29-year veteran here. Began programming professionally in 1990, writing BASIC applications for an 8-bit Apple II+ computer. Learned Pascal, C, Clipper, COBOL. Ironic side-story: back then, my university colleagues and I used to make fun of old COBOL programmers. Fortunately, I never had to actually work with the language, but the knowledge allowed me to qualify for a decent job position, back in '92.

For a while, I worked with an IBM mainframe, using REXX and EXEC2 scripting languages for the VM/SP operating system. Then I began programming for the web, wrote my first dynamic web applications with cgi-bin shell and Perl scripts. Used the little-known IBM Net.Data scripting language. I finally learned PHP and settled with it for many, many years.

I always wanted to be a programmer. As a kid I dreamed of being like Kevin Flynn, of TRON - create world famous videogames and live upstairs my own arcade place! Later on, at some point, I was disappointed, I questioned my skills, I thought I should do more, I let other people's expectations make feel bad. Then I finally realized I actually enjoy a quieter, simpler life. And I made peace with it.

I'm now like the old programmers I used to mock 30 years ago. There's so much shit inside my brain. And everything seems so damn complex these days. Frameworks, package managers, transpilers, layers and more layers of code. I try to keep up. And the more I learn, the more it seems I don't know.

Sometimes I feel tired. Yet, I still enjoy creating things and solving problems with programming. I still have fun learning. And after all these years, I learned to be proud of my work, even if it didn't turn out to be as glamorous as in the movies.

Website: "your ad blocker's on, consider adding us to your white list..."
Me: *inspect element*
Me: *Delete modal*
*Insert montage of me hacking into the mainframe for dramatic purposes*

I'm in. 😎

During a penetration test, I was dropped off in a Navy SEAL Ranger Black Hawk helicopter on the top of a 300 story building. I repelled to the 150th floor with fishing line, carved out a window, and installed Kali on the office door knob. I then typed out l337 HTML code in notepad and gained access to the mainframe. Then, some guy named John McClane wouldn't stop asking me for advice as I roped down the elevator shaft cable. I then walked outside, got my shoe shined, and the CEOs daughter came up to me saying she wants to take me to dinner because I'm the most l337 of the l337.

!Rant

Once I had a summer job at the town hall that ran some mainframe program.
The woman explaining this program was like 'now that you've pushed that we have to go back 3 screens and return to it just to check if the data has been properly updated.'.

I'm first thinking like 'wtf' followed by a 'could it be' and pushed the F5 button. The thing refreshed instantly and the women went wild! (That is after staring for 2 whole seconds with her jaw dropped at the screen, unable to grasp what just happened.)

HUU?! WHAT! WHAT DID YOU PRESS!!??? HOW DID YOU..??

Turns out she was been going back and forth these screens for over more than 20 years!

Ouch..

About two years ago I get roped into a something when someone was requesting an $8000 laptop to run an "program" that they wrote in Excel to pull data from our mainframe.

In reality they are using our normal application that interacts with the mainframe and screen scrapping it to populate several Excel spreadsheets.

So this guy kept saying that he needed the expensive laptop because he needed the extra RAM and processing power for his application. At the time we only supported 32 bit Windows 7 so even though I told him ten times that the OS wouldn't recognize more than 3.5 GB of RAM he kept saying that increasing the RAM would fix his problem. I also explained that even if we installed the 64 bit OS we didn't have approval for the 64 bit applications.

So we looked at the code and we found that rather than reusing the same workbook he was opening a new instance of a workbook during each iteration of his loop and then not closing or disposing of them. So he was running out of memory due to never disposing of anything.

Even better than all of that, he wanted a faster processor to speed up the processing, but he had about 5 seconds of thread sleeps in each loop so that the place he was screen scrapping from would have time to load. So it wouldn't matter how fast the processor was, in the end there were sleeps and waits in there hard coded to slow down the app. And the guy didn't understand that a faster processor wouldn't have made a difference.

The worst thing is a "dev" that thinks they know what they are doing but they don't have a clue.

When your floor names a room Galileo and you have @bachmanity as a co-worker...

So where to start... Let me preface this by saying I am a Software Architect for C# and do 99% dotnet development.

I just received a phone call from our Director of Development asking me to look at adding a feature for SSO with our companies main development project, which is written in PHP. I hope I made the correct changes but since I am not a PHP dev... I am not 100% confident in my code.

Now I am writing this as we are making the deployment Friday, December 29, 2017 at 5:00 pm. I should add that I am going on vacation for the next week.

So let me summarize... I am not a PHP developer, the non-PHP developer is making PHP changes on a Friday Night, and before a long weekend and before going on vacation.

I would like to point out that I said I was not 100% comfortable with this... but well this is what they wanted. I am not even sure what really to say about this though.

So I was driving my car the other day and the screen on my radio decided to go blank and the music stopped. I ended up pulling over and turning my car off and back on again.

I had to reboot my car. Didn't see that one coming. 😡😂

So I worked on getting a server ready for about 30 hours last week to be ready for a deploy on Monday Night (last night). Not only did I work on it for 30 hours, we had two other architects and a senior engineer working on it too. We got everything done Friday and it was ready to go with a simple cutover on Monday night.

The only thing left to do was deploy a link change Monday night on the existing landing page. My part was the backend servers and application that had the complicated SSO system and the other part was just a link to get to the SSO. I asked the person responsible for deploying the landing page's link if he was ready about a dozen times. He kept saying he was deploying X (the code name for the project deploy) and that is all he was doing.

Now jump to that night. They have decided that a single landing page wasn't enough and they were going to deploy a full CMS. Well no one knew what the hell was going on and they didn't realize that the landing page was hosted externally on another host. After arguing for two hours they delayed the deployment for multiple days. 24 hours later they are still trying to figure out the CMS on a host.

30 hours and four senior engineer's time wasted to get everything done for the deadline all to be canceled because of on jackass's lack of planning. WTF

If you write documentation and no one reads it, did you ever write it in the first place?

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

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

I guess I was just ahead of my time?

sync meeting:
dev: damn, the tests failed again

bossman: let's blame it on the neutrinos hitting the mainframe which flips a digit and causing the tests to fail this time!

dev: ok ...!

When you are in Facebook and double tap a post but it doesn't like it...

A lot of engineering fads go in circle.

Architecture in the 80s: Mainframe and clients.

Architecture in the 90s: Software systems connected by an ESB.

Architecture in the 2000s: Big central service and everyone connects to it for everything

Architecture in the 2010s: Decentralized microservices that communicate with queues.

Current: RabbitMQ and Kafka.

... Can't we just go back to the 90s?

I hate fads.
I hate when I have to get some data, and it's scattered on 20 different servers, and to load a fucking account page, a convoluted network of 40 apps have to be activated, some in PHP, others in JS, others on Java, that are developed by different teams, connected to different tiny ass DBs, all on huge clusters of tiny ass virtual machines that get 30% load at peak hours, 90% of which comes from serializing and parsing messages. 40 people maintaining this nightmare, that could've been just 7 people making a small monolithic system that easily handles this workload on a 4-core server with 32GB of RAM.
Tripple it, put it behind a load balancer, proper DB replication (use fucking CockroachDB if you really want survivability), and you've got zero downtime at a fraction of the cost.

Just because something's cool now, doesn't mean that everybody has to blindly follow it for fucks sake!

Same rant goes for functional vs OOP and all that crap. Going blindly with any of these is just a stupid fad, and the main reason why companies need refactoring of legacy code.

My co-workers hate it when I ask this question on a technical interview, but my common one is "what is the difference between a varchar(max) and varchar(8000) when they are both storing 8000 characters"

Answer, you cannot index a varchar(max). A varchar(max) and varchar(8000) both store the data in the table but a max will go to blob storage if it is greater than 8000.

No one ever knows the answer but I like to ask it to see how people think. Then I tell them that no one ever gets that right and it isn't a big deal that they don't know it, as I give them the answer.

Use SharePoint 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

Perfectly describing my relationship status...

My Father is an old bank accountant. So he knows that, behind their mainframe screens there are ugly code stuff and I deal with them.

When I try to talk about my job, Mother's eyes grow in awe. She thinks of me as a sci-fi character.

As my career goes very well, my wife thinks I'm so skillful that I must be like the architect guy at Matrix.

Mother-In-Law and Father-In-Law: A mix of my wife and mother.

They are all proud and happy, so am i.

Last year the rewrite of an ancient system (VB6/mainframe COBOL) was started. Instead of moving to modern architecture management decided to rewrite the app's functionality into our last gen WinForms client/server arch. I set up a meeting to present alternatives and plead for some level of modernization. After presenting and asking management to plan for five to ten years in the future instead of just this year's budget my director said, "In five to ten years I'll be retired on a beach in Tahiti and this will be your problem to solve." It was the last straw and I left the company shortly after. Last week I found out the director was force retired out of the company. I sent her a congratulations slip and a cocktail umbrella with "Tahiti" written on it.

My kid is hacking the mainframe xD

H4ck1ng 1n70 7h3 m41nfr4m3

I had done some light development but always saw myself as a sysadmin, until I was passed over for a job. So when my wife had our second child, I wrote a program to help my department. I got a job as a developer a few weeks later and have been happy ever since then.

So I am going to talk about interviews from a different perspective, the being on the question side of the technical interview.

We have had four interviews for a single Senior Dev position. I threw some very hard questions at the people and some very easy ones. The thing that amazed me was that people actually went for an interview when they where woefully under qualified.

The latest in this list was someone who didn't understand how inheritance works for object orientated programming, and when I asked him something very specific he needed to look at his notes...

The person that I felt did the best on the interview was the person that didn't have every answer but said clearly that he didn't know and talked about his ability and desire to learn. The people that failed the worst were the ones that were certain, arrogant, and wrong.

Technical interviews are fun 😏

When your manager who claims to be a Wordpress "developer" says to you oh my God, why are you using notepad to write the page when there is an editor?

My response, because I am a developer. I write code and I can write better HTML than any editor can. I then said I do add editors for my projects where required, not for me, but for the end users that cannot write HTML. He walked away 😂

It was 1957 and this was a 1 byte ram memory module for an IBM Mainframe.

If you can pick it up, it's a PC.
If you can't pick it up but you can push it over, it's a minicomputer.
But when you can't pick it up or knock it over, it's a mainframe.

I took over someone's code right after they left, and this was in there... By the way the containing method was about 300 lines long.

Get some sleep... and stop coding in my head when with the family

My Unicorns 🦄.

If you look at the picture you will see more than one and there is a funny story behind them. About three years ago I was talking about a new project and I wanted to call it the Magic API, however I work for a religious organization and they said that it would be a problem to call it that. So I said what the hell how about unicorn? They said that would probably be okay. Then I saw that Microsoft had unicorn tags for their developers so it has been my thing ever since then.

So Unicorns it is. 🦄

!rant

I have been at my current company for seven years. I am in a senior position and I am a senior person in the department with a lot of systems that I am responsible for. Anyway I am getting really tired of my management and getting burned out working basically 24x7 on call. My last two vacations I have been called and worked 6 hours each time.

So, tomorrow I have a second interview at another company, I am worried what will happen if / when I leave. I have a feeling I will probably land a side contract with my current employer.

I think I am sure I am ready to leave, just a little anxious about the change.

This is workstation setup.
Put icebags in the closet to have mainframe cooled setup.

Unluckily not me

Wrote a SQL stored procedure today to do a complicated query. Decided to make it so that I could pass multiple records into the stored procedure in comma separated format, but the damned thing would only pull the first record. The query worked fine outside the procedure but it wouldn't pull anything more than the first record. After deleting and recreating and spending 30 minutes trying to figure out what was wrong I realized I changed the length of the wrong parameter. Set the correct one to varchar max and it was all good. 30 minutes of my life I will never get back.🐘💨

So I took over a project from another dev after he left the company and his project was currently in QA pending release. They were blocking it due to some issues around the persons information not appearing consistently. It turned out he wasn't persisting the persons information in the database with the actual record.

It would be as if when you ordered something on amazon and changed your address for a future shipment all shipments would show the new address. So it turned out QA had no idea how bad the problem was and they had pushed this issue to him to fix but he just wasn't fixing it.

When I reported the problem to my boss and due to the time constraints for release they authorized a contractor to come in to assist. I ended up writing a few classes and one table to persist the data and all of it was solved. I ended up fixing the problem in one weekend. Huge problem and I fixed it in just a few days.

When a Field Tech emails you about a problem and the screenshot is embedded in a Word Document. WTF, why can't they send it as a f'ing jpeg, gif, or IDK a png?

BAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Fullstack Bluetooth in the cloud using a mainframe matrix and heatsinks for optimal parallel multiprocessing.

I hate buzzwords. And especially hate TV shows that try to sound smart.

when I spend more time trying to decide on naming than actually writing code. Then when I decide on it, I rename it at least once because I second guess myself on the name.

When you ask your infrastructure admins for a firewall rule and you are very specific. They say that you don't need it... you troubleshoot for 2 hours then argue with them for 5 hours. Then they add the rule and it works. I want to punch someone right now and have a beer. FML!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Woo finally off to work :D

When you get a vendor email (Stackify)referencing devRant...

when you start a new job where they just switched to a new CMS product that is no longer being developed... then find out they spend tons of money on a vendor to set it up for them.
At least it's supported for the near future. Last job was using FoxPro and AS400 mainframe

As someone who uses UNIX and UNIX-like systems on a daily basis, and someone dealing with computer support in a school, I experience so, so many issues, many of which others have already ranted about.

For no reason at all, I find it incredibly frustrating how many high school students' understanding of sudo is limited to this:
Student: Hey, isn't sudo the minecraft command
Me: Erm
Student: You know, the one skeppy uses... to troll players? Anyway, you're doing it wrong. There should be a slash before you run the command
Me: aaargh.
and so on. Happens probably every 10th time I invoke sudo.

I mean, really? Surely these kids, with all their complaints and lines: hacking into the mainframe/whats the admin password/why did you block my VPN/ and so on, would know what sudo is. But NO, they just don't seem to get it. Sometimes I lose my hope in the futures of these kids.

Every time I go to use a local app that uses Java...

My favorite part is that when I update JAVA it tries to install a Yahoo toolbar. They are totally related right. I like the language but the framework somewhat makes me crazy.

So for those of you keeping track, I've become a bit of a data munger of late, something that is both interesting and somewhat frustrating.

I work with a variety of enterprise data sources. Those of you who have done enterprise work will know what I mean. Forget lovely Web APIs with proper authentication and JSON fed by well-known open source libraries. No, I've got the output from an AS/400 to deal with (For the youngsters amongst you, AS/400 is a 1980s IBM mainframe-ish operating system that oriiganlly ran on 48-bit computers). I've got EDIFACT to deal with (for the youngsters amongst you: EDIFACT is the 1980s precursor to XML. It's all cryptic codes, + delimited fields and ' delimited lines) and I've got legacy databases to massage into newer formats, all for what is laughably called my "data warehouse".

But of course, the one system that actually gives me serious problems is the most modern one. It's web-based, on internal servers. It's got all the late-naughties buzzowrds in web development, such as AJAX and JQuery. And it now has a "Web Service" interface at the request of the bosses, that I have to use.

The programmers of this system have based it on that very well-known database: Intersystems Caché. This is an Object Database, and doesn't have an SQL driver by default, so I'm basically required to use this "Web Service".

Let's put aside the poor security. I basically pass a hard-coded human readable string as password in a password field in the GET parameters. This is a step up from no security, to be fair, though not much.

It's the fact that the thing lies. All the files it spits out start with that fateful string: '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>' and it lies.

It's all UTF-8, which has made some of my parsers choke, when they're expecting latin-1.

But no, the real lie is the fact that IT IS NOT WELL-FORMED XML. Let alone Valid.

THERE IS NO ROOT ELEMENT!

So now, I have to waste my time writing a proxy for this "web service" that rewrites the XML encoding string on these files, and adds a root element, just so I can spit it at an XML parser. This means added infrastructure for my data munging, and more potential bugs introduced or points of failure.

Let's just say that the developers of this system don't really cope with people wanting to integrate with them. It's amazing that they manage to integrate with third parties at all...

I am a senior .net developer and I should be promoted to a software architect over Java and .net soon, and my parents independently asked my wife and me if my job was stable. They also asked me if I was worried about losing my job. They have no idea what I do and they think it is nuts that I get paid what I do for the hours I work... I doubt they will ever get it.

My router bit the dust last night... so I bought a new one that is a bit faster. I was getting about 30 mbps with wifi on my old one, this is what I am getting on my new one. I should add that I thought I was only paying for 150 mb connection, I guess i was wrong :)

Does anyone ever fear falling behind the technology 8-ball.

I made a career move from web dev to mainframe in COBOL. I've been here two weeks and feel like learning COBOL is wasting my time and making me fall behind.

Thoughts?

So I started at a new company about two months ago. I was hired as a Senior .net developer, which I am well qualified. I also told them that I did MVC but haven’t done react or angular.

So my first project with this company is building a react-native app. (Never done a native app either) The craziest thing is I am the most senior on this project too.

What is even crazier, I still work for my old company on the side, and the only .net I am doing is for them. And even funnier, my old company thought the reason I was leaving was to do more .net development.

Mainframe to Cloud... when your primary job is to eliminate your position....

One of my classmates is going to start working on MAINFRAME at a company as his first job after graduation.

I feel bad for him.

When you have two managers and one of them is trying to screw you into a position on his team even though you have made it clear that you want nothing to do with that type of development.

I am looking for a new job now...

Not a rant just a question, can I change my profile name? I like my name and all but I didn't think about anonymity when I created it.

That feeling you get when you realize that most people don't know what your doing and assume you're "hacking the mainframe"

Fun one on the subway:

Make a little prompt script for your phone or computer

>welcome to Washington, D. C., Mr. Davis
>what would you like to view?
>1-traffic lights
>2-subway
>3-mainframe
3
>Subway Control
>1-emergency shutdown
>2-accelerate line
>3-shutdown line

Interact with script while on subway, watch reactions. Wearing dark glasses also helps.

When the guy you are relying on to do an export for an app during a MISSION CRITICAL downtime exports the wrong data and drops offline... Then you find his number in an email... then you find out he is driving somewhere and will not be back at his computer for 30 minutes...

Thanks for staying up with me @joeygreen

Ok so I'm a student so I don't have a boss but man this one kid who is the lead of my programming team. I swear he works with a 10ft pole up his a**. Maybe that's why he is so tall 🤔. Anyways he is a nerd and by far my LEAST favorite person ever. I wish nothing but BSODs in his future. He is a devrant user but I'm not gonna name him to hurt his feelings. *cough* ewpratten *cough* but im.pretty sure he copy pastas 🍝 his code from stack schools and pastes it in our mainframe robot.

#BSODToPratten

Took over a project where a dev created a table with no primary key and enforce a unique constraint in code. Wtf? He also always selected top 1 so if you added a record directly in the table it completely fucked the expected data.

So, when I took this piece of shit over I didn't realize what the table was and when I tried to convert it to EF it barfed since there was no PK. Was a complete PITA and had to create all new tables.

Some people shouldn't develop software!!!!!!!!!

Still wants to use and support mainframe

That moment you take a crap after eating lunch and equate your digestive system as a circular buffer...

I had this dream, We had to destroy this super mainframe who wanted some revenge because we as a programmers made a lot of mistakes in the code.

So we had to create this amazing machine with super powers and machine learning and then to go back to the past to save the world and to find me and protect me from the same machines that we created..

At the end, I died.. because the fucking machine betrayed me.

There was a project I took over that was supposed to be at 90% when the previous developer quit. The project was in QA with some "minor" bugs that needed to be fixed. When I looked at the minor bugs I realized that the project had major underlying data issues. So after working 80 hour weeks I managed to hobble it together and make the release date.

That was a little over three years ago. Since then another developer has taken over maintenance and enhancements on the product and overall the application works pretty well for what it is.

So his analogy is, that the application is a tank that was made out of aluminum foil that has been hit many times in battle. Whenever it has been hit we have patched the tank with random things like bricks, soda bottles, and old car doors yet somehow it keeps going. The tank is still surviving the war but we really don't know how.

🐜

I just met real life Wally from Dilbert.
Semi retired, works a few hours a week with excellent pay because he is the only one who understands the legacy mainframe.
Learning from his example we now plan to obfuscate all code before check-in. Only readable code version will be on our encrypted personal drives.

When your parents call you about how to change the spacing on a paragraph in Word and you are like IDK, I didn't write it.

<!rant>

With very little experience I have become head of software integration on a multimillion dollar state contract. (Whole other story on that part) had a meeting with the states mainframe and DB departments this last week after having worked in person with these guys for three months. They told me that I am by far their favorite employee of a vendor they have worked with. I have put a lot of work into understanding their workflows and making sure we have minimal impact on their systems. Evidently this is a rare occurrence for them. I am just so stoked that I am having such a positive impact on them while still getting my job done. Still have a long way to go, but it is awesome to hear I am at least making a good impression for my company!

</!rant>

Amazing supermarket for customers, but the worst company to consultants:

- You have to badge in-out using wall-mounted computers running a MAINFRAME app using number and F keys to enter your times.
- They have an internal mailing system that they dubbed 'Notes' because making 'Mails' available to all superiors would be breaking privacy law.
- They won't let you work 1 day from home when there's a national public transport strike and you have no way of reaching the office.

You work on a huge factory. You’re ready to upload the new AI prototype to the mainframe. Upload finished, and the light goes off.

Light turns on. All speakers in the building:

🎵This was a triumph
🎵I’m writing a note here: huge success

Whatever, as long as it has 0 dependency to mainframe 💩 directly or not
Fuck mainframe up it's dusty ass

My first job was through a technology "Graduate Training Program" at a large bank. We were sold on the job being told that there would be a month of corporate training before getting to work. You know, stuff like presentation skills and Myers Briggs and actual useful stuff. And yeah, they did have that for like two days of the month.

The rest was the most bullshit work to basically kiss-ass to upper management. Having to analyze their commercials and explain how amazing they were and why (they sucked). Explaining a portion of the business to upper management.. you know- the business they knew because they are executives in it- but it had to be "fun". We were stuck making board games and rap songs to these things to make an ass of ourselves in front of executives.

Then after that I was stuck working on VB6 programming with a Cobol mainframe backend. So fucking awful.

I have to work against the mainframe ancient cobolt expecting fixed length input and filler chars depending on type, there is hundreds of fields and 40 vars in a function call.... deadline tomorrow at noon.
Awh... hell no!!!
ragequit!

Company paying tons for retired old mainframe devs to come teach basic z/OS and to give a hands-on. Third try and they still sent a guy showing off their windows based mainframe replacements without terminal connections.

I set an pirated z/OS up and now I have to deal with 10 coworkers who apparently can't unpack a 7zip, follow basic instructions or failed to open the .torrent with files i distributed 14 days ago. Losing the will to live (in legacy tech)

I am attending a lecture about IBM mainframe computing and I have no idea about what the lecturer is talking about

Worst experience: Learning how data is stored in segments in a middleware application called PMS on mainframe and how to manipulate that data.

Best Experience: Building a app that lets you pull down any set of segment data from mainframe and figuring out a way to automatically annotate the data so you could just hover over it and you know what the data is exactly. This way I didn't have to constantly refer back to a reference manual to see what a field name is in a segment, or having to go talk to a mainframe developer to go look at their code. Btw, did I mention I made it searchable by field name??

Cobol / Mainframe, create on your computer then ftp to server to compile and run (and hope it doesn't crash the cobol region due to infinite running) then ftp to get the output.

Hey I got a ++ from @dfox

Does that count for +100?

When you work with a "Systems Architect" that doesn't understand object oriented programming but still insists on writing code.

This particular person only uses one class in a given application and names it "Class1." He also doesn't understand ORMs and insists using inline SQL statements without parameters because he can do "just as good of a job" with his SQL "cleaner."

sed s/cloud/mainframe/ig

My first computer exposure was on a mainframe (CDC Cyber 180). My university in Kerala, India had a collaboration with the Indian defence organisation DRDO. The operating system was something called NOS/VE, though as I remember it could run some Unix version virtually. I had Fortran 77 programs to be developed as part of the course. (finite element methods). As I remember, the machine had built in routines for the same. Screen was a green on dark terminal conected to the thing. No windowing or graphics.
Today kids have more powerful machines at home (or in their pockets). The famous computing power law be praised.

So, the story starts with me getting a job. Full-time job for the first time in my 21 years old life. After short conversation about how amazing this company is, after countless lies and stood questions they decided to hire me. I had to get come on Monday a week later with everything prepared.

So of course I did that and got to my workplace on designated time. Turned out nobody was expecting me, nothing was prepared for a new programmer and everyone seemed angry at me for no apparent reason.

After long talk with my new boss I got some less than 100$ pc with CPU that couldn't handle virtualization and expected me to work on software that needed extensive use of virtual machine.

PC is of course filled with all kinds of spying software that uses most of the resources. IT teams only job is to check if programmers are working their assess off for at least 8 hours a day.

I've filled a ticket about granting me access to Debian machine on the mainframe so I could work. No response for two weeks. I've lost hope already.

I have to work on open space with more than 30 engineers. Screams, phone calls, alarms, all at once, all the time. My colleagues seem to not care and I can't understand how.

I was tasked with rewriting major application because old developer did some half assed piece of burning shit. It took him more than one year, I'm finishing it in less than two weeks.

Of course nobody except for me is preparing any kinds of documentation. I had to reverse-engineer whole API for alarm system.

Salary is less than a junior programmer should earn.

But I'm stuck here for at least a year because nobody's here wants a guy whose only experience is as a freelancer.

Coolest project.... SharePoint sucks, so I wrote an app to extend it into something that is useful.

The app consists of:
- a custom SharePoint event receiver to maintain a custom retention setup
- a custom feature to enable users to tag documents as related to each other
- a custom search experience with custom views and previews
- a .Net windows service to sync the data into a SQL database
- a .Net MVC application to manage the reporting and notifications system
- a notifications system in .Net
- custom SharePoint approval workflow
- a PHP site that maintains a full backup of every document in the event that SharePoint goes down

I was the only developer on the entire project and while I asked for backup they never provided it. So if anything happens to me... And since I am a good dev, my code is self documenting and someone will need to telepathically link to me to find out the multiple places that all of this is running (like five different servers including both windows and Linux).

The whole thing, I have about 18 months invested into it ;)

When you click on a link in the devrant announcement and you have no way to get back to finish reading it...

When you weren't really thrilled to celebrate the fourth and the aunt you were really close to dies.... This was a really shitty day😢

while(!me.isDead){
if(!dayStar.isOverhead)
me.Thread.Sleep(dayStar.riseTime() -DateTime.Now);
var totalCodeTimeToday = new Timespan();
while(dayStar.isOverhead){
if(me.isHungry())
me.Eat(food);
totalCodeTimeToday.addTime(me.Code().Duration(tenMinutes));
if(totalCodeTime >= eightHours)
me.Relax();
}
}

I have my first tech interview on Thursday and I am very nervous. I am a full stack web dev student at a CC who is finishing my program next quarter. I switched careers so this is not my first rodeo.It's for a role of technology specialist and gave a vague description of uploading data to the mainframe and working directly with developers and QA.Only skill question the recruiter asked was how well I know SQL. Great company and location for me. What can I expect? I know they are going to do an assessment but I am unsure if it will be programming based.

When someone gives you a requirements document that has too many details including table names that do not fit your convention but doesn't give a simple breakdown of things such as when x = y do this.

My job is so much more complicated since the requirements document is almost 3k words when it could be a few paragraphs.

One of the MS libraries for directory services has a known memory leak and there is an easy fix for it but rather than fix it, our systems architect decided it was best to just restart the app pool nightly for one of his apps.

I don't get lazy coding. My apps that use the same MS library don't suffer from that problem all because I spend a little time on the code...

Copying from SO without knowing what he is copying...

My father is an electrical engineer and using computers from MainFrame times. So, duirng my childhood I always see computers arround me. This is the first reason I fall in love with computers and programing.

I think I am using a computer since 3rd grade. Or mightbe erlier. doesn't remamber.

When you get stuck going to a gathering of your in-laws, and have nothing in common with them, not even the weather...

When you have a manager that gets the requirements for a super simple content page one month ago...

Then argues with some people about where it needs to go...

Then when it was decided two weeks ago that it needed to be a new publishing site insists on getting approval to deploy the new site even when I said hey I can have this guy set up publishing on our external server...

Gets approval anyway, now the deadline for it to be activated and working is tomorrow and because he is "a Wordpress developer" (by which he can install a theme) he thinks he knows how to fix Wordpress...

Because of the security at our company it needs to be over https and we are doing ssl offload from our publisher and Wordpress doesn't seem to like it or it is his jacked up Windows box running Wordpress? Wtf

Best of all he said "do you think we will meet the deadline". I said I don't think we have a choice, this will be used by a lot of people Saturday for a conference. OMG I was ready to scream...

Now today I need to setup a new cms on an external server and get it done by tomorrow morning, with content. FML

Mainframe. Who knows that s?

2019 Recap: Quit studentjob. Got engineering degree, worked as a devops consultant, got a child, bought a house, started at new company as mainframe developer.
2020 goals: less cobol, more java, get courses for a long term goal of becoming an it-architect.

That moment when you are told the code you wrote two years ago and has been working fine until there were "no changes" made...and it turns out some stupid extension tools said to dispose of an object before it has a chance to execute

Someone mentioned antivirus and custom code... it reminded me of when Symantec Endpoint Protection received an update and some of our production servers had our custom apps quarantined. We had about four servers that had most of our custom apps removed. When it happened I thought someone was monkeying with the servers (they were our task servers used for task and service jobs). It took me about an hour to realize what happened then another hour to get the SEP admins to disable it until we could get another patch. Fun day.

So let me start by saying I get so much more done when I am not in the office, so I have my top annoying co-workers

-The number one person. This person was a "developer" but I say that loosely and now she is a Agile champion / Scrum something. She is the biggest PITA constantly going around talking about how great Scrum is.

-This other developer, I actually like the guy, but he just walks over all of the time to ask me stuff. He will grab his laptop and just pop it on my desk to ask me stuff.

-I will go ahead an lump a few together, the ones that have "been doing it a long time" but don't understand the architecture of their own systems. <smh>

Seriously, what's the difference between a supercomputer and a mainframe computer?

!Rant

I am just curious about why the CoBol compiler in IBM mainframe is IGYWCLG.

NullReferenceException

Nuff said

After a year and half of learning and working in web development I thought it would be a good choice to make a career move to learn COBOL. I'm now a mainframe programmer writing COBOL all day. The struggle is real folks.

Everything I learned GONE!

NINE Methods _IN A ROW_ look like this. I can't bring myself to search for more. They are called 100+ times and after each call we check if they returned success.

VERIFY_XYZ SECTION.
V_010.

MOVE RETCODE$FAIL TO RET_CODE.

CONTINUE.

MOVE RETCODE$SUCCESS TO RET_CODE.

V_100.

V_EXIT.
EXIT.

#notrantrelated

I find it hard to think what to code and what to make. Currently I'm joining a contest and I need to come up with something that would be beneficial to mainframers. I've joined IBM master the mainframe 2020.

Can you suggest me on what would be cool to make? They want something awesome. And I'm sorry for asking you guys to help me.

Any ideas will be appreciated. Thank you :)