Watching normal people use a computer is incredibly painful.
* slow typing
* slow mouse movements
* mouse is used for everything
* instead of hitting the back button, they'll load up a website and go through 6 pages again.
* no shortcuts!

Someone lost their tabs today (Windows crashed), so I said "press ctrl + shift + T". They were so amazed that keys could do something so advanced.
Dhcosncowhtoehwurt hrnxkxxhry he.

Honestly, if people learned how to use keyboards to their full potential, they could shave off 1-2 hours of their normal work PER DAY!

The problem with being a programmer...

I just broke up with a girl I've been seeing the past 2 months, that I was really into.

But in the end, it became a question of, either i'm with her, or I'm with my work.

I don't think that would happen with other professions, at least, not as easily.

I think, with other professions or projects, you tell someone "I need to work" and it's really fucking understood. "Ok, you need to work"

They understand it. If I was a lawyer.. I have a case. if I was a carpenter, I have a wall to build,
or a house. Etc. All understood things. Or physical things that can be seen.

But with programming, first of all, I work my own hours, I write software and then sell it. I do it all myself, I own my own business. I don't have normal hours like a job, but I do know my requirements, which is at LEAST 8 hours a day of solid, uninterrupted work.

If I had a "job" it would be like "gotta go to work" and that would be it.

But, because I work for myself, and because the things I build, aren't like something you physically see, nobody gets it.

My parents, as supportive as they are, will never understand how I just implemented a new design pattern and like, leveled up because of it.

They see software... buttons, and even then, when I try to explain what excites me, it's like trying to get a 3 year old interested in calculus.

How could they possibly understand the richness of what I do, how fulfilling it is
and how much I love it, when all they see
is me on a computer, clicking keys.

The same for this girl I dated.

The only place I feel where people understand,
is here.

Do you have any similar experiences to share?
Would love to hear it right now.

Today (as a joke), I asked my class if there were any “professional HTML programmers” who could help me.

Surprisingly a couple people came over with smirks on their face. I thought they were going along with the joke.

Turns out, they were serious. They legitimately believed that they were professional HTML programmers and talked to me in such a condescending way that I was speechless.

“This is called a file. See that part after the dot? That’s what makes it HTML. HTML is an incredibly hard programming language and powers CPUs and the computer that you are using.”

I didn’t know how to respond. Hopefully they were joking.

I’m kind of pissy, so let’s get into this.
My apologies though: it’s kind of scattered.

Family support?
For @Root? Fucking never.

Maybe if I wanted to be a business major my mother might have cared. Maybe the other one (whom I call Dick because fuck him, and because it’s accurate) would have cared if I suddenly wanted to become a mechanic. But in both cases, I really doubt it. I’d probably just have been berated for not being perfect, or better at their respective fields than they were at 3x my age.

Anyway.
Support being a dev?
Not even a little.

I had hand-me-down computers that were outmoded when they originally bought them: cutting-edge discount resale tech like Win95, 33/66mhz, 404mb hd. It wouldn’t even play an MP3 without stuttering.

(The only time I had a decent one is when I built one for myself while in high school. They couldn’t believe I spent so much money on what they saw as a silly toy.)

Using a computer for anything other than email or “real world” work was bad in their eyes. Whenever I was on the computer, they accused me of playing games, and constantly yelled at me for wasting my time, for rotting in my room, etc. We moved so often I never had any friends, and they were simply awful to be around, so what was my alternative? I also got into trouble for reading too much (seriously), and with computers I could at least make things.

If they got mad at me for any (real or imagined) reason (which happened almost every other day) they would steal my things, throw them out, or get mad and destroy them. Desk, books, decorations, posters, jewelry, perfume, containers, my chair, etc. Sometimes they would just steal my power cables or network cables. If they left the house, they would sometimes unplug the internet altogether, and claim they didn’t know why it was down. (Stealing/unplugging cables continued until I was 16.) If they found my game CDs, those would disappear, too. They would go through my room, my backpack and its notes/binders/folders/assignments, my closet, my drawers, my journals (of course my journals), and my computer, too. And if they found anything at all they didn’t like, they would confront me about it, and often would bring it up for months telling me how wrong/bad I was. Related: I got all A’s and a B one year in high school, and didn’t hear the end of it for the entire summer vacation.

It got to the point that I invented my own language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet just so I could have just a little bit of privacy. (I’m still fluent in it.) I would only store everything important from my computer on my only Zip disk so that I could take it to school with me every day and keep it out of their hands. I was terrified of losing all of my work, and carrying a Zip disk around in my backpack (with no backups) was safer than leaving it at home.

I continued to experiment and learn whatever I could about computers and programming, and also started taking CS classes when I reached high school. Amusingly, I didn’t even like computers despite all of this — they were simply an escape.

Around the same time (freshman in high school) I was a decent enough dev to actually write useful software, and made a little bit of money doing that. I also made some for my parents, both for personal use and for their businesses. They never trusted it, and continually trashtalked it. They would only begrudgingly use the business software because the alternatives were many thousands of dollars. And, despite never ever having a problem with any of it, they insisted I accompany them every time, and these were often at 3am. Instead of being thankful, they would be sarcastically amazed when nothing went wrong for the nth time. Two of the larger projects I made for them were: an inventory management system that interfaced with hand scanners (VB), and another inventory management system for government facility audits (Access). Several websites, too. I actually got paid for the Access application thanks to a contract!

To put this into perspective, I was selected to work on a government software project about a year later, while still in high school. That didn’t impress them, either.

They continued to see computers as a useless waste of time, and kept telling me that I would be unemployable, and end up alone.

When they learned I was dating someone long-distance, and that it was a she, they simply took my computer and didn’t let me use it again for six months. Really freaking hard to do senior projects without a computer. They begrudgingly allowed me to use theirs for schoolwork, but it had a fraction of the specs — and some projects required Flash, which the computer could barely run.

Between the constant insults, yelling, abuse (not mentioned here), total lack of privacy, and the theft, destruction, etc. I still managed to teach myself about computers and programming.

In short, I am a dev despite my parents’ best efforts to the contrary.

When some moron decides to give your free (and ad free) app a 1 star rating because it does exactly what it is supposed to do, but doesn't do what the reviewer wanted it to.

How considerate of these arse holes to ruin an apps reputation because they are moronic.

I really wish that you could file claims for the reviews to be removed for defamation.

Got laid off my by old employer back in 2019 because they have their priorities completely wrong.
Got a mail today whether I could fix something for them (ofc, they wanted me to do it essentially for free).
One of the websites I built for a customer back when I still worked there had a massive bug (that I was aware off and patched in later versions of the library causing it).
They never updated it so, I told them "just update the library".

Apparently, the idiot that was in charge of maintaining said site after I left didn't know how to and completely broke everything.
The hilarious part: While I setup everything using stuff like Docker and Git to make rollbacks easy...
That idiot went back to FTP and manually upgrading the databases through PhpMyAdmin :^)
He nuked the entire site.
Database? Gone.
Codebase? Borked (installed a version with a lot of breaking changes without properly reading the migration guide).
And knowing that shit company, they don't have any backups either.

They said "I wasn't needed because we have other good devs" when they laid me off.
Uhu, I can eh... see those good devs doing their job :^)

Biggest scaling challenge?
The imaginary scaling issues from clients.

Client : How do you cope with data that's a billion times bigger than our current data set? Can you handle that? How much longer will it take to access some data then?

I could then give a speech about optimizing internal data structures and access algorithms that work with O(log n) complexity, but that wouldn't help, non-tech people will not understand that.
And telling someone, the system will be outdated and hopefully been replaced when that amount of data is reached, would be misinterpreted as "Our system can not handle it".

So the usual answer is: "No problem, our algorithms are optimized so they can handle any amount of data"

Once upon a time there was a dev.
The dev had a resume that said he could dev.
We called the dev, he sounded intelligent.
We hired the dev, who was a bit green, on a three month probationary period.
The dev did very little.
When asked, we said he contributed to discussions, but seemed unclear about what to do, and maybe they could keep him as an intern if they wanted to have him at all.
They hired him. As a full time dev.
6 months later, that dev was shocked to find we could log into the servers with a privileged account.
We (his team mates) were sad.
We asked him to fix a few prod errors.
A little while later he said "Done!"
We then had to walk him through how to actually fix them, not just add a couple pieces of info to the table.
We were sad, again.
We asked him to fix some prod errors again.
We had to walk him through the process again
We expressed concerns to our superiors about his abilities because he was all theory, no hands on ability
They promoted him
We were sad
A few of us said "Fuck you guys, I'm going home"
They said OK
Now that guy is the only one that "knows" that code base
I get calls sometimes asking me questions.
I told them to pay me a consultant fee.
They said no
I said no
They called again
I laughed at them

Listen to the people who know when you ask them questions.
Listen to the people who know when they tell you there is a problem
Don't be like that company

It’s one-on-one time yet again this week!

I have a 1:1 with my boss every Thursday from 11:30am to 12:00 noon. They often run 45 minutes instead of the planned 30.

Why do I have these? I complained that I have too many meetings, and that it’s hard to get my work done around them (especially while burned out). So as a remedy he scheduled a weekly meeting, every Thursday, so he can make sure I’m getting enough work done. Totally makes sense, right?

And every Thursday he’s 15-25 minutes late. And because they always run long, I lose a full hour or more of time I could have used to get my work done. See the problem?

Today he was 36 minutes late.
Seriously, how disrespectful can he be?

So apparently the Amazon S3 outage happened because of one setting being wrong in a looooong string of commands issued to shut down just a few servers.

Am I the only Linux user who totally gets how that could happen to just about anyone regardless of how awesomely competent they might be?

Last week my company fired 4 people (on top of 15 more over the past few months). This week they silently pushed a change to all of our machines that changed our wallpapers. The wallpaper was a picture of someone in upper management staring at you with wide eyes.

They claimed it was a joke or something but the office didn't see it that way. At best it was incredibly tone deaf and stupid, at worst it was a way to tell employees that they are always watching.

I have no idea how management could be that fucking out of touch.

"We need to get visitors age, gender and it would be nice if we could get city too.. can we pull this from the cookies so they don't have to enter the information on our site? How much info can we even pull, we need as much as we can get"

I literally kicked a wall when I received this message

Multiple friens asked if I could help someone with her "laptop".

Me: so I hear that you have problems with your laptop?
She: oh yea let me get my laptop.
A minute later she comes back with an iPad mini.
She: I cant get this app to work!

How can they all call that a laptop! *facepalm*

So...
I'm penetrationtesting a network and the servers on said network
The network administrator and IT security officer knows this, because they hired me..

TL;DR a scan caused the network to crash.

Today I received a very angry email going "Stop scanning NOW!" from one of the IT departments.

Apparently I crashed their login server and thus their entire network...
It happened d the first time I scanned the network from the outside and they had spend an entire day figuring out how and repairing the service they thought was the problem, but then it crashed again, when I scanned from within the network.

Now they want to send me a list of IP's that I'm not allowed to scan and want to know exactly what and when I'm scanning...

How crap can they be at their job, if they weren't able to spot a scan... The only reason they found out it was me was because the NA had whitelistet my IP, so that I could scan in peace...

When I was in sixth form, I taught my friend how to create empty files using Python. He soon learnt that you could get around the quota enforcer this way.

He was curious to see what would happen if you filled the entire drive to maximum so he ran the code for an ~8TB file. Before he could delete it, he was told to log off. Nobody could save their work and backups weren't performed for 24 hours.

It's safe to say they weren't impressed when they found this.

Sometimes I feel I'm the live version of stack overflow for my family and friends...
Mom: The printer is acting up, how do I fix it?
Brother: I can't login to Netflix, help!
Grandparents: could you fix the radio/TV?
Gf: Apple can't validate my .uk mail

All to which I replied with the answer to life, the universe and everything...

FUCKING GOOGLE IT! Have you googled it?!

And the inevitable reply: no.

The only ones who get a free pass are my grandparents they were born in the 40's and think YouTube works on voodoo.

A colleague from university cried the last week that he cannot use git. For him it was just a big pile of software BS. I didn't bother to ask, as he is a very whiney person and complains about everything.

I asked him today...

He tried to create a git repostitory on his usbdrive. How else could he work on different machines???🤔😝

I tried to introduced him to Github/Bitbucket/...
He knew about them but was afraid they would sell/use his bugriddeld programming excercises😂

My son loves...loves Star Wars, so when Star Wars Battlefront (on the PC) went on sale, he jumped on it.

To my shock (I'm not a big gamer), the game is filled with hackers/cheaters that are able to give themselves 'god' mode, so they can kill in one shot and take no damage.
My son (and others in the game) keeps 'reporting' them, but it looks like an issue EA is ignoring.
My son keeps asking me "You're a programmer, can't you fix the game so they can't do that?"

Good lord...I could care less about russians "hacking" our election (moronic press, doesn't even know what that means), but hacking my son's favorite game!...hmm..wonder how long it would take me to drive to EA headquarters and find that SOB dev manager in charge?
I get it, cheaters are gonna cheat, but fix your friggin' code! Aren't you embarrassed!?

Don't give me any of that "we don't know how they are doing it..." nonsense. This is devrant, not <insert media outlet you hate>.

I've been wondering for a while, how the backend my team has to use could have so many issues. I was convinced they had no alerting system in place and have been commenting on it for a while now, and complaining about it.

Was on a Zoom call with one of the backend devs today, he shared his screen and had his email open. I saw a folder he had setup called alerts, and sub folders under that. One of them was named the name of the service/app we are using ... it had over 360,000 un-reads ... and emails are automatically deleted after 4 months in my company.

So they have alerts setup, they just don't care ... problem solved. Enjoy your weekend folks!

dear anyone looking to teach kids programming (especially organizations):

- please be realistic. teach things your students can use. how to debug, how to solve realistic, real-world problems. not how to make a turtle draw a circle, that's not programming.

- please don't have blocks. just don't. they hurt.

- focus on your content instead of putting up posters on the wall with celebrities talking about the importance of programming

- don't call it 'code,' call it 'program.' do you know how different muggles think they are?

- please teach in a logical order. too many times have I seen commands --> functions --> variables/variable types --> then back to functions and return types.

- don't set an appropriate "age" to do it. please. its enough for people to learn to program, but to be told they're too "old" for a course? I can't tell you how many forgetful seniors and special needs students have been insulted. and don't even get me started on being too young. knowledge is knowledge, skill is skill, ability is ability.

- teach concepts with programming. don't separate them. they work better when they're taught together.

- understanding is more important than style. for beginners, fuck style. all of your program could be all on one line for fucks sake. I've had teachers chose style > functionality, because, fuck working programs, right?

- let your content speak for itself. this is not the place for celebrity endorsements.

- give resources for after a lesson is complete. when a beginner is finished, recommend more resources. you're never done learning.

most of these were things code.org did wrong. fuck them. I was in a constructive criticism mood today…

Javascript is a horrible language.

I really try to like it but I can't. Even the wonderous node ecosystem can't redeem Javascript's flaws.

Seriously how the fuck could they invent such a bad language and make it so damn popular. Why couldn't they used an existing language's syntax to make life easier.

last time I went into a "computer shop" one of the staff members was trying to sell this poor little old bloke a mid spec macbook pro just to Skype and email his son/grandkids who live in Australia, when he asked if there was a cheaper option as he didn't have much money they very rudely told him no and that they where the "experts", best bit is when I tried to point out how wrong this was and that he could do that on a cheap tablet (let alone a macbook) to a manager he tried to convince me that he needed the macbook.

are these people just stupid or really that shallow as to try and convince an elderly man to spend such an outrageous amount of money.

!rant

Let's take a moment to appreciate interested and enthousiastic non-developers who really want to learn a programming language.

I am studying Medical IT at my college and most of my classmates aren't coming from an IT background.
We're currently working with Java, PHP, JavaScript and some require Node for their semester projects.

Some of my classmates approach me when they're stuck while coding and I try to teach them as much as possible so they understand what they are doing wrong and how to fix it.
I also show them how they can optimise their code step by step and they love it!

As a classmate told me yesterday:
"It's always so much fun working with you. I come up with a small problem, but I end up learning so much more about programming when solving a problem with you. I appreciate that."

It's a mindset I've learned when I was doing my developer apprenticeship back in the day. One of my colleagues told me: "if they want your help because they need a quick fix, tell them to kiss your ass. If you know they've already tried everything they could and ask you specifically because they want to understand what they are doing wrong, they are future developers with great potential, so go teach them."

May the force be with you, my enthousiastic little non-devs ❤️

It's not a dev quiting but my brother who worked in parcel delivery at that time.
He was hired on a temporary contract but promissed from the beginning and in every discussion they had, that he'll get a permanent position after 6 moth, if his work is good.

Fast forward 6 months. They had a meeting and told him how satisfied they where with his work so naturally he asked about the permanent contract. Fuckers acted suprise and shit. Claiming to never have said any of it. However as they are happy with him and so "generous", they offerd him another contract for 6 months and told him, they could talk about a permanent one after that period.

He kind of has a temprament, so he got up, fliped them the bird and called them lying assholes and went home. He didn't show for the time left on his contract.

The funny thing about it he worked for the swiss postal service (which is owned by the state) but not directly but through this.company providing temporary workers (which is cheaper for them as they get a shitty salary compared to a full time employee with all the benefits).

Wankers!

Nice thing though, the accounting department still sent him a christmas bonus (he quit somewhere around mai...)

I was recuited to do devops work for a client. The project started in late '14. Until mid '15 I was forced to just sit there and do nothing. And I mean nothing. The ops team needed my help but the project lead didn't allow that (endless discussions). Somewhere around the end of '15 I could start to work and quickly learned that I had to report to two leads that couldn't disagree more on what to do and how to do it. I also learned that the companies mentality is "Clean me but don't get me wet". So the ops team demands a lot but is really uncooperative with everything. So I am currently sitting between three grindstones and everything I do is worthless. Because nobody agrees with anybody and I cannot fulfill my job for which I have been hired: Make ops more efficient because they are drowning in manual work. My job is further complicated by the following facts: This company uses no standard whatsoever but their own. Thru this they have created a Rube-Goldberg-Machine. But they think their system is the greatest in the world and the only one that makes sense. Which makes automation pointless because it is not maintainable. They call it diversity and they say that it is the clear reason why automation is not for them even though they schedule meeting after meeting in which they discuss about how to automate things. But in general they do just block everything useful and sabotage my work. And behind my back they make me the reason for the fail. Every real decision is blocked anyway. Also the ops guys think they are the leetest in the world. And everything they invent is above and beyond. If you ask them why they have over 400 VLANs for example (in a company of unter a thousand employees) they stutter and stumble because they cannot explain their complicated shit. They also change their decisions like underwear. Another really "kewl" thing they just did: They hired a devops engineer and everybody loves him. During the interview he said that he has no prior experience with devops whatsoever and it will take him around six month to get started on the basics of devops. I could go on for hours here about the insanity of this company that in my opinion will cease to exist within the next 5 years, if you ask me.
Long story short I am getting out of there by the end of march and will be on sabbatical shortly after because I am burned out. And I mean burned out. Not like "Oh I am burned out". I mean really burned out, with health problems and everything. Another external guy got out here last month because of the same health conditions.

You know, sometimes I wish I had friends who knew how to code or new a bit about the programming world. Then I could show them my projects and they could help out of they wanted. I could also get them to properly criticize my designs and script. Instead of the ones that just scroll past your shit and say nothing at all, you know, people who would actually give a little bit of a shit. Sigh.

M - Me
F - Family member

F: So you study computer science... Could you recover my Gmail login data? I don't remember my email address, password or security question. (7th request to me like that from the same person, they don't bother to write down the recovered pw)
M: I can't do it if I don't know any of the above
F: Wow, I thought you're a good student... Could you at least create a new account for me?
M: But you won't even remember the new... [gets interrupted]
F: So, are you going to talk trash or get to work? You would have already been 50% done

PLEASE I'M SO TIRED OF IT. HOW DO I DEAL WITH THESE OTHER THAN TELLING THEM WHAT I THINK ABOUT THEM. I SEEK HELP

I didn't actually realize anyone could be this dumb. Sure, I'd heard stories, but I wasn't sure that I'd ever come across this level of stupidity in the wild. I was moving email across hosting accounts for someone, and I asked them to please navigate to a certain domain. Then they asked what navigate meant, so I told them to please type it into the URL bar. They said "OK." 5 seconds later, they said, "Which one do I click on?" They googled the url. So I asked them to please type it into the URL BAR. Then they asked what that was.

...like what? I just told you this yesterday. How fast does information fall out of your head? Do you forget where your toilet is when you wake up every morning? How do these people even function in society?

-_-

Fellow Dev: the clients are requesting a gallery on their website with functioning modals.

Me: okay cool

So for the record, I'm new to front-end and I've got quite a lot to learn in JavaScript.

*I googled as much as I could and I made a proper functioning gallery in 2 full days of coding*

Him: okay, so this is great but they aren't really digging it.

Me: *sigh* yes, so what do they want?

Him: have you seen how an image opens in Google images? Like you click on one, the image opens while the rest of the content shifts down?

Me: um... Yeah?

Him: yeah, so they want that.

Me: ... *Scoops the web trying to figure out how Google does it*. Dude, I can't find anything close to it and I've still got a lot to learn. Idk how to do it.

Him: well, you're being paid for that. So, you better do it.

Me: 1000Rs ( approx. 14.58$ ) isn't called "being paid". Gimme a break here.

Him: You're a novice rn.

Me: why don't you do it?

Him: I'm your boss.

*Sigh* (he indeed is my boss)

Him: deal with it.

Me: FU........C.....*suddenly I realized how it's done* OH OH OH OH I just got it, I just got it!

(I actually make something like that)

*Lol yay*

That's just my best story of a fight. Lol.

Linux... Is shitty... Ok it just is. I've tried all kinds of variations and they all just... Urgh

Now I know... I know devs are meant to love it ... But compare it to windows

(Yes windows fucks up more) but when it works it works.

... Windows isn't perfect... But it doesn't try to be.

Linux has that feel of... Clearly made by a dev... It works consistently but doesn't take into account how people want to use something...

Linux is something you have to learn to love. And I'm sure I could.
But with windows it's intuitive it's straight forward

I feel like if I was to pick up windows having never used it... I would know how it works. I could at least use it go online and watch videos do the basics... In Linux ... No it's not as easy, sometimes not possible

An os you should just know how to do everything you want to do, and not have to download tonnes of shit to get it that way

It is, the future... But holy fuck get your act together Linux

For my school coursework, we have to create a search facility, now the problem is my class weren't taught this. So 3 sleepless nights and with basically no knowledge of Javascript, I create it. Now, I like my classmates so I don't want them to fail, so I distributed it to them with clear instructions and told my teacher that I'd done this. They asked for my help anytime it crashed but no-one said thanks, they just treated me like an easy route to a pass. I went onto my school private development forums and it turned out my teacher had created a tag for me called 'Unsung Hero' and made a UH appreciation thread that I could read but others could only type their own post. People in my class were praising me for what I'd done and how much I helped. I understand why I do development and why I'll never stop.

So my in-laws got a new computer 😑
Yup you know where this is going. Ok so after I transferred all of their data set them all up etc.
They wanted to use "word" and could I set it up for free for them. I said no Microsoft office is not free you lost your license and disk and your old computer is trashed so the better choice would be Google services . So I explained the value of using Google drive, docs,sheets etc.. today and told them how much better it is everything would be on their Google drive so if I got hit by a bus they could get a new computer again and still have access to their data etc... So they said great and so I did.

Two weeks later... Can you set up word for us on our computer. Me annoyed at this point " sure no problem"

I made a shortcut on their desktop to Google docs. Them: oh boy this is great see John all you have to do is click on google docs to go to word! Thanks so much!

🤫🤓

The Steam Community forums for the Planet Zoo beta have really reinforced my decision to stay far away from game development.

A third of the posts are people who clearly have no idea what a beta is - "don't buy, too buggy". Sorry, were you expecting a finished game? You wasted your money, then.

Another third of the posts are people making decisions for the developers. A very common discussion is "Should they delay launch?" which makes my blood boil a bit. First of all, you have no fucking clue what kind of manpower this development team has. You don't manage them, and neither do I. So, neither you nor I should be making assumptions about how fast they can fix the issues, and definitely shouldn't make decisions about if the game should delay launch.

Second of all, neither you nor I know how the game is built. These fixes could mean a line of code, or they could mean a re-write of multiple core systems. We don't know, and I'm guessing you've probably never even written a line of code in your life so you REALLY shouldn't be telling these guys how to do their job.

The last third is benign discussion - people reporting bugs (even though there's an issue tracker, but that thing is fucking jam packed with 250 pages of reported issues), asking how to do xyz, posting feature requests, etc.

But if roughly 60% of the community is behaving poorly and actively working against development by pissing off the devs and drowning out constructive discussion, then yeah; I won't be going near game dev any time soon. Sure, developing business software means dealing with REALLY dumb people but at the very least they are in a business environment and not in a toxic forum of bullshit.

Oh, and as a closing remark, I love this game!

S = Some person I know
Me = Me

S: Hey, I heard you also do [software/web development].. I was hoping to get some advice from you about some advanced level HTML and CSS for my classes.
//or that if I could teach him something

Me: What do you study?

S: Oh, I teach.

Me: 😯 Really? What do you teach?

S: Oh, just some basic HTML and CSS with Notepad to about 50-60 students.

Me: (;﹏;) That's great.

/*this is a shortened version of a very long conversation*/

They teach some basic HTML and CSS like <table> and <marquee> and stuff. They also teach C++ and Tally ERP.

Also, he and some other person made their small intuitions' website but they don't know how to put it online. They made it in, as far as I understand, simple HTML and CSS USING NOTEPAD (Don't know if they used JS or something else). That's.. really courageous or something... ? I don't know, I couldn't have a look at it because they have it on their local computer and don't know what Git is.

I showed him some better alternatives and ways that they could use (editors, version control, db, etc.) to improve their curriculum and answered his questions, and I told him that I'll try to help in any way I can if they ever need me.

This also made me realize how much I've learned and grown since I first started learning C in school. Still, I've got so much more that I need and want to learn.
//Always keep learning
😊

PS. What would you've told him if you had been in my place?

Funny how it's the conversation when I give my 2 weeks notice that all this comes up, like:

1) how they were "talking about giving me a raise"
2) how they were "hiring more people" so I could spend more time coding and less time doing bullshit
3) how they were going to fix all the other broken things in the company

How do you think it would fly if instead they fired me and I promised to fix everything that's wrong about my working there after the fact?

Anyway, I knew they would pull this bullshit so it was expected. Excited that I signed the new offer today. Finally getting market rate pay and expecting better work environment as well. 🐶

On my former job we once bought a competing company that was failing.

Not for the code but for their customers.

But to make the transition easy we needed to understand their code and database to make a migration script.

And that was a real deep dive.

Their system was built on top of a home grown platform intended to let customers design their own business flows which meant it contained solutions for forms and workflow path design. But that never hit of so instead they used their own platform to design a new system for a more specific purpose.

This required some extra functionality and had it been for their customers to use that functionality would have been added to the platform.

But since they had given up on that they took an easy route and started adding direct references between the code and the configuration.

That is, in the configuration they added explicit class names and method names to be used as data store or for actions.

This was of cause never documented in any way.

And it also was a big contributing cause to their downfall as they hit a complexity they could not handle.

Even the slightest change required synchronizing between the config in the db and the compiled code, which meant you could not see mistakes in compilation but only by trying out every form and action that touched what you changed.

And without documentation or search tools that also meant that no one new could work the code, you had to know what used what to make any changes.

Luckily for us we mostly only needed to understand the storage in the database but even that took about a month to map out WITH the help of their developer ;)

It was not only the “inner platform” it was abusing and breaking the inner platform in more was I can count.

If you are going down the inner platform, at least make sure you go all the way and build it as if it was for the customers, then you at least keep it consistent and keep a clear border between platform and how it is used.

Client called the office in an angry voice complaining about how he could nog see the data in the latest generated excel sheets. Calmy tryimg to figure out what could be the problem. Asked him to send over the file so I could check it. Works perfect on my end. Ask him to open the file again on his computer and tell me what he is seeing. Error message, empty excel file. He starts to me discribing a directory full of files and folders. 15 minutes later I finally figuren out what it is.

The guy had set winzip as default program for excel files. Hoe do these people work behind a PC Evert day. Are they like I hope this magic box with screen and buttond does everything right today.

I interviewed to this small company. It was a position requiring a lot of experience they said. They did Microsoft SQL server and their technical interview questions were so easy it took me a lot of time to answer them because I was looking for traps, like for real. Think I might've answered too complex for them as well.

In the non-technical interview they joked about how they'd need to reserve two saunas in team events (Finnish thing) as they were all male and I would've been the first female.

Then they asked questions about my *children*. "Who takes care of them when they're sick?" Ummm, yeah, illegal much.

In the end they didn't hire me but they took two interns from the vocational school (or applied sciences). Yeah, so hard a job a Master of Science in Software Engineering with (at that point) three years of full-stack experience couldn't handle but some not even graduate interns could do?

Oh, and fun thing was. A couple months later a recruiter called me about the same company. I told *her* the story and she said she's gonna drop that company from her list and said no wonder they complain about not getting people for them. xD

I also send a tip to my unions discrimination department. They used my case as an example in presentations so suppose this experience served a purpose. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We made a software for hospitals in my old department. The senior Dev kinda gave me the software, because he thought it sucked and was perfect for a newbie like me. I really loved my work and gave everything I had to improve the quality of software, introduced tests, refactored old smelly code and talked with the product manager to overhaul the ui. Several months later this little shit project the senior gave the newbie, was a huge success and better than any thrash that the senior has created. The senior was really pissed, so everytime I had some days off, he tried to sabotage me in any way. I couldn't take that and many other things anymore, so I left the company. The most tragic part is, that my software could become a massive foundation for the company, but after I left they abandoned it. I still had some good contacts within the old company and they said, that the senior dev told everyone how bad everything was, that I have done through the years and that they can't even describe how bad the architecture of the software is. tl;dr fuck off!! I've done so much things for the company and they never appreciated it. I'm glad I quit that job. Best decision ever!!

I learnt to navigate in Vim 🤩.

Ik it's not much. But had heard so much about Vim and Emacs (tho still don't know why are they so popular, or how to use them), but I kept my distance after the first time I could not quit the application.

Well now, I wouldn't want to mention anyone specific since talking about someone behind their back and calling them 'weird' isn't very nice. 🙄 But absolutely HYPOTHETICALLY speaking, if I HAD a weird coworker, they would probably...
- ... strut about the office, telling all how great yet underpaid their work is
- ... write lots of 'concepts' because coding is for lowly programmers
- ... insist that the code they have to do when boss is looking is simply too complicated for unit testing, and 'that's great!'
- ... brag about their/wear to work a ridiculous array of ties in every colour imaginable, when everyone else shows up casual

- ... trap people into listening to them talk for hours about...
-- ... ties
-- ... their misspent youth
-- ... how awesome they are/were/will be
-- ... why it's a good idea to eat cheese

- ... never let me forget I'm female, coz *insert BS reasons why all devs must by nature be male here*
- ... send me little unsolicited notes and mails with funny (sexist) jokes *har har*

- ... be let go, at which point everyone else discovers why they had so much time that they could spend chatting away at the watering hole
- ... earn the eternal hatred of anyone picking up the pieces of their 'work'
- ... try to steal our customers away who will laugh in their bloody face

Just my theory, of course..

so my parents live close and my dad said his router died. I told him I had a spare. I loaded it dd-wrt on there and next time I went over there he asked about opening a port. I said I could do it for him. wouldn't let me touch it. he believes he is the computer genius and that I would brake it.

funny part is I work on servers for huge companies like Wells Fargo, Ally Bank and tons of others. I can configure a rack mount router but he doesn't trust me to touch a little crappy home linksys router lol.

no matter how smart you are they never want to admit their kid knows more about tech than they do.

This one's for all the SysAdmins out there.

About 4 years ago I was asked to take over a dental offices systems administration (~20 machines) after their previous guy had allowed their servers RAID 1 to fail and hadn't done any updates or general maintenance. (please take note this office is my parents dental office).

I since have been recovering from his poor configuration and setup by instating an active directory environment and installing up to date software as well as updating machines on the domain to Windows 10 since windows 7 is no longer supported. I have also been properly licensing everything.

My bosses (my parents) are annoyed with this because "it's more expensive" and "it's too complicated we don't know how to manage it" and I don't know how to explain to them that they aren't fucking systems admins. They asked why they could do it before and I tried to explain that now it's secure and things need to be rolled out on the network level. They had every user running full local admin on every workstation plus the server.

Some people don't fucking understand that just because it's simple doesn't make it a good fucking idea. And because it's cheap doesn't mean it will always be (just wait till Microsoft audits you).

Oh and they also don't understand fucking CAL licensing and refuse to pay for gsuite for all their staff who use it. Instead they just have two gsuite accounts and give everyone the fucking password.

I'm going to have an aneurysm

I don't know how anyone could write complex programs with C (though they apparently used to and still many do)

Inappropriate experience at work? Here is another one:

The IS department manager 'John' bought a drone (when they first started getting popular, paid over $400 for it), flew it around the office, which was kinda fun, then he took it outside and started peeking in (and recording video) various VPs offices.

Needless to say, that behavior wasn't popular because several/most have their back to the window and never saw the drone and the drone was close enough to see/record their monitors (which John did). No one was doing anything wrong (no porn, no secret company plans, etc), but they were rightfully upset.

Later that day he decided to find out how high he could go and because of the technology at the time, it lost signal or battery power, fell from the sky, and before he could gain control, it crashed (styrofoam wings shattered). Can't say I felt sorry for him.

Interviewee was googling the answers to the technical questions on a Skype interview. Their CV said they had 2 years experience.

Us: "How does X work?"
Them: "Uhh...what's X?"
[clack clack clack of interviewees keyboard]
Them: "Oh.....X! [reads verbatim from the tutorial]"

We had some fun asking ridiculous questions for a while, seeing how big a hole they could dig for themselves. Once we got bored of making fun of them we ended the interview early. Much less awkward on Skype than IRL.

I am tired of toxic politics at work.

Signs of a toxic workplace:

* (good) decisions are discouraged rather than encouraged.
Someone wants to introduce a great optimization and guess what the reply is (often from someone IT-ignorant): wait a minute, you can't do that because we have all these nifty little hacks and if you dare to suggest change to our shitty system, we could not allow that! We want to stay in our comfy zone, no no!

* no one can make a decision unless Mr. favorite-developer-everyone-likes says it's a good idea. And even if he's wrong, no one cares to listen to anyone else's idea on it. Stupid Feudalism. One man decides over the entire codebase. That's just idiocy. Where's TEAM in there?

* thinking years of experience equals intellectual capacity. It certainly does not! There are senior developers with 15 years of experience who don't even know how to open commandline, or they didn't even know about Chrome developer tools, or how the HTTP spec is built. That shit just makes me cry inside. How can you give these peoples the title of senior when they know less than a freshman year kid?!

* ignoring people's education and/or capacities. "You just graduated, so you're a noob". Right, I know more than you, you idiot. You've demonstrated your ignorance often enough. Stupid ignorant colleagues.

* blaming politics (every team blames the other team and there's constant tension)

* roaming ignorance (no one in the company, and I mean no one, besides me, knows enough about Information Technology to make competent decisions or analysis)

Politics:
What gives testers the idea that they know more than other members of the team? Why do they treat devs like they are mentally challenged?
What gives PO's that same idea?
What gives managers the idea that they can just yell at developers and threaten them with time pressure? Yeah, because the customers are breathing down their neck.

Just because I am a Junior Developer, that makes me stupid? I am tired of no one caring to listen to my ideas. I could save the company at the snap of a finger but everyone ignores my opinion (and often facts) on things.
People come in and instead of asking me for help, they ask everyone else for help, including the people who don't know shit about IT; now that's insulting.

Anyway, toxic politics.

Can I just say that the absolute most important skill for any kind of programmer or engineer is knowing HOW TO FUCKING GOOGLE!!!

<Background>
I am the head of programing on my school's Robotics Team. We're relatively know, however most all of my teammates know how to program and they are all very talented academically. In fact my "Lieutenant" will be the valedictorian.
</Background>

Seriously I missed one meeting yesterday because of the flu. Imagine me lying in bed and suddenly getting multiple calls from the team (even the valedictorian) asking how to fix errors from Android Studio. I asked them if they googled them and they said "No we didn't".

Why is knowing how to google not apart of any kind of CS education! They could have been after an hour, but NOOO it took them after 5 hours!!

Oh my FUCKING GOD!!

Why don't devs read the fucking docs?

Time and time again I find my coworkers inventing new ways of doing stuff that could easily be done with existing features.

Today I saw this on a code review (functions are from lodash):

head(filter(...))

That's what fucking `find` does, you dense motherfucker!

This is just a tiny example. I've seen so much of this shit. Sometimes it's almost art how they find ways to solve problems without actually reading the docs.

I got some work on a new project so I ran the 500, or so, unit tests and it took almost 3 minutes. Everything was mocked and no external dependencies so I got curious as to how on earth they could take so long.

I found some suspicious code doing a while loop over a date range incrementing by 1 day each time. It turned out the tests didn't initialise the start date which defaults to 01/01/0001, and there are 5 scenarios!

I got test execution down to a respectful 10s.

I used to work in a company with such a high bus factor that we called "teams" composed of a single people "immortal" like in the movie "highlanders" because of the fact they could not be fired since they were the only people to know how their project works. We went through hard times for the company when several of the immortals resigned one by one. Each time one of us left premises on his last day, we played the song "Princes of the Universe" very loud on the office. I was the last and I left four months ago.

I once had to make a shitty canvas game as part of a marketing campaign when I worked for an agency, for fuck only knows what. You dragged a shopping trolley back and forth in an aisle, and got points for catching items that fell from the top.

The initial round of feedback had the complaint that sometimes players weren't receiving points for items. I spent a night playing this senseless game over and over, but I never failed to get the points for an item. I was pretty confident that it worked, it wasn't like the logic was complex, so I sent it over.

Second round of feedback had the same complaint. They were getting quite annoyed by it, said that it was a bad user experience. Again, I could not reproduce it at all: the game was an equally tedious waste of life on every device I tried it on.

In exasperation, I asked the sales guy whose pitch it had been to get me a video or a more detailed report. The client was quite arsey, as they saw it, at having to do bug-fixing for us, but they did agree.

Anyway, it transpired that they were angry that players were not receiving the points for the items they *failed* to catch. The way they saw it, the game wouldn't be fun if you were punished for not catching items - so they wanted the player to get ten points for every item on screen, regardless or not of whether they caught it in their trolley. Of course, I thought. Silly me.

I was actually quite impressed at how a marketing department could accidentally undermine the very notion of a game whilst seeking to make one more fun.

My CTO prefers to hire very expensive consultants than to trust on staff. It's funny, because he also decided that all technical teams should run on the absolute minimal amount of resources.

You can't imagine how shitty it felt this morning when he sent an email talking about a security consultant that we should hire, just because he thinks the guy could "take our expertise to the next level".
They will charge us 450/hour to run assessments, to find the exact same things my team discovered a year ago.

Black Friday fail.

Local online store totally failed last year on BF, so they spent the whole week on news, radio, print ads, newsletter raving about how they upgraded the systems for BF and are expecting double the traffic of last year and are super ready. 60 seconds into BF, site went totally tits up, was not till 01:45 that anyone could access it again, and according to uptimerobot, they were tits up for about 55% of the day.

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.

My father was very supportive. Every time I was studying he'd take the dog for a walk, do the dishes and whatnot so I could study quietly and uninterrupted.

The rest of my family was supportive as well but not on that level. They always told me how awesome it is and do what I love.

Happens every day:
"could you please fix those bugs ASAP? Testers are waiting for it"
*resolve the issue and inform the requester*
(two weeks later)
"Thanks, I'll inform the testers they can begin their tests"

Ugh, how ASAP makes everything seem so urgent and important

The management brought some devs from another outsourcing company into our project to overcome the fact that we, the existing developers, are retarded. We are retarded because they change the scope continously (aka daily) and we can’t keep track with their requests. They want something and after we implement it, they want it changed. Completely.

Instead of getting the project and deep dive into it using the materials (setup, architecture etc.) I prepared along the way, their PM said that we have to make some low level knowledge transfer. This knowledge transfer session happened on Friday.

The presenters were me and one of my colleagues. After 2 hours of training, we found out that the supposed senior devs don’t know how to use GIT, they don’t have a clue about Spring nor Angular (nor any SPA framework), their only questions were ‘why didn’t you use X?’ (where X = bootstrap, jQuery etc.) etc.

What is even funnier: during the presentation we were asked to keep a screen sharing opened during working hours for a couple of days just so the new devs could see how we are working.

Guess what happened with the scope on Friday evening: it changed again because ‘you got new devs so there will be multiple resources to handle tasks’.

2 more weeks and i’m out of there...

Imagine if, when a Windows version became outdated (So anything before Windows 8, I guess), Microsoft made it available in the public domain.

We could have Windows distributions, just like Linux! Imagine how weird it would sound if you just said to your Linux-using friend, 'Oh yeah, I use arch!' and they replied 'Oh, me too! I love Arch Linux!', and you just stare at them and say:

'What's Linux? I only use Arch Windows.'

...
...
...

'Arch Windows? Are you stupid?', they would reply in utter disbelief.

We all know someone's gonna blurt out 'Yeah guys! I just downloaded Kali Windows so I could learn to hack, I don't know what you're talking about!'

Ah, good times.

I’ve been contracted to build a website using Wix... I’ll refrain from ranting. They want simplicity after the fact that it’s already created... I’ll give them that.

My question is how much would you charge for this? I’ve tampered with it in the past but not “really” used Wix.

If some of you could give me some advice on pricing, I’d appreciate it. Hourly rates or a lump some preferably. I’ve got a meeting with them this evening to determine what they’d like to see and how many pages etc.

Thanks in advance.

Had a meeting with a web development firm with 10+ developers on staff to discuss ways we could help them improve efficiency and they said "we don't have anyone who knows SQL or databases"...

How do you even find 10 developers who "don't know databases"?

Fucking news articles like wtf if they don't have a buzzword in the title they will never be published.

This Forbes articles talks about googles quantum computer and hotw it could break Bitcoin. FUCKING BITCOIN like who TF cares maybe you should talk about how it would break the ENTIRE FUCKING INTERNET.

Seven hours of meetings this week, and every. single. one. of them could have been an email.

How can they expect me to get anything done when all I’m doing is listening to them drone on and on and …

And of course this shouldn’t affect the deadlines. No siree! But can I work during them? Not a chance! … Totally do anyway …

I am being mentored all of my life.

Parents mentored me that I won’t get to that school and I should pick other one ( I got there where I wanted ).

Politicians mentor me to make me happier by taking more and more of money I earned ( I am not ).

Advertisers mentor me to buy their products cause those are best products in the world ( I buy cheaper versions produced in same factories by same people ).

My boss ( when I got one ) mentored me that everything is simple and could be done in 5 minutes. ( after reading some dummy article )

Coworkers are mentoring me everyday that it’s not their fault ( It definitely is ).

Telemarketers, emails, sms messages are mentoring me about my future, don’t miss that occasion, it’s best for your life ( No it’s not )

Celebrities are mentoring me how to live my life to become a successful person ( Yeah right, cause they known how to become one right after they were born ).

Now I see I am starting living in times where computer will start mentoring me how to live my life. ( Sometimes it already is )

What’s left is doctors start mentoring me about my illnesses and children ( if I ever have one ) mentoring me about how dumb I am.

Then I can finally peacefully die and don’t come back to this mentoring hell.

Tried a mobile app club this semester and the second meeting they brought in these two business majors who said they had an idea for an app that would share videos of college parties and the videos would disappear after 24 hours. You could also invite people to the parties as well.

I was like so you basically want snapchat... what happens when cops create accounts and fine people for under age drinking? How will you get market share over snapchat or vine? How much money are you offering?

They were not pleased...

SeniorDev: “OMFG..MalwareBytes is taking up almost 50% of my CPU!”
Me: “Didn’t you have a virus on your machine couple of days ago?”
SeniorDev: “Uh..yea..but it was cleaned up.”
Me: “Your OS might have been compromised. If your antivirus is still busy doing something, then it may be time to start over with a fresh re-install.”
SeniorDev: “No, that’s not it. This is just BS our Network admins don’t want to fix because I’m not a VP”
Me: “I’m pretty sure they don’t care.”
-in as much of a ‘I’m kidding’ tone as I could -
Me: “They would care more if you stopped going to inappropriate web sites on the company computer.”
SeniorDev: “I never go to those sites. It was a link to a charity web site my wife sent me. You know how those sites are. They are built by college kids, so they have no security and was hijacked. That’s how I got the virus.”
Me: “You actually said that to Jim and he believed it?”
SeniorDev: “Well ...yea because….oh …–bleep- you.”
"Jim" sits about 50 feet away, popped his head over the cube wall and smiled. It was awesome.

So I can see everything thinks CS should be taught differently this week.

Based on all of the ways we could change it, something no one seems to be mentioning much is security.

Everyone has many ways of learning logical processors and understanding how they work with programming, but for every line of code taught, read or otherwise learnt you should also learn, be taught how to make it less vulnerable (as nothing is invulnerable on the internet)

Every language has its exploits and pitfalls and ways of overflowing but how you handle these issues or prevent them occurring should be more important than syntaxually correct code. The tools today are 100000x better then when I started with notepad.exe, CMD and Netscape.

Also CS shouldn’t be focused on tools and languages as such, seeing as new versions and ideals come out quicker then CS courses change, but should be more focused on the means of coming to logical decisions and always questioning why or how something is the way it is, and how to improve it.

Tl;dr
Just my two cents.

Soo I am the only tech-guy in my family and it's a bit like:

Other: You do program?
Me: yes?
Other: pls repair my printer!

And you guys know how awful that is, aren't you? But in my family it gets tougher...

Today my older sister asked me how to save data from a broken HDD. I said I know a guy who's doing forensic on HDDs and he could make that.

She's like: "but a friend of mine said it could be done easier with software"

And yes, it is! But not that successful...

Now's the point she killed me instantly!
She said: "he opened the HDD and said the disks look fine they could be easily added to a new HDD"....

WHAT THE ACUTAL FUCK I SAID NOW YOUR DRIVE IS BROKEN FOREVER! AND THEN SHE INSULTED ME AND BLOCKED ME ON FUCKING WHATSAPP! SHE IS LEARNING WEBDESIGN WHY THE FUCK DON'T TEACH HER THE BASICS OF FUCKING COMPUTERS! Oh for fuck sakes....

So my parents got speakers integrated into their monitor. A few years ago (like 3-4) they made me turn off the sound because it annoyed them since all they did were playing some shitty flash games and some office work. Now they needed the sound back on and this is how it happened.

1. Confirm they plugged the right cable in. I know them so I knew that could be a problem

2. Made them download Teamviewer because I know they can't even doubleclick without guidance

Now the juicy part was to tell them they need to turn on sound on the monitor. As I was watching via teamviewer I saw them trying to click on the menu items from said monitor. Took me 5 minutes to explain that their mouse can't do shit on that because they need to navigate with the buttons underneath the monitor.

Turned out they couldnt get things right and I had no idea what they were seeing because they explanations went like "All I can see is Main Menu and Exit." - "Is that really all dad?" "Yes thats all. Main Menu, Brightness and Exit" turnes out the middle part is interchangable like "Brightness, Saturation, etc..."

After 2 hours I gave up and told them to pick up my speakers tomorrow

The best mentors I had were the people at the company where I started working.

I was doing my master thesis, bored like hell writing about someone else's idea. I decided to drop out and do a 10 week apprenticeship at this company. They had been my mentors in a university project and thought it would be nice to see what I could learn from them. I wasn't wrong.

During that time they taught me Ruby, JavaScript, Angular, Node and Git. They taught me about coding standards and how to write better, more maintainable code. They inspired me to keep learning and also to share my knowledge. In the end I didn't stay there, but they helped me get my first real job.

If it weren't for those 10 weeks my career would have been a lot different. I wouldn't be the developer I am today without them and I'm forever grateful.

I know a developer who works for a Mortgage Company, and he is dangerously incompetent. He used to work for my boss before I did and we both told his new boss how unqualified he is, but because he's able to get things "done" they think he does a good job. But I've been in the code and their entire system could any day just completely Fall Apart and they could be in a lot of trouble and we tell them this and they don't listen to us.

That time you think you found your dream dev job...

But they really just needed a content entry person so the other dev could add 'senior' to his title and work on all the new fun projects, while you're stuck fixing IE7 bugs in his code from 3 years ago.

He used prototype instead of jQuery.

You try to tell them about responsive design, but they think everything needs a separate mobile version.

You spend half the day learning his custom functions to a cms he built 2 years ago, and he's in the process of rebuilding a new cms from the ground up, so you have to learn the new version too.

Was fired 3 days before my birthday, and didn't get my company gift, even though I contributed to every one else's gifts.

Fired 2 months before birth of my child so lost my insurance.

After my time there... They now build responsive, they now use jQuery for everything. I also showed them how to do IE testing with virtual box, instead of them using the secretary's computer.

I am always shocked how many people at work are not able to use Google efficently. No matter if experienced developers or graduates. They are not able to limit search results to a certain period of time, search in certain pages, for certain file types and so on. EVERY FUCKING search result gets clicked, although you can already see in the preview that it's absolute crap and not relevant at all. I could cry sometimes and the worst part is, that many of them don't want any help or suggestions.

Sometimes I don't want my co-workers to see the notes I write on a meeting, for several reasons: Maybe they might have bad intentions (yes, I'm a little bit paranoid), or sometimes I wrote stupid stuff just to concentrate or remember things faster, or I want to practice my cyrillic alphabet.

What do you think? how do you take "secret" notes on a meeting? Any slav in here that could tell me if he/she understands my calligraphy? XD

Solved a complex puzzle on a website for a local ecommerce business, mind you in 16 and not really looking for a job but an unpaid internship would look beautiful on a resume or university application.

They wanted to see some of my code and give me a tour and none of them despite them being PHP developers for Magento could wrap their heads around laravel or how the routing worked. They also didn't understand and raw PHP whatsoever. I lost all faith and walked out of their office when they asked why I was using prepared statements and how they worked. That was after finding out that they don't understand cloud scalability whatsoever or common security practices.

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...

Hi guys! This is my first rant, please be easy on me.

This is for all who always rant about how horible old codes on existing systems are, compared to what new tech they knew and how better they are as programmers compared to the seniors in the team and how they could have done it better... im getting an impression that it's either your a newbie on a corporate world or a freelancer that has not worked well with a system whos been there for ages... first, most of us devs thinks that they can do better than the previous ones, it is a never ending curse for us proud race but as time goes we would also regret our decision..2nd: cost.. migrating a battle-tested / fully functional system to a new tech would take time and money including training, which the management wont agree unless of course you do it for free.. 3rd: standards.. the company has built a pretty solid standards that changing to a new tech would affect it..there are so many more reasons that the only thing we can do is accept our fate.. coding is fun until the system grows to become an abomination that even its creator regret doing it... it's not our fault, blame the marketting guys! :D
Thank you for reading!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The job I am interning at wants to hire me. Yay.
But they want to start me at basic programmer salary, which makes me feel really sad about doing another 1.5 years of specialisation education.
Just to get hired at the salary of what I could have started at 1.5 years ago.

They even keep talking about how competent I am, and how easy it has been implementing me.
I studied to specialise so it would be easy.
Fucking pay the convenience fee.

GRANDPAFUCKING RETARDS!
I HOPE YOU ALL DIE ON SOME ELEPHANT DICKS TURNED AROUND YOUR HEADS WHILE GETTING RAPED BY THOUSANDS OF GIRAFFES (EACH OF THEM BEING SO HORNY THAT THEY ALSO COULD FUCK YOUR WIFE AT THE SAME TIME!)

THEY ASK ME A FUCKING QUESTION AND ONLY GIVE ME THE OPTION TO AGREE ON THE COOKIE POP-UP TO ENTER THE WEBSITE! YOU DIPSHITS!
YOU SISTERFUCKING ASSHOLES!

WELL... I FUCKING CLICKED "AGREE" AND WHEN I FINALLY FOUND THE PRIVACY CENTER (LOL) THE SAME FUCKING POP-UP DID APPEAR!
HOW ABOUT YOU FUCKING FUCK YOURSELF, DISTROWATCH?!

Btw. they really still use tables instead of proper css styling.
DO WE LIVE IN THE FUCKING STONE AGE?!

Only touching the topic slightly:

In my school time we had a windows domain where everyone would login to on every computer. You also had a small private storage accessible as network share that would be mapped to a drive letter so everyone could find it. The whole folder containing the private subfolders of everyone was shared so you could see all names but they were only accessible to the owner.

At some point, though, I tried opening them again but this time I could see the contents. That was quite unexpected so I tried reading some generic file which also worked without problems. Even the write command went through successfully. Beginning to grasp the severity of the misconfiguration I verified with other userfolders and even borrowed the account of someone else.

Skipping the "report a problem" form, which would have been read at at least in the next couple hours but I figured this was too serious, I went straight to the admin and told him what I found. You can't believe how quickly he ran off to the admin room to have a look/fix the permissions.

The one time a piece of software I was semi-responsible for maybe had been compromised. But I was student dev so I wasn't even brought into the meeting despite being the only person in the entire organization who knew how it worked. Gr8 politics, glad you hennies trust me. They came out and a good colleague of mine was brave enough to come over and ask if maybe I knew how this and that worked and I could clear up the confusion they spent 45 minutes on in 20 seconds 🙃

I don't know how recruitment goes outside of the Netherlands, but here they can be very very aggressive due to the scarcity of programmers.
One was even so blunt that he called the office I was working and asked to be connected to me with some bullshit story. Now you have to understand that this was a small company, so small that it was one open space. You can imagine how I felt when he was asking me questions and offering me work while the rest of the people could actually hear me. I got mad at the guy and refused.

What are your weirdest recruiter stories? Beside LinkedIn spam...

"I met with a potential client today and part of their opening gambit was how they were looking for revolutionary work delivered within a tight timescale, and if the work could be done a reduced rate then they’d be able to send a load more work our way. … They were saying that they wanted work that was fast, good, and cheap. And if the work was fast, good, and cheap enough, the reward would be the offer of more work that is fast, good, and cheap. … Let me be clear about this, these people are evil, and their work is poison. " - Hoss Gifford

So, during my Java lessons we had a teacher who had a very special relationship with the language.
During the introduction he used to tell us that interfaces in Java are really poorly designed and that they would not reflect how an interface normally should be implemented. The possibility for a developer to add default methods to an interface or that a class could inherit from multiple interfaces was unacceptable to him.

Due to those reasons, he would hate on Java 8 and tell us to not use it and instead stay with Java 7 - dafuq!

My Manager: Could you help "other manager" (OM) they need some very simple code changes.

Me: sure that will only take a few minutes *adds 15 lines of code tells OM one single line they have to modify*

Some other manager (SOM): Hey how does this work, I'm confused, do I need to do anything?

Me: Yes see the email chain you were copied on.

SOM: Actually let's have a meeting instead and all discuss this.

Goddammit this was a simple change to make your life easier now you are wasting everyones time by not reading the email

I work in a fintech company and our product is a point of sale app. Two senior indian dev contractors just spent 3.5 months on a feature where all they had to do was map two tables by using a third mapper table and display 2 lists to the user so he could update the data in those two tables.

After hearing same excuses (that they are working in it) for the past few weeks, I took it upon myself and made a proof of concept for them.

Yeah our codebase is kinda shit but even me, a fcking junior with 3 years of experience managed to do it in 1 week.

Meanwhile these fuckers spent 14 weeks beating around the bush and couldnt even save data to a fucking database. They just added UI and thats it. When asked how investigation is going fuckers couldnt even come up with any findings. For weeks. Seniors my fucking ass.

If not for me, I guess they would have taken till the end of the year. No, fuck you, here is an example now pickup your slack.

Im tired of picking after you. God damn incompetent leeches

Yay devRant stickers!! I suppose I could rant about how they took almost 2 months to get here, but I have a policy against complaining about free things so I won't! And because, well... DevRant is awesome!

Tldr: hilariois scam website is hilarious

Today I saw a website that was obviously a scam, but it was quite hilarious: it said you could download an ebook and they tried to trick the user into clicking the fake download links. It was a textbook for engineering and at the botom of the page they had those fake user comments that encouraged people to du those things you are asked for after clicking the wrong download button (like entering your bank info). They described how their friends couldn't believe what an awesome book they got for free and so on and that they really loved reading it. Reading an engineering textbook. Also, and that made me lol quite hard: they discribed the condition of the book as "used with a few water marks". A fucking pdf with water marks...

Slack.

A product which I hated in the beginning, is something that I have started admiring now.

Like Telegram, things just kept improving without bloating the shit out of the product.

What's interesting is that they came up with Huddle, an instant call and connect feature where they support Audio and Screen sharing.

Totally a game changer and a Zoom killer because Zoom could be even better in terms of UX.

Functionally, hands down, Zoom is flawless but slowly it's becoming an overkill.

I am excitedly waiting to see how both of these compete because Slack surely has an upper hand in this game.

New meeting with the CEO and Chairman of Middle Company.

As the last week shit hit the fan hard, today they wanted to have an appeased relationship until my departure. They praised my job and what I accomplished in two years. And started a really well-executed blowjob (figuratively!).

They continued with the really fucking bad situation they are in and asked if I would help them. And I answer "Yes, I'll help you as much as possible."

And they asked if I could stay a little more. And I answered, "No, I can't".
They said that they are willing to double my pay for the next six months if I stayed. And I answered, " That's nice, but I can't".

They asked if I could convince some of the middle management (IT) to withdraw their resignation. And I answered, "No, I can't". Once again, they offered some money. This time I told them it wasn't a money problem.

They asked how could I tell that I was willing to help them if I refused everything they asked.

I simply replied " By doing my job!"

I think they got my "screw you, I'm going home!"

pms always tell the higher ups that I"don't have passion". I don't know how to show passion for their photoshop mock ups, one line requirements with no definition of done, their talking for hours about "leveraging" and name dropping about the top brass they are schmoozing with. I just ask if we are going to show our MVP to real users and she morphs to the bride of chuckie. I say we ought to pair program and she says it cost double to make a feature. Testing and code reviews are taking too much time but they hover over your shoulder while you try to fix a "mission critical bug" that occurs because they wanted us to skip practices that could have prevented the bug. Woo I feel better now!

Am I the only one who's getting more and more aggrevated about how the large youtube channels misinform and make out VPN providers (I am looking at you, Nord VPN, mostly) as the messiahs of the internet? How they protect our data that would otherwise be in incredible "danger" otherwise?

I understand they need clients, and I know most of the YT channels probably do not know better, but... This is misinformation at best, and downright false advertising at the worst...

"But HTTP-only websites still exist!" - yes, but unlike the era before Lets Encrypt, they are a minority. Most of the important webpages are encrypted.

"Someone could MITM their connection and present a fake certificate!" - And have a huge, red warning about the connection being dangerous. If at that point, the user ignores it, I say its their fault.

Seriously... I don't know if Nord gives their partners a script or not... But... I am getting super sick of them. And is the main reason why I made my own VPN at home...

I was laid off. The reason? Well, they didn't really want to say but they were clear it wasn't due to performance. (Thankfully, I got severence pay.) From my perspective it really came out of nowhere, no warnings or even hints that this was coming, which has me spinning. 😵 If I'm doing well at my job and the company is doing well, how in the seven hells could I get laid off??

What they said was partly the reason didn't seem true, or not the whole truth. They essentially stated that "they talked with everyone I worked with" (probably not true based on their decision, but who knows) and came to the conclusion I wasn't suitable to work on large teams, and that's the direction they are moving in. As if it wasn't something that could be improved on 🤔

I'll be the first to admit I'm not the best communicator face-to-face, mainly due to my social anxiety but also because I have too many thoughts. It can be difficult to condense them down for other people in the heat of the moment. (I'm an INTP, if that helps you to understand what I mean.) However, I know I'm a pretty good communicator overall since I listen and pay special attention to phrasing and word choice. So most people I worked with there seemed quite satisfied with communication with me. There were only 2-3 out of more than 12 who I had any difficulty working with.

So why did I have trouble properly working with a couple people? I hesitate to say this but, like other jobs I've had, well... they didn't have either the experience or knowledge to understand me. Basically, they were stupid. I was pretty frustrated working with such inadequately prepared people on a complex project with ludicrously short deadlines, and had no desire to work overtime so I could educate or guide them.

To give perspective, one React developer didn't understand how object properties work with JavaScript. 🤦‍♀️ (They are references, by the way. And yes you can have an object reference inside another object!) Another React developer thought it was okay to have side effects during the render lifestyle because they didn't affect the component itself, even if it was a state change in a parent component. 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

So what is the real reason I lost my job, if not performance? Could be I pissed off the stupid (and loud) ones which hurt my reputation. My main theory, however, is that I was raising the cost of the company's healthcare. I had a diseased organ so I did miss some work or worked from home more than I should have, and used my very good health insurance to the fullest extent I could. Of course, if they say that's the reason then they can get sued.

Huge bummer, whatever the case. I definitely learned some lessons from this situation that others in a similar position could find useful. I can write that up if anyone expresses interest.

Honestly though, this is a good thing in the end, because I was already planning to leave in a month or 2 once I found a better job. I was waiting for the right time for the project I was on and for my own financial stability. So I'm trying hard not to let this affect my self-esteem and think of it as an opportunity to get my dream job, which is working with a remote-first company that is focused on improving the human condition.

Being unemployed isn't ideal, but at least I didn't have to quit! And I get to have a bit of a vacation of a sort.

Why would someone in their right mind change a piece of code that was working fine (and it wasn't a complete mumbo jumbo in styling, logic, transparency, was in line with how the project was coded etc..) to use dapper just to call a stored procedure?! Dafaq is wrong with people!?
Or is it just me & I'm overreactig again?!
I hate when people add more stuff to projects that are already overbloated with fw/techologies to do something so trivial.. like adding 6827646 js fw so you can use one function in each (or are simply still there because they didn't know how to use it and left it in project) which could easily be achieved with our own fw we use...wtf?! O.o
// me cringing, cussing etc..

Senior developer just showed me a "competitor" that seems to do things waaaaaaaaaaaaay better than us on his web site and was telling me:

Senior: damn, I wish I could figure out how they do this. I've been trying for so long...

I write the URL on chrome with dev tools open and literally the first thing that comes on the console is a nice greeting from their devs with links to they github repositories, ends up they are open source...

And now I'm here thinking "WTF!!!! WHY ARE WE NOT DOING THINGS THIS WAY?"

How do people justify writing GUIs only for Mac and Windows? They could make just a single QT program which would work on Linux too.

MANAGER: "Hey Slug, I just got off the phone with $partner about $issue and they want to have a meeting with us to discuss it. Send them an email and schedule something for Thursday morning."

WHAT THE HECK DO YOU THINK I AM, YOUR PERSONAL SECRETARY!!??? If you're the one who has a specific day and time of day that works this week, and if you were talking to them anyway, then how about YOU schedule the meeting????? And of course $partner comes back with "Does 10:30 work?" and so now I'm just playing middle-man. Who could have seen THAT coming.........

Client: here's what we want, a website where someone can directly edit any file on the website, php that java thingy all of it. Hell allow them to access, the os so they can see how that works to.

Me: ... Hey great idea ... We could set the server up in your offices ! I could link the server to all your computer's they can modify anything you have on there as well. That won't cause any issues.... At all.
Client: urm why?
Me: *hangs up* sigh ....

It's a fake scenario.... But how I feel like when I speak to clients 😐 based off what some guy wanted to do, a whole training thing for devs to learn how servers work ... The idea is ok to train... Say an apprentice, but he wanted to attach this to the Internet.... Not limit its use... Obviously way to expensive.

The school I work at was supposed to implement a new attendance-tracking system. It required teachers to log in to the system using the laptop in each classroom, and mark the attendance.
Oh, and by the way, the same system would be used to track grades.
How would they be sure nobody could get into the system? One student from each class would be chosen to be sure the system is logged out when the teacher leaves!
Thank God they haven't started using this system yet.

This just happened to me, a few minutes ago:

Colleague: Could you please call xyz and ask how we can administer their server and ask about the bug?
Me: Sure, gonna do this after lunch.
[...]
Me: So I called xyz, and we're now able so ssh into the machine to administer stuff [...] and they'll check the bug.
Colleague: Oh yeah great, I called xyz a hour ago and we're all set didn't they tell you?
Me: No, they didn't.. (YOU GOD DAMN PIECE OF SHIT!)
Colleague: Oh an what about the bug?
Me: ...

It's totally fine if you're going to do it yourself but WHY dou you WASTE MY TIME? You could've told me that you already called them! 🤬

Stakeholder: Users are connecting invalid memberships to their web accounts. They shouldn’t be able to do that.

Me: Their memberships were valid when they set up the account. Your team’s record de-duping project is the issue here. You decided to mark those memberships as invalid.

I’m real tired of this stakeholder acting like this is a website issue or user error. Plus, this chaos could have been avoided if they and other involved stakeholders had just cc’d me on this de-duping project. I would have said their approach was not a good idea. But they didn’t because they want to do what’s convenient for them. If they want to be a reliable source of truth for our data, then they need to be responsible with how they’re handling that data.

It's rant time again. I was working on a project which exports data to a zipped csv and uploads it to s3. I asked colleagues to review it, I guess that was a mistake.

Well, two of my lesser known colleague reviewed it and one of the complaints they had is that it wasn't typescript. Well yes good thing you have EYES, i'm not comfortable with typescript yet so I made it in nodejs (which is absolutely fine)

The other guy said that I could stream to the zip file and which I didn't know was possible so I said that's impossible right? (I didn't know some zip algorithms work on streams). And he kept brushing over it and taking about why I should use streams and why. I obviously have used streams before and if had read my code he could see that my code streamed everything to the filesystem and afterwards to s3. He continued to behave like I was a literall child who just used nodejs for 2 seconds. (I'm probably half his age so fair enough). He also assumed that my code would store everything in memory which also isn't true if he had read my code...

Never got an answer out of him and had to google myself and research how zlib works while he was sending me obvious examples how streams work. Which annoyed me because I asked him a very simple question.

Now the worst part, we had a dev meeting and both colleagues started talking about how they want that solutions are checked and talked about beforehand while talking about my project as if it was a failure. But it literally wasn't lol, i use streams for everything except the zipping part myself because I didn't know that was possible.

I was super motivated for this project but fuck this shit, I'm not sure why it annoys me so much. I wanted good feedback not people assuming because I'm young I can't fucking read documentation and also hate that they brought it up specifically pointing to my project, could be a general thing. Fuck me.

I don't like interview coding challenges. At the same time, given the skill level of some developers I've worked with who work for a contracting firm and presumably didn't get a coding test in their intervies...I understand the necessity. Some people are so bad at coding that even the simplest of coding tests can show how bad they are.

I think my favorite is being given a simple task to write code for. And that's it. No "use this specific language feature to do this specific thing". Just a task and that's it.

I got a really simple coding test once. I had to reverse a string. I could choose any language. Presumably they wanted to see loops or something, but I just used Python and did this: string[::-1]

I got the job.

It wasn't exactly a meeting, just boss' boss coming into our office to ask about a feature. Went something like this (BB - boss' boss (or Big Bitch, whichever you prefer, Me, SP - second programmer) :

BB: Hey guys, I've got a question.

Me (without turning around since I was focused on whatever I was doing at the time) : Sure, go ahead.

BB: Could we do a country map where you would be able to click a region and get to a page with posts for that region?

Me (without pausing what I was doing) : Sure, easy. Html imagemap, or embedded flash if it's supposed to be fancy and animated.

BB: ...how would we do it?

Me (in exactly the same tone of voice, trying to mimic the same sound sample being played again) : Html imagemap, or embedded flash if it's supposed to be fancy and animated... Links leading to the same address as the filtering form for regions already goes. All that's needed is the map graphic.

BB: ...but how would we link to the correct results? Would we need to make new page for those?

Me: *sigh*

At this point SP stops doing whatever he was doing, proceeds to sit next to her by the whiteboard, and they proceed to talk about this for about 45 minutes, which to this day, I have no idea how they managed. I had no idea how they managed to stretch it for this long even as I was listening to them talking and drawing stuff on the whiteboard about it.

Afterwards, I've been reprimanded for not paying proper attention when important stuff was being solved, and a month later when I was being fired, I had been reprimanded for it once again.

Fuck that company. Fuck those people.
I have no idea how they managed to still not go bankrupt.

I work in a team where I am the only person not belonging to the main company. We have been a year and 3 months working together and they still don't realise that I have very restricted access to many of the things related to the project. So every now and then, something breaks and we have a meeting where they all tell me how disappointed they are at me because I was responsible for that and then I try to show them how I could not possibly even access the information where it is stated that I was responsible for that thing. Or that that thing even existed.

And then, the move the conversation to why they won't pay for my ramping up. This is not ramping up, assholes, this is you allowing me to access the information I need to do my job as you want!

I really don't know what to do... Other than looking for another job

FU*** unnamed company..... lets recap.
I went for a job interview at this unnamed company i was acting like me and dress like i normally do, witch is good not extrem like a model but normal OK. like you would see in any company.

Yes maybe i could have got a haircut but you know time...

but not to drift, i when i was myself in the interview and no out of the ordinary things happend....

3 days later they call with feedback and you properly guest it! they did not like my appearance..

Like why? my feedback to them was to think that refusing someone based on there personal statement of looking fucking average JO is not good thing to do. and that it makes them look like big "i am better than you..." jerks....
of course there was more of this so called "feedback".

They also ask if i had any feedback for them... i kindly suggested that they need to invest in training how to not judge people on how they look but on there ability of there work and skill....

pfff.. that gone! alright thanks devrant for this outlet.

!dev

Out of shower, I sit on bed staring at my phone cuz I don't know who to talk to. This is the shittiest stage of the lockdown. When you've bore your close friends, exhausted your "I'm gonna find new friends online" options, and now you're -I am- circling back to remind yourself of all the people who put you aside. Just making yourself sadder remembering how each one of them shared a lot of their life and feelings with you and then how easily they went like "Nope. Don't want to deal with you". Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that's everyone. Every friendship has a proper "distance" but I just don't know why some people are like asteroids. Or rather, their interests are. They come quick and crash your mental barriers and tell you everything there is to know about them but then something shinier catches their attention or they realize they actually won't be able to have you -me- as a sidepiece and then they just... Fuck off.
And I don't know, maybe they think I'll remember them as the one that got away, but sadly, they just become "another one" in a list that I can't remember past the last 5-6 of.

Anyways, I miss the days when I could sit next to a friend, or hug a friend, or just looking into someone's eyes from less than safe distant and seeing how the details of their face change as they speak, and how their emotions flow.

I'm tired of all the zoom and vc and...

I'm just tired. 😢

I FINALLY GOT CHROME BACK!!! A few weeks ago, my computer, for no reason, said I couldn't use chrome due to Microsoft Family features, despite me not having a Microsoft Family setup. I have been using edge for weeks. Pray for my sanity.

The solution, was to create a new Microsoft account and run chrome as that. But, it does bring up the interesting topic of how much Microsoft sucks. They do this all the time, they look at something that doesn't need meddling with, like my right to use my property and my apllications, and release some garbage they didn't test without thinking of the implications. Did anyone ever as Microsoft for a way to manage your family forcefully? No. Because, if you cared enough, I'm sure you could just download a stupid family app, rather than let Microsoft take hostage of your computers.

One thing really interesting to me was that Firefox nor chrome worked, but edge could launch just fine. A little suspicious, don't ya think, Microsoft?

This Book....

Before doing any systems programming you should definitely read this book... most people think they know what they are doing but in fact they are completely clueless and the worst part is you don’t realize how clueless you are... you don’t know what you don’t know nor do you know how much you really don’t know.. a most people are part of this group, including myself lol.

Computers are much more than a bunch of CPUs, buses and peripherals. (Embedded folks realize this). But this goes beyond embedded this is a systems book, on architecture of computers in general.

Learning only java and the java/C# python and the others SDK/Api and spending your life with horse blinders for what’s going on below only sets you up for failure in the future, and when you that point it’s gonna be a shocker. Could be tomorrow could be 20 years from now, but most people with those horseblinders get to that point and have that “experience” no avoiding the inevitable lol.

I really enjoyed this book in their quantitative approach to teaching the subject. Especially understanding parallelism and multi core systems.

i’m so tired of people who are developers that go to every new popular social media platform and try to teach others to code. god fucking dammit. what could possibly going through these people’s minds? do they really think people who want to learn to code think “i want to learn to code so bad. i should scroll mindlessly through instagram/tiktok until i find someone teaching how to code”?

god, if you’d ever uploaded code to tiktok or instagram to teach others to code, you’re a fucking idiot.

She: Hey, if I send you a video (made of photos), could you please rotate the images (they are rotated 45 degrees)?
Me: hmmm sure.
*She sending the video*
Me: Wait... there is some text over the rotated photos...
She: That's a problem?

Are you fucking kiding me? How the fuck I can rotate *only* the images in a video where you put also some text (not rotated)???
Can't you visualize that if I do that, the text will be rotated 45 degrees and the video will be still wrong?

Prior to a tech conference in Las Vegas, the department manager held pre-meetings (yes, more than one)
with the developers to outline their expected behavior (yes, there was an outline in Word). Since
they would be representing the company, professionalism would be expected at all times, not just
during the conference. He knew he couldn’t forbid gambling and drinking, but any unruly behavior
that could reflect badly on the company would be dealt with severe disciplinary action up to and
including termination. He wrote up very detailed itinerary, what track each developer was
expected to attend, meal times (yes, what time to get up for breakfast, meet for lunch, and time
to eat at night). First day was fine, casinos are kinda crazy so having an itinerary wasn’t the
worst idea and no one got lost. Days following however, got interesting. After the first evening
meal, everyone hit the casino as expected (too much drinking, etc..normal single twenty-something
guys do) and the manager especially had a good time.
Next, and following days, the manager could not be found in any of the ‘required’ technical tracks.
Not that they cared that much, but couple of devs decided to check out the casino, and sure enough,
there he was at one of the tables, drunk, and being very loud around at 10 in the morning.
Again, nobody cared much, manager wasn’t very tech savy, and so attending a track on C #threading
would be lost on him. It was more of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ kind of thing.
The manager kept to the itinerary, he met everyone at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, etc, but the
‘WTF’s didn’t get good until the manager was bragging about how wonderful the conference was, how
much he was learning and couldn’t wait to get back and start implementing everything he was learning.
It was such a joke, the guys would bait him on tracks they know he didn’t attend and an amazing amount
of BS could not be believed.
On the last day of the conference several decided to follow him after breakfast to see where he went
and watched him go into a technical track, just to walk back out and straight to the casino floor.
Again, around 10, he was drunk, not quite as loud until he threw up in a trash can (they said it was quite a scene).
He left to go back his room, which they suspected he took a nap before meeting everyone for lunch.
After that, they gathered his daily itinerary was:
- Get up for breakfast
- walk around and make sure it looked like he was heading to a track
- head to the casino
- take a nap
- eat lunch
- walk around some more
- head to the casino
- take a nap
- eat dinner
- head to the casino
- wash-rinse-repeat
Last day caught up with him. After about week of drinking, staying up late, etc, his body (he’s in his mid 50’s, 350lbs+, so imagine)
kinda’ gave up. Could barely walk 50 feet without needing to sit down, and the flight back was worse for everyone,
throwing up occasionally, moaning, you get the idea.
On the following Monday with the VP if IT, everyone was discussing the conference, what they learned,
what they liked, etc, the manager also bragged, yes bragged, on how tired he was because of how much
he learned and the reason why he probably caught the flu (he couldn’t hide how sick he was on the flight)
saying “When you’re in the learning zone, you lose track of time and then you are so exhausted, your
immune system is susceptible to all kinds of things.” . VP was so impressed by his dedication and
fighting through the exhaustion for the good of the company, he gave him the rest of the day off.
Other devs? No, they had to go back to work.

Was talking about how I implemented CI/CD in one of our projects as a starting point to others and how it worked by running tests and deploying to the server and one of my colleagues laughed about having to have tests at all, I explained and asked him what was he gonna do that morning, his answer:

"Well, I'm gonna test the system X and fix some bugs"

To what I replied:

"If you have automated tests you could have those tests automatic(?!) and they also help you finding bugs early"

Wtf do ppl have in mind that they prefer remediation over prevention and they end up wasting their time with shit that could be fully automated?

made a prototype and showed the demo to clients. They asked me where it was stored and how to access to the code. Told them where it was stored was was a trial and it has expired. Asked me why I didn't pay the subscription. Also asked me if I could send them the code, for them to "try using it" and "implement it in their office". Told them if they wanted to use the program, it needs to be done again (since this is a prototype). 3 days now, no sounds from the client.

Today, I made someones day in 5 minutes by using my phone camera, a picture to pdf converter, and a wireless capable printer to take a sheet of music in a small book, supersize it, and print it so they could read it without squinting.

Sometimes I forget how awesome it is to have this technology on demand, and it takes someone who doesn't have it to realize just how cool it is.

Today I had a client raise a high defect directly with my boss’s boss. I got called into a meeting and was told
I needed to fix it immediately.

I looked and realized it was in their code and not our component. I told them as much. They asked me if I would still fix it. I refused. Told them it’s not my component. Fix your own problems.

Sat their as my boss’s boss asked them how they functioned if they didn’t even understand their own component. Feels good man. All I could do is smile at them trying not to laugh.

I already had a previous succesful interview the day before and just went to my current employer out of decency.
The previous day gave me so much confidence, that I dominated the complete interview and asked them what they could offer me, that I would choose them.

On my way home they send me a text how much they were interested in me and that they will show me code as I demanded.

I took the job because the were as much interested in quality, as I am.

I have a sandbox account for a product we are developing and I'm receiving promotional emails.

I could just opt out, but I think it's adorable how they try to surprise me with the new features I created

Someone saw my work and asked how I used this api, and I was like "oh ok you just do this this and this" and they were really lost and asked me if I could teach them. So I asked if they programmed and they said no. *inhales* *sigh*

Had a couple occasions to feel like a badass, recently.
I'm the only programming polyglot on the team. They've been wrestling with an encryption problem. I crack open C, make a few calls to wincrypt (yes, I'm sorry, we're a Windows company) and give them a dll they can call in their IDE. They were stunned by how fast it was.
Last week, my manager asked if I could put together a communications module for our flagship software.
Him: will 3 months be enough time?
On Monday, I had an alpha of the module ready, and a standalone simulator of the module, and a couple different examples of how to communicate with it written out in python.

!shortRant

You all complaining about shit code from coworkers and about fucking WordPress. Looks different, but know what? Answer is the same.
Money.
Let me explain.
For example, you were born in USA. You can choose any profession, and if you became pro - you will be payed great. Looks nice, isn't it?
But if you were born in Russia, India, somewhere in Africa, whatever, you can be businessman, coder or you can suck a dick to the end of you life.
Not that great, yeah?
You are looking around and see great people with their own dreams and talents. But then you ask them "to which faculty are you going?" Answer is obvious. And that's how shitcoders are born.
And yeah, about WordPress. I'm mobile developer, I just can't understand how awful it is (or not, idunno). The only thing I know - if I were PHP developer, I could earn twice more than now. But why I didn't choose that way? Because I REALLY LOVE MY WORK. Everyday is good, I'm working at weekends often, because I want.
So please, shut up. You could never work with WordPress, but you motherfucker CHOOSE IT. You could switch to node, go, Java. Why the flying fuck you didn't? Oh yeah, MONEY. So please, shut up.

Devrant isn't for crying girls complaining about shit they did themselves. (No sexism, just metaphor, sorry girls)

"damn bro, you made that? how can i get into coding?"

shut the fuck up. you can get into programming like anyone who wants to can. by googling how to code. it's not the question itself that bothers me, it's the fact that if you actually wanted to code so bad, you already would've googled it. stop projecting your lack of passion on me.

this is most common with programming, but it happens so often with so many other things.

if you want to learn about biology and chemistry, there's free courses online and papers from nih.

if you want to learn about forsenics read a book about it and read about cases and how they were solved.

i could go on and on. the internet gives you access to so much that if you actually wanted to learn something, you would've already have.

I am so mad, I have no words for how fucking much I hate ever having to work or pass work to other incompetent developers or teams, what a fucking waste of time and resources.

After handing off the frontend - for the client to find some team, that would do it in the short time and budget he needs (multiple developers, more fast, much good), he found a team that seemed to be alright for the job and seemed alright to me too, now maybe a month or two later, the client contacts me, that they fucked something up and if I could talk to them.

The email I then received from them seriously made me speechles, mad and sad, all at same time, I spent multiple upon multiple hours, getting a very good readable documentation up (markdown with TOC, properly rendered headers, bulletpoints, all that shit), with all files, all services used, all credentials, even converted all ssh keys into putty ppk format, in case the developers are using windows and are too dumb to do it themselves, nginx configs, it had seriously everything, even too much to list.

They somehow managed to fuck up the entire server, while attempting to "add ssh keys themselves", EVEN FUCKING THOUGH I have included all the keys they need, all the hosting credentials, everything, yet they decided to fuck with shit themselves and completely annihilate the server in the process (HOW?!), so not even the webserver works anymore.

I am fucking speechless, I made it so fucking easy to gather all info and files they need, all properly put into well named folders, along the documentation in an archive and they somehow managed to nuke the fucking server, while attempting to add ssh keys?!

If you don't know how to config a server, then don't fucking touch it and just use everything, that got served to you on a fucking silver platter.

---

I'll just instantly answer the most annoying comment, that somebody could come up with: "why didn't you do it yourself?"

Because in a perfect world, a fully managed team, can do much more than a single developer can, especially in the same timeframe and from what I heard of said client, atleast they did something in terms of developing the system. (which surprises me, considering it's the same people that nuked a server, while trying to add ssh keys)

!rant

More like a genersl question I guess. But how do you guys react to writing software that might make someone else get laid off? At work I developed an application that manages a lot of the inventories and yard management that had to be done by hand. While I was developing it, the manager that was giving me the details mentioned (jokingly) many times that if the software works as it was expected that they will not require certain people anymore. I shrugged it off as a joke since I could not imagine it being serious. Turns out, it was serious and some talks about company restructuring have taken place since I released the app into our servers. How the fuck am I supposed to feel? If someone loses their job because of something like this, how would someone go about NOT feeling guilty af?

🪙 The golden age of tech is coming to an end. We currently live in a world of tech built by engineers and great minds; both Windows and Linux are great in their own ways. PCs are the peak of engineering, both desktops and laptops because of how versatile, powerful and universal they are. They serve engineers, designers and end users. You can do anything you can imagine; because the great people who built it, did it in such way that they themselves could use and enjoy it.

📱 The tech of the future will become ever more limited. The next generation of humans will use Chrome OS gladly and not even feel limited because they never experienced the freedom provided by a true personal computer device. Android OS is already getting ever closer to restricting 3rd party APK installers. Big tech will do everything they can to limit freedoms and make everyone use cloud, where they can charge $ for every damn click.

☎️The consumer-facing tech will become increasingly dumbed-down over time. The programmers and engineers will be still able to use "true" tech, but only for work. In everyday life, they will have to be content with the dumb limited tech.

And there is nothing we can do to stop it.

Bit of an odd question maybe, but when sending out your CV to a company over email, what would you expect to be written / write in the email itself?

I've got a sysadmin position that I'd really like to apply to, and it seems like I'm ticking all the boxes, however some of the things like SSH authentication (I mean it's fairly basic, isn't it) I haven't mentioned on the CV at all because I feel it's to be assumed. But I'd like to mention it in the email itself along with motivation. Apparently there's this thing called a "motivation letter"? How does that work?

Point is, I could go on all day about these services they ask about and how they already exist in my home lab, but I'm not entirely sure whether I should just keep it brief and just say "here's my CV and there's my number", or go a bit in-depth about it in the mail. Perhaps something in between?

So I help teach a class of high schoolers to program and I want to pose a question, what can I do to give & better more interesting presentations, and what should I avoid?

Today I gave a presentation and the first half of showing them some practical things you can do with Python didn’t go as well which I figured would be a little boring,

but the second half I showed them a script I wrote to install fonts in Linux and I essentially set it up so that I could rewrite it in front of the class and I walked them through the process of rewriting it to show how useful loops are and they really enjoyed watching the process, so I thought about doing more stuff like that where I just walk them through problems but Idk

Let me know what you think I could do better

When I was a kid I loved Microsoft because they built that thingy that I could play my computer games on. I learned how to reinstall the magical but fragile Windows out of necessity, instantly promoting me to the position of the family's computer whizz-kid.

Now I just see them as one of many shady international mega corporations who on behalf of their shareholders best interest (oh the irony) are fighting to gain power so that they one day may own the planet and basically rule over everything (yess, stocks reach all time high!)

We spent a lot of time creating these CSS animated pop-ups that described parts of the product. They looked great, but the client called and said they were "flickering" on her computer. We debugged and could not for the life of us figure out what she meant by flicker. The code was so simple that we couldn't imagine how it could be flickering. It was just a jQuery fadeIn(). It worked fine for us in every browser we tried. So we just gave up. The next day, the client called back and said,"Hey, it looks great. You fixed the flickering. How did you do it?" And our dev replied, "Uh, we set the flicker to 0".

This isn't about dev, but is related as it was one of my first times seeing how tech could be abused or used in a creative way.

When I was a kid doorbell ditching was a thing. Also, flashing was a thing. Dudes would be naked in a trench coat and flash random people. The 80s was a strange time.

Anyway, my brothers liked to pull pranks. So they took apart a flashlight and mounted a switch into some wires to hold in their hand. They wore a trench coat, had all their clothes on, but wired the light part of the flashlight to their belt at about crotch level.

Then they went to houses at night, rang the doorbell. When people opened the door they flung open their trench coat and blinked the flash light a couple of times and ran away. Everybody in the neighborhood thought it was hilarious.

Ever since then I have had an interest in repurposing technology and code for fun things.

Helping Fix something on my Managing Directors Laptop...

After a restart I ask (word for word), "Can you please give me the password you use to login to your laptop"

She proceeds to give me her E-mail password

I respond by saying that I think that is her e-mail password and I need the laptop password.

Next thing I hear "You have to be more clear, to me they are the same thing"

Seriously... How much clearer could I have been, I'd be annoyed right now if my brain wasn't in an infinite loop going WTF JUST HAPPENED... WTF JUST HAPPENED... WTF JUST HAPPENED...

I want you all to think back on how "transparent" and "helpful" everyone was to you when you were useful to the company.

And then as soon as you were gone, did they just complain and say something like "how could fullstackclown leave us??!?!?!"

I swear, the last call I was on, I literally heard the phrase "we are such a good team, we think up great MVP products and you guys execute so well"

Let me translate: "we are whimsical fucksticks and you are our slaves to implement it because we ourselves are too incompetent to do it"

Well no more.

Fucking tools, all of them, everyone just wants to use us to get ahead. No competence, no self-understanding, just encapsulate the "IT" or "tEcHiE" people to some department - doesn't even have to even be near us, they can be from any geographic location; they can just be replaced at a moment's notice!

Yeah, well fuck you, because we're growing in skill and understanding, and fighting against you.

Fucking 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡s

The unionized revolution of software developer is coming soon.

Widget "hack" in secondary.

When I was around 13 or 14 I was enrolled at a public school in the UK. In an effort to try be eco friendly, the students and a IT technicain teamed up to try and create a widget that would track the consumption of printer credit used by all users (staff and students).

At first, I was just playing around with the homepage source code but eventually noticed the widget had separate code within the page.

Because all of the computers were interconnected, I grabbed the source code of the home page and put it into a notepad editor.

I used the intranet to look up staff names and student login usernames. I replaced my user ID with several staff members.

Boom, I could see how much paper they had used, how much they owed the library etc. May not be as impressive as others exploits but some staff were in debt by hundreds and never paid back a penny.

Hope you liked my story.

I've made a fucking retro game and it takes too much time and effort to make this thing when I complete my game I showed this to my cousins and their first words was it is too boring anybody could make it could you make something like pubg or fortnite when I listen to these words they were fucking demotivating and made me drive crazy I don't know how do I explain them how much hard to make something like this.

Freelance Headhunters...

No idea where they got my name and the number of my work phone...

- they do not give a damn and call me 1045 am to discuss "EXCITING BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES™"

- they are sure I am having a case of stockholm syndrome, because I could NEVER be satisfied in my current employment

- they call every other day with a new number and start the same process again

How fucking dense can people get?

Working for a company with solid procedures really makes me appreciate how important they are. Knowing someone will be scanning through my pull request made me *really think* about appropriate layout and commenting. Before I could submit any old code and the other programmer wouldn't give a monkeys.

I guess that's a poor reflection on my performance but, I'm working on it

Project ideas:

Make my own social media
|
V
Maybe they could share games instead of pictures
|
V
How about they can make their own games instead
|
V
I should add a drag and drop system to make it easier

I think I just re invented scratch xD

I'm out of high school now but one of my 'fondest' memories of being known as the computer geek was that people would always ask me how they could use the inspect element tool to change their grade permanently. I never had the patience to explain lmao

I just thought of a terrible scenario. So here it is:

You invent a revolutionary machine which can communicate with the dead. It's a marvel of technology and could reveal secrets about the afterlife.

After turning it on and getting in contact with the dead, the only thing they want to talk about is how much you masterbate. They literally will not talk about anything else.

Would you share your discovery?

Companies : we cannot provide sponsorship.

Me: I can pay for my visa.

Companies : we don't provide relocation.

Me: I can arrange my own ticketes.

Companies never reply back.

It's incrible how many openings for developers I saw around the world and when we apply for them we have to face this issues.

I know some countries is a pain to sort out the documentation, but another countries is very easy and always I face this bulshit and this stupid behavior.

The worst part is they made us waste time with assessment and don't give any shit for feedback.

I made by myselft my own recruitment process for each company that I worked for and I answered each candidate when they didn't pass on the assessment and why and in interview without fear of hurt feelings.

It's best being sad for not passed in the process for any reason that they would could told me than get this limbo.

I see a lot of rants on this platform complaining about their boss/management.

About how they don't understand how complicated the development can be of seemingly simple tasks or how they would prefer small estimations over realistic ones.

Is that really the standard in this field of work?
Am I just that lucky to find basically the ideal boss on my first try?

My boss really understands how difficult some tasks can be even if they don't initially seem like it. He listens to my ideas as if they are at least just as important as his own. He can almost think like a real developer and is prepared to give us all tools we could want to evolve.

It is a very small firm and I'm basically the only real developer on this project, but I would follow that man to the ends of the earth.

Can some people please clear my conscience and confirm there are still good managers in this field who really care about their project and their employees/colleagues?

This is a personal rant, not a devRant. BUT ITS STILL A FUCKING RANT.

Anyways, I don't have a lot of friends. In fact, only one. That one friend used to pull of his moods on me, and I was more or less okay with that. When he was in a bad mood, I didn't annoy him too much. However, I expect the same from him.

Today he really triggered me badly, and at some point he knew he should just leave me alone. We were in a LoL lobby, and went into the Discord where I could hear how he is dragging me down, saying I'm an asshole etc. As a result of that, I left the lobby, and heard him say more bullshit. Then he talked about how he left at another server, since they were assholes and excluded them.

At was at that point were they deafed me. Meaning, I couldn't hear nor what they were saying or speak for myself. What is this bullshit? I mean, if your fucking best friend does this shit to you, how can you have faith or trust anybody else? It's just really fucked up, and fucking bullshit, and like the only place where I can vent off is here.

What a fucking piece of shit. And I keep forgiving him.

Why do big companies hire such loser engineers ??? I mean what the hell man. When you are hiring a fresher to code they should at least know how to apply/write a for loop. I once had a colleague who assigned each array element individually instead of writing a for loop and asked me why I refused to approve his stupid code. What do I reply to this ? It was so dumb, I could not articulate an answer.

The IT department at my school doesn't know anything on Ubuntu or even Linux for that matter.
I asked them how I could connect to the WiFi on Ubuntu, cause I couldn't connect and they just said there was nothing they could do.
After that I spend two days to figure out how to connect and finally I got it working.
Next time I don't ask if they can help. I just ask for the settings and do it myself...

The developer of this app should post their technology stack so we could rant about how faster and better in general it would be if they used something else! :D

"Hey guys, we should start using ESLint. It's a popular linter. There's 13,000+ styling inconsistencies it could streamline using `--fix`"

"Yeah... But these errors, they're not really errors, right? So, we don't need to fix them."

...

1. I never said they were errors. Do you know how a linter works?
2. Sure, I guess being consistent and familiar are overrated qualities of a codebase. Carry on!

Do not trust Unity Collab.

Been using unity collab as a VCS for months on a project, regularly saving the files, working well.
Today i decided to refactor some code but lost track of some things, so i reverted to a version i checked in 2h before.

Unity replaced my files with the stable build back then, except... half of the files were missing. of course no undo functionality.
months of work were simply not saved in collab. no version had these files, i did modify them regularly and they never caused collab issues.

how can a company not make the vcs they add for their main product work to its minimal requirements?!

Im not sure how i could motivate myself to fix this mess. fuck this trash company, cant have a single project without major issues.

Just spent 30 mins (in bed at 5am) thinking how to improve a mongodb collection sync process from a basic script I wrote years ago to a cleaner Java process.

But then asked myself why.... WHY THE DUCK SHOULD I TAKE THE INITIATIVE TO IMPROVE SOMETHING THAT I WILL RARELY NEED TO USE BUT WOULD MAKE ALL THE MONKEYS JOBS ON MY TEAM A LOT EASIER

NO ONE ELSE TAKES INITIATIVE, WHY THE DUCK SHOULD I...

THEY DON'T LISTEN TO WHAT I SAY EITHER...

Or I could just not share my toys anymore... Watch while everyone else toils in misery...

I am now sitting in my apartment lobby after rushing home this morning because of a FedEx Delivery.

They said they can't get access to the building then how the fuck did this FedEx package get in between when I got back and when I came down?

Now they said there are different trucks... And my service could come later today.

It wasn't even supposed to come today but I guess maybe that's good since I took today off anyway...

Now I'm just stake out here all day and if it's not here..... Im going to aim to make FedEx the next Facebook or Panama Paper PR crisis

Business Continuity / DR 101...
How could GitLab go down? A deleted directory? What!
A tired sysadmin should not be able to cause this much damage.
Did they have a TESTED dr plan? An untested plan is no plan. An untested plan does not count. An untested plan is an invitation to what occurred.
That the backups did not work does not cut it - sorry GitLab. Thorough testing is required before a disruptive event.
Did they do a thorough risk assessment?
We call this a 'lesson learned' in my BC/DR profession. Everyone please learn by it.
I hope GitLab is ok.

Disclaimer: I hold no grudges or prejudices toward [CENSORED] company. I love the concept of the business model and the perks they pay their employees. Unfortunately, the company is very petty, and negligence is the core of the management. I got into an interview for the position, of Senior Software Engineer, and the interview wouldn't take place if wasn't for me to follow up with the person in charge countless times a day. The Vice President of Engineering was the most confused person ever encountered. Instead of asking challenging questions that plausibly could explain and portray how well I can manage a team, the methodology of working with various technology, and my problem-solving skills. They asked me questions that possibly indicated they don't even know what they need or questions that can easily get from a Google Search. I was given 40 hours to build a demo application whereby I had to send them a copy of the source code and the binary file. The person who contacted me don't even bother with what I told her that it is not a good practice to place the binary in cloud storage (Google Drive, OneDrive, etc) and I request extra time to complete the demo application. Since I got the requirement to hand them the repository of the codebase, it is common practice to place the binary in the release section in the Git Platform (Jire, Azure DevOps, Github, Gitlab, etc). Which he surprisingly doesn't know what that is. There's the API key I place locally in .env hidden from the codebase (it's not good practice to place credentials in the codebase), I got a request that not only subscript to an API is necessary but I have to place them in the codebase. I succeed to pass the source code on time with the quality of 40 hours, I told him that I could have done it better, clearer and cleaner if I was given more grace of time. (Because they are not the only company asking me to write a demo application prior to the assessment. Extra grace was I needed)

So long story short, I asked him how is it working in a [CENSORED] company during my turn to ask questions. I got told that the "environment is friendly, diverse". But with utmost curiosity, I contacted several former employees (Software Engineer) on LinkedIn, and I got told that the company has high turnover, despises diversity the nepotism is intense. Most of the favours are done based on how well you create an illusion of you working for them and being close to the upper management. I request shreds of evidence from those former employees to substantiate what they told me. Seeing the pieces of evidence of how they manage the projects, their method of communication, and how biased the upper management actually is led me to withdraw from continuing my application. Honestly, I wouldn't want to work for a company where the majority can't communicate.

In my opinion, russian nation's chronic inability to fight oppressive regimes is partly attributed to one interesting quirk the russian language has.
When talking about injustice committed against someone, or making threats to commit said injustice, the actor is completely omitted.
Here's an example:
“Надо будет — найдут”, roughly translated to “they could find you if they wanted to”, is a common phrase to use when talking about proxies, VPNs and other online privacy measures. But the word “they” in English translation is nowhere to be found in the original text! Let's examine the literal translation:
- “надо будет” — “the need will arise”
- “найдут” — “will find you”
The English phrase “they could find you if they wanted to” can be easily challenged with a simple question: “Who's they?” The government? The corporates? The regime? The CIA? Who exactly?

English language can mimic that with passive voice: “you are being watched”, “you are an easy target”, etc. But in active voice, you can't avoid using “they” or some other actor.
In russian, you can. And you will. Indeed, this is how russian people converse. It's a very specific, very common pattern that never really changed.

It's a very powerful thought-terminating cliché built straight into the language. You can't fight an enemy that has no name and no word to describe it, not even a euphemism. The very language you THINK in prevents you from analyzing the entities that oppress you.

In a Tom Scott Plus video where he tried tightrope walking, he learned that they don't say the “F-word” — “fall”. You can't say “I'm afraid I'll fall”. You have to find more specific alternatives like “I'm afraid I'll lose balance”. The word “fall” in this context is a thought-terminating cliché. There is no going back after you “fall”. But if you “lose balance”, you can “regain balance” — the lack of a thought-terminating cliché promotes problem-solving.

Russian language is the same, but in soviet russia, language terminates you, I guess.

So last time, when HR asked for a meeting I thought they knew who'll be leaving with me. But there is only rumors saying "CTO is poaching inside his team".

And I also learned from the a paralegal, who talk too much, that they just want to fuck with me.

So new course of action: how can I fuck with them? All week end thinking about it. And today, a big competitor, offered me the VP Engineering!!!

So I'll try to make them use their Non-Competition clause.

In France you can set a couple of main competitors and the employee can't work for them for a couple of years. And you have to pay the employee the full salary he could earn during that time (two years of salary). As the employee, you have to disclose this information (you want to sign with the competitor) with your current company and they have a couple of week to decide if they want to use the clause.

So I'm starting to see how I can scare them enough to make them use this clause.

I know it's not cool, but I enjoy so much fucking with them!!!

rant.

i'm graduating uni and I have to say, my school sucks. they dont teach us how to be developers, they're teaching us how to be tools.

half the subjects could easily have descriptions like how to be employee of the month. I know social and management skills are important in the workplace but by god if I knew that that's the only thing they'll be teaching then I shouldnt have enrolled. for fuck's sake this is IT not HRM.

it doesnt help that most of the professors cant even code beyond printing statements and loops. they didnt even teach object-oriented programming. I had to study that shit myself, so mind you i'm probably not good at it.

though I've had my share of wonderful professors who have taught me so much, a handful of them isnt enough to salvage the incompetence of the whole faculty.

end rant.

I was an introvert while growing up hence I found interacting with non-living things easier. When I was 11 i.e. like 17 years I told my parents to enroll me into computer classes. They didn't see much of a future in it so they refused. I fought hard and finally they agreed. Hence started my journey with computers.

First week all students were allowed to explore the computer we were assigned and also were taught to play basic Windows 95 default games to make it interesting. It was all fun. Next week the teacher said he would be teaching us how to tell computer to do what we want i.e. programming. Hearing that I could make my computer do what I want excited me a lot. I felt I could finally communicate to a computer. This is how I learnt BASIC. I was so amazed I could do so many things like take input and do calculations etc. I decided I would do this kind of job in the future if it exists.

So now I am actually doing what I wanted to do when I started programming i.e. coding job!

They’re making us use netbeans for class. Like I have a whole lab on learning how to use it. I’m not going to class, I finished the lab in 2 minutes. This one particular class is so dumb, we’ve had labs on ms word, PowerPoint, excel... they could have just done an optional workshop for people who don’t know how to use them. Waste of 2 hours every Thursday. And the teachers a dickhead

I've been working on the ecommerce website from hell for over a year now. I should have heard the alarm bells when the studio who were running the project took a month to pay my deposit but still expected me to start working, but I explained that I wouldn't start without some form of security and they were cool with it, so I carried on.

It started off as a simple build with simple products, no product variations etc and a few links on the designs which appeared to lead to external links, and checkout and cart pages were nowhere to be seen. It wasn't a big money job so I just build them in as plain and straightforward as I could, in line with how the rest of the site looked. They then changed their mind about how they wanted these to look, and added loads of functionality to the site throughout the build, so by the end of the line, the scope of work had completely changed. I also had loads of disagreements in terms of design and useability, as their designs straight-up weren't going to function otherwise, plus every round of changes meant that I had to prolong the job further and fit it around work for other clients.

Fastforward a few more months and I get sent a really angry email with some of the client's complaints, including one that raised an issue with the user journey, and the finger of blame was pointed at me. The user journey had been a part of the designs from the start, and this was never raised as an issue for A WHOLE YEAR. They then said that it had to go live on Monday (three days after they sent email with these huge new structural changes). I told them I could no longer work on the project but was happy to waive the rest of my fee (3/4 of the total fee, when I had essentially completed the site, minus 2 minor bugs), so they could find another developer in the limited time they had. At first they refused to hire another developer, claiming that it would be too expensive, which made no sense, as for a few minor fixes and out of scope additions he could get paid a wage that would have otherwise paid for the majority of the work I had done on the site. I stood my ground and finally they found someone, so I sent over all of the files and database to their new developer and asked him to give me a heads up when I could remove the staging site from my server. The next day, I received an email from the studio asking me to fix some bugs the developer was requesting I fix so he could carry on with the site. They were basically asking me to work more, for free, to enable him to walk off with the majority of the money and do less work. They also forwarded a suuuuuper shitty, condescending email from him, listing all the things he thought was wrong with the site (he even listed 'no favicon' although they'd never supplied a graphic for this). He also wrote a paragraph at the bottom EXPLAINING MY JOB TO ME and telling me:

I get the feeling you like to write Javascript, while being one of the easiest languages to learn, it can also be one of the hardest to master. While I applaud you for writing Vanilla JS, it looks like you have a general problem with structuring your application.

Not sure if I'm being oversensitive here but it felt so patronising, and i couldn't even go for an angry walk to get it out my system because of social distancing lol.

Let a girl quarantine in peace!!!!!!

Oh fucking hardware virtualization.
how many times have I failed at setting sth up googled it and just read "check your BIOS ... and enable..."
Well I would IF I FUCKING COULD. THERE AIN'T NOTHING TO ENABLE ON THIS CHEAP CPU.

I know. I know. Should just get a newer setup, this lappy ain't that powerful anyways - but still - it's frustrating to get excited, start sth and than hit that dead end realizing they presupposed sth I don't have.

During the "how to install WordPress" the professor tells us to use the root user of the database.... Wooooooo yeah! Let's get fucked!

And he never even notes to them "DON'T use root in production!"

I can just imagine every one of the 40 people in attendance that day wondering how their website could POSSIBLY get hacked...

And they are are going to entering the industry, some of them as freelancers from the onset, thinking all that is ok.

So it's 5 am and a random Snapchat adds me. Of course I know it's a bot. I tend to answer these because i'm curious of how clever the ai has become in these scams. Still hasn't improved in like 5 years. Here I am telling this ai how shitty it is at it's job and telling it how it could be better by using deep learning to copy the way others talk and actually be convincing and then I think to myself, "well damn, why don't I just build a better ai." Seriously thinking about it. Ended up leaving the chat after telling the ai to inform it's lizard overlords I am for hire if they want a better trap.

I'm fully convinced that VS Code is a fork of MS Word. How else could they manage to make their autocompletion features so disgustingly intrusive?

I'm actually surprised that it hasn't tried to capitalize the first letter of each sentence... yet.

I WISH TO END MY HTML TAGS WHEN I FUCKING WANT TO! I WANT TO WRITE A SINGLE QUOTE SIGN IF I WANT TO!

And fuck their fucking "Preferences" menu. Those dropdown boxes are absolute fucking garbage.

Fuck their fucking JSON fuckery. If they cant fit their custom settings into a GUI, it's gonna suck anyway.

Fuck their fucking CPU and RAM requirements. If it manages to lag on a Thinkpad T420, fuck it.

For everything that Microsoft has created, there's an objectively better alternative out there. I'll stick to fucking Atom.

Anyone ever just get seriously discouraged about peoples view on how easy/difficult it is to code?

A client has requested that they want a system built so they can create surveys and send them to people via email all in one tool. Im not a good front end designer but I know how to develop it. So they hired a designer to send me screen mockups and I will develop them. Easy enough.

This is where the bullshit starts... The designer was supposed to send me the V1 designs last Friday so I could begin building. I told them that I could have a rough version of some pages (with placeholder text and whatnot) ready for the following Friday (tomorrow). However the designer didn't send me the designs until 5 minutes before we were all meeting yesterday. We were all going over the designs in the meeting and this is how the conversation went (roughly):

Client: Wow these designs are amazing, I cant wait to see what it looks like when it functions. Are we still going to have a demo version by Friday?

Me: Well seeing as I just got the designs today, Ill have to look them over and get back to you on a new timeline.

Designer: Yah sorry about the delay, designing can be tricky sometimes.

Client: No worries, I understand. However I want to stick to the same timeline and have the demo by Friday.

Me: Well as I said, Im only getting the designs now, this is the first time I'm seeing them so I'll have to look them over and re-evaluate.

Client: Yeah but the designs are done so it will be easy for you to code it by then. It's all right there in front of you. I need to run, excited for Friday! Bye!

Designer: Bye!

Me: ...........

-- I know its partially my fault for saying I could have a demo done by Friday assuming the designer would have it done on time but COME ON. I hate when people say something is easy when they have no idea what it entails or how to even do it.