fixed your phone/laptop last time (for the record, this was *never* the case).

UGHHHHHHHH

ps: I just found this community and I love it already! Thought this mental rant I had earlier would fit right in lol
(Also, sorry English isn't my first language D:

So before today, I'd never used GoDaddy before. Not even once. My supervisor walks in and happily informs me that I'm going to be adding photos to a website that she does editing for. Okay, fine, that's stupidly easy. What I did not realize, however, is that this entire website had been built using GoDaddy's site builder, and if you're not familiar with it, thank whatever gods you worship that you've dodged that bullet. I hardly want to go wandering around somebody else's web hosting, so I search about for a bit praying that there's SOME semblance of a normal text editor someplace, because text editors make me happy and all, and find very little on the regular site. Already not thrilled. So I figure, how bad is this site editor? Really, how bad can it possibly be?
Oh, you poor misguided son of a -
Anyway, I go in and look at the site. Slideshows everywhere, nothing is aligned correctly, it's a web designer's nightmare. Thankfully, I'm not a web designer, so I press on and reorganize a little bit. I try slapping a new slideshow on their, and discover that unlike the way it SHOULD work, elements do not move to allow for other elements, they just sit there and let you throw things on top of them. I stare at my neatly-stacked slideshows for a second in utter disbelief, knowing but not really accepting that I'm going to need to take every last one of those slideshow elements and slide those little so-and-so's down by hand. ....why? Who designed this? Who decided that was a good idea? I do some Googling to see if there's anything out there to make this less horrid, and lo and behold I find a GoDaddy page about their FTP file manager! It's under web/classic hosting, which apparently means it's deprecated because I spent the next ten minutes hunting around for the "web hosting" link those chicken-lickers were so proud of and it's nowhere to be found.
Alright, so they want to do this the hard way.
At this point I'm screaming internally and PRAYING that I'm just being stupid and not seeing anything to make it easi-
No, not even easier. Just less stupid. This website builder makes no sense. It's like hiring a contractor to build a bridge and handing him a box of Legos and a banana.
So I do more googling and find instructions on getting to the file manager. FINALLY. The first step is find "Hosting" under "My Products." I rush over to My Products joyfully, hoping I can get this stupid website up and running reasonably quickly, and...!
There's no hosting tab.
No button.
Not even a little hard-to-see link. At this point my brain is screaming. WHY would you give me a website builder but absolutely no way to actually write the website? Do people actually use this thing? I mean, I get it if they want to make it nice and accessible for people to make websites without overwhelming them with HTML but if they know how to edit the website and they don't want your help, why would you force me in to this? Why? Then it occurred to me that maybe the organization just hasn't ever had a web developer in it, ever, or at least not one who was willing to help out with the website, so they purposefully signed up for hosting that deprived them of any kind of HTML editor. Then on top of all of that, I noticed that on the home page, which had been edited by someone else long before I ever looked at it, ALSO had one of these stupid slideshows that I had to reorganize by hand, and some sad, angry little man had put in one of the photos sideways. It was SIDEWAYS. Just sitting there on its side, the photo's occupants staring at me with sad eyes begging me to turn them facing up again. I sat there and stared at a badly-designed website in a questionably-designed editor. And I wondered. I wondered who put this all together, and I wondered why *I* was the one doing it, when I work for a university and the website was for some beach homeowner's association. And I wondered if this job was a task that my supervisor had agreed to do and just passed off onto an office monkey. And I wept bitter tears at the realization that I am that office monkey.

I swear to god, I'm going to track down the dipshit who just made my day hilariously painful.

So here I am, finishing up this project that's been going on for what feels like an eternity, when I get an email "why doesn't order X show up in this other system?".

I mean, it's a common thing they can take 15 minutes to push across, so the usual quick glance and what do you know, it's just sitting there as if it's waiting to be pushed through, than an hour later... it's still there, so I start digging, maybe a data issue, nope looks all good, customer details, payment details, products...

just another order, jump on the logs and all looks fi......... wait.... why does this postcode have 3 digits and not 4 , Australia has 4 digit postal codes fyi, looks at order again, 3 digits, look at log, 3....hold on why's it only 3 digits, checks code, handled as string... ok..... where the fuck would it drop a digit.... frontend requires 4 digits, validation requires 4 digits... how the fuck did you get 3 digits in... I can't see anything anywhere that logically makes sense for this🤔

Drops address into google and it's a postcode starting with 0.

Jumps on DB and the fucker is an int in the postcode table. For all you playing at home 0123 <> 123

I don't know if I should feel bad, or impressed, it's been 7 years since this table was created, and 7 years before someone managed to live in one of these parts of the country with a leading 0.

QA didn't spot this years ago,
No one tested this exact scenario,
The damn thing isn't even documented as a required delivery area, but here we are!

Kudos good sir, you broke it! 🤜 🤛
You sir may get your order now!

So I'm on stack overflow trying to give back to the community that has helped me so much yanno.

So I see a question and decide to answer it but I'm on my mobile and trying to write a well formatted etc. answer is a bit tricky so instead I thought I would answer it as best I could on the phone so at least the OP would be going in the right direction and then when I got back to my computer, I would expand on the answer.

But before I had a chance (within 10 minutes of answering) some 200k+ rep dickhead decided it was his job to tell me how bad I was for not giving a proper answer and i have enough rep to comment and I should know better.

So I responded to him (my first mistake) and told him that my answer was intended to get him going and most likely he wouldn't need any more help but that I was going to update it when I got back to my computer.

Well he didn't like that and continued to berate me for my unbelievable behavior.

I then said that if he was that upset, then report me, or even better how about he actually answer the question instead of being a fuckwit to others that have tried.

I also said that I thought that SO and development in general was not about being given the answer but by finding it yourself and actually learning something and that sometimes you need to be pushed it the right direction to find the answer which is what I did here.

Well he disagreed with that too and downvoted my answer which by that point had been updated (like I said I would).

I just don't get it, what is wrong with these people and why has SO become such a toxic place?

I want to give back to the community and help others like people have done for me over the years, but then fuckheads like this just ruin it and make you not want to be a part of it anymore.

Then I come here to devRant and everyone is so nice to each other, you can see the respect.

I'm working on a project with a teacher to overview the project at my school to be responsible for the confidential student data...

Teacher: How are we going to authenticate the kiosk machines so people don't need a login?

Me: Well we can use a unique URL for the app and that will put an authorized cookie on the machine as well as local IP whitelisting.

Teacher: ok but can't we just put a secret key in a text file on the C drive and access it with JavaScript?

Me: well JavaScript can't access your drive it's a part of the security protocol built into chrome...

Teacher: well that seems silly! There must be a way.

Me: Nope definately not. Let's just make a fancy shortcut?

Teacher: Alright you do that for now until I find a way to access that file.

I want to quit this project so bad

Last Friday company-wide call consisted of the sales CEO bossman, the remote contractor dev, and myself. The only topic of discussion was CTO-bashing (bossman's favorite). Neither person had much of anything to say about their week, and they didn't want to hear my rather-lengthy summary either (I did a lot). All they wanted to do was bash the CTO (API Guy).

The CEO asked how many hours I had worked, and seemed annoyed when I said less than 40. Well screw you. Monday was Christmas, and Sunday was Encroaching Estranged Asshole Day. (Earlier rant)

I've been spending most of my time trying to learn the steaming mountain of rancid hippo shit that API Guy squeezed out, since he's leaving forever in 10 days. Sure, CEO bossman says he'll still be around to answer questions, but even with him right next to me in the office he's less than useful. After he's gone and finally feeling free of this farce? It'll be worth fuck-all.

So bossman is mad at me for both not working enough over Christmas, and not pumping out features at a frantic pace despite multiple explanations of why this is a bad idea. And he didn't care about what work I actually did do.

My every interaction with him makes me angry. Whenever I -- or anyone else -- does something he doesn't approve of, seemingly no matter the reasoning, he makes it out to be a failure on their part, and like he can't trust them as much now.

Well I'm sorry we're trying to make sure our websocket works perfectly before putting it in the hands of our customers who rely on it for cash processing.

I'm sorry I'm trying to recall printers that aren't configured properly, which also prevent customers from using our goddamn service they're paying for.

I'm sorry I'm trying to learn how everything works while I still have someone to talk to and ask questions of.

I'm sorry I'm preparing for the day I have to take over and have you breathing down my neck. Once API Guy's gone I'll be responsible for everything, and you'll be yelling at me and having a @Root bashing session instead if I don't know how to fix everything right away.

But no. All you care about is that I talk to you about what's going in so you can micromanage development despite having zero fucking understanding of goddamn anything. All you ever fucking want is the next shiny feature you can push to make more sales / keep your current contacts happy. Doesn't fking matter if it makes development awful later; that's tomorrow's problem. And yet you have the gall to bash API Guy over and over and over again for the codebase being a mess? Sure he's a terrible programmer, but been putting up with this exact same shit for five years. No wonder it's a mountain of rancid hippo shit. That's as much your fault as his, asshole.

I'm so sorry you "have serious concerns" about me. I don't want to put up with your shit either.

Fuck off and die.

Been reading devrant posts for a month or so, this is my first actual post. I'm hoping it will be therapeutic. ☺️ I need something to keep me from killing my boss when I see him again tomorrow..

Some backstory: Currently working in HR for the last 7 or so years with complete shit for brains boss, even worse when it comes to anything related to technology. For almost two years I've been working to get another bachelor's degree. This time in computer sciences, to make a career switch to systems and software engineer. Last week I roughly had the following wonderful conversation:

Boss: we've needed new Recruitment software for a while now. Can't you make us one as a school project?

Me: 'Make us one?' It's not really that simple.. I'm barely halfway through my education, maybe I could do it, but it would take me quite a long time even if I could work on it fulltime.. Combining a halftime job with a fulltime education is taking up enough of my time as it is and I have more than enough school projects btw..

Boss: it would be a win-win. Work a little harder in your spare time and when you graduate you have a real-life project on your resume.

Me: I'm sorry, i'm failing to see the 'win' for me here.. I work 10 hours a day, 7 days a week on average, trying to combine work and studies. I'm pretty much maxed out..

Boss: Your coworker(also extreme dumbass) told me you wrote some quick code the other day that helped him out. Don't underestimate yourself, I'm sure you can do this.

Me(in complete disbelief by now): I wrote him an Excel-macro! They don't even teach me that at school. It's a very very very long way from actual software development! I'm sorry, it just can't be done.

Boss: Thats too bad. I expected you to welcome an opportunity like this and be more motivated towards this company..

Me: ***more disbelief and silence, just staring at him***
I'm sorry you feel that way.
***walked away***

WTF, I work my ass off for 7 years for this fucking shithead.. Even before I started this bachelors degree I had at least some understanding of the work developers put in their software. It blows my mind, no, it fucking angers me how people think making software is so simple.. Why do you think it's a 3-year education you fucking cunt?

Please, someone tell me how I can keep myself from ramming his fucking head through a wall tomorrow...

I'm unbelievably angry. So please bear with my venting.

QA guy and I are stuck working the entire weekend. A few months ago our company decided to promote an account manager to a Product/Project management role with 0 experience and offering them 0 training. They have no experience working with devs and have been making our lives hell. I work easily 50-60hrs per week and they still budget projects according to 40hrs/week meaning they're stealing my time not to mention they're incorrectly setting the client's and company's expectations.

They now have complete control over roadmaps, client communications (this wouldn't normally be bad except that they're having technical discussions with the client with 0 tech experience), timelines, etc. and since their experience was in account management they are now working with devs but making decisions that exclusively put the client first at all costs, even if it means everyone else has to work weekends while they go on vacation!!!!

I've approached them several times to offer help on budgeting time or to propose that we do a Q4 planning so that we can improve the product instead of stay in a shitty position as we are. I'm responded with "You deal with what's in front of you. It's my job to look at the bigger picture."

They mismanaged a $500,000 project and our CEO got wind of it because the client called him while he was travelling. He in turn gave shit to our Directors who in turn chewed the QA guy and I out. "You need to be more meticulous when deploying. How could you let this happen? We're eating shit because of this. You need to work over the weekend to make up for this", etc.
I'm now directly responsible for having delivered something that wasn't up to standards even though I was already putting in the overtime.

This is honestly fucking ridiculous. How can I be blamed when I'm truly doing the best I can and putting as many hours as I can while edging toward burnout.

I love what I do but I hate feeling extremely pressured to turn down friends and family like this. Maybe I'm just too easy going and need to say no more. Who fucking knows. I know that I'm angry with the company right now.

What do you all think? If you read this rant, thank you. Feels better to write it out.

Man I really need to get this off my chest. So here goes.
I just finished 1 year in corporate after college. When I joined, the team I got was brilliant, more than what I thought I would get. About 6 months in, the project manager and lead dev left the company. Two replacements took their place, and life's been hell ever since.

The new PM decided it was his responsibility to be our spokesperson and started talking to our overseas manager (call her GM) on our behalf, even in the meetings where we were present, putting words in our mouth so that he's excellent and we get a bad rep.

1 month in, GM came to visit our location for a week. She was initially very friendly towards all of us. About halfway through the week, I realized that she had basically antagonized the entire old team members. Our responsibilities got redistributed and the work I was set to do was assigned to the new dev (call her NR).

Since then, I noticed GM started giving me the most difficult tasks and then criticizing my work extra hard, and the work NR was doing was praised no matter what. I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but lately the truth hit me hard. I found out a fault in NR's code and both PM and GM started saying that because I found it, it was my responsibility to fix it. I went through the buggy code for hours and fixed it. (NR didn't know how it worked, because she had it written by the lead dev and told everyone she wrote it).

I found out lately that NR and PM got the most hike, because they apparently "learnt" new tech (both of them got their work done by others and hogged the credit).They are the first in line to go onsite because they've been doing 'management work'. They'd complained to GM during her visit that we were not friendly towards them. And from that point on if anything went wrong, it would be my fault, because my component found it out (I should mention that my component mostly deals with the backend logic, so its pretty adept at finding code leaks).

What broke my patience is the fact that lately I worked my ass off to deliver some of the best code I'd written, but my GM said in front of the entire team that at this point "I'm just wasting money". She's been making a bad example out of me for some time, but this one took the cake. I had just delivered a promising result in a task in 1 week that couldn't be done by my PM in 4 weeks, and guess what? "It's not good enough". No thank you, no appreciation, nothing. Finally, I decided I'd had enough of it and started just doing tasks as I could. I'd do what they ask, but won't go above and beyond my way to make it perfect.

My PM realized this and then started pushing me harder. Two days back, I sent a mail to the team with GM in cc exposing a flaw in the code he had written, and no one bothered to reply (the issue was critical). When I asked him about it, he said "How can you expect me to reply so soon when it's already been told that when anything happens we should first resolve within the team and then add GM in the loop?" I realized it was indeed discussed, but the issue was extremely urgent, so I had asked everyone involved, and it portrayed him in a bad light. I could've fixed it, but I didn't because on the off chance if it broke something, they'd start telling me that I broke the tool, how its my fault and how its a critical issue I have to fix ASAP, etc. etc., you get the idea.

Can anyone give me some advice of how to deal with this kind of situation? I would have left but with this pandemic going on, market being scarce and the fact that I'm only experienced by 1 year, I don't think I qualify for a job switch just now.

College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.

I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.

This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.

Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.

Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.

The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.

Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.

Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.

And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.

And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!

But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.

My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.

If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.

Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.

Not just another Windows rant:

*Disclaimer* : I'm a full time Linux user for dev work having switched from Windows a couple of years ago. Only open Windows for Photoshop (or games) or when I fuck up my Linux install (Arch user) because I get too adventurous (don't we all)

I have hated Windows 10 from day 1 for being a rebel. Automatic updates and generally so many bugs (specially the 100% disk usage on boot for idk how long) really sucked.

It's got ads now and it's generally much slower than probably a Windows 8 install..

The pathetic memory management and the overall slower interface really ticks me off. I'm trying to work and get access to web services and all I get is hangups.

Chrome is my go-to browser for everything and the experience is sub par. We all know it gobbles up RAM but even more on Windows.

My Linux install on the same computer flies with a heavy project open in Android Studio, 25+ tabs in Chrome and a 1080p video playing in the background.

Up until the creators update, UI bugs were a common sight. Things would just stop working if you clicked them multiple times.

But you know what I'm tired of more?

The ignorant pricks who bash it for being Windows. This OS isn't bad. Sure it's not Linux or MacOS but it stands strong.

You are just bashing it because it's not developer friendly and it's not. It never advertises itself like that.

It's a full fledged OS for everyone. It's not dev friendly but you can make it as much as possible but you're lazy.

People do use Windows to code. If you don't know that, you're ignorant. They also make a living by using Windows all day. How bout tha?

But it tries to make you feel comfortable with the recent bash integration and the plethora of tools that Microsoft builds.

IIS may not be Apache or Nginx but it gets the job done.

Azure uses Windows and it's one of best web services out there. It's freaking amazing with dead simple docs to get up and running with a web app in 10 minutes.

I saw many rants against VS but you know it's one of the best IDEs out there and it runs the best on Windows (for me, at least).

I'm pissed at you - you blind hater you.

Research and appreciate the things good qualities in something instead of trying to be the cool but ignorant dev who codes with Linux/Mac but doesn't know shit about the advantages they offer.

Every time management says "were now using SaaS product X, and they're giving a webinar so we can learn how to use their solutions to take our business to the next level!" — I can't help but associate it with Nigerian Prince scams.

The longer I'm a developer, the more I think vertical integration and inventing your own shitty wheels isn't such a bad idea.

Their generalized, overpriced seat-per-month service always boils down to "vendor lock-in, nothing can be customized or exported, integrations are a pain in the ass, and within a few months the bills will explode because of some overage fee".

Manager: I'm so sorry to say but your collegue A has passed away yesterday afternoon. There will obviously be flowers etc and we'll try to support her family as much as we can..

Me: Oh, no. My deepest condolences. (I'm always bad at saying much in situations like this, but)

B: My gosh! So does this mean A's family also caught it??!? (Corona)

Manager: She died in a car accident.

...
Also how unfortunate. Due to the lockdown, a ton of the people use the roads as a racing track around here...

First I wanna say how grateful I am that devRant exists, because my friends either don’t understand this vocab or don’t care lol.

Last week I worked on a pretty large ticket, opened a PR with 54 file changes. Just to follow standards I set the PR milestone to a future release version, but the truth is I didn’t care which version this work ended up in— I just needed it to go into the develop branch asap.

Since it was a large PR there was some expected discussion that prolonged its merging, but in the meantime I started a second branch that depended on some of the work from this branch. I set the new branch’s upstream to develop, fully expecting my PR to merge into develop, since that’s what I set the PR base to.

I completed all the work I could in the new branch, and got two colleagues to approve the initial PR so it would be merged into develop, I could add the finishing touch and get this work done seamlessly before the week was over. They approved, it got merged, I pulled develop, and… my work wasn’t there. I went to look at my PR and someone had changed the base branch to a release branch. It was my boss, who thought he was helping. (Our bosses don’t actually work on the same team as us, so he didn’t know. it’s weird. We have leads that keep track of our work instead.)

I messaged him and told him I really needed this in develop, knowing our release branch won’t be in develop for probably another week. I was very annoyed but didn’t wanna make him feel too bad so I said I’d just merge the release branch into my new branch. So many conflicts I couldn’t see straight. His response was “yeah and you’ll probably have a bunch of package manager conflicts too because that’s in that release.” He was right— I have so many package manager conflicts that I can’t even see how many compiler conflicts there are. I considered cherry picking my changes, but the whole reason I set develop as my upstream was to avoid having any conflicts since I’m working in the same functions, and this would create more.

So I could spend the next (?) days making educated guesses on possibly a thousand conflict resolutions, or I can revert my release branch merge and quietly step back and wait for the release branch to be merged into develop.

I’m sure cherry picking is the best option here but I’m genuinely too annoyed lol, and fortunately my team does not care to notice if I step back and work on something else to kill time until it’s fixed automatically. But I’m still in dire need of a rant because my entire plan was ruined by a well-meaning person who messed with my PR without asking, so here is that rant and I thank you for your time.

“Arya” and I were classmates in college. We were in the same year and did the same major. We’ve known each other for 16 years and have worked together twice; one time she was my manager and the other time I was hers. We often attend the same work-related conferences and exchange thoughts on articles that appear in industry publications. Our relationship is a professional one, although I did attend her wedding because her husband was in the same fraternity as me, and she did introduce me to my future husband at a networking charity event. Besides her wedding, we have never talked outside of work or a networking event.

I was hiring for a position and one of the promising candidates was working for Arya and had put her down as a reference. Arya sung her praises and told me she was the best employee in the department. The position I was hiring for would be a promotion for the candidate, and Arya said there was no room for promotion in her department at the moment. Based on Arya’s glowing review and the same from another manager there (and her strong resume), I hired her.

It was a catastrophe. Her work was sloppy and disorganized. She struggled to do basic tasks, missed deadlines, and was sometimes cold to her coworkers and clients. She was asked to take point on a project because her resume listed a similar project, and it went so far off the rails we had to bring in outside help to get it back on track. I know a promotion and new company can be an adjustment, but she was incompetent beyond having to adjust to a new place. Her mistakes cost us so much money she had to be fired.

When I spoke to Arya the first time, she played dumb. The second time, she admitted to lying about how good the candidate was because she was tired of dealing with her mistakes and wanted her gone. She told the candidate she wouldn’t fire her if she quickly left on her own and promised a good reference in exchange. The other manager agreed to do the same thing when Arya asked him to. Arya also told the candidate to lie about how long she worked there to make it seem like she was there longer and to put the project on her resume even though she wasn’t point on it. Arya said it was business and nothing personal.

After she was fired, my boss told me the bad candidate is being investigated by federal authorities for regulatory violations from her time at Arya’s company. The investigation started just when we were interviewing her, and Arya knew about it and didn’t tell me. The other manager is also being investigated for the same violations, which is how Arya got him to lie about the candidate. If the candidate had not left her job there, she would have been fired when word of the investigation got out. We had another candidate who worked for Arya, and Arya told me he was a mediocre employee who does the bare minimum. He just won two different prestigious industry awards. Arya also admitted to lying about him because she didn’t want him to leave. He still works at the same company as her.

I’m angry. She knowingly lied to me. I put stock in her opinion because of our relationship. I feel stupid and duped. I’m afraid making such a bad hire and passing up a good candidate will make me look bad and affect my career. My boss and her boss are upset about this debacle, and everyone knows something is up because the regulators came in when they found out the candidate worked here. They haven’t found anything yet but everyone is still nervous. The other manager who lied about the bad candidate has already been arrested and, based on what the bad candidate is accused of, she will likely be arrested soon also. (Arya cooperated with authorities, isn’t being investigated, and isn’t accused of doing anything against regulations.)

I don’t plan on talking to Arya again beyond being arms-length and professionally cool if I run into her at a conference and others are present. I’m not even sure if I can go to her boss because I don’t have any proof beyond her telling me verbally. Whether I knew her or not, the lie was egregious. Do I tell her boss? Do I confront her or leave it alone? She didn’t show any guilt or apologize to me.

DISCLAIMER: UNPOPULAR OPINION

I'm tired of the Linux community, they effectively discourage me of taking part in any discussion online

I'm currently making Windows-only soft, some game stuff, some legacy DirectX stuff you got it.

Everytime I go online, this shitty pattern happens, when I stumble upon a problem in project I don't know how to fix and I ask for help
These are responses
- HA, HA, WINDOWS BAD, HA, HA, GET REAL SYSTEM
- In Linux, we can do X too. I mean it has 4x less functionality and way shittier UX and is even harder to implement but it can probably work on too Linux, so it's better, yes, just move to Linux
- btw you didn't like Linux before? Try this distro man, it's better <links random distro>

Is there anything valuable in the Linux community? I feel like these people don't like Linux anyway, they just hate Windows. Every opinion, tip is always opinion based. Anyone who works on internals knows how much better and how well thought is Windows kernel compared to Linux kernel. Also, if someone unironically uses Linux distro on desktop PC then he's a masochist because desktop Linux is dieing. So many distros ceased work only this year.

Is it a good tool for servers and docker containers? I don't have my head stuck up my ass to admit that yes, it's much better than Windows here.

This community got me stressed right now, I fear that when I go to bathroom or open my microwave there's gonna be a Linux distro recommendation there

😠😡😠😴

Customer: (calls emergency hotline) We have a really bad bug!
Rep: What seams to be the issue?
Customer: I need to talk to Sam, he knows what to do, tell him it's urgent.
Rep: can I tell Sam what the issue is?
Customer: Well, Sam built a newsletter program but I don't have a way to import mass amounts of emails addresses.
Rep: That sounds like a feature, not a problem.
Customer: why wouldn't it do that? Would you build a car without a steering wheel?
Rep: I am not sure that's relevant to the problem.
Customer: what do you mean?
Rep: I would say it is more like, "would you build a car without a pair of jet skis attached to the back." And we would respond with, "we would be happy to add Jet Skis, but it's going to cost you additional money."
Customer: So, how are we going to fix this bug in YOUR software?
Rep: :/

Tl;dr porn is ruining my life.

Today I had a meeting with the project leader and the CTO. They had bad news, which did not come as a surprise.

In short, they said I did not pass the expectations they had, and unfortunately need to find somewhere else to work.

This is my third time being told to find somewhere else to work, and I really can't describe how it feels. I was even told that I maybe I should reconsider my future as a developer, and kids can do programming better than I can do.

It's really difficult when all you've done in the last year is to learn and improve your current skills.

I have good grades, a unique experience, built lots of unique projects, and a GitHub portfolio with high activity. The apps I've built are used by many customers today. I also have a blog with 600 k views where I share dev tips.

The thing with this work if I'm going, to be honest, is that they expected someone with senior experience, and unfortunately, I don't have that thus it takes many years to build it. So I started here with almost scratch experience of the things they needed.

On the other hand, it feels like a relief in that I can finally focus on my personal business. And maybe this wasn't the right place to work, maybe it requires a couple of jobs until I find the right place.

Despite the bumpy ride, and what such people tell you, I'm not going to give up.

10 years ago, my school teacher told me I was going to be a carpenter (nothing against that) but I manage to get an MSc degree in the engineering field.

There's a lot of shit going into your head when you receive such message like "What if they are true, what if I can't handle programming, what if I'll never be anything etc".

I'm not giving up, this is just a great story every successful person has.

What my number one problem is, and I will f*** win is porn addiction. Get rid of that, and the future is bright.

Sorry for mixing so many things here.

!dev at all

Was chilling with my t mobile rep trying to get some issues resolved regarding what Verizon's bitchass was trying to do after i left their shitty company.

While i was there and my dude was working his magic i noticed this smoking chick walking around the store waiting for someone to help her out. So being that everyone was busy and sorta scared of talking to her( i can sense that shit) i told my boy to go and pick her as his customer, to be flirty and cool and shit.

My poor dude was all like "nah man I dunno how to talk to girls...."

I was telling him "bro, you ain't bad looking, just go, introduce yo ass and tell her that you'll take care of her in a min!"

"But i get all anxious and shit"

"Nah man, just talk to her like you did to me when we first met, she is just a customer, i aint telling you to ask her out on a date, just i dunno practice talking to girls! No harm with that! Specially this one b look at them leeeeeeegs!"

Now, why did I care? The reason is that he mentioned to me after seeing my wife (total babe) that he pictures me as a player. Which I was but that is beyond the point. And he said that he had always had trouble talking to girls.

So i told him what to do, said to be calm and confident. Ninja is an alpha salesman, and great with t mobile services, so he has that confidence, told him to exude that shit as if he was talking to a guy.

Homeboy got ballsy, drank 5 gallons of man the fuck up and went and did what I did. Then she went ahead and stand next to us, and i put on the good words for my dude "ah you got the best rep right here! G boy is bomb with everything!!" She was laughing saying that she hopes that he can help her with her phone.

"Don't worry, i got you, its just a small thing and if you want i'll show you what to do for future occasions"

"Oh so you don't want me to come back if it happens?"

"Haha you can come back any time as long as I am the one helping you out"

DAAAAAAAAAAAMN son!!

"Ok, but only if its you"

Daaaaaaaaaamn

Went better than expected. The dude needs more confidence, he aint bad looking at all and don't want him missing out on some of the babes we got walking around town.

Lord knows I had my fun with them.

Had 2 days of vacation. Theoretically (plus weekend, plus 2 days) 6 days.

Worked today… At Saturday.

Some administrators forgot to properly check bandwidth limitations....

*rolls eyes*

We had a major version upgrade of some server software at Monday.

Guess why I got called...

Of course it MUST be the software upgrade.

It couldn't be the new hardware that was setup 2 weeks ago and on which a lot of "important" VMs were migrated.

*eyes roll inside till only white is visible*

The even more annoying thing is that it wasn't that hard to figure out.

Looking at monitoring, we had spikes on 20 Gbit/s (roughly 2.x Gigabyte/sec - Ethernet) connection of some server at roughly 1.9 plus Gigabyte/sec.

IO latency spikes that made the graph look like a heartbeat EKG with severe tachycardia...

*additionally to white eyes starts cursing in reverse latin*

Incompetent admin answer: Booboo that can only be your fault - the developers must investigate.

Me (just a tad more polite): Meep Meep mother fucker, get your shit together. If the software would eat that much, the network would be a niece chunk of charcoal. Plus the time (sending instead of links to monitoring pictures… guess the lazy fucktard who's brain is a vacuum didn't even bother to check it)...

NOTICE SOMETHING?!

Incompetent admin: It starts at the same time. Always.

After wasting roughly another hour of time discussing with him, I just hanged up the video call.

Called someone I knew from the admin department and turns out that - drumrolls please - the incompetent admin was someone who got recruited 3 months ago…

*turning into antichrist*

I then had a not so polite discussion about how the only competent people could take days off (all except incompetent admin were on vacation) and the seemingly incompetent fresh recruit - who by the way NEVER mentioned this - was the only one left of the admin department. Which would be bad alone, but no - he even got the 24/7 emergency support role for the whole weekend.

Sometimes this company and HR especially notoriously drive me insane...

Guess next week there will be some HR barbecue.

But yeah. After a lot of raging around we nailed it down to the traffic of backups and could fix it.

Roughly 4 hours of analysis, communication, raging and hatred.

Just one hour implementing shit.

*goozfraba*

Hey guys,

this rant will be long again. I'm sorry for any grammar errors or something like that, english isn't my native language. Furthermore I'm actually very sad and not in a good mood.

Why? What happened? Some of you may already know - I'm doing my apprenticeship / education in a smal company.
There I'm learning a lot, I'm developing awesome features directly for the clients, experience of which other in my age (I'm only 19 years old) can only dream.
Working in such a small company is very exhausting, but I love my job, I love programming. I turned my hobby into a profession and I'm very proud of it.
But then there are moments like the last time, when I had to present something for a client - the first presentation was good, the last was a disaster, nothing worked - but I learned from it.

But this time everything is worse than bad - I mean really, really worse than bad.

I've worked the whole week on a cool new feature - I've done everything that it works yesterday, that everything gets done before the deadline of yesterday.

To achieve this I've coded thursday till 10pm ! At home! Friday I tested the whole day everything to ensure that everything is working properly. I fixed several bugs and then at the end of the day everything seems to be working. Even my boss said that it looks good and he thinks that the rollout to all clients will become good and without any issues.

But unfortunately deceived.

Yesterday evening I wrote a long mail to my boss - with a "manual". He was very proud and said that he is confident that everything will work fine. He trusts me completly.

Then, this morning I received a mail from him - nothing works anymore - all clients have issues, everything stays blank - because I've forgotten to ensure that the new feature (a plugin) and its functionality is supported by the device (needs a installation).
First - I was very shoked - but in the same moment I thought - one moment - you've written an if statement, if the plugin is installed - so why the fuck should it broken everything?!
I looked instant to the code via git. This has to be a very bad joke from my boss I thought. But then I saw the fucking bug - I've written:
if(plugin) { // do shit }
but it has to be if(typeof plugin !== 'undefined')

I fucked up everything - due to this fucking mistake. This little piece of shit I've forgotten on one single line fucked up everything. I'm sorry for this mode of expression but I thought - no this can not be true - it must be a bad bad nightmare.
I've tested this so long, every scenario, everything. Worked till the night so it gets finished. No one, no one from my classmates would ever think of working so long. But I did it, because I love my job. I've implemented a check to ensure that the plugin is installed - but implemented it wrong - exactly this line which caused all the errors should prevent exactly this - what an irony of fate.

I've instantly called my boss and apologized for this mistake. The mistake can't be undone. My boss now has to go to all clients to fix it. This will be very expensive...

Oh my goodnes, I just cried.
I'm only working about half a year in this company - they trust me so much - but I'm not perfect - I make mistakes - like everyone else. This time my boss didn't looked over my code, didn't review it, because he trusted me completly - now this happens. I think this destroyed the trust :( I'm so sad.
He only said that we will talk on monday, how we can prevent such things in the feature..
Oh guys, I don't know - I've fucked up everything, we were so overhelmed that everything would work :(
Now I'm the looser who fucked up - because not testing enough - even when I tested it for days, even at home - worked at home - till the night - for free, for nothing - voluntary.

This is the thanks for that.
Thousand good things - but one mistake and you're the little asshole. You - a 19 year old guy, which works since 6 months in a company. A boss which trusts you and don't look over your code. One line which should prevent crashing, crashed everything.

I'm sorry that this rant is so long, I just need to talk to you guys because I'm so sad. Again. This has happend to frequently lately.

They've literally left me with nothing to do. I'm doing nothing. I can't be happy doing nothing.

To illustrate the chaos: Everyone on the team was trying to figure out some defect. No one knows what is going on in the code. It's unlike anything I've ever seen.

I found an API call with a misspelled endpoint. It was wrong since the code was written two months before. There's no way it ever worked. Obviously no one tested the code because they would have immediately seen that the call returned a 404 every time.

I fixed it. That was my only PR in about a month. It was literally one character.

The next week that PR got reverted. Apparently the app works better if the API call fails. No one said what goes wrong if the request is made, just that it "causes problems."

That's how bad it is. No one knows why anything does or doesn't work. People write code that doesn't work, never test it, and the application works better in some unspecified way if that code never gets executed.

The last straw for me was when an architect told us that if we want to improve our skills we need to learn how to read and debug stuff like this.

1) Not to be immodest, but I'm good at figuring out bad code.
2) Just because I can doesn't mean I want to do it all day instead of actually developing software
3) He trivialized the really important skill, not making a mess like this in the first place. If his idea of skill is to sling crap without tests at the wall and then debug it, how is he an architect?

I tried really hard but I can't keep a good attitude. I don't want to become toxic, but why would I consider working that way? I try my best to be good at this. Writing decent code means a lot to me. It should mean a lot to them. Their code is costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe millions.

I can't write good code and add value if all I do is debug bad code.

So I'm out. I'm going to another project. Have a nice life.

Avoiding bad companies starts at the job interview. Remember that the job interview is not only for them to evaluate you, but also the other way around. Make sure to ask a lot of questions. What are they doing, how are they working, what help is there if you get stuck, are they doing code reviews, what will you be doing etc.

The job interview is the opportunity for you to get an inside view of the company. Don’t just accept any job because you are desperate. Luckily qualifies devs are much needed in companies.

Also, make sure to go to multiple job interviews so you can see the differences. I think it can be difficult to avoid in the beginning, but as you get more experience, you can sort of tell whether it’s a good or bad company at the job interview.

Though sometimes you are just unlucky. In that situation: leave. It is so good damn easy to get a job in this field.

My preciousssss!!

Fucking assholes! Just spent 3h debugging for bugs that weren't there.. Our client insisted we must rollback the whole update, because gui was broken.. after analysing data & testing I figure out that there must be something 'wrong' as there was no data to copy from in the first place...so there should be no bug..
Aaand here goes the best part: they didn't want to point out missing data bug, they just wanted one restriction to be removed, because it 'broke GUI', to allow for empty value on save... WTF?! How can you insist that gui is buggy & that you don't want an update, if you just want something to be optional?! Which was done immediately, one change in one js file?! Dafaaaaaq?!

Kids, English is important!! Otherwise you end up debugging ghosts for 3+ hours withou a cigarette...and waking up a coworker with bad news of rollback at half to midnight... Aaaaaaaargh!!!
сука блять 

If you are sick...

STAY THE FUCK HOME!

It has nothing to do with how YOU are feeling. It’s about RESPECT for those around you.

Especially if you work in an open office. Coming into an open office when sick is like coughing right on someone’s face repeatedly, it shows that same level of (lack of) respect.

Almost every company I have seen fucks this up so bad. It’s the same shit every year....

People are afraid to take days and stay home. They go in and make everyone sick, then everyone is taking days off and we are “short” on people. Then the incompetent CEO is scratching his head as to why this toxic work environment could produce such a toxic result.

And one more fucking thing.

If you got a cold/flu on Monday and your in the office on Wednesday because you are “feeling a bit better” then your a fucking idiot. At day 3 you are just starting to expel germs while still being highly contagious.

If you come into an open office while sick then I would say...

“Smarten the fuck up! And start showing some respect for the people you work with!”

If you have created (or are creating) a culture that encourages this then I would say...

“Fuck you! You should be fucking smarter than that.”

————

If your still sitting there thinking something like...

“Well I have to attend the meeting” or some other shit. Then let me add this to the pile.

Not everyone has had a rosy fucking life.

You may be working next to someone who has a lowered immune system due to past medical problems. What may be a week of sickness for you could end up being a month in the hospital for them.

You may be working next to a person who has a family member dying of cancer. If you make them sick then they can’t visit that family member (colds can kill cancer patients) and you may be stopping that person from seeing their loved ones one last time before they die.

Don’t be a fucking asshole.

STAY THE FUCK HOME!

Fuck Apple sideways! (Wait for it, the original part begins)

HOW can a company that keeps on boasting about UX, to the point that last WDC they took more time speaking about a fucking kaleidoscope animation for their watch then about the whole changes to their MacBook's hardware, even consider putting that turd of a remote on market.

If you have an Apple Store in reach, I invite you to get up, flush, and go there. Try that atrocity that is the AppleTV, and laugh at how incredibly bad it is. Then do your best to refrain from burning the place down in your inevitable rage, that might cause you legal issues.

The previous AppleTV was fine, it was practically useless, but usable. But for some reason they decided a touchpad with low precision and no gestures was a good idea to put on a remote to a thing that will, due to its target audience, most likely be plugged into a fancy TV that has a 300ms lag due to fancy image processing. That thing gives no feedback, appart from visual, has so little precision that in a movie, the smallest step I've achieved was 5 fucking minutes, while being really fucking careful not to spoil the movie.

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 **

I was at a company for almost 5 years (my first job too). Got fired a few months ago by my mentor/the lead dev who was there for about 3 - 3 1/2 years of my time there. He left for better opportunities, he knew the company was pretty shitty to work for. He comes back (why???) and fires me about 1-2 months after his return.
Reason why, I'm unhealthy for the company and the company is unhealthy for me (not because I'm a bad dev, cool I guess). I don't disagree (a lot happened while he was gone, but he doesn't really know what happened) but this happens after I have a "discussion" with him about how I don't know how to prioritize my work anymore with new policies regarding billables and pms and management pushing me in multiple directions in regards to what I should be working on. (There's more to this but I'm trying to finish this rant eventually.)
I'm not surprised but I'm pissed at the company for never really improving and I'm pissed at him for drinking the kool-aid so to speak.
I want this company to fail. I'm surprised it hasn't. The place was a shit show when it came to the Dev department and my old mentors return didn't help much either.
I should get over it and move on but this place was like a toxic relationship I couldn't bring myself to leave (as much as I wanted to leave and knew I should). And there's so much to unpack with this place.
I'm hoping dev rant can be a good place to unpack the shit I dealt with there over the years so I don't burden my friends and family with my thoughts.
So yeah, hey ya'll and welcome to my rant(s).

Background: I work at a small startup company in Canada who makes simple FAQ Chatbots for companies who waste a lot of resources on the same Customer questions over and over.

So we were making this one bot for a provincial government who wanted a bot for students to be able to ask questions regarding the upcoming election and how to vote, etc. and get the answers they were looking for. Since it's Canada and a government bot, it had to be in both English AND French.

These bots take some time to train (we use Wit.ai mostly) in english so it was a challenge to train it in French. However I am bilingual (not very strong in French but can manage) so I did my best and the bot didn't turn out too bad. (English was great, French was, Id say, "not terrible").

HOWEVER, now that it is done (The company loved it, even with the less than perfect french version). The sales team (who know nothing of the process of making/training these bots) is now telling companies we support "SEVERAL LANGUAGES" and are currently about to sign a contract with a company overseas that wants a bot done IN JAPANESE!!.

To make matters worse.. when we (the dev team) brought up that it would be EXTREMELY difficult to do this, their answer was ... "You did it in French so you can just do the same but in Japanese"

HOW DOES THAT EVEN MAKE SENSE.

Oh well, Rosetta Stone here I come, I guess it's time to learn Japanese.

- Recruiters are as bad as car sellers
- They are not your friends
- They're not on your side
- The less you ask for a job the more they're gonna get
- Keep your cards on your side
- Don't tell them how much you make (they love to know that)
- Set a salary expectation for yourself and push it
- Expect a few-months long job hunting
- If you know you deserve the salary you are asking for keep pushing.
- Be patient.
- Don't give your 2 weeks notice until you signed already for the other company
- Medical insurance makes a big dent on salary
- Keep applying for jobs even if you are advanced in a hiring process.

So far this is what I've been learning through my current job seeking experience.

I hate job recruiters, if you can, avoid them at all costs

So my client wants to stick with their current hosting provider (Bell) because the company is "big" and "won't go anywhere anytime soon." I just said, well okay it can't be that bad. Bell charges about 10x more and gives you about 10x less compared to other options, but it's not my money so whatever. Well, Bell has the absolute worst customer service. They have an online support form where I can type in my questions and they will call me within a day to help me. They called me during work hours and I missed the call, so they sent me an email to let me know I missed the call and gave me a number to call. I called and I might as well have called my dog because the support didn't even know what a .htaccess file is. I emailed them back and asked if they could forward my email to someone in the hosting department that could help (because the phone support I got was shit). I got a reply saying they "can't"... yup, they used the word "can't", they can't forward the email and that I would have to call. Is everyone at Bell a fucking dick chugging brainless pile of moldy-ass shit biscuits!? YOU CAN"T SEND AN EMAIL? Turns out they do have a dedicated hosting support email, let's hope the email I send ends up in front of someone at Bell who at least has a slight clue how to use a keyboard.

I recently ranted so much about languages but here it goes

JS we need to talk. BECAUSE YOU GOT FAT AND UGLY STUPID BITCH! Dumb piece of bloatware. What even is your problem? Depending on a library for strpad and then blow up like Steve jobs ego. Bastardized fuckfest. I used to like you bro and then you screw me over!
It's like you fuck my wife while I try to fix your car. Why can't you even be usefully on your own anymore? I'd be richer than bill gates if I get a dollar for every damn framework people pull from their asses. Are you writing this fuck while shitting so you can compare colors of your outcome?

Normalize the fucking base, don't add to the bukkakke! bitch is drowning already. Why is everyone jerking of to react and angular? When have YOU written something in vanilla the last time? Why even bother? Remove the core and hardcore every damn framework into the browsers. Guess that saves you 200kb. Oh wait I forgot that's about unminified jQuery.

Now I need to load about 2GB of dependencies, some creating code that puts code in my code to load code out of my code which was generated out of something that remotely resembles JS so every browser is able to execute my fancy shit. But hey, it's fast. And of course there are the fanboys. You are worse than apple fags. You sample your own jizz with your friends in a wine glass. there was a Time it was bad practice to mix logic and view. Now you made it mandatory. "Browser does the rendering" ofc you imbecile pile of fuck don't show me a damn preloader for 1 picture and 20 lines of text. Who fucked your brain so hard?

So react seems to be the cool kid now, then I tell someone I know angular it's like showing up in a pikachu onsie to a formal dinner with the queen.

I used to love you girl. I loved how we could dirty things together. Now you are like a pig. Please loose weight bby the sight of you disgusts me nowadays

I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.

I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.

We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.

The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.

We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.

It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.

Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.

But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.

I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.

But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.

Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.

They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.

I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this

Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.

I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.

But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.

... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.

Do you guys know about the Windows 10 operating system?

I highly recommend it.

It is so easy to get done whatever you want in just a few clicks or.. several.

It has a great web browser called Internet Explorer that comes pre-installed with it. If you love animations, it will even sometimes show you that beautiful loading animation for as long as it wants. If you have a habit of wasting time on the Internet, it will intelligently slow things down and become unresponsive to help you get rid of that bad habit. It's just that great.

It has a lot of great features pre-enabled for you like sending data to Microsoft to improve your experience on a personal level. The operating system cares so much about you, unlike other operating systems that represent a flightless bird.

It's so smart, it even keeps you from doing stupid things like customizing the operating system. It makes sure that you live in the given box and don't break anything. So caring, right?!

At random times, it shows you a blue screen and a sad face to remind you that life can be sad at times but you gotta keep going. It is profound.

It comes with great useless software that you absolutely don't even need! How great is that!

I use Windows 10 and I recommend that you do too.

Have a good day..

May i ask for help dear fellow devRanters?

@aureliagbrl suffered a deep depression and pressure from her family, the cause is exceptionally simple yet very crucial; so here's the story :

Every week, in friday after the last class she have to go home to fulfill her family wish to gather around and will come back to her dorm in Sunday. her home is more than 1.5 hour from University. recently one class in Wednesday moved out to Saturday Noon for some reason this cause her to go home in Saturday afternoon, yet her family doesn't care if it means she have to wake up 3am in Monday, to get back alone to catch up with class. her family just want to gather around longer, that's it, no exception. According to her this is so frustrating and exhausting. so the condition now is Tomorrow Morning (Monday) there will be a Live Coding Exam. she isn't prepared, her only wish was to get back on Sunday instead of Monday to Study. her family discard her wish entirely. this make her so deeply depressed and i can't even talk to her, she starting to mumbling about quitting college, and etc, etc.

We all know how bad it is to burnt out right ? and we want our fellow developers get out from it and a good shape. My wish is simple from you guys, i wish you can mention her in comment and cheer her up.

Thank You

here is her cheerful photo.

LONG RANT ALERT, no TL;DR

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

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

*** EMAIL NOTIFICATION ***
* clicks *

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

My first reaction:

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

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

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

I mean seriously. A bit of clarity for you:

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

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

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

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

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

TLDR: SAP sucks. Don't ever work with it. Run away from it. Delete it from your memory. If your company works with it, quit. It's the best you can do.

A couple of weeks ago the group rant was "Story of your best/worst career choice" and I talked about the contract I signed. Even tho that is still true and I still feel like that, I think I got a new worst choice:

WORKING WITH SAP.

When I got this job I knew it would be SAP, but I didn't know what SAP was. I just thought "it's programming, how bad can it be?" OH BOII.

If only I would have done some FUCKING RESEARCH I would know this would be a mistake!!

And I knew I didn't want to work with this, I knew I wanted to be a web developer, but I STILL ACCEPTED THE JOB OH MAN WHAT WAS I THINKING I'M SO MAD.

Were I live we all have the same mentality when looking for the first job, which is to just accept anything you can get, because it's your first job, you need to work and to get experience, even if it's a bad job or if you know you won't like it. When my intership was ending, I told my parents I didn't want to stay there because they treat their employes like shit, and the salary is terrible. They told me to still accept it if they offered because I still need a job (this one was web tho) and experience.

So, of course, since I was looking for my first job, was told this my entire live, always thought like that and they were the first to contact me, I accepted it.

BIGGEST FUCKING MISTAKE!! DON'T THINK LIKE THIS!! AND STOP TELLING KIDS THIS!! IT'S NOT A GOOD MENTALITY!!!

ALSO DON'T WORK WITH SAP! EVER!

Introduced a ‘new’ logging framework for our web site. Web team is testing the integration and I get an email saying the logging wasn’t working. Instead of sending me how she is searching the logs, she sends me a screen shot of the code (which is ass-backwards of how I documented the logging library, but that’s another rant). OK, she wrote 5 lines of code that should be one line, but OK, the error still should have logged fine. I search the logs, and sure enough, there they are. Errors logged just as they should.
So I email back (with screenshot of the search query and results) asking how she searched for the errors.
Hour later she responds ..”I don’t know.”
That’s it.
WTF do you mean “I don’t know”?…WTF…you are a –bleep-ing developer too! This is not the first –bleep-ing splunk query you’ve written!
OK..I’m calm..feeling better. Wouldn’t be so bad if she emailed just me with the question (I’m not a splunk query expert either, we can figure it out together), but she was sure to cc 3 of the PMs involved in the integration, my boss, and other team members to make it sound like the problem was my code.

OK, so we had a session in which a so called Company (Some ecorise.in ) came to give Internship-Training-Program. Ok, he said it'll take 5-8 minutes, and then it took fucking 75 minutes for the session to end. Horrible blunders he made.
1) Did not tell about the company and important stuff for the first 50-60 minutes. Instead, was just focusing on why you should do an Internship, what is it's benefit, what does a company want from you. And why this Internship-Training Program is important... I mean seriously? - A training for Internship. 🤦🏻‍♂️
2) Said all the Web Developers can be Mobile App Developers with the help of just HTML and CSS.... Wow, so XAML/XML is shit now, and we will call APIs with the help of CSS rules. 🤦🏻‍♂️

OK, still I tolerated all that, then was the part when he said how much will be the stipend. It was fucking nothing, they said. That for first three months they will not give a single penny as it is training, and then IF the performance is good, then they will give stipend, and then Placement assurance. OK, that's good that they are assuring placement, but wait. Package of 2LPA INR... WTF Man, it's like $3107.28 for a whole Year.

OK, that too tolerated, then was the part when they said that they'll take the written test, I was like OK, let's see. We moved to a classroom, it went over-the-full capacity, so we moved back to the seminar hall. (Arrrrgggghhhhhhhhh), still tolerable. But then that guy realised that there were no question papers to take the test, then sent someone to get the print outs. Wasted 15+ minutes, I was burning inside.

In the whole seminar hall, I stood up and said, that when you knew there will be a test, why didn't you pre-prepared the sheets beforehand, he was like, that we didn't knew the count. But his tone was. like he got offended and Get-Lost-ed me out of the seminar.

Then even I said:
🙏🏻 - Nahi chaahiye aapki Company
(🙏🏻 - I don't want your Company).
And moved out.

But my point, I am a third Year College Student, and this Company came for our benefit, but I did so (and I am not sorry), so that's pretty obvious that the Company guy will talk (bitch) to the teachers about me, and tomorrow will be a bad day for me... But isn't it wrong on the side of the company also?
I mean, there was an attendance sheet passed in the beginning of the session, had he taken count from that and got the sheets printed, (He had almost an hour for that).
Secondly, when they knew that the count of students is more than expected, then why didn't they check for the classroom that whether the class can accommodate so many students or not. If not then something would have been planned accordingly... But no, the Guy (I guess, that small Company's Owner) got offended that a Student back-chat-ted a CEO of a so-called company, and so he just had to "Get-Lost" me. Checked the website of his Company, they have hardly done 3 Static Websites... I mean, WoW, I have done at-least 10X the work of the Company, alone!

I don't know, I feel happy that I kept my point, but I feel sad because I generally don't do this kind of thing (may be my tone was also wrong, I had other issues also, may be because of them and they all combined and this happened). I feel scared too, that I don't know what the Company guy will say to my teachers and what action will they take against me...

Because I know, none of my friends will stand with me when I go down, it's all fake here, everyone can just give sympathy, but nothing else.

I don't know why I am posting this here, and if you have read this till here, thank you. I just wanted to share my heart out... :-)

A close friend of mine is in his third term in university studying software engineering, asked me how did I land my first job so quickly after graduation.

His question made me stop for few seconds and ask myself, how would my life would've been without Coursera , Udacity, codeacademy and css-tricks.

I literally spent 2 years wasting time in uni then I discovered these sites and started learning while studying just enough to pass subjects that really has no benefit for the future whatsoever.

Even with subjects like data structures and AI, which should be interesting, it was 40℅ theory and the practical part was to complement the theory part, it was never for real world examples.

Kinda feel bad for my friend because he'll end up feeling the same frustration I went through at university.

Even now a year after graduating I feel that the only benefit of my degree was legal.

When would this silly system change ? If university courses can be specialized like online courses wouldn't it bring better talent to the market? And why governments don't take action towards this?

HR: you didn’t write in your job experience that you know kubernetes and we need people who know it.

Me: I wrote k8s

HR: What’s that ?

…
Do you know docker ?
Do you know what docker is ?
Do you use cloud ?
Can you read and write ?
Are you able to open the door with your left hand ?
What if we cut your hands and tell you to open the doors, how would you do that ?
What are your salary expectations?
Do you have questions, I can’t answer but I can forward them. Ask question, ask question, questions are important.
What is minimal wage you will agree to work ?
You wrote you worked with xy, are you comfortable with yx ?
We have fast hiring process consisting of 10 interviews, 5 coding assessments, 3 talks and finally you will meet the team and they will decide if you fit.
Why do you want to work … here ?
Why you want to work ?
How dare you want to work ?
Just find work, we’re happy you’re looking for it.
What databases you know ?
Do you know nosql databases ?
We need someone that knows a,b,c,d….x,y,z cause we use 1,2,3 … 9,10.
We need someone more senior in this technology cause we have more junior people.
Are you comfortable with big data?
We need someone who spoke on conference cause that’s how we validate that people can speak.
I see you haven’t used xy for a while ( have 5 years experience with xy ) we need someone who is more expert in xy.
How many years of experience you have in yz ??? (you need to guess how many we want cause we look for a fortune teller )

Not much changed in job hunting, taking my time to prepare to leetcode questions about graphs to get a job in which they will tell me to move button 1px to the left.

Need to make up some stories about how I was bad person at work and my boss was angry and told me to be better so I become better and we lived happy ever after. How I argued with coworkers but now I’m not arguing cause I can explain. How bad I was before and how good I am now. Cause you need to be a better person if you want to work in our happy creepy company.

Because you know… the tree of DOOM… The DOMs day.

how to become a true scum master:

- formulate jira tasks for your inferiors as vague as possible, best they don't make any sense

- before sprint start, ask the subhuman being to estimate storypoints, and if they say they can't really tell with this description and choose the highest estimate, say "okay, let's estimate it to one sprint length", so they can actually work on it within one sprint (which makes total sense)

- if the scum dares to question the content of the ticket and begs for more details, be like teflon and give no useful answer at all. if they continue asking for a meeting to discuss the ticket, tell them to have a meeting with a coworker about it (who also has no clue). don't be available for them because you have more important stuff to do.

- bully them during daily standups that they didn't create clear subtasks from this task and criticize them because you have no idea what they are doing. tell them they are having performance issues and suspect them to sit on their lazy asses all day.

- criticize the team in general for bad performance, bad item tracking and never say something nice, to make sure everybody loses even the last bit of intrinsic motivation for the project.

stay tuned to learn how to make yourself a skull throne out of those filthy dev smartasses ^.^

The worst boss and human being so far, still wondering how he keeps the company afloat. This was my first longterm developer job almost a decade ago and I was a student at that time. The application was an outlook plug in for a document management system.

Scene 1:
Boss: The processing is too slow. Make it faster.
Me: After analysis and profiling I can prove that the core (developed in VB6 by a physicist and autoconverted to VB.NET) is the bottleneck.
Boss: I don't care. Make it faster and don't touch the core.

Scene 2:
Boss: I want the app to behave in that way.
Me: This is not what we specified previously. Look here. Nonetheless, I would have to rewrite half of the plugin. Mind that it is an outlook plug in and we are restricted by outlook. If you want that, it would take XX days and we do not have enough time until release.
Boss: I don't care. Do it. And the deadline stays as it is.
Boss 2 weeks later: I don't like it.

Scene 3:
Me: To release in time I need more resources. I need at least one tester and another developer would be a huge plus. Also, I need a second PC for testing.
Boss: No.
2 weeks later:
Boss: why does it not work properly in outlook 2010? Didn't you test it?
Me: I could not. I have only outlook 2007. I asked for more resources and did not get them.
Boss: it's your fault. Bad work.

Scene 4:
*Me having failed multiple exams, stress at work, started to drink*
Boss: Don't you like working here?
Me: ...

Finale:
*Me getting written sick with severe depression*
Boss: fires me.
Me: Loses flat. Quits uni. Unemployed for 6 Months, one rejection after another (boss was phoned, that's sure). Moving back to parents. Sues boss. Gets money.

I still hate him and wish him the most painful experiences in life. Such people belong behind bars. But the justice isn't always served. One has to move forward and improve himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never a single word from the community about me.

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

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

iPhones are ridiculously picky when it comes to finding a mate- um charger. And knowing why doesn't really make it any easier to understand why. If anything it baffles me more.

So, let's start with appliances that are not phones. Think Bluetooth headsets, keyboards, earbuds, whatever. Those are simple devices. They see 5V on the VCC line and 0V on ground, and they will charge at whatever current they are meant to. Usually it will not exceed 200mA, and the USB 2.0 spec allows for up to 500mA from any USB outlet. So that's perfectly reasonable to be done without any fuss whatsoever.

Phones on the other hand are smarter.. some might say too smart for their own good. In this case I will only cover Android phones, because while they are smarter than they perhaps should be, they are still reasonable.

So if you connect an Android phone to the same 5V VCC and 0V ground, while leaving the data lines floating, the phone will charge at 500mA. This is exactly to be within USB 2.0 spec, as mentioned earlier. Without the data lines, the phone has no way to tell whether it *can* pull more, without *actually* trying to pull more (potentially frying a charger that's not rated for it). Now in an Android phone you can tell it to pull more, in a fairly straightforward way. You just short the data lines together, and the phone will recognize this as a simple charger that it can pull 1A from. Note that shorting data lines is not a bad thing, we do it all the time. It is just another term for making a connection between 2 points. Android does this right. Also note that shorted data lines cannot be used to send data. They are inherently pulled to the same voltage level, probably 0V but not sure.

And then the iPhones come in, Thinking Different. The iPhones require you to pull the data lines to some very specific voltage levels. And of course it's terribly documented because iSheep just trying to use their Apple original white nugget charger overseas and shit like that. I do not know which voltage levels they are (please let me know!), but it is certainly not a regular short. Now you connect the iPhone to, say, a laptop or something to charge. An Android phone would just charge while keeping data transmission disabled (because they can be left floating or shorted). This is for security reasons mostly, preventing e.g. a malicious computer from messing with it. An iPhone needs to be unlocked to just charge the damn thing. I'm fairly sure that that's because the data lines need to be pulled up, which could in theory enable a malicious computer to still get some information in or out of it. USB data transmission works at at least 200mV difference between the data lines. It could be more than that. So you need to unlock it.

Apple, how about you just short your goddamn data lines too like everyone else? And while you're at it, get rid of this Lightning connector. I get it, micro USB was too hard for your users. I guess they are blind pigs after all. But USB-C solved all of that and more. The only difference I can think of is that the Lightning connector can be a single board with pads on either side on the connector, while in USB-C that could be at the socket end (socket being less common to be replaced). And at the end of the day, that really doesn't matter with all the other things that will break first.

Think Different. Think Retarded. Such tiny batteries and you can't even fucking charge them properly.

So Patanjali(aka Ramdev Baba trying to sell you even a fucking underwear as ayurvedic and locally made) released their chat application "Kimbho" and was taken down within 24 hours because of major security flaws.

Some obvious ironies I would like to point out here.

1. Coming up with a chat application with gaping security flaws at this stage when privacy related discussions are happening at every nook and corner, worst move ever.

2. There are elections in 2019 and 1 year would be the right amount of time to gather data on public and start targetting and influencing people. It shouldn't be so obvious and everyone knows which political party Patanjali leans towards.

3. You are promoting an app citing Make In India initiative. You are the biggest Indian based FMCG operating in India, courtesy exploiting nationalist sentiments. Whatever you aim of doing, at least invest a decent amount of money in hiring good developers and designers. If not anything get a content writer who will write you an original description of your app for as low as ₹1000.

4. Promoting a competitor of whatsapp on whatsapp is a brilliant move. Give that marketting fellow a big raise.

5. Replacing the phone icon with a shankh is not innovation. Also, everyone knows about spam farms in Bangladesh and many places in India. So boasting about 1.5 lakh downloads in less than an hour only speaks more about your ignorance and lack of technical knowledge.

6. If you really are promoting "swadeshi app", why are you offering logging in through facebook? I mean even a blind person can clearly see your agenda here.

7. Hike is a messaging app made in India and they are here since long and still it are nowhere near the usage of whatsapp. Selling shit in the name of Make in India is not cool and its high time Patanjali realises this. But then again, it is their only marketting strategy because how else can you sell something as gross as cow urine and that too people buying it voluntarily.

8. If this stunt was carried out to be in the news, well played. You are getting a good amount of publicity, but this time a bad publicity will do more harm than good. People are calling out your bluff and you will get to see the results.

Mr. Baba Ramdev, fraud karo, itna blatant mat karo. India ki public sentimental hai chutiya nahi.

Hey guys.
Arduino + Bluetooth + L293D + car Chacis and 4 DC motors.

Finaly finished my second bot/Drone.
Actually finished it yesterday but had lots of problems with hardware bugs (learned so fucking much in a day).
Tought I fucked two unos with bad soldering... No they are fine, just won't turn on in the circuit that was already working (was fine running the code).
Redone everything from scratch with a arduino uno, it's perfect now.

Funniest part is how I got my hands on a 50€ car kit for almost free... So some Chinese store sended this kit instead of some cheap stuff. Saved another arduino with the chip rack (that one that you can trade the atmega chip), I'll save it to program single chips. Plus a h bridge and lot lot more cool stuff.
Used only the Chacis.
Next: esp8266 and camera... And maby a gun? Would be cool

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank goodness I put on my adulting cap and had a talk with my project manager today. He's such a kind and understanding person, truly underestimated qualities.

I'm basically a sub-contractor; a freelance consultant who get jobs from another company (ie my PM) and I messed up the estimate for this project we're working on and I did so in a rather spectacular manner.

60-80 estimated hours are now in the 300:s... I've missed more deadlines in this project alone than I have done in all my career (+10 years) combined. It's bad. It's a complete clusterfuck.

Problem is because of this never-ending project I haven't been able to work on things I can debit since May and I didn't have those margins. I'm fucked financially and I've been so stressed out about that I've literally been loosing sleep over it, found myself ugly-crying in the middle of the night more than once, worrying about how the fuck I'm gonna get on.

In my mind it was a real thing that they wouldn't want to keep working with me after this. Even though the failures in this project isn't _only_ on me, I'm not one to make excuses for myself and I would completely understand if that had been the outcome.

But it wasn't.

Instead he just said he was sorry he wouldn't be able to get all my hours billed by the client (of course not; we've left an estimate and by at least Swedish business law you can't deviate from those simply because you made an incorrect estimation).

But he has no intentions of letting me go as a consultant and assured me there will be other jobs (planned since before this whole ordeal). He's even going to try and get some hours in for me in other projects, small things here and there so I can get some billable hours quickly to help me out.

He knows me and he knows this isn't who I am as a professional. I'm so relieved I could god damn cry.

I've promised to do the Mozilla rant about the whole meritocracy thing a few days ago.. well, this is that. Along with some other stuff along the way. Haven't ranted for a couple of days man, shit happened! But losing 6 days that could've been spent on finishing my power supply project.. to a stupid cold, it got a little bit on my nerves, so that's what I've been working on for the time being. Hopefully I'll be able to finish it up in a couple of days.

1. COCKtail party thingy

Turns out that there's this conference in Brussels in a couple of days about the whole Article 13 copyright stuff. I've been letting a mail to the MEP's about it mature on my systems for a while now.. well, maturing or procrastinating, you be the judge 😛
Now I'm glad that I waited with that though. It's mostly a developer-centric insight into how the directive would be a horrible idea.. think AI, issues with context recognition, Tom Scott's video on Penistone and Scunthorpe etc etc. But maybe I can include some stuff from the event afterwards.
Also, if you're coming to the conference too, do let me know! Little devRant meet while we're at it, it'd be fucking great! I'll try to remember to bring my Christmas ducks, they've got these cute little Santa hats 😋

(P.S.: about the whole COCKtail, I saw the email while drunk and during registration I had to choose an email address.. I figured, feminazis are doing such a great job at going out of their way to find offense in everything, I figured that I'd make their job a little bit easier by sending a COCK bomb in my registration mail address, in the hopes that it finds its way to one of them.. evil, I know XD)

2. The whole feminazi stuff at Mozilla

So Mozilla hates meritocracy now? I've been wanting to rant about the big bad meritocracy for a while now. Thank you Mozilla for giving me an incentive to actually do it!

Meritocracy, feminazis think it's bad because it's about power relationships and discrimination, right? But what if I told you that that is exactly what makes great software great. Good code, good merit, is what's welcomed in software development.. or at least it should be. Because it's a job of fucking knowledge, experience, and quality! Also, meritocracy is a great thing because nobody cares if you're a professional developer in a suit, getting paid to work on a piece of OSS, or a homegamer neonazi who's coding shit in their underwear while wanking to child porn.. nobody fucking cares. If your code, your merit, is good, contribute ahead! Super inclusive, yet apparently bad because bad code is excluded to ensure the health of the project.

So what is the alternative to the big bad meritocracy? Inclusion (or as it's looked like in practice, more like exclusion) based on gender/sex, political orientation, things like that. But not actual fucking merit, the ability to write good code. How the fuck is politics and gender going to be any good at all to an inherently meritocratic craft?! Oh but yeah, it's great for inclusion. It's like females in tech. Artificial growth is just a matter of growth numbers and the only folks who like it are fucking HR and wanketeering cunts, and feminazis. Merit, that's what matters!! And have you ever considered that females are generally not interested in technology? Or for that matter, where's our inclusion movement for men in healthcare?! Gender equality my ass.

That's just my two cents on it of course. Meritocracy shouldn't be abandoned in tech. And even if it's just a matter of calling it something else. How the fuck is it a good idea to not call a pot a fucking pot just because someone might take offense at it?! It's meritocracy, call it fucking meritocracy!!! And while we're at it, call a master a fucking master and a slave a fucking slave!

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...

Oh man. I have been waiting for this one. Gather round lil' chil'rens it's story time.

So. I was looking for a new project because my old one was wrapping up and that's what my company does. So I was offered some simulation type stuff. I was like "sure why not, I want to make a computer pretend it isn't a computer no more." Side note I should not be a psychiatrist.

So, prior to coming on to this job I felt stifled by my old job's process. This job was a smaller team so I thought the process would be a little smoother. But it turned out they had NO process. Like they had a bug tracking system and they held the meeting to add things to the system, but that was just fucking lip service to a process.

First of all, they used the local disk on the test box as their version control. and had no real scheme as to how they organized it. We had a CM tool but gods forbid they ever fucking use it. I would be handed problem reports and interface change requests, write a bug to track it, go into the code and about 75% of the time or more it had already been worked. However, there was no record of it being worked and I would have to fucking hunt that shit down in a terribly shitty baseline (standardize your gods damned indentation for fuck's sake) and half the time only found out it was done because when I finally located the piece of code that needed changing, the work was already done.

Then, on top of all that, they ask me what time I want to come in. I said 10am, they said okay. One day I roll in at 10 and my boss is mad. Because I missed a meeting. That was at 9. That I wasn't told about. He says I can keep coming in at 10am though (I asked and volunteered to help get him up to speed on the things I was working he said it wasn't necessary) so I did, but every time I missed a 9am meeting he would get pissed. I'm like PICK ONE!!! They move the meeting to 9:30am (which is not 10am).

This shit starts affecting my health negatively. Stress is apt to do that. It triggered an anxiety relapse that pushed me back in to therapy for the first time in 7 years. On top of that the air quality in the office is so bad that I am getting back to back sinus infections and I get put on heavy antibiotics that tear up my stomach along with the stress and new meds tearing up my stomach. So one day as I am laid out in pain, I call out sick. Two days in a row. (Such a heinous crime right.) Well I missed a test event, that I wasn't even the primary or secondary on.

So fast forward to the most pissed off I have ever been. I get called in to a meeting with my boss's boss. As it turns out, my coworkers are not satisfied by the work that I'm doing (funny because I thought I was doing pretty good given that my only direction was fix the interface change reports and problem reports. And there was no priority assigned to any of them).

And rather than tell me any of this, they go behind my back to the boss and boss's boss. They tell me I need to communicate (which I did) and ask for help when I need it (I never did). That I missed an important event (that I played no part in and gods forbid I be sick) and that it seemed like I didn't want to be there (I didn't but who WANTS to work a corporate job).

They put me on a performance improvement plan and I jumped to another project. I am much happier now. Old coworkers won't even say hi, not even those I was friendly with, but fuck them anyway.

TL;DR you suck, I suck and everybody sucks, deal with it....

------------------------------------

Let me let off some steam, since I've had enough of people hating on languages "just because"

Every language has it's drawbacks and quirks, BUT they have their strengths also. Saying "I hate {language}" is just you being and ignorant prick and probably your head is so far up your ass that you look like an ass hat. With that being said, every language is either good or bad depending on the developer writing in it. Let's give you an example:

If I ware to give you a brick and ask you to put a nail in a plank, can you do it? Yes, it will be easier if you do it with a hammer, but you have a brick, so hammer is out of the question. If you hit your thumb while doing it... well... sorry, but it is not the bricks fault - it is YOU!

JavaScript, yes it has a whole lot of problems, but it works, you can do a ton of stuff and does a good job at that, it is evolving through node and typescript (and others, just a personal pref), BUT if you used js when you ware debugging that jquery (1.0) plugin written in the free time of a 13 yo, who copy pasted a bunch from SO, well, it is not js' problem - deal with it. Same goes for PHP, i've been there where you had a single `index.php` with bazillion lines of code, did a bunch of eval and it was called MVC, but it also is evolving.. thing is all languages allow you to do some dumb stuff so YOU have to be responsible to not fuck it up (which you always DO btw, we all do). Difference is PHP/JS roll with it because the assumption is that you know what you are doing, which again - newsflash - you don't.

More or less I would blame that shit on businesses which decided to go with undergrads to save money instead of investing in their product, hell, I am in a major company that does not invest that doesn't care a whole lot about dev /tech stuff and now everybody's mother is an engineer - they care about money, because investors care about money (ROI) and because clean code does not pay the bills, but money does.

If we get all of the good practices and apply them to each language every one of them has it's place, that is why there is no "The Language", even if there was, we STILL ware going to fuck it up and probably it was going to be even worse than where we are now.

Study, improve, rinse and repeat... There are SENIORS and LEADS out there that are about 25-30 and have no fucking clue about the language, because they have stuck up their heads up the ass of frameworks and refuse to take a breath of clean air and consider something different than their dogmatic framework "way" of doing things.. That is the result you are seeing. Let me give you a fresh example to illustrate where I am at atm:

Le me works with ZendFramework 2.3-2.5 (why not, which is PHP5+ running on PHP7 [fancy, eh]), and little me writes a module for said project, and tries to contain it in its own space, i.e not touching anything outside of the folder of the module so it is SELF-CONTAINED (see, practices), during 2-3-4 iterations of code review, I've had to modify 4 different modules with `if (somthing === self::SOMETHING_TYPE)` as requested by my TL, which resulted in me not covering 3 use-cases after the changes and not adding a new event (the fw is event-driven, cuz.. reasons) so I have to use a bunch of ifs in the code, to check a config value and do shit. That is the way of I am asked to do things I hate what I've done and the fact that because of CR I have lost case-coverage, a week of work and the same TL will be on my ass on monday that things are now "perfect".

The biggest things is "we care about convention and code style"... right.... That is not because of the language, not because of me, not because of the framework - it is some dude's opinion that you hate, not the language.

New stuff are better, reinventing the wheel is also good, if it wasn't you would've had a few stone circular things on your car and things ware going to be like that - we need to try and try, that is the only way we actually learn shit.

Until things change in the trade, we will be on the same boat, complaining about the same shit over and over, you and me won't be alive probably but things will not change a bit.

We live in a place where state is considered good, god objects necessary (can you believe it, I've got kudos for using the term 'God Object'... yep, let that sink in). If you really hate something, please, oh god I beg you, show me how you will do it better and I will shake your hand and buy you a beer, but until then, please keep your ass-hurt fanboy opinion to your self, no one gives a shit about what you think, we will die and the world will not notice...

Should’ve posted this after it happened, but it requires a bit of background anyway.

There’s this guy that oversees our OpenStack environment. My team often make jokes and groan about him in private because he’s so overbearing. A few months back, he had to take us to our data center to show us our new racks, and he kept saying stupid stuff like “you break this and it costs me $30,000” as if he owns everything. He’s just... one of THOSE people. Always speaks in such a condescending way. We make jokes that he is our “best friend”.

Our company is shifting most of our products to the cloud in response to the coronavirus (trying to make it an opportunity for “innovation”). This has involved some structural and responsibility changes in our department, and long story short, I’m now heading the OpenStack environment alongside other projects.

This means going through grueling 1-on-1 meetings with our “best friend”. It’s not too bad, I can be pretty patient with people, so I didn’t mind too much at first. Then a few things happened.

1. He sent a shared folder that he owned containing info related to the environments. Several documents were outdated and incomplete, so I downloaded them, corrected them, and then uploaded the documents to my teams file share, as I was supposed to since we now own the projects.

2. Several files were missing, and when I asked about them, he said “Oh, did you refresh the browser?”. I told him no, that I downloaded them locally and republished them to my teams server, because he was supposed to hand everything off to us at once. He says “Well, silly, how are you going to get updates if you’re looking at them locally?” and kind of chuckles at me like I’m stupid.

3. He insists on training me how to remote into one of the servers to check on cluster space, which in itself is fine. I understand others wanting to make sure things will be done right by the people who come after them. But he tells me to download SuperPutty. I tell him, “oh no, that’s alright. I don’t need putty”. He says “oh cool, what tool do you use for ssh?”. I answer him “Just Git. If I want to I can use a CentOs bash terminal too, because we have WSL installed”. He responds “You can’t ssh through Git”.
I was actually a little shocked. I didn’t know if he was serious or not so I was silent for a few seconds before hesitantly saying “yes you can”. He says “this is news to me” and I so I tell him “every single one of our build jobs fetches code from Git with ssh” and he seemed genuinely shocked and surprised by that.... so then it occurs to me to show him that you can ssh in Powershell and that REALLY blew his mind. He would not shut up about it for several minutes. I was amused until it just got annoying.

Needless to say, my team had been previously teasing me about having to work with him, so they found it hilarious when I told them afterwards.

Had my first car accident today. I was taking a friend to school, we were down the street from our school. Person in front of me slammed on their brakes for no reason (light was green, nobody was crossing), so I did the same. Almost fucking hit them, but whatever. As me and my friend started to recover from that, we get hit from behind.

I remember just looking over at her when it happened and going "DID WE JUST FUCKING GET HIT?", she looks at me and says "I don't know what else it could have been"

The guy that hit us was a really nice guy. When me and the person in front of me slammed our brakes, the guy behind us followed, but it was raining this morning and he slid into my car.

So the guy called the cops, had an officer come, we exchanged information and everything (wasn't a bad enough accident for an actual police report). I called my insurance company, they said to call his insurance company, so I did. Filed a claim, told them everything that happened, then they called the guy, he confirmed everything and said the accident was his fault. But since my car is fairly old (it's a 2001 model), they said it might not even be worth fixing and they'll probably just end up seeing how much the car is worth and sending me a check.

The fun thing is, my cousin is my mechanic and he can also do body work, and the damage isn't that much, so he said he probably wouldn't charge much. So I'll probably get to pocket a good amount of the money (maybe like $700 max but still)

So, fun day.

I just gave robocopy another try, in order to get my WanBLowS D: drive and my file server synchronized again, in preparation to move that file server VM to a LXC container instead.. bad choice. I should've used rsync in WSL.

Hey you Not so Robust File Copier for WanBLowS, how many attempts of you fucking up my file server's dotfiles does it take before I configure you right with every fucking option you have specified? How about you actually behave somewhat decently like rsync where -avz works 99% of the time, in local, remote, any scenarios that you can think of that aren't super obscure?! HOW DIFFICULT CAN IT BE, REDMOND CERTIFIED ENGANEERS?!!

Drown in a pond of bleach, Microshit certified MOTHERFUCKERS!!!!

Well, at least this time it didn't fuck up my .ssh directory so I can still authenticate to the VM.. so I guess that at least that's a win. Even that you can't take for granted anymore with this piece of garbage!!!

Sorry for my bad english.

So, I made an e-commerce site for a company once. It's actually just a WordPress site with that WooCommerce plugin.

After that, my dad was "advertising me (suggesting me?)" to one of his friend that I can make a website.

Then his friend called me and I asked what to do. In short, she has an online marketplace website where the users can be either a seller or a buyer (just an ordinary e-bay like site). Her site is built with PHP (codeigniter 2).

I can't make custom site that's why I'm using WordPress for my client, I'm still learning PHP right now. How do I tell my dad to not "overestimate" my ability to make sites. I already told my dad about my abilities and I'm still learning, but he keep saying that I should accept it because it will give you experiences.

Question everything!

Comments lie.. sometimes code does too.. Customers..they lie the most..and are sloppy..

Don't be like customers, don't be sloppy. If you were sloppy own it & don't lie about it!

Pick your fights (trying to fix vs rewrite the shit out of it)..you will know what to do more with experience..

RTFM & docs.. If things still unclear, ask before your dick gets stuck in a toaster!

Ask away, learn about the customers & how they use your product.. you'll be surprised how something intuitive to you might be a rocket science for them..meaning more room to fuck things up when using it..more ways you can adapt & prevent things..

Most of all, don't fuckin lie.. ever!!
If you lie on you're CV, we will find out.. If you fuck up something & lie about it, we will find out.. but it will cost us precious time when solving it from scratch.. People fuck up..that's a fact..how you go about it is what makes/breaks it for me. So don't ever fuckin lie to me!!

And don't be arogant.. if you complain about fixing bugs, this is not a job for you.. if you can't even fix the obvious ones you've put there in the first place..twice as bad..

So think before you code..what do you want to do, how you want to accomplish this, is it reusable, can it be extended, does it introduce new technology into the project, will it fuck up current setup.. once you have this shit figured out, code will write itself..

Did I mention already you're not to lie to me, ever?!

And don't try talking about me behind my back either..I've seen it backfire before, results were not good..

I make a presentation to explain to the boss why we had to tweak around the requirements in order to keep backwards compatibility and stuff. I take 15 minutes explaining how our system currently works and how these requirements would change it, etc etc.

"So... is this workflow okay for our customers?"

They stared into the presentation slide for a good minute.

"I think we should align this row over here with that square over there."

"Oh don't worry this is a demo. But do you think our customers will still be okay with these changes?"

"Yeah, but these two elements are unalligned and they look pretty bad."

I'm starting to think that fancy speech can deter people from questioning or complaining to you. I'm pretty sure they don't know their own product as well as I know it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Am really Fed up with it all

"Graphics don't matter."

I ranted a while back about gamedev being hard to get into for me, and, today, user @DOSnotCompute posted a similar experience.

I had a couple more thoughts, so thought should post them here (FUCK! It ended up being too fucking long! sorry!)

So I was watching the making of mortal kombat 3 on yt, which was pretty amazing btw because I got to see the actors of the sprites in game which were engraved in my and thousands of others kids minds.

Anyhow, the creators of the series, John Tobias and Ed Boon, were interviewed and what not. And it hit me that while both were the designers, John was the main artist and Ed was the programmer (at least for MK1). Another game that comes to mind Super Meat Boy, and I bet hundreds of others did the same.

And it got me thinking, maybe that's my problem, I just need an artist.

And I think the reason why I never thought of that is because of this idea that graphics don't matter.

"you don't need an artist. You don't need graphics. The most important thing is the gameplay."

What a load of shit.
A lot of people believe that because they got tired of polished AAA games with automatic and predictible gameplay.

People started parrotting this knee jerk of a conclusion since then.

It's dumb. Imagine if Infiminer, one of the games Minecraft was based on, which btw looks terrible, had all the same features Minecraft had.
I would still not touch that shit with a pole.

Graphics ARE important. Games are on the VISUAL medium.
That doesn't mean you're sucking Sony's dick on every AAA release or that every game should be made with UnreUnityCocksReloadedEngine.

Some level of visual craft is required for a game ro be considered such.

(btw, I think most of you guys here get this, not trying to pander, just that I want to make it clear that I'm not accusing this community of being guilty of this)

If a game looks bad (given, bad can be subjective), if it gives the impression that it wasn't seriously made, then you kinda lower your expectations.

People get hyped on games that look good, because it means that the game could be good. Games that look unoriginal or terrible won't get played, wether they're good or not. And I think it's a reasonable reaction.

How many times did I hear things like "Look at x video game from the 90s, the graphics are terrible but it's fun as hell".

That is an absurd statement. The level of production some NES games went through is insane. We're talking millions of dollars for games that today might look primitive.

The graphics weren't shit back then, and even today you could say that they are simpler but also of excellent craftsmanship.

I'm not into creating art, I hate it in fact because you can't quantify the success of produced art.

So, duh, find an artist. Ok, how? This is the part where I have no fucking idea how.

You start spamming shit like "I need an artist" online? I dunno, something for another post I guess.

I guess the most healthy thing I could do is making demos that might look like shit just to get experience so that when I get to find an artist, I have practice already.

I had spent the last year working on a online store power by woocommerce with over 100k products from various suppliers. This online store utilized a custom API that would take the various formats that suppliers offer their inventory in and made them consistent. Now everything was going swimmingly initially, but then I began adding more and more products using a plug-in called WP all import. I reached around 100k products and the site would take up to an entire minute to load sometimes timing out. I got desperate so I installed several caching plugins, but to no avail this did not help me. The site was originally only supposed to take three to four months but ended up taking an entire year. Then, just yesterday I found out what went wrong and why this woocommerce website with all of these optimizations was still taking anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to load, or just timing out entirely. I had initially thought that I needed a beefier server so I moved it to a high CPU digitalocean VM. While this did help a little bit, the site was still very slow and now I had very high CPU usage RAM usage and high disk IO. I was seriously stumped the Apache process was using a high amount of CPU and IO along with MYSQL as well. It wasn't until I started digging deeper into the database that I actually found out what the issue was. As I was loading the site I would run 'show process list' in the SQL terminal, I began to notice a very significant load time for one of the tables, so I went to go and check it out. What I did was I ran a select all query on that particular table just to see how full it was and SQL returned a error saying that I had exceeded the maximum packet size. So I was like okay what the fuck...
So I exited my SQL and re-entered it this time with a higher packet size. I ran a query that would count how many rows were in this particular table and the number came out to being in the millions. I was surprised, and what's worse is that this table belong to a plugin that I had attempted to use early in the development process to cache the site. The plugin was deactivated but apparently it had left PHP files within the wp content directory outside of the actual plugin directory, so it's still executing scripts even though the plugin itself was disabled. Basically every time I would change anything on the site, it would recache the whole thing, and it didn't delete any old records. So 100k+ products caching on saves with no garbage collection... You do the math, it's gonna be a heavy ass database. Not only that but it was serialized data, so when it did pull this metric shit ton of spaghetti from the database, PHP then had to deserialize it. Hence the high ass CPU load. I had caching enabled on the MySQL end of things so that ate the ram. I was really desperate to get this thing running.
Honest to God the main reason why this website took so long was because the load times made it miserable to work on. I just thought that the hardware that I had the site on was inadequate. I had initially started the development on a small Linux VM which apparently wasn't enough, which is why I moved it to digitalocean which also seemed to not be enough, so from there I moved to a dedicated server which still didn't seem to be enough. I was probably a few more 60-second wait times or timeouts from recommending a server cluster to my client who I know would not be willing to purchase it. The client who I promised this site to have completed in 3 months and has waited a year. Seriously, I would tell people the struggles that I would go through with this particular site and they would just tell me to just drop the site; just take the money, just take the loss. I refused to, this was really the only thing that was kicking my ass. I present myself as this high-and-mighty developer like I'm just really good at what I do but then I have this WordPress site that's just beating the shit out of me for a year. It was a very big learning experience and it was also very humbling as well, it made me realize that I really don't know as much as I think I might. It was evidence that there is still so much more to learn out there, I did learn a lot from that experience especially about optimizing websites the different types of methods to do that particular lonely on the server side and I'll be able to utilize this knowledge in the future.
I guess the moral of the story is, never really give up. Ultimately things might get so bad that you're running on hopes and dreams. Those experiences are generally the most humbling. Now I can finally present the site that I am basically a year late on to the client who will be so happy that I did not give up on the project entirely. I'll have experienced this feeling of pure euphoria, and help the small business significantly grow their revenue. Helping others is very fulfilling for me, even at my own expense.

Anyways, gonna stop ranting. Running out of characters. If you're still here... Ty for reading :')

!dev

A child's mind is fascinating.

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

Things were magical, mystical and happy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was dreamy.

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

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

I started to get annoyed at the game.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

you get attached

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

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

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

Just another big rant story full of WTFs and completely true.

The company I work for atm is like the landlord for a big german city. We build houses and flats and rent them to normal people, just that we want to be very cheap and most nearly all our tenants are jobless.
So the company hired a lot of software-dev-companies to manage everything.

The company I want to talk about is "ABI...", a 40-man big software company. ABI sold us different software, e.g. a datawarehouse for our ERP System they "invented" for 300K or the software we talk about today: a document management system. It has workflows, a 100 year-save archive system, a history feature etc.
The software itself, called ELO (you can google it if you want) is a component based software in which every company that is a "partner" can develop things into, like ABI did for our company.

Since 2013 we pay ABI 150€ / hour (most of the time it feels like 300€ / hour, because if you want something done from a dev from ABI you first have to talk to the project manager of him and of course pay him too). They did thousand of hours in all that years for my company.

In 2017 they started to talk about a module in ELO called Invoice-Module. With that you can manage all your paper invoices digital, like scan that piece of paper, then OCR it, then fill formular data, add data and at the end you can send it to the ERP system automatically and we can pay the invoice automatically. "Digitization" is the key word.

After 1.5 years of project planning and a 3 month test phase, we talked to them and decided to go live at 01.01.2019. We are talking about already ~ 200 hours planning and work just from ABI for this (do the math. No. Please dont...).

I joined my actual company in October 2018 and I should "just overview" the project a bit, I mean, hey, they planned it since 1.5 years - how bad can it be, right?

In the first week of 2019 we found 25 bugs and users reporting around 50 feature requests, around 30 of them of such high need that they can't do their daily work with the invoices like they did before without ELO.
In the first three weeks of 2019 we where around 70 bugs deep, 20 of them fixed, with nearly 70 feature requests, 5 done. Around 10 bugs where so high, that the complete system would not work any more if they dont get fixed.

Want examples?
- Delete a Invoice (right click -> delete, no super deep hiding menu), and the server crashed until someone restarts it.
- missing dropdown of tax rate, everything was 19% (in germany 99,9% of all invoices are 19%, 7% or 0%).

But the biggest thing was, that the complete webservice send to ERP wasn't even finished in the code.
So that means we had around 600 invoices to pay with nearly 300.000€ of cash in the first 3 weeks and we couldn't even pay 1 cent - as a urban company!

Shortly after receiving and starting to discussing this high prio request with ABI the project manager of my assigned dev told me he will be gone the next day. He is getting married. And honeymoon. 1 Week. So: Wish him luck, when will his replacement here?

Deep breath.
Deep breath.

There was no replacement. They just had 1 developer. As a 40-people-software-house they had exactly one developer which knows ELO, which they sold to A LOT of companies.

He came back, 1 week gone, we asked for a meeting, they told us "oh, he is now in other ELO projects planned, we can offer you time from him in 4 weeks earliest".

To cut a long story short (it's to late for that, right?) we fought around 3 month with ABI to even rescue this project in any thinkable way. The solution mid February was, that I (software dev) would visit crash courses in ELO to be the second developer ABI didnt had, even without working for ABI....

Now its may and we decided to cut strings with ABI in ELO and switch to a new company who knows ELO. There where around 10 meetings on CEO-level to make this a "good" cut and not a bad cut, because we can't afford to scare them (think about the 300K tool they sold us...).

01.06.2019 we should start with the new company. 2 days before I found out, by accident, that there was a password on the project file on the server for one of the ELO services. I called my boss and my CEO. No one knows anything about it. I found out, that ABI sneaked into this folder, while working on another thing a week ago, and set this password to lock us out. OF OUR OWN FCKING FILE.
Without this password we are not able to fix any bug, develop any feature or even change an image within ELO, regardless, that we paid thausend of hours for that.

When we asked ABI about this, his CEO told us, it is "their property" and they will not remove it.
When I asked my CEO about it, they told me to do nothing, we can't scare them, we need them for the 300K tool.

No punt.
No finish.

Just the project file with a password still there today

So I am getting back into game dev. I keep going back and forth about making a 2D or 3D rpg. Maybe I will end up making a mix.

I also want to make customizable characters in game. I found a decent solution for 2D. An artist is making 2D sprites that allow things to be overlaid. Each component has animations. I can layer sprites and animate them in sync to keep all the pieces moving together.

For 3D this journey of what is possible is a lot longer I think. It is hit or miss finding generic 3D characters with build in morphing. I want to be able to change the body for customization. I think I will have to relearn how to 3D model. As I learn what kind of model I need I am also learning what it takes to do this in Blender. And holy hell, Blender is so amazing now! The stuff I can do easily is staggering. You can sculpt a mesh using sculpting tools. Then do a remesh of that to make a more easily animateable mesh. No remeshing by hand, other than installing a plugin. There are a bunch of plugins that you can buy too. I found one for free that looks promising. But the paid ones are not that bad either. Between $25 to $100 depending upon source, license, and features.

However, being a programmer I want to figure out how to generate 3D and 2D models. There is code out there to do this, but I wonder what the learning curve is on that. The engineer side of me wants to be able to model the shape of humanoids and then auto skin that. I think I will start with modeling a few by hand to learn the way it should work. I want a simple anime look. I did find info on automating face rigs and body rigs. Oh the tools we have now!

Anyway, I am having fun.

this was about office politics. for context, a lot of non tech people think they can borrow our time willy nilly and our boss agrees, so we're often pulled out of our tasks to do random shit.

these girls asked for my consultation on a simple problem, because another team wasn't fixing an issue for them and they said it wasn't possible. i said it was possible and simple to solve, i spoke to the other team, showed them how to do it and thought that was done. they kept asking me to produce proof that it was possible, excessively, like i had nothing to do.

that went on for a week, lots of back and forth, i was getting tired, so i told this girl fine, I'll do this stupid thing IF you send me an email making this a formal exchange, she says fine. the next day i find out they went after another guy in my team, who's much busier than i, and he stopped everything to coddle them.

i told him to be careful about that stuff, because he's setting himself up for this shit, he's making the rest of the team look bad and he's stopping his work to do something that was already done, because they couldn't bother to send an email. had a huge discussion about this, he was super condescending and overall, he was an asshole.

next time, I'll just send the girls his way

Ohh man i fucked up bad. 5 days as intern, and i fuck up really bad with my ego and ignorance.

I love my this company. A great environment, lots of people to learn from , i am given reasonable tasks and i feel happy to complete them. But what happened today was weird and fucked up.

I have never worked at a place with seniors designers tech leads and more people with positions. I have also worked with a lot of competitive people who are always in a race to be first.
And how do we come first? Have a lot of knowledge, hear the smallest of detail and sprint towards goal (because the combination your knowledge, assumptions and speed is enough to make you reach to the top). You don't ask for specific details, because they are obvious. And that's me in short.

Today i fucked up.
Mistake #1 ) first i was given a small task by my senior. It was a 20 mins task max if i had done it the normal noobie way . But i am a pro in mind , i have to do it with all the architecture , even if i don't understand why. So i asked for 50 mins. They gave it and did not had a problem with my time, but with the way i wrote my code.

He was like "who told you to make it like this ? Why did you made it like this?" And was visibly irritated. And i was like super chill saying "i don't know the why, but i know its correct way of using it" , pissing him even more. In my eyes he's just a super friendly sr, more like a bro and wouldn't mind some cheeky answers. And he didnt show any
consequences for that time.

Mistake #2 this is super fucked up. Our office is going under some renovation & interns were asked to sit in the co-working spaces (outside of the office). It was already very disturbing and i had to go to office every few minutes.

So after lunch this happens : We are working on a new module that already has a tonne of screens and logics. I have made a small part which is from the middle and now we can go both in the forward or in the backward direction.(Also, its quite a new module whose idea was recently discussed and decided. And weirdly i am also being treated like a core member as the ceo once himself asked what would he my flow for doing things in this. i am in direct contact and under direction of backend , designers , ceo and My senior and many ppl are giving me tasks ) And... Aagh fuck it. .. its a long story and i don't feel like repeating it but

inshort :

got a task,

didn't understood it completely and thought its my task to figure it out, took a long time figuring it my self ,

techlead/designer somehow changed my and my sr. direction of flow even tho we were taking a different approach

I sit in a noisy and irritating place

Techlead/designer comes during the time when i am figuring out the solution(already overtime the one in point #2) nags for result.

I get in an argument with him, justifying for my time and arguing that it's difficult to think technical logics for that design
( truth be told, it WAS a difficult logic which he thought was too easy. It consisted of 3 variables and 8 states we were doing different works for 4 of them and rejecting 2 and ... I don't know, i had got that wrong . But that shouldn't had been my problem to solve. I should have gone to my senior and didn't get into argument with tech lead ). It think i might have offended him too.

After he left, i am so angry on him that after sometime my senior comes and i misbehave with him. He just asks to meet me before i go, and i do so. During the meeting we discuss this whole fuck up and how many times i showed him my ego and indiscipline. And then i realise what a fuckup i did due to my ego and lack of asking, blindly following my own over confidence and blindly following or arguing with others.

Fuck fuck fuck

At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.

Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.

Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.

After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.

Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.

My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V

Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.

We've all had shitty jobs at one point or another, maybe some of us already had software engineering experience while having to work in a different field for a variety of reasons.

Well check this shit.

At one point(during my second year of school) for various reasons I had to work in retail. For those that know, retail can be a soul crushing experience...the trick is not letting management to convince you that it is an actual good job, it is not, and I have respect and sympathy for everyone currently working in it. The mind numbing retarded customers that we get are absolutely fantastic in every sense of the word.

My position in retail was as a phone salesman, for MetroPCS (which for all of y'all european ninjas is one of the low end phone carriers here in the U.S) and the people that we get as customers where I live are normally very poor which apparently in Mexican culture stands for annoyingly ignorant (I am Mexican myself, so I can really vouch for this shit)

One day a customer came in telling me that there was an app that he was using that kept giving him troubles, it was a map application for truck drivers. Now, obviously, this had nothing to do with my line of work(phone salesman) and as such I normally tried to explain that and let them be, but I imagined that it was a settings issue so I reluctantly agreed to help him. I explained to him that the app was no longer maintained and that the reason for it was probably that the developer abandoned it and that he would just have to look into the app, upon closer inspection the app itself was nothing more than a wrapper over google maps with trucker icons and a "trucker" interface, he was using the app as a GPS navigator and he could as well just have been using google maps.

The conversation was like this:

Me: Well this app is no longer supported, it will probably be taken off the google store soon, you can look for something similar or just change to Google maps

Retard: What? no! I came here in order for you to fix it, Metro needs to fix their own apps!

Me (in complete disbelief): We have no control over third party apps, and even for the ones that we provide the store has no control over them. But this app is not ours and so we can't really do anything about it.

Retard: Well WTF should I do? I have been having many issues with youtube and spotify, shouldn't Metro fix their Google store?

Me: Those apps are not ours.....wait, you seem to believe that we own youtube and spotify, those are not ours

Retard: How the fuck they are not yours! its your phone isn't it?

Me: Eh no.....Metro does not(at this point I was sort of smiling because I wanted to laugh) own youtube or spotify or the play store or even this phone, metro does not own Android or Samsung(his phone was a samsung core prime)

Retard: Well You need to fix this

Me: No I do not and I can not, the developer for this app abandoned it and has nothing to do with us

Retard: Well call the developer and tell him to fix it

At this point I was on a very bad mode since this dude was being obnoxiously rude from the beginning and it annoyed me how he was asking for dumb shit.

Me: Did you pay for this app?

Retard: No

Me: So you expect that some developer out there will just go about and get working for something that you did not pay for?
Why don't you just use Google maps as your GPS?

Retard: Don't be stupid, Google has no maps

At this point I show him the screen where there is a lil app that said maps, pressed it and voila! map comes to life

Retard: Well....I did not know

Me: Yeah....but I am the stupid one right?

** throws phone for him to catch

Me: Have a good one bud.

And my manager was right next to me, he was just trying to control his laughter the whole time. I really despised working in there and was glad when I left. Retail man.......such a horrible fucking world.

i don't think that i'm having a burnout but i think that i'm maybe not so far away from it... several people, including friends, my therapist and also a colleague, told me they see me at risk of sliding into a real burnout.

i've known this for longer that i have a crappy work life balance. the habit of making work the most important part of my own life. thinking about work even in my private time, when i fall asleep, when i wake up in the night or in the morning. the tendency to think about problems, plans, coworkers, not being able to quit work mentally. the idea that i have to prove to everybody at work that i'm awesome. the feeling that, after a work day, i'm just "waiting" at home for the next day, in idle mode, so i can continue working on a problem (like a bug) that's occupying my whole mind. and at the same time, feeling totally empty after work, having no energy. i've lost interest and quit several hobbies in the last two years that once were important for me. and i think one important reason is that i didn't have any mental energy left to deal with that.

another factor for this development was also the pandemic for sure, because for some time, i had no real social life except for that at work.
but more important is probably that i find my job most of the time really fun and am highly motivated. i have the tendency to say yes to everything and to really commit to and own the problems that are handed to me. (right now, however i feel like there's not much motivation left)
then again there is the feeling that what i do is never good enough, i have little self confidence in my own abilities as a software engineer. there's a big discrepancy between how i myself perceive my work and how other people do (not only at work). on a rational level, i know that what i do is at least "good enough", otherwise i wouldn't have this job, and i wouldn't receive this amount of positive feedback from people. but it's hard to really deeply understand this thing, when there are deep-rooted beliefs like "only perfect is good enough" or "your colleagues will be disappointed and get a negative idea of you (and something bad will happen), if you don't give your best"... and there's also this idea that i have to be this super nerdy person who also codes in their free time, reads IT magazines and stuff, because only then i will fit this stereotype of a software developer, and only then i can be taken seriously and be good enough. no matter if this is fun for me or not.

anyway, right now i'm at a point in life where i'm realizing all this not only rationally, but with full emotional impact... :/ my life feels like it's gone stale and empty. i've lost creativity, warmth and human connection and that hurts a lot.

i'm trying to change my life.
one thing that really helps me right now is to talk with people who have (made) similar experiences. can you relate? if yes, how do / did you address those problems? i would really appreciate to hear your stories...

Once I was told to interview a junior dev. It was my first ever interview from the side of employer, so I hope this story will never appear here told by my vis a vis. Ok, to the subject. Position of jun iOS dev. It was so long time ago, the manual reference counting was the only option on a platform. And I ask her, to describe how the manual ref counting actually working. She cannot answer this. I try to split the theme in to a pieces and ask more precise questions, about this or that situation, what should happen, or at least how she thinks it may work. She cannot answer this as well. Technically for me it was the end of interview, but I cannot give up on her that easy so I ask her to tell me what she is doing on her current position and we had spoke for another 15 min. TLDR she has failed.
Next year, another company, interview for the same position, the same people on the scene. So, I remember her, she remembers me. We both know the question I will ask. TLDR she has failed on the very same question.
Oh god knows how bad I feel after rejecting her second time. But I was little more experienced with the interviews and I was sure this question should not be a problem to those who have little experience on a platform.
Several years has passed. Another company. I’m about to jump to the next company and project managers are doing their best to fill the position with ANYONE as it’s a big fight for developers at the moment. So they have found a junior inside the company who wants to try. And SAME PEOPLE on the scene. Same question on a table. And some other questions, and more. So she’s got that job.
After many years I can say she could have a job from the first time if only I try to question her about other sides of day to day code writing. It was just me - not very experienced interviewer and not very experienced mid developer. I only hope she is not hating me a lot.

Well, everytime I build a pc for a friend I'll always end up telling myself "this is the last time". Not bc I have a problem with building pc's, I love it, but its the "free of charge" 24/7 IT-support my non techy (techii?) friends expects from me after the build is done I hate.

So here's the deal.
A week ago I built a brand new pc for a friend, as usual (bc he's a good friend) I told him that my "fee" would be a couple of beers and the train ticket up. So I got there, built the pc and we hooked it up to his monitor. About 5sec in to windows the screen went black. My friend started to panic, and I started to check if all the components and cables were hooked up right (tho I've done this a couple of times, shit can happen) but found nothing was wrong.
I had to take the train home, cause it got late AF and I live in another city, but I told him to try another cable. Felt bad AF for not being able to help him.
Flash forward 2 days, my friend started messaging me late in the evening, complaining about how he had tried everything and ultimately had to leave the pc at an (as he called it) "proffesional" who charged him 100$.
I felt even guiltier about that one, asked him if he tried to change the hdmi, but he said that's in The hands of this guy now.
Two days later this PC God gave him an answer.
Guess What he told him?
CHANGE THE ***** HDMI CABLE.
Well, shit..
Afterwards he wanted help installing drivers over fb-messenger.
I love my friends, but man why do I do this to myself.

Buffer usage for simple file operation in python.

What the code "should" do, was using I think open or write a stream with a specific buffer size.

Buffer size should be specific, as it was a stream of a multiple gigabyte file over a direct interlink network connection.

Which should have speed things up tremendously, due to fewer syscalls and the machine having beefy resources for a large buffer.

So far the theory.

In practical, the devs made one very very very very very very very very stupid error.

They used dicts for configurations... With extremely bad naming.

configuration = {}
buffer_size = configuration.get("buffering", int(DEFAULT_BUFFERING))

You might immediately guess what has happened here.

DEFAULT_BUFFERING was set to true, evaluating to 1.

Yeah. Writing in 1 byte size chunks results in enormous speed deficiency, as the system is basically bombing itself with syscalls per nanoseconds.

Kinda obvious when you look at it in the raw pure form.

But I guess you can imagine how configuration actually looked....

Wild. Pretty wild. It was the main dict, hard coded, I think 200 entries plus and of course it looked like my toilet after having an spicy food evening and eating too much....

What's even worse is that none made the connection to the buffer size.

This simple and trivial thing entertained us for 2-3 weeks because *drumrolls please* none of the devs tested with large files.

So as usual there was the deployment and then "the sudden miraculous it works totally slow, must be admin / it fault" game.

At some time it landed then on my desk as pretty much everyone who had to deal with it was confused and angry, for understandable reasons (blame game).

It took me and the admin / devs then a few days to track it down, as we really started at the entirely wrong end of the problem, the network...

So much joy for such a stupid thing.

What would you change if you were the owner of a site like devrant?

I've been in devrant for weeks now and the thing I like the most of it is the community (at least most of it).

If you are going through a bad time, they wish you well.
People here also seem to have very decent work experience.
In general, they seem to be open towards other technologies and honest about their shortcomings.

I also like that the site (for better or worse) is not insanely moderated.
For example, in reddit, it's very easy to get a post removed because it doesn't abide to the rules. They can be rudiculous strict, and mods can be trigger happy.

I'm not denying the existence of any moderation here, but for example I've seen some pretty graphic sexual comments, and I appreciate that anything goes (except being a dick ofc).

And I guess that the fact that the community is so chill has to do with that, there's not a huge need for moderation (unless I'm totally oblivious).

But how do you keep a community like that?

I've seen people complaining about the influx of new users and the spam of shitty memes.

How do you keep devrant cool while letting new people join?

I think a necessary thing is that you separate the people into 'universes' and each universe has a limit of x users. And somehow the users are distributed in a way that the average level of 'user likes the universe they're in' is maximum.

Now, how do you create that? Not sure, maybe you let users vote whether they like the other users or not (such votes being hidden to others ofc) and let users switch unis if they don't like them.

What ideas do you have?

New office saga continues

We had 2 days on induction and these guys hired a 19 year old intern for the HR department.

Yes, the worst possible combination.

In last two days she made our life hell. Insufferable human being.

How can a person be so annoying?!

It was so tempting to roast her, but then I had to control my instincts so as to not get a warning during my first two days.

Not saying that everyone is bad and there surely exist great people, but wide majority of Gen Z makes me go nuts and that is all what is wrong with corporate world, old wine and fresh blood overlapping.

We are headed towards self destruction, buckle up your seat belts.

Sooo...
Got Fired...
By the same fucking company who is responsible for my burn out.
Should I be Happy or Sad? No matter how I loved the company I can only expect more abuses... On the other hand, If I made a few complaints, I couldn't get fired now...
Anyhow...
This weekend (can't remember the day, It was the day I took two victans, 20's beers and the same join I would smoke in a whole week ... (It worked, so...) I posted lots of really bad shit on facebook about the company... true Shit, but you know... Truth doesn't matter.
Today got a letter ending my contract on the term of the current one... less than one month from now.
So.... Lets See...
At least this pushes the time I have to start making Apps to get some money.
Just lacking the energy and will...

Last Monday I bought an iPhone as a little music player, and just to see how iOS works or doesn't work.. which arguments against Apple are valid, which aren't etc. And at a price point of €60 for a secondhand SE I figured, why not. And needless to say I've jailbroken it shortly after.

Initially setting up the iPhone when coming from fairly unrestricted Android ended up being quite a chore. I just wanted to use this thing as a music player, so how would you do it..?

Well you first have to set up the phone, iCloud account and whatnot, yada yada... Asks for an email address and flat out rejects your email address if it's got "apple" in it, catch-all email servers be damned I guess. So I chose ishit at my domain instead, much better. Address information for billing.. just bullshit that, give it some nulls. Phone number.. well I guess I could just give it a secondary SIM card's number.

So now the phone has been set up, more or less. To get music on it was quite a maze solving experience in its own right. There's some stuff about it on the Debian and Arch Wikis but it's fairly outdated. From the iPhone itself you can install VLC and use its app directory, which I'll get back to later. Then from e.g. Safari, download any music file.. which it downloads to iCloud.. Think Different I guess. Go to your iCloud and pull it into the iPhone for real this time. Now you can share the file to your VLC app, at which point it initializes a database for that particular app.

The databases / app storage can be considered equivalent to the /data directories for applications in Android, minus /sdcard. There is little to no shared storage between apps, most stuff works through sharing from one app to another.

Now you can connect the iPhone to your computer and see a mount point for your pictures, and one for your documents. In that documents mount point, there are directories for each app, which you can just drag files into. For some reason the AFC protocol just hangs up when you try to delete files from your computer however... Think Different?

Anyway, the music has been put on it. Such features, what a nugget! It's less bad than I thought, but still pretty fucked up.

At that point I was fairly dejected and that didn't get better with an update from iOS 14.1 to iOS 14.3. Turns out that Apple in its nannying galore now turns down the volume to 50% every half an hour or so, "for hearing safety" and "EU regulations" that don't exist. Saying that I was fuming and wanting to smack this piece of shit into the wall would be an understatement. And even among the iSheep, I found very few people that thought this is fine. Though despite all that, there were still some. I have no idea what it would take to make those people finally reconsider.. maybe Tim Cook himself shoving an iPhone up their ass, or maybe they'd be honored that Tim Cook noticed them even then... But I digress.

And then, then it really started to take off because I finally ended up jailbreaking the thing. Many people think that it's only third-party apps, but that is far from true. It is equivalent to rooting, and you do get access to a Unix root account by doing it. The way you do it is usually a bootkit, which in a desktop's ring model would be a negative ring. The access level is extremely high.

So you can root it, great. What use is that in a locked down system where there's nothing available..? Aha, that's where the next thing comes in, 2 actually. Cydia has an OpenSSH server in it, and it just binds to port 22 and supports all of OpenSSH's known goodness. All of it, I'm using ed25519 keys and a CA to log into my phone! Fuck yea boi, what a nugget! This is better than Android even! And it doesn't end there.. there's a second thing it has up its sleeve. This thing has an apt package manager in it, which is easily equivalent to what Termux offers, at the system level! You can install not just common CLI applications, but even graphical apps from Cydia over the network!

Without a jailbreak, I would say that iOS is pretty fucking terrible and if you care about modding, you shouldn't use it. But jailbroken, fufu.. this thing trades many blows with Android in the modding scene. I've said it before, but what a nugget!

!rant

tl;dr at the bottom

This might not be a popular opinion, so please, if you throw things at me, limit yourselves only to tomatoes and other soft projectiles. Thank you!

So this being said, i must say ut: i actually like how facebook use this data overall. While i am completly against privacy violation, that data is given up by ourselves with a choice to do it, so we can't hand them for it. However, i think the fact that we got ads for what our interests are is quite awesome! For example because of this i found webcomics and artists i curently hold really high in my praises and this might not have been the case if FB had another business model.

This being said, i just think people should focus on problems more important than how social media manages to earn some bucks, and while is our choise to be part of that we can't simply call ourselves "products". History holds many stories about civilization that gaved no choice if you wanted or not to be a product so we could be at least glad it is not the case anymore.

Anyway, if you read all the way down here, tnaks for your time!

TL;DR: Facebook is no holy church but it actually not so bad, we can find things we get to love or actually needed in the first place in their targeted adds system. At least we have a choice to be part of this or not!

So, it's time to fucking rant!

Location: A small startup where direct contact with C-Level members is frequent.

A while back we had a customer using our SaaS product who had gripes about the way it worked.

He contacted our CEO and made a bunch of claims based on bad assumptions.

In the end, he wanted all images removed from his site. I was pulled aside by the CEO and asked if I could handle this for him and make a new screen for them without images.

So I did. I tried to discuss and get deeper into the problem by saying "this seems like a symptom of a problem and not the actual problem. What do you think?" He responded with "That was his request so it must be the problem if it won't take long then let's fix it for him.

- a week later

The problem is fixed and in the wild. No more images. Now he has another request :/

He does not like the pagination on his site. He says " I shouldn't have to click a button when I scroll so I want the be able to scroll and see all my products!"

This time the CEO asks me if this can easily be done and I take him aside and say "no, this will be a big change to our system and will need to be discussed with the team."

The main point I make is that we should go down and spend some time with this customer to find out what the real problem is.

After a half hour of discussion about the real issue he decided to bring in the CTO.

In the end, we implemented infinite scroll, dropping our current product building tasks to service one customer (yeah, it's a bad scene). But we got infinite scroll built and shipped.

- 2 Weeks later

This time he demands that infinite scroll isn't good enough. "If I scroll fast then I have to wait for them to load, they should all load at once!"

This time I have had enough. I can see the CEO is coming over to me to as me how much work is in this. I tell him there are 3 things I have to say...

1. I'm going to implement exactly what he asked by the end of the day.
2. We will only release it to him because it is going to be a shit-show loading everything at once, the load times will be mental!
3. We should fire this customer, right now.

So, I built it. Customer hated it (of course, who the fuck wants to wait 30s for loading. That's basically a lifetime). We changed it back and he was still mad.

- 2 weeks later

Customer leaves. Good riddance.

- sometime later

I am in the customer's store on a road trip. I get a feel for how their store works and they have a different system for making things operate.

It turns out that they did not know what the real problem was. They actually needed a completely different system (from a UX perspective) for accessing their data.

To top it all off, the system would have taken less time to build than the shitty fixes we made over weeks of work. FFS

I guess the moral of the rant is to find the problem, not a symptom of the problem.

I'm working on a redesign of a website and their logo is so bad… (I made it years ago, but ssshhh)…
And they love it so much, so I can't even change it.

It's killing my creativity, because the only way you can put it seems to be at the top, inside a white header.

I hate its' designer so much… and it's me! Fuck myself.
I designed it thinking about a particular website look, so it was perfect back then, but now I have to do something "new", "different", but without changing the logo.

Any suggestion on where to put it, how, or how kill myself?

daily.
me: i looked into the customer dev's project and even though it's C#, i can use it as a source of inspiration for my own C++ library.
PM: okay, maybe we can even still use it, so that you use a C# dll with your C++ code.
me: ...
other colleague: that's a bad idea. it can already be a challenge to use unmanaged c++ in dotnet, but the other way round it's even more difficult. C# and C++ are languages that behave quite differently and it will be hard to implement a correctly working interface.
PM: okay. well... then please analyze this project's complexity in terms of LOC and create a class diagram, so we get an idea of how complex it is.
me: sure.
PM: hmm... maybe we should split this topic. since dev x will also rely on your library, analyze this project together with him, each of you look at another part of the classes.
me: that's.... i think that's a bad idea. implementing this functionality in this library is my job, not of dev X. he won't be involved in implementing any of the funcionalities and for him, it shouldn't matter how this works.
PM: yeah, but since we are prototyping, maybe we should just violate the "separation of concerns" rule.
me (internally): (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

in the end i could convince him to do it my way, but for fuck's sake... when was the last time he actually succesfully implemented something? 🤦‍♀️

!dev

I have a couple of thoughts about social justice controversies from these last years.

I think it's hard to have a good opinion about these events for several reasons.

One reason is that finding good information in 2019 is very hard.

Revenue based sites (thus unneutral) dominate the search results. You search about something and you find thousands of sites basically saying the same thing (because they copy each other).

That's why the existence of a free and open search engine is so important, so it's easier to find neutral hence good information on which to base your opinions, but they are prohibitively big for small groups to build.

Another reason is that controversies generate shock and shock curtails rational thinking. Maybe that's how the primitive brain works?

I'm not much of a scholar to feel confident to say that, but it's so recurrent that it's not too much of a wild guess.

When a controversy happens, a natural reaction is to pick a side. This means that:
a) we assume that there are only 2 sides, and
b) we must pick one of them

So, maybe the human is a bad politician by nature?

Also, because of the shock controversies generate, peaceful dialogue is very rare.

I have yet to see peaceful dialogue online about what patriarchy means to feminists and a lot of other terms they use.

I don't care much about feminists that vandalize or interrupt talks (yelling over someone else is abuse in my opinion).

But for the rest of them, I think discussing their ideas would be good.

I say this because most feminist discourse I see online is not open. Or maybe there are such instances but the web is so big that it's hard to find such instances.

I think some part of the modern feminist doctrine is bullshit, and some part is true.

I for one hate when some men I know in life expect their wives to be their cooks+cleaners (unless they want to do that, willingly). Personally, I'd encourage my wife to get a job (rightfully so, not just to meet some minority quota in some company).

I don't mind either calling a trans person the pronoun she wants.

But other ideas are awful, like the idea that meritocracy is patriarchy, so you need to force minorities to meet a proportionate quota. That's terrible reasoning.

Or the excessive self appreciation culture, like saying to yourself "you are pretty, you are beautiful, you are perfect". I think that grows arrogance and black-or-white thinking.

And some other ideas as well.

I guess the same you can say about any doctrine with different degrees. Some part is bullshit, some part isn't.

Some right wing people hate everyone who isn't white by default, but some want to have more immigration control.

I sure don't like the experiment of separating children from families like the current us govt did, but I wouldn't be happy either to know that by '99 50% of gangs members in the us were hispanic.

With this, I'm not going to say "embrace everyone's ideas" like an idiot. I hate when people do that. It's a stupid and weak reaction to radicalism.

In fact I think the way you fight radicalism and bad doctrines is that you listen to them and maintain good dialogue and counterargue in a respectful but insightful manner.

Making snide remarks, insulting or trolling won't change anyone's mind. That is just throwing fire to the fire.

In fact, when someone gets harassed because of something they believe in, usually it results in even more adherence to their beliefs, because of the usual assumption that success or goodness is full of strife.

So by telling a "sjw" or kkk member that they are idiots over twitter, you are in fact making them stronger believers in their doctrine.

Think of Daryl Davis, a black guy that made 200 members leave the kkk. How? He didn't tell them they were assholes, he somehow made friends with them.

I feel bad now because I've been trolling new devrant users a lot because of how they worsen the quality of the site, but maybe I should tell them that they are ruining the site somehow in a nice way and maybe they'll listen? I dunno...

Best:
Really getting into Rust. It has taught me so many things.
1. Null is evil
2. Sum types are amazing
3. Compiler can actually have good error output
4. Multi threading is actually really scary if you don't have a compiler to back you up

Worst:
I had to deal with SSIS. It has also taught me many things:
1. No matter how 'mature' a product is, it can be awful. Simply dump a random error code, the user can figure out what went wrong, no need for good error messages.
2. The modern concept of the database is crap. It's a gigantic global state that is used by everyone and owned by no one.
3. Don't use tools that aren't made to be used with version control.
4. Even when you tell your team that it's bad, you will be ignored.

If this isn't the worst thing.

I was asked to develop a WordPress plugin as an intern developer and I've been on it since last week. I got stuck when i finally had the loops running but couldn't find a way to format the output without overwriting the existing values on each iteration.

For the last one week I've been showing the progress on my code to the CTO and this is how it has been.

Me: Hello. Everything is coming along fine, I have most of the functions running properly, do you mind looking into the algorithm?

CTO: Oh not at all, let's see what you got. Omg great code for an intern. I think you should add a new variable there and maybe clean up that function over there because it's deprecated now and yeah HaHa, Great work.

Me: Thanks xD I'll have it finished latest next week.

CTO: Oh great. I can't wait to see what you'd have by next week so we can install it on our WordPress.

*Next finally week comes and I'm done with the code.

Me: Hello, I'm done with the entire code! Want to take a look? The plugin works just exactly as described.

*CTO takes a look

CTO: Omg?

Me: Omg?

CTO: This is completely bad programming practice, so you are running 4 nested loops that all send queries to our data base and make changes to data. This would have a very drastic effect on the server considering the traffic we get.

Me: But you saw this exact code last week and said it was okay, I only changed some CSS since the last time.

CTO: Omg, we can't accept this, you have to develop it again from the scratch without using those loops and queries.

Me: What? Okay, fine. Any hints?

CTO: Yes.

Me: What?

CTO: Just start. That's the greatest hint I could ever give. And also, always have a plan before you begin.

Me: Yeah, thanks for those. It's the first time I'm hearing them and they would totally be applicable to building this thing.

At 20 I thought my life would be an adventure. At 30 it seems like it's a rerun.

The reality is that life is full of grey areas, "good guys and bad guys" on all sides of most issues, and the story and excitement eventually end.

sometimes getting old feels like becoming comfortable with being numb and mediocre.

you are not the star at the center of your own story.

there is no story. there is only today, and then tomorrow, and then the day after that for as long as they happen to go on.

I can see no greater meaning or purpose behind this circus.

people think in months, seasons, years. maybe some of you even have five year plans.

but for me, rome was yesterday. and every rome to come. thats how near it is. It is so close, it and so many times before and after it, I cannot explain the sensation.

and in the vast gulfs of time, I see the wars, the conflicts, the narratives, and they unfold like dust or scum swirling on a pond, mechanistic, telling stories about nothing, algae struggling over territory on a rock.

as clearly as day, I see it all.

I saw your birth, and I saw your death. Your pain, and your greatest joy. How is it possible to love a total stranger and know them intimately because of their shared humanity? And still.

And from afar, in the stillness, I can't help being detached from the world and its problems.
And when we die, it is as if the world dies with us. Because it is not the end of the world, but the death of our own.

Softly go mortals, gently to their gods, like flowers in the fading summer. Never grasping that the permanence of the true identity and the temporality of the spirit are as fundementally distinct as the permanence of say "the G note", against the brief sound it makes when touched.

Eh. forget it. Sentimentality is a curse sometimes.

A little late but whatever.

About half a year ago, I started working on setting up self hosted (slippy) maps. For one, because of privacy reasons, for two, because it'd be in my own control and I could, with enough knowledge, be entirely in control of how this would work.

While the process has been going on for hours every day for about half a year (with regular exceptions), I'll briefly lay out what I've accomplished.

I started with the OpenMapTiles project and tried to implement it myself. This went well but there were two major pitfalls:
1. It worked postgres database based. This is fine but when you want to have the entire world.... the queries took insanely long (minutes, at lower zoom levels) and quite intimate postgres/tooling knowledge was required, which I don't have.
2. Due to the long queries and such, the performance was so bad that the maps could take minutes to render and when you'd want that in production... yeah, no.

After quite some time I finally let that idea sail and started looking into the MBTiles solution; generating sqlite databases of geojson features. Very fast data serving but the rendering can take quite some time.

After some more months, I finally got the hang of it to the point that I automated 50-70 percent of the entire process. The one problem? It takes a shitload of resources and time to generate a worldwide mbtiles database.
After infinite numbers of trial and error, I figured out that one can devide a 'render' (mbtiles aka sqlite database) into multiple layers (one for building data, one for water, one for roads and so on), so I started doing renders that way.
Result? Styling became way more easy and logical and one could pick specific data to display; only want to display the roads? Its way more simple this way. (Not impossible otherwise but figuring out how that works... Good luck).

Started rendering all the countries, continents and such this way and while this seemed like a great idea; the entire world is at 3-4 percent after about a month. And while 40-70 percent generates 10 times as fast, that's still way too slow.

Then, I figured out that you can fetch data per individual layer/source. Thus, I could render every layer separately which is way faster.

Tried that with a few very tiny datasets and bam, it works. (And still very fast).

So, now, I'm generating all layers per continent. I want to do it world based but figured out that that's just not manageable with my resources/budget.

Next to that, I'm working on an API which will have exactly the features I want/need!

dear female devs / haecksen, how many other female devs do you have in your team?
if not so many, how do you feel about it?
and do you get a lot of sexist bullshit or not so much?

would be great to hear your experiences.

the female quota among our devs is < 3% 😅
most of the time i don't think about it and just do my job and it's fine, but sometimes i think, it's a bit weird. also, there is this fear that people might not have trust in my skills. it can be good and bad to be "special"... anyway, having more female rolemodels / mentors / colleagues to have technical discussions with would be awesome.

So it's been a while since I've posted as my first few months at the new job have been amazing. But now I'm running into issues with a team member that I need to get off my chest.

So my new job is front end development in React. I'm brand new to it but I was promised time to learn on the job. On my first day the team member I'm now having a conflict with offered me help. He's the most experienced so I gladly took it.

But now several months in I've noticed his teaching style doesn't work for me. He'll go into long theoretical explanations whenever I ask a question and I get overwhelmed with info. And he gets frustrated with my inability to process all that, because he feels I waste his time. So frustrated that at one time he just walked out of work and drove home, which was really upsetting to everyone.

My direct manager and my mentor in the company (our software architect), as well as our scrum master (a consultant) are all aware of the conflict. I've been assigned another colleague to help me out. Things were going ok but he got sick so I had to turn back to the team member with the conflict for assistance. Of course frustrations arose again.

Now yesterday during our sprint planning meeting we had to say what we liked and didn't like about the past sprint. And I brought up I feel I need time for learning and that I don't know where to put that, since we don't have a task for it. I said I also felt past approaches weren't working out and that I'd like to take up the offer to go on training. I was trying to word it very neutral to not upset my colleagues, as they tried their best. But the colleague who I had previous conflicts with took it personal and accused me of not listening and that is why my code is awful. While all I've been doing is rely on his code to learn. Long story short it got very heated and direct manager and scrum master who were present had to shut it down.

I'm thinking of talking to my manager and mentor today. It really hurts when you're accused of maliciousness when all you did was try. I know my code isn't perfect. But I get no help in improving it beyond long winded explanations about theory. If I ask for practical help he says he won't write my code for me. Which isn't what I expect. When I say I followed his example he says I shouldn't copy. But two sentences later he says if I don't know what I am doing I should listen to him. It's really very confused and demotivating as a beginner, but he makes it about how I waste his time and ruin his job for him. I understand he tries his best and that it has to be hard when someone seemingly is as dumb as a bag of bricks. But my manager and mentor told me they support me as long as I continue to show improvement. So I asked for alternatives (training, time to study, or whatever I haven't thought of) and now I feel like the bad person. I'm already someone with crippling low self esteem, and I'm thrown into the deep end. It kinda sucks when someone then tells you from the sideline you can't swim and how swimming works. How about tossing me one of those floaty things and then maybe accept I need to hold on to that for a bit and my technique will need work until I can make it on my own? :(

JavaScript is a rollercoaster. From "Golly hello world is easy and I can make webpages now", to "wtf '1'+1 is '11' kill me now", to "it's not be that bad if you know how to use it", to discovering typescript and it starts feeling like a real language.

... until you can't build the project because you have too many types so you blow the memory limit in node. I can up the limit, but I can't guarantee that we won't blow past this in the future. Browsing issues on the ts repo reveals that this has been a thing for years.

Sticking with the rollercoaster analogy I'm now at "Burn it all to the ground".

How do you guys/girls explain to potential new customers that you can perfectly work in a structured business environment and follow the rules, but also that you're assertive enough to oppose desicions being made based on bias, misunderstanding, fanboyism, or grave stupidity.

I just got informed from a freelance position that they would have hired me if it were not for my 'rebellious nature towards customers'

I don't oppose customers, i oppose stupidity unfounded.
Example from experience
> me working in a helodesk support position, all windows computer.
> new mgr comes into office, is a douche and complete mac fanboy
> wants all computers that are FINALLY working decent for some time in the entire department replaced with mac's... Back at 2010.
> whole team, even disliking microsoft themselves, are telling mgr that's a bad, dangerously dumb idea, expensive too, different OS, different software mgmt making, back then integration microsoft and apple was beyond diarhea... Several other issues the senior devs and admins pointed out

>mgr: 'but aple is soh much better, like a billion times better, hurrduurrrrr'
His decision passed somehow to the board..
> All stations from our customers get changed...we don't get a single machine to try out problems because overspending
> we are most of the time unable to help out customers because we still have pc's...
> mgr asks team why performance drops after 1 month
> we compared performance graph with his starting date of mgr, see clear drop after mgr's plan implemented...
> board stilll stands by mgr, gets praise for 'bold changes in the company', but appears to be some associate's son
> two main seniors leave after 15 years of employment, in three months, 80% of staff leaves.
> we canr fix the problems, we are not dev's , we get shit from all sides, i was still a junior in the industry so i worked as a slave inside that job.
> eventually get fired due to 'bad performance'
> mgr loses entire team... 'Hey why don't we outsource this dept to south africa, it's a lot cheaper! '

now that company is an it hellhouse where everyone get clinically depressed from sitting atbtheir station...
This is what i wish to oppose!

How to make that clear!

*flashback to days of windows xp*
Just finished formatting and installing xp on friend's trash pc cuz the os was compromised due to a shitload of viruses. Notice that other partitions might still be infected and i don't have an antivirus on me.
"Big boi Ill be back in an hour, just whatever you do, don't open ANY drives no matter how urgent it is. Just Don't do it or i won't be able to help you"

Come back and VIOLA this worthless trash avocado opened a drive to play a game and d pc was infected. Again. Back to square one. It almost broke my heart. Almost.

I remember that day well. I was 15yo and hopeful. That day marks d start of my hatred toward tech incompetent people.
SO FKIN
A N G E R Y

So today
College
My classmates stink of incompetence. I'm not that smart in fact i consider myself to be a noob among devs but seeing ppl that are several order of magnitudes trashier than me breaks my heart and makes me soo Fkin

A N G E R Y

Hey you cunt of a skunk, WHY can't you even compile a fkin cpp file without an IDE what the fuck is wrong with you? What do u mean ur program isn't compiling? Well it literally says there syntax error on line 15 congrats u moron u fkin spelled else as esle. Why shud I waste my time on stupid Shitty ppl like u huh?

And waddup mr shithead.No. Not gonna help you partition ur drives and install a fkin linux just cuz ur too lazy to google it urself.
And if i refuse to help cuz im working on my shit then I AM D BAD GUY? Stop bitching about me u lazy bastards get ur lazy arse off and read the fkin book. Watch a tutorial or sm shit why the fuck can't u understand YOU LITERALLY PAY TO COME HERE AND YOU AREN'T EVEN TRYING TO LEARN THE BASICS GOOD LUCK GETTING A JOB YOU WORTHLESS CUNTS.

Now now all the poison is out i can finally focus on improving myself and stop giving a fuck about them. Its hard to be calm and cool when ur surrounded by ppl like this all day. Even harder when there is almost noone that you can look upto. All this time, there's only one thing I've learnt- in a place like dis, being an asshole is better dan being polite.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thats all for today! Heading for breakfast!

I can agree to shit when presented with hardcore data, data that proves me otherwise. But when people go by opinions and then hold is a truth because of "many feel the same way" I cannot help but to giggle a bit.

Most issues I have found with programming stacks come from opinions rather than hard presented data, if a bunch of people dislike a tool, but it delivers, I get to differ two things: (1) it is bad but it performs as needed, but it is bad because of design problems etc, (2) some dude made a post concerning why he things is bad and sheep mentality follows.

If technologies were without merit, then we would have all discarded C++ a long time ago cuz Linus disliked it, a powerful programmer indeed, but a FOCUSED one, meaning, one that deals with 1 domain (kernel development)

Do I care about what Linus things about web development? No, lol, he is a better kernel developer than I am, but I highly, grossly doubt that he knows enough about web development to give me something to think about.

all languages have faults, regardless of what point of view we look at them, but completely disregarding a tech stack because of shit that you saw some fucktard wrote about, benefits and otherwise, just seems....well...sheepish, there might very well be a tech stack out there that covers everything, to me it is a mixture of things, and I use them as I please and feel like, but this is because after years of learning I have read about quirks and pitfalls and how to avoid them. I would suggest you all do the same, by you all I mean those of high opinions that can't be deflected.

This field is far too wide and concentrated to go head and think about absolutes when even the fundamental mathematical theory concerning computer science is not absolute whatsoever, it is akin to magic, shit works, but it might not, the incantation might be right, but circuits and electricity have a way of telling us to go fuck ourselves, so do architectures, specifically ones based on physics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Github 101 (many of these things pertain to other places, but Github is what I'll focus on)

- Even the best still get their shit closed - PRs, issues, whatever. It's a part of the process; learn from it and move on.

- Not every maintainer is nice. Not every maintainer wants X feature. Not every maintainer will give you the time of day. You will never change this, so don't take it personally.

- Asking questions is okay. The trackers aren't just for bug reports/feature requests/PRs. Some maintainers will point you toward StackOverflow but that's usually code for "I don't have time to help you", not "you did something wrong".

- If you open an issue (or ask a question) and it receives a response and then it's closed, don't be upset - that's just how that works. An open issue means something actionable can still happen. If your question has been answered or issue has been resolved, the issue being closed helps maintainers keep things un-cluttered. It's not a middle finger to the face.

- Further, on especially noisy or popular repositories, locking the issue might happen when it's closed. Again, while it might feel like it, it's not a middle finger. It just prevents certain types of wrongdoing from the less... courteous or common-sense-having users.

- Never assume anything about who you're talking to, ever. Even recently, I made this mistake when correcting someone about calling what I thought was "powerpc" just "power". I told them "hey, it's called powerpc by the way" and they (kindly) let me know it's "power" and why, and also that they're on the Power team. Needless to say, they had the authority in that situation. Some people aren't as nice, but the best way to avoid heated discussion is....

- ... don't assume malice. Often I've come across what I perceived to be a rude or pushy comment. Sometimes, it feels as though the person is demanding something. As a native English speaker, I naturally tried to read between the lines as English speakers love to tuck away hidden meanings and emotions into finely crafted sentences. However, in many cases, it turns out that the other person didn't speak English well enough at all and that the easiest and most accurate way for them to convey something was bluntly and directly in English (since, of course, that's the easiest way). Cultures differ, priorities differ, patience tolerances differ. We're all people after all - so don't assume someone is being mean or is trying to start a fight. Insinuating such might actually make things worse.

- Please, PLEASE, search issues first before you open a new one. Explaining why one of my packages will not be re-written as an ESM module is almost muscle memory at this point.

- If you put in the effort, so will I (as a maintainer). Oftentimes, when you're opening an issue on a repository, the owner hasn't looked at the code in a while. If you give them a lot of hints as to how to solve a problem or answer your question, you're going to make them super, duper happy. Provide stack traces, reproduction cases, links to the source code - even open a PR if you can. I can respond to issues and approve PRs from anywhere, but can't always investigate an issue on a computer as readily. This is especially true when filing bugs - if you don't help me solve it, it simply won't be solved.

- [warning: controversial] Emojis dillute your content. It's not often I see it, but sometimes I see someone use emojis every few words to "accent" the word before it. It's annoying, counterproductive, and makes you look like an idiot. It also makes me want to help you way less.

- Github's code search is awful. If you're really looking for something, clone (--depth=1) the repository into /tmp or something and [rip]grep it yourself. Believe me, it will save you time looking for things that clearly exist but don't show up in the search results (or is buried behind an ocean of test files).

- Thanking a maintainer goes a very long way in making connections, especially when you're interacting somewhat heavily with a repository. It almost never happens and having talked with several very famous OSSers about this in the past it really makes our week when it happens. If you ever feel as though you're being noisy or anxious about interacting with a repository, remember that ending your comment with a quick "btw thanks for a cool repo, it's really helpful" always sets things off on a Good Note.

- If you open an issue or a PR, don't close it if it doesn't receive attention. It's really annoying, causes ambiguity in licensing, and doesn't solve anything. It also makes you look overdramatic. OSS is by and large supported by peoples' free time. Life gets in the way a LOT, especially right now, so it's not unusual for an issue (or even a PR) to go untouched for a few weeks, months, or (in some cases) a year or so. If it's urgent, fork :)

I'll leave it at that. I hear about a lot of people too anxious to contribute or interact on Github, but it really isn't so bad!

Sorry, long since my last post...

I have quit my job recently at DERP & CO.. The level of anxiety was already somewhat of medical severity.

For months I had been in a project that not only did not progress, but that it was getting worst day by day.

A bit of Context

November: "Dev, junior anon needs you to help him on the SHIT project because they are running out of time, it is mainly doing unit tests."
Well, the code was a mess, there was a LOT of copy paste and it was all bad quality (we talk about methods with complexities between 80 and 120 according to SONAR QUBE).
Dev: "Anon, you know this is wrong, right?"
Anon: "Why? it works"
Dev: after long explanation.
Anon: "Oh well, yes, from now on I will take it into account." And he did it / try his best.

Dev does the unit tests and do extra work outside of the reach of the sprint (y than i mean work after hours, classic) and alerts the boss of the mess.

December: After a project of approximately 6 or 8 months of development, the boss discovers that the junior anon have been doing everything wrong and/or with poor quality (indicating that throughout the whole development the quality of the code was NEVER checked nor the functionality).

Boss: "This is a shit. Dev, you have to correct all the errors and warnings marked on sonar", which are around 1200 between smelling code, high risk errors, etc.

Dev fixes something like 900 bugs... lots of hours...
Boss: "This still is all wrong, we have to redo it. We will correct the errors leaving something stable and we will make a new repository with everything programmed as it should be, with quality and all"
- 900 corrections later, now are irrelevant -
Boss: "Dev, you will start to redo it, anon is out on other project. First you must leave the existing one working properly"
Dev: "ok ..."

January: How can I correct the mess if the client asks for more things. I am just fixing the mess, doing new functionalities, and when I have free time (outside the work) I try to advance the new repository, poorly I must say because burntout.

Boss: "Everything should be arranged at the end of January, so that you can redo everything well in February."
I can't handle everything, it starts to fall further behind. Junior Anon quits the job.

February: Big Bad Bugs in the code appear and practically monopolize the month (the code is very coupled with itself and touching in one place sometimes meant breaking other stuff).

Boss: "It can't be, you've been with this since January and you haven't even started correcting this mess in the new repo"

Dev: "It is that between the new things that are requested and the bugs I cannot put myself with that"
Boss: "Do not worry, you will be helped by random dev if you needed. SPOILER ALERT: random dev is allways bussy. Not made up bussy, He had a lot of work by itself, but it can't help me the way I need it.

High anxiety levels, using free time to try to reduce the work left and gradually losing the taste for develop.

March: So far, not only do they add new things day and day, but now they want to modify things that were already "ok", add new ones and refactor everything in a new repo. I just did not see an end of this nonsense.
Dev breaks, the doctor says it's anxiety, so I just know what I have to do.
Dev: "I quit my job"
Cool Manager: "Damn, why?"
Explain everithig
Cool Manager: "Do you want to try if I can change you to other project or anotjer scope on the same project?"
Dev: "Thanks, but no Thanks. I need to stop for a while".

End. sry for long sad post and maybe poor use of English (?) Not my native language.

I used to work with a teacher in my last uni year.

The job consisted on doing a kinda-like management system for a business. It all began kinda "right", we agreed upon a price for 6 months of my work (a very lowball price, but it was just right because I was learning stuff that we were going to be using).

Fast-forward first six months, all I do is code frontend, mockup screens and whatsoever because this "business" hadn't give us proper requirements (Yeah, I told him to ask for them, but nothing came through).

So I was like well, I'll keep working in this project because I really want to finish it. Sidenote: I was doing all the "hard work", he didn't know how to code, and he calls himself a teacher... wtf).

Months go by, and a year goes round, in between these months, he spoke to me, that he wanted me that we kept working together, that we could renegotiate the payment (I asked him to give me my payment once the job was done). I agreed, but my uni residence period was coming along and I got an oportunity to go abroad to another country.

So there I was, in the need of money to buy my passport, plane tickets and other stuff, so I asked him for the payment.

Needs to be noted, that the last 6 months work was me doing tutorials on how to fucking use Linux, how to use PostgreSQL, how to fucking use CSS! He told me he would pay me extra for it.

The day came, and I received my payment... the exact amount we talked a year ago, I was like "Seriously dude?", but well, I needed the money and I didn't have time to argue, so we talked a little bit about me helping him and I told him "As long as I have time, I'll help, but remember that I'm going abroad to work for a small startup, so maybe I'll be up to my head with work" he agreed, we nod and then I left.

First week abroad came in and I was doing a shit-ton of stuff, then his first message comes around "Hey, I need more tutorials! ASAP! Before 6PM"

What.The.Fuck. I told you, son of a bitch, that I wouldn't be able to do them until weekend.. and it was monday!

So I ignored it, weeks went throught and my "angry mood" was fading away so I said to myself "Well, it's time to pick up that stuff again", I open Slack and I find a week old message with a document attached, it was a "letter", I just skimmed by it and read some keywords "deceptioned... failed me.."

Sure dude? Was I the failure? Becase, as far as I remember, you were the fucktard that didn't know how to fucking install a VM!

A week went by, and then randomly a friend of mine talks to me through Facebook:

E: Hey, how are you?
M: I'm fine, what's up?
E: What did you do to TEACHER?
M: Nothing, <explains all situation>
E: Well, It seems weird, that's why I wanted to talk with you, I believe in you, because I know you well, but TEACHER it's thrashing shit about you with all his students on all of his classes
M: Seriously?
E: Yeah, he's saying that you are a failure, irresponsible, that you scammed him

That moment, I for sure, lost all moral responsibility with him and thought to myself "He can go fuck himself with my master branch on his ass"

So when I got back to my country, I had to go around in school, avoiding him, not because I was ashamed nor anything by the way, just because I knew that If i ever had the disgrace to meet him face to face, my fists would be deep into his nose before he could say "Hey".

Moral of the story:
If you overheard that a teacher has a bad rep, not by one, nor two, but more than +100 people, maybe it's true.

Good thing my friends and others know me well and I didn't have repercutions on my social status, I'm just the guy that "fucked up TEACHER because I had the right and way to do it"

The argument of "vim/zsh/whatever is not good because it requires configuration, and you don't usually have that on a new server" is a weak argument and it can suck my fucking nuts.

If some people are weak and lazy and forget how to use plain bash because they added a single alias, that's their problem.

That's like saying that getting used to a car is a bad thing because you can forget how to ride a bike.

Even if I did have the brain of a fish and forgot to use a bike because of using a car, I'll still be using a car 95% of the fucking time, so I'll take it.

If you do customize your setup, you can write an install script, dockerize, or just fucking something, it's 2019, you can do whatever the fuck you want.

Get a fucking couple of neurons.

BielyApp, yeah, GOOOOOOOOD IDEA! I still can‘t understand how this works or why did a reasonable human being though that this would be a great idea! 🤔

Ok. There‘s a community that lives 4 or 5 hours from my my city. I don‘t want to offend anybody, so let‘s call them “Bielys” (just a random name, I don’t know if there’s actually a group or etnia with that name).
Bielys live isolated from modernity, they speak their own language and they don’t use technology.

A dev friend of mine was having a hard time (he got divorced and was almost in bankrupt). One day, a man asked him and another dev to work on a mobile app:

...

“BielyApp”.

...

It was supposed to be a movile app for commerce. Bielys could sell and buy biely stuff from another bielys. Well, at this point you can figure out why this was a bad idea. Anyway, they developed it. Even it’s on GooglePlay and AppStore 😱 I installed it to see if it was truth or not. Incredibly it was true. BielyApp exists and the worst thing is that you can log in with your facebook account. WTF?!

I asked to him “But why?! WHY?! They don’t even use smartphones!!!!”
And he answered “I know, but I needed the money”

I take the train well out side of rush hour when the trains are about half empty (though most seats taken). I have to come in because it's not like I can afford to have a workspace comparable to the cockpit of the millennium falcon both at home and at work.

I don't believe going into a panic about coronavirus but take obvious basic precautions to at least reduce the chance and slow the spread and that should do a good amount to reduce overloading the system. I kid you not, at this point medical facilities are considering buying diving equipment for enriched O2 supplies to keep up.

Today, as usual, some fucking piece of shit cunt twat psycho beggar that literally needs to be in an asylum with a massive fucking great gob of snot dangling out his nose is going up the entire train, every carriage, begging groping every hand rail along the way and potentially exposing several hundred people every hour.

I told this sorry sack of shit, surprisingly politely, that he'll end up rapidly spreading coronavirus if he keeps going all the way up and down the carriage like that. After he's fucking muttering on trying to make people feel bad about fucking ignoring him not being all caring and shit and then doesn't give a shit about giving everyone coronavirus after fucking waltzing down the entire fucking length of the train his pockets stuffed with coin. Then he threatens to assault me. I was fucking this > < far away from unleashing a life changing beat down and kicking his ass off the train with no pain or injury spared.

At the same time, that piece of scum waste of skin the mayor has apparently informed the public that you can't get coronavirus on the train or buses. How the fuck did he come to that conclusion? Is this really happening? How can something that clinically fucking thick as shit be our lord and master?

I fucking thought the great toilet paper rush was brain dead. Jesus fucking Christ and people voted for this fucking championship moron. Why don't they just all save themselves the fucking hassle and all march themselves off a fucking cliff?

These dumb shits without two neurons to rub together only need to put a dozen or so plain clothed police offices on the trains to catch these fuckers.

Why am I even fucking paying taxes? Where's it all fucking going? Another fucking lets give a billion quid to Fujitsu fucking failed IT project again I bet. Can't people bloody do anything these days? Does there have to be an app for fucking everything?

Someone should make a fucking facial recognition app so I can snap a shot of these fuckers and then if one of these fucking passes the phone camera anyone else with the app it'll set of there's a fucking imbecile in the vicinity alert.

These people need to be dragged out into the street, lined up against the wall and shot. No remorse. Toss them in a pit, cover it with dirt and be done with it. Why even bother with the execution? Throw them down the hole and fill it with dirt.

You don't have to go mental like it's the plague but people could at least show some fucking common sense, common decency and basic decorum. Even minimal measures, is that much to ask? Absolute scum of the Earth. How we even allow them to walk to Earth I do not fucking know.

It’s been so long since I posted but this time it’s juicy again.

I got a coworker, no prio experience but already a year and few months into the job. He’s bad.
Magnitudes of bad!

We’re trying to teach him but to no avail. Everything about him sucks, major ballsack to be exact.

His attitude is to avoid every task, finishes nothing and then starts something new.

„Did you do X like we told you to?“
„No I started on Y, because I thought it [looks better, seems more interesting, thought that X is useless…]“

When you ask him much is done he is always „almost“ finished and needs your help on the „last 5-10%“. Yeah fuck that!

But that guy has a talent, his talent is to always give you technically correct answers which actually are complete bullshit.

„What are you doing at your job?“
„Staring at a screen and typing things.“ dude what?

That guy used the excuse „I can’t do maths“ on everything.

For an exam he had to calculate how long it would take to reach a certain amount if you would get some interest in that every year.
He asked the teacher for the formula. During the exam! And when the teacher didn’t want to give it to him he wrote plainly „can’t do maths“ on the paper and left

His code is of a quality as if he would write his first line in a week and then has the audacity to blame me and the colleagues for not explaining it right.

Ok you might think now we’re teaching him bad, or are too impatient. But honestly if you have to explain how to do a for loop for over about 15 months and get that attitude I think you get the right to be angry. I don’t mind explaining on how things work, even for the hundredth time, but then don’t tell me you understood, go behind my back, complain at a colleague how bad I explained, get explained by him and then do it again until you whored yourself through the whole staff!

It’s like he got the mind swiper from Men in black at home. Every day he hits the reset button.

He had a week of just changing indentation on a html file. Why? Because he wanted to find his style.

Yeah his style

if(a==b){
console.log(a);
}
else {
console.log(b)
}

And to produce code like that it takes him atleast 4 hours of trial and error.

And at the same time he goes arround and boasts what a super good programmer he his and that he can do some project work for them.
How we found out? Because he started working in those projects during work time at the office and asked us how to do things.
And he does so like a complete bastard!
Broken sql query? “No that query is perfect as it is, it’s supposed to show no results! But, just in theory, if I wanted to show some results, what would I need to change?”

I’m so mad about it and pissed on a personal level because he goes around blames everyone and the world for his short comings

Inspired by @NoMad. My philosophy is that technology is a means to and ends. We’re a tool oriented species. As it relates to software and hardware, they should be your means to achieve your ends without you needing to think. Think of riding a bicycle or driving a car. You aren’t particularly conscious of them - you just adjust input based on heuristics and reflex - while your doing the activity.

For a long time Software has been horrendously bad at this. There is almost always some setup involved; you need to front-load a plan to get to your ends. Funny enough we’re in the good days now. In the early days of GUI you did have to switch modes to achieve different things until input peripherals got better.

I’ve been using windows from 95 and to this day, though it’s gotten better it’s not trivial to setup an all in one printer and scan a document - just yesterday I had to walk my mother through it and she’s somewhat proficient. Also when things break it’s usually nightmare to fix, which is why fresh installing it periodically is s meme to this day. MS still goes to great lengths with their UI so that most people can still get most of their daily stuff done without a manual.

I started Linux in University when I was offered an intro course on the shell. I’ve been using it professionally ever since. While it’s good at making you feel powerful, it requires intricate knowledge to achieve most things. Things almost never go smoothly no matter how much practice you have, especially if you need to compile tools from source. It also has very little in the ways of safe guards to prevent you from hurting yourself. Sure you might be able to fix it if you press harder but it’s less stress to just fresh install. There is also nothing, NOTHING more frustrating than following documentation to the T and it just doesn’t work! It is my day job to help companies with exactly this. Can’t really give an honest impression of the GUI ux as the distros have varying schools of thoughts with their desktop environments. Even The popular one Ubuntu did weird things for a while. In my humble opinion, *nix is better at powering the internet than being a home computer your grandma can use.

Now after being in the thick of things, priorities change and you really just want to get things done. In 2015 I made the choice to go Mac. It has been one of my more interesting experiences. Honestly, I wish more distros would adopt its philosophy. Elementary only adopted the dock. It’s just so intuitive. How do you install an application? You tap the installer, a box will pop up then you drag the icon to the application folder (in the same box) boom you are done. No setup wizards. How to uninstall? Drag icon from app folder to trash can. Boom done. How to open your app? Tap launch pad and you see all your apps alphabetically just click the one you want. You can keep your frequent ones on the dock. Settings is just another app in launchpad and everything is well labeled. You can even use your printers scanner without digging through menus. You might have issues with finder if your used to windows though and the approach to maximizing and minimizing windows will also get you for a while.

When my Galaxy 4 died I gave iPhone a chance with the SE. I can tell you that for most use cases, there is no discernible difference between iOS and modern android outside of a few fringe features. What struck me though was the power of an ecosystem. My Mac and iPhone just work well together. If they are on the same network they just sync in the background - you need to opt in. My internet went down, my iMac saw that my iPhone had 4g and gave me the option to connect. One click your up. Similar process with s droid would be multi step. You have airdrop which just allows you to send files to another Apple device near you with a tap without you even caring what mechanism it’s using. After google bricked my onHub router I opted to get Apples airport series. They are mostly interchangeable and your Mac and iOS device have a native way to configure it without you needing to mess with connecting to it yourself and blah. Setup WiFi on one device, all your other Apple devices have it. Lots of other cool stuff happen as you add more Apple devices. My wife now as a MacBook, an IPad s d the IPhone 8. She’s been windows android her life but the transition has been sublime. With family sharing any software purchase works for all of us, and not just apples stuff like iCloud and music, everything.

Hate Apple all you want but they get the core tenet that technology should just work without you thinking. That’s why they are the most valued company in the world

!rant

Need some opinions. Joined a new company recently (yippee!!!). Just getting to grips with everything at the minute. I'm working on mobile and I will be setting up a new team to take over a project from a remote team. Looking at their iOS and Android code and they are using RxSwift and RxJava in them.

Don't know a whole lot about the Android space yet, but on iOS I did look into Reactive Cocoa at one point, and really didn't like it. Does anyone here use Rx, or have an opinion about them, good or bad? I can learn them myself, i'm not looking for help with that, i'm more interested in opinions on the tools themselves.

My initial view (with a lack of experience in the area):

- I'm not a huge fan of frameworks like this that attempt to change the entire flow or structure of a language / platform. I like using third party libraries, but to me, its excessive to include something like this rather than just learning the in's / out's of the platform. I think the reactive approach has its use cases and i'm not knocking the it all together. I just feel like this is a little bit of forcing a square peg into a round hole. Swift wasn't designed to work like that and a big layer will need to be added in, in order to change it. I would want to see tremendous gains in order to justify it, and frankly I don't see it compared to other approaches.

- I do like the MVVM approach included with it, but i've easily managed to do similar with a handful of protocols that didn't require a new architecture and approach.

- Not sure if this is an RxSwift thing, or just how its implemented here. But all ViewControllers need to be created by using a coordinator first. This really bugs me because it means changing everything again. When I first opened this app, login was being skipped, trying to add it back in by selecting the default storyboard gave me "unwrapping a nil optional" errors, which took a little while to figure out what was going on. This, to me, again is changing too much in the platform that even the basic launching of a screen now needs to be changed. It will be confusing while trying to build a new team who may or may not know the tech.

- I'm concerned about hiring new staff and having to make sure that they know this, can learn it or are even happy to do so.

- I'm concerned about having a decrease in the community size to debug issues. Had horrible experiences with this in the past with hybrid tech.

- I'm concerned with bugs being introduced or patterns being changed in the tool itself. Because it changes and touches everything, it will be a nightmare to rip it out or use something else and we'll be stuck with the issue. This seems to have happened with ReactiveCocoa where they made a change to their approach that seems to have caused a divide in the community, with people splitting off into other tech.

- In this app we have base Swift, with RxSwift and RxCocoa on top, with AlamoFire on top of that, with Moya on that and RxMoya on top again. This to me is too much when only looking at basic screens and networking. I would be concerned that moving to something more complex that we might end up with a tonne of dependencies.

- There seems to be issues with the server (nothing to do with RxSwift) but the errors seem to be getting caught by RxSwift and turned into very vague and difficult to debug console logs. "RxSwift.RxError error 4" is not great. Now again this could be a "way its being used" issue as oppose to an issue with RxSwift itself. But again were back to a big middle layer sitting between me and what I want to access. I've already had issues with login seeming to have 2 states, success or wrong password, meaning its not telling the user whats actually wrong. Now i'm not sure if this is bad dev or bad tools, but I get a sense RxSwift is contributing to it in some fashion, at least in this specific use of it.

I'll leave it there for now, any opinions or advice would be appreciated.

I feel really bad for the guy I'm currently working with. I have until roughly the end of August to upskill him in every aspect of 3 different iOS apps because once I move to a new project he will be the entire maintenance team for those apps. Feel like he is getting shafted so badly. The whole process has been poorly managed. The managers don't care how well I train him as long as it doesn't take too many man-days. And they are expecting that they can still pull me back in to help if he gets stuck even after I've moved. Starting to feel like I'm being taken for granted. Can't wait to get off this horrible project.

I don't know what you did yesterday, but i did make my company throw away 2 months of progress.
It all started in the beginning, since that i've made numerous complaints about the workflow or code and how to improve it. I've been told off every time, and every time i either told the boss who agreed in the end or wrote code to prove myself. Everything was a hassle and my tasks weren't better.
Team lead: you'll do X now, please do that by making Y.
Me: but Y is insecure, we should do Z.
Team lead: please do Y
Later it turns out Y is impossible and we do Z in the end...
Team lead: please do W now
Me, a few days later: i've tried and their server doesn't give http cors headers, doing W in the browser is impossible
Team lead, a few days later: have you made progress on W?
Me: * tells again it's impossible and uploads code to prove it *
Team lead: * no response *

After that i had enough. Technically i still was assigned to do W, but i used my time to look over the application and list all the things wrong with it. We had everything, giant commits, commented out code, unnecessary packages, a new commit introduced packages that crashed npm install on non-macs, angularjs-packages even though we use angular, weird logic, a security bug, all css in one file even though you can use component-specific css files...

I sent that to my boss, telling him to let the backend-guys have a look at it too and we had a meeting about this. I couldn't attend but they agreed with me completely. They decided to throw away what we have already and to let one of the backend-guys supervise our team. I guess there will be another talk with the team lead, but time will tell.
It feels so good having hope to finally escape this hellish development cycle of badly defined task, bad communication and headache-inducing merges.