As a developer, sometimes you hammer away on some useless solo side project for a few weeks. Maybe a small game, a web interface for your home-built storage server, or an app to turn your living room lights on an off.

I often see these posts and graphs here about motivation, about a desire to conceive perfection. You want to create a self-hosted Spotify clone "but better", or you set out to make the best todo app for iOS ever written.

These rants and memes often highlight how you start with this incredible drive, how your code is perfectly clean when you begin. Then it all oscillates between states of panic and surprise, sweat, tears and euphoria, an end in a disillusioned stare at the tangled mess you created, to gather dust forever in some private repository.

Writing a physics engine from scratch was harder than you expected. You needed a lot of ugly code to get your admin panel working in Safari. Some other shiny idea came along, and you decided to bite, even though you feel a burning guilt about the ever growing pile of unfinished failures.

All I want to say is:

No time was lost.

This is how senior developers are born. You strengthen your brain, the calluses on your mind provide you with perseverance to solve problems. Even if (no, *especially* if) you gave up on your project.

Eventually, giving up is good, it's a sign of wisdom an flexibility to focus on the broader domain again.

One of the things I love about failures is how varied they tend to be, how they force you to start seeing overarching patterns.

You don't notice the things you take back from your failures, they slip back sticking to you, undetected.

You get intuitions for strengths and weaknesses in patterns. Whenever you're matching two sparse ordered indexed lists, there's this corner of your brain lighting up on how to do it efficiently. You realize it's not the ORMs which suck, it's the fundamental object-relational impedance mismatch existing in all languages which causes problems, and you feel your fingers tingling whenever you encounter its effects in the future, ready to dive in ever so slightly deeper.

You notice you can suddenly solve completely abstract data problems using the pathfinding logic from your failed game. You realize you can use vector calculations from your physics engine to compare similarities in psychological behavior. You never understood trigonometry in high school, but while building a a deficient robotic Arduino abomination it suddenly started making sense.

You're building intuitions, continuously. These intuitions are grooves which become deeper each time you encounter fundamental patterns. The more variation in environments and topics you expose yourself to, the more permanent these associations become.

Failure is inconsequential, failure even deserves respect, failure builds intuition about patterns. Every single epiphany about similarity in patterns is an incredible victory.

Please, for the love of code...

Start and fail as many projects as you can.

Me: hey look, the time is gone!
Collegue:........?
Me:...... you don't see it? 😅😆
Collegue: no......?
Me: 4:04 🤣
Collegue: *gives death stare*
Me: 😞☹️

*In a team meeting*

Me: *happily jotting down notes in markdown*

Other guy: "Dude what are you doing? Pay attention."
Me: "Umm... I'm taking notes?"
Other guy: "But why does your MS Word have black background?"
Me (a bit lost): "Umm... That's not Word. That's my text editor."
Other guy: "Alright... But how do you convert your notes into Word then?"
Me: "... I don't."
Other guy: *stares at me*
Me: * stare back*

It was a nice conversation.

I am so sick and tired of hearing "I'm not good with computers" from these god damn secretaries I have to work with.

Fuck you! I mean, seriously, FUCK YOU! That God damn piece of shit Windows XP door stop has been on your desk for at LEAST a decade (shit, I think that was the same PC my highschool had, and I'm in my mid thirties)!

What in the FUCK do you mean you don't know the difference between files and folder? How? HOW can you stare at that damn screen every fucking work day off your life and not grasp simple concepts!

And FUCK THE ADMINISTRATION for hiring these volunteerily ignorant babies who refuse to bother figuring out more than just where the power button is (and, fuck me, even THAT took years).

Fuck me if, after spending 40 God damn minutes of my time trying to guide some secretary, who's been working twice as long as I have and making probably twice as much, on how to copy a file from one folder to another, I have to listen to some fucking pity speech "I just don't get this high tech computer stuff. I'm just too old"

And FUCK society for allowing this fucking behavior! I don't know any other piece of technology where people are happy being so blindly ignorant to even the basics! I don't know Jack shit about the internal working of a car, but I know where and how to use my steering wheel and peddles and that I need to take the thing for an oil change. Hell, I even know when my tires look bad... If I can do that, you can fucking learn how to copy a god damn file without needing me to help you... FOR A FUCKING HOUR!

FUUUUCK!

*Takes a deep breath*
So... How was your day?

Church proyect...

Client: we want our logo in our new website

Me: ok no problem just give me the....

Client: but we dont want ppl to be able to download it.

Me: excuse me but that is not posible cuz...

Client: where is your faith! Nothing is imposible.

Me: proceed to stare in disbelief....

That rare moment when you write clean beautiful code and you just stare at it for a few minutes

When you stare into git, git stares back.

It's fucking infinite.

Me 2 years ago:
"uh was it git fetch or git pull?"

Me 1 year ago:
"Look, I printed these 5 git commands on a laptop sticker, this is all I need for my workflow! branch, pull, commit, merge, push! Git is easy!"

Me now:
"Hold my beer, I'll just do git format-patch -k --stdout HEAD..feature -- script.js | git am -3 -k to steal that file from your branch, then git rebase master && git rebase -i HEAD~$(git rev-list --count master..HEAD) to clean up the commit messages, and a git branch --merged | grep -v "\*" | xargs -n 1 git branch -d to clean up the branches, oh lets see how many words you've added with git diff --word-diff=porcelain | grep -e '^+[^+]' | wc -w, hmm maybe I should alias some of this stuff..."

Do you have any git tricks/favorites which you use so often that you've aliased them?

So there was an inspection from government for our bank's IT security. I gave a tour to our server and security systems. I threw all possible acronyms as much as I could remember. Inspector nodded and noted down never uttered a word.

Finally, he breaks his silence, looking at a device he points out and says "What's that ?"

I look at the device then stare at his face back again at the device and to his face I reply "That's AC, Air Conditioner".

This is Alice.
Alice ++'ed my post about shitty internet.
Be like Alice.

Senior IT engineer enters the room and quietly talks to a coworker about a job related issue.

Another coworker decided to troll the sysadmin.

CW: *yells* "Open a ticket!" (That's the sysadmin's regular reply)
IT: *ignores*
CW: *trying to get his attention* "Open a ticket first! Then come back"
IT: *gives him the stare of death*
CW: "Go away and open a ticket!"
IT: *silently leaves the room*

After no more than a minute CW gets a reject from all networks outside the company's VPN.

IT comes back into the room, get's intimately close to CW's ear and says "Now open a ticket".

👋

🎤

Not a windows hate rant, just a funny encounter at work.

Was configuring KDE on my work pc and got the windows key to work after a little configuration.

Me: YAY I finally got the windows key to launch the application menu bar thingy!!
Colleague 1 (fellow support engineer): WINDOWS?! Thanks for the ear cancer mate 😞
Colleague 2 (fellow support engineer): Hey stop swearing!
Colleague 3 (senior Linux engineer): *grabs nearest waste bin, pulls it open, puts head in and starts to make vomiting noises* *pulls head out: don't do that again 🤢"*
Colleague 4 (senior Linux engineer): *gives me a death stare for about a minute"

Me: *completely losing it* 🤣

I fucking love this place 😊

Nothing new on DevRant.
Close DevRant.
Stare at home screen.
Open DevRant.

My wife asks me how I can stare at a computer screen all day at work, then come home and continue to use a computer for the evening..

I respond that it's 95% of the only light I see all day..

Long time no see Friend:- "hey dude what do you do for a living"

Me:- "I suffer in silence"

Ltnsf:- " but what exactly do you do"

Me:-"I stare at a rectangular space hoping to find enlightenment"

New senior dev joined the project today.
Senior dev: "There's no way for me to test my changes before I merge this into develop"
Me: "Can you at least run our test suite?"
An hour later the develop branch is fucked and everyone who has merged it locally has pages of red errors splattered across their screens whenever they run any tests.
Start looking into what the fuck is going on.
Notice that all the errors are related to changes the new guy made.
Ask him if he ran the tests..
Senior dev: "Nah they wouldn't catch anything locally "
Stare at the stream of red text running down my screen.
Normally I wouldn't care but we were trying to prepare a release... RUN THE FUCKING TESTS ASSHOLE.

Sit down at desk

Open VSCode

Stare are my code for a good 5 minutes

Get up

Goto kitchen

Make extra strong cofee

Drink. It. All.

Sit down

Re attempt to decipher last weeks code.....

Mondays.

After I submitted a code review:

Coworker: What did you mean with this comment?

Me: **translating the comment to Portuguese** Your Footer component isn't rendering any footer element.

Coworker: **blank stare** what?

Me: There is no footer tag here. **points to Footer component**

Coworker: **computing... found approximate result** I'm rendering the Footer here. **shows me where the Footer component is being rendered**

Me: **internal facepalm** Yes, I know, but I'm not talking about that. I'm saying that inside the Footer component you should be rendering a footer element.

Coworker: **segmentation fault** what?

And then I had to explain that there is an HTML footer element. To a mid level frontend developer (or so they say).

HTML is not only divs, for fuck sake.

My biggest dev blunder. I haven't told a single soul about this, until now.

👻👻👻👻👻👻

So, I was working as a full stack dev at a small consulting company. By this time I had about 3 years of experience and started to get pretty comfortable with my tools and the systems I worked with.

I was the person in charge of a system dealing with interactions between people in different roles. Some of this data could be sensitive in nature and users had a legal right to have data permanently removed from our system. In this case it meant remoting into the production database server and manually issuing DELETE statements against the db. Ugh.

As soon as my brain finishes processing the request to venture into that binary minefield and perform rocket surgery on that cursed database my sympathetic nervous system goes into high alert, palms sweaty. Mom's spaghetti.

Alright. Let's do this the safe way. I write the statements needed and do a test run on my machine. Works like a charm 😎

Time to get this over with. I remote into the server. I paste the code into Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. I read through the code again and again and again. It's solid. I hit run.

....

Wait. I ran it?

....

With the IDs from my local run?

...

I stare at the confirmation message: "Nice job dude, you just deleted some stuff. Cool. See ya. - Your old pal SQL Server".

What did I just delete? What ramifications will this have? Am I sweating? My life is over. Fuck! Think, think, think.

You're a professional. Handle it like one, goddammit.

I think about doing a rollback but the server dudes are even more incompetent than me and we'd lose all the transactions that occurred after my little slip. No, that won't fly.

I do the only sensible thing: I run the statements again with the correct IDs, disconnect my remote session, and BOTTLE THAT SHIT UP FOREVER.

I tell no one. The next few days I await some kind of bug report or maybe a SWAT team. Days pass. Nothing. My anxiety slowly dissipates. That fateful day fades into oblivion and I feel confident my secret will die with me. Cool ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Someone's outlook wasn't connecting to a mail server.

Fair enough, colleague started debugging in the morning!

It worked fine on any client on linux/mac.

After a while the swearing started to come, for some reason outlook thought that the url used for incoming/outcoming email was offline, worked on any other system.

We all left him alone for the rest of the day.

At the end I walked to his desk aan went:
Me: hey man is it working already? *very sweet smile*
Him: *gives a death stare* fucking die 😡

😆😅

<person>: What do you do?
<me>: I'm a developer.
<person>: What?
<me>: A computer programmer.
<person>: **blank stare**
<me>: I work with computers.
<person>: Ohhh. You work with computers! There is something wrong with mine, will you look at it for me?
<me>: I don't do hardware.
<person>: **blank stare**
<me>: I don't fix computers.
<person>: What?
<me>: **walks away**

Real developers don't use debuggers. They stare deep into the screen and let the code confess

Debuging 101

1 You open the project.
2 Run the app and replicate the bug.
3 Stop the app.
4 Stare at your code for like 15 mins and change nothing.

5 you re-run the app and hopes that it would fix on its own even if you didnt do anything.

Rashly say to a web developer colleague that you'd quite like to learn to code. Feel too awkward to decline the subsequent invitation. Meet for coffee, discuss basics. Understand nothing. Go home and Google extensively. Start trying code out at home. Cry. Swear. Make a thing that does a thing. Try to make another thing. Fail. Give up. Try again. Start an online tutorial. Work through said online tutorial. Start contributing on Github. Discuss Laravel. Play with Laravel. Set out your own Laravel project. Get engaged to the colleague who said they'd teach you. Get sent a technical test. Stare at the test blankly for days on end. Have an idea. Try to implement the idea. Cry some more, swear some more. Enjoy it. Get hooked. Hate it. Enjoy it. Finish it. Stare at the screen in amazement and wonder what has gone wrong because you are getting the result you were expecting. Rinse, repeat.

Thanks, I am happy to be sharing my payment details with your company.

ATTACHED TO THE LOGIN DETAILS YOU EMAILED ME!

I don't use debuggers. I just stare down until the code confesses.

I stare through the blueish black backgrounds and blurry colorful syntax into a somewhat familiar office within a mirrored world. That damned reflective glass layer covering these meaningless pixels is certainly not on my side.

The rushing sound of transactions flowing through cables is silenced today. Some blood cloth in the invoicing system is zeroing out everything after the currency mark.

While sighing I spin a one-and-a-half pirouette on my desk chair — even when desperate, you shouldn't give up on style — I take three steps away from my screen and try to harmonize my thoughts.

So much noise, everywhere... Noise from within?

I have been stuck at the apogee of an inhale for a while now. Locked into some masochistic constriction, self-punishment for the blindness which stings my ego.

Just fucking take a deep breath you asshole...

I freeze in place, and fall backwards.

Patterns on the creamy drywall rapidly vibrate and synchronize on vivid rhythms of respiration and resonating basslines. Deep indigo rainbows ripple through tiny veins, in-between chalky grains, raining as fine magenta dust through the ceiling frames.

My bare feet slide over soft oscillating concrete, fine flows of unsievable sand surrounded by toes, toes surrounded by streaming variables veiled in obscure vile abstractions.

A jadegreen field of vectored compressions resiliently rumbles and bounces through the clearances and corners of the vibrant concrete office cave, whispering in tongues. I try to voice my woes in little blips and bleeps but I seem to be missing an asymmetric key to their shrouded sequenced speech.

Suddenly, a wild turbulence breaks up all signals.

Joanna floats by in her tipsy effervescent cloud of disordered black hair and alcohol perfume, one hand grasping grapes, her other waving at me.

With every finger she moves a thousand tensors propagating paradoxically flawed but perfect pieces of an intricate surreal picture, sketching whole constellations of possible paths throughout the leafs of the giant Ficus next to her desk.

She stops dead in her tracks, and asks somewhat hypocritically: "Are you high?"

I can not discern the meaning of her words, and respond stoically.

"Joanna! Check out those branches!".

"Pun intended?", she giggles.

I'm focused on her grapeless hand, her fingers stretching to reach the lush little tree.

On touch, the plant shivers, grappled in the tight net of the puppet master. She pulls her strings, applying measured weights, all nodes normalize, and Joanna speaks in an oddly soft tone:

"Isn't it beautiful, how so many models emulate nature"

Her cheek buried in foliage she babbles on about unbalanced search trees and machine learning models... but from the tips of her fingers tables and indexes flow into the plant. Users, payments, tariffs, invoices and taxes crawl over the bark, joining at thicker branches, joining at the stem....

Joining. JOINING. A JOIN.

"IF THERE'S NO FUCKING TAX MULTIPLIER IN THIS LEFT JOIN, EVERYTHING COALESCES TO ZERO" I shout at a perplexed Joanna who squeezes grape juice over her desk. I hop on the beat to my keyboard. She looks puzzled, hugs her Ficus tightly, and reaches for the whiskey bottle behind her monitor.

Attracted by my exclamation, Tom from finance swings open the door, while I push my branch.

I look at Joanna still half hiding between the leaves, and I laugh at her: "Branches! Oh, lame, I finally got it!"

Tom's heavy voice interrupts me: "Does this mean... does this mean that the invoicing bug is resolved?".

I smile at Tom with his tailored suit and waxed hair. "The money is flowing once more. All debts are being settled."

He releases his breath in relief, which he seems to have held since that morning as well.

Joanna adds: "Although I think he is forever indebted to my Ficus".

I nod.

My whole team was a circus:
- Dev 1, the senior: he will be spent his days coding his personal projects and will convince management that everyone else needed to prove themselves so he will have nothing to do and we will do all the work.
- Dev 2, the junior: he was convinced that his mission in life was to be friends with his team. He's desk was far from the rest of the team so he will show just right after lunch EVERY FREAKING DAY with a list on his phone of random things he wanted to talk about like music, artists, art, news, etc., he really thought I didn't notice the list.
- Dev 3: the vegan: you will hear on every chance how she was so awesome for being vegan.
- Dev 4, the expert: if you ask him anything he will stare at you in silence to make you feel like you are a stupid for not knowing the answer and then turn around like nothing.
- Dev 5, the ghost: he will show early every day, code without mouthing a word and leave at 5pm, I think I heard him saying "hmmm" once but I might be wrong.
- Dev 6, the coder by accident: he was a graphic designer and ended up doing front end so he hated his job.
- Dev 7, me: the one who didn't care about anything but doing his job and leave.
- The project manager: she didn't knew anything about technology but will attend meetings with clients on her own, commit to deadlines and then inform us that the project that we estimated for 8 weeks will have to be done in 2 with new additions to the features.

You know the drill, here's your potato :/

Friend: "Wow! Is it a Raspberry PI?"
Me: "It's another version called Banana, but yes."
Friend: "I want one too for the games!"
Me: "OK, it's easy. There's a ROM called Retro ..."
Friend stare at me intensively
Me: "Sigh... Ok, I'll setup it for you..."

I was at Leeds Central train station the other day, waiting for the platform to be announced on the screen in the main bit. I noticed a commotion to my right. There was a teenage girl screaming and writhing around on the floor, her mother was knelt on one knee trying to calm her. I walked over without thinking, I know nothing about Epilepsy or first aid, at a push I could probably figure out the recovery position from a faint diagram i have stored in the unused part if my brain...

(it’s where I keep the washing machine instructions, which incidentally were designed for maximum confusion, if Id designed a washing machine it would have 1 button labelled ‘wash’)...

Sorry, back to the story. So i walked over and just before I got there, with the mother looking directly at me, I realised, what the fuck am I doing, meanwhile the daughter was screaming still and writhing, a bit like a rapid angel print you would make in the snow as a kid (until your hand touched the dog shit).

I couldn’t help it, the words just came out, like a dumb fucker, i said ‘Has she got epilepsy?’ , i stood there waiting for the sarcastic comment or the murderous stare, even a fuck off would suffice, so that I could remove myself from the situation.

To my surprise, and shock, she looked at me, calmly and said “oh no, it’s not epilepsy or anything like that.... she’s lost her iPhone”.

Sometimes I stare at the screen with my void eyes, questioning my abilities and say with a shivery voice "WTF" and refresh the website.

Then it works again.

Called into my bosses office one day.
He takes a big swig of mouth wash. I stare at him while he swishes it around in his mouth. He straight up swallows it and tells me he gets a buzz from it.

When you stare at your syntactically correct but logically wrong code for hours but can't find that little bitch of an error.
And then you call up your colleague, and it doesn't take him 4.3seconds to spot it.
-___________________-

Colleague got a few statical electricity (or however you say that) shocks.

After yet another one:

Colleague: seriously, again?
Me: damn, that's quite shocking!
C: *blank stare* bro.... 😐

😄

What do you guys do when you get bored at work?

this is what I do:

1. Drink Water
2. Stare at the code
3. Go to Bathroom
4. repeat

Have you experienced solving a programming problem for hours, and when you finally got it, you just stare at your monitor and admire your code?

You just sit there smiling and thinking to yourself, finally you did something right. ehehehehehe

Happy Sunday buddies!

I used to work as an all-in-one IT guy in a company. One day I got a call from our HR team and the HR said "my Internet banking account has been hacked! It's logging in automatically!!" So I went to see the issue, and the so called "hack" was because she allowed Mozilla Firefox to save her login credentials, and because of that the login form was automatically filled. Such a stupid ass

Friends brother: So what do you do for work?

Me: I am a DevOps engineer

FB: *blank stare* 😐

Me:I work with computers and fix servers.

FB: Awsome. Well my laptop been acting up lately. Can you..?

Me: NO

Credits: nixcraft

The Micromanagement God. The guy would come to the office 64 times a day, go behind my desk, stare at the monitors for a while and ask what am I working on.

He would sometimes ask for explanation of how something works because he never saw it before and then give me advice on how to use that thing he never saw before.

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

That moment you are coding as a group,and you have one error in your code.after rectifying your one error you get more than 5 errors,and all you can do is stare at that code.

> make a change
> PR gets rejected
> IHATEFORALIVING! YOUR CHANGE IS NOT WORKING! EVERYTHING BREAKS!
> 3 hours long debugging session
> We find out a whole bunch of bugs
> Suddenly, everything works
> None of the bugs had ANYTHING to do with my change. In the instances where the app broke, my code wasn't even being called at all.
> My change was literally the one and only working thing

I wish life was like in The Office, when you just stop what you're doing and you drop the Jim stare at some camera

I know Australia has shit internet, but seriously?

Gf: "Why are you such a typist"

Me: "I promise not to buy more keyboards with blue switches..."

Gf: "No, I mean like being racist or sexist, but you discriminate types"

Me: "Uhhh"

Gf: "You are always bitching about how awful date/time types are, with timezones, leap seconds and daylight savings"

Me: Face turns pale, thousand yard stare, vietnam-flashback to when I was writing a calendar scheduling/meeting/matching tool which used 3 databases, with timestamps in different formats, and web frontends for people in offices around the world.

Me, with a soft broken voice: "So?"

Gf: "You've been working on that palette tool this week, and you keep talking about how interesting all these colorspaces, white balances and conversion formulas are"

Me: 🤔

So this happened about a year ago. I was going bowling with some friends that day. My brother was invited, but he needed to finish a couple of programs for a MATLAB class.

So I drive my friends to the bowling place, then head to where my bro is saying. Once there my brother starts going over the program, he tells me what it's supposed to do and such. I follow along and I'm thinking "yup, this makes sense". That's when he tells me "The logic is fine, but look at what happens when I run it".

The program works fine...

We just stare at the screen, then at each other. "Your welcome" I tell him with a grin.

I'm mad. Really really mad. I've worked so hard and this guy just comes in makes me feel inadequate. I come in every day and there he is sitting in his corner watching me as I work. For him it's so God damn easy! It takes me hours to do what he accomplishes in mere minutes! Oh yeah and he's such a fat ass too. He doesn't even have to do much to get his food. It just comes to him. I don't know how he fucking does it. He's got no fucking phone! What the hell!? I actually have to get up and go places to get my food. He's so fucking entitled, the little shit. He thinks he's a suave motherfucker. Well I fucking hate him. I might actually get around to killing him and then wiping the floor with him. But today's not that day. He's just a little to high for me to handle, honestly.

I should really just keep my head down and continue working and not let him bother me. But I can always feel it, that stare behind my head. I guess...

spiders are just better web developers than i am

I feel guilty when I spend time after work writing code, because there's that voice in the back of my head saying I should switch to leisure activities. "You've worked enough, don't sit all day, it's unhealthy".

Then I go for a walk or start planning something to cook. And there's still this weird feeling of guilt for not being productive enough, telling me I should learn a new programming language. "Work on your skills, you need to learn stuff to stay relevant in your field"

BRAIN, BE FUCKING CONTENT WITH WHAT I'M DOING FOR ONCE!

And stop fucking bullshitting me.

You're not trying to make me take a walk, you're not having my best interests at heart by making me learn or work.

I'm fucking on to you, you treacherous shitlitter of neurons. You're betraying me, and it happens every single fucking time I let my guard down.

I alt-tab out of my IDE, and within seconds you're there, impeding my intellect, making me click bookmarks to check the feculent streams spraying from the fingers of "friends" on Facebook.

I take a poop, and you just let me slide into a slowwitted state where I pick up my phone and stare at some crapfilled mire of memes.

You're the retarded digital-era id, wearing the disguise of a renaissance smart-ass ego, and you're dumping the fucking guilt on ME?

FUCK YOU AND YOUR MEMES, I'M GONNA BAKE A STEAK WITH MUSHROOM SAUCE AND WATCH PROGRAMMING VIDEOS WHILE DANCING.

NAKED.

(and maybe browse devRant later. I still love you, devRant)

Pro tip: if you want to day dream at work just open a complicated XML file in your IDE and stare at it intensely any time someone walks past your desk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The solution for this one isn't nearly as amusing as the journey.

I was working for one of the largest retailers in NA as an architect. Said retailer had over a thousand big box stores, IT maintenance budget of $200M/year. The kind of place that just reeks of waste and mismanagement at every level.

They had installed a system to distribute training and instructional videos to every store, as well as recorded daily broadcasts to all store employees as a way of reducing management time spend with employees in the morning. This system had cost a cool 400M USD, not including labor and upgrades for round 1. Round 2 was another 100M to add a storage buffer to each store because they'd failed to account for the fact that their internet connections at the store and the outbound pipe from the DC wasn't capable of running the public facing e-commerce and streaming all the video data to every store in realtime. Typical massive enterprise clusterfuck.

Then security gets involved. Each device at stores had a different address on a private megawan. The stores didn't generally phone home, home phoned them as an access control measure; stores calling the DC was verboten. This presented an obvious problem for the video system because it needed to pull updates.

The brilliant Infosys resources had a bright idea to solve this problem:

- Treat each device IP as an access key for that device (avg 15 per store per store).
- Verify the request ip, then issue a redirect with ANOTHER ip unique to that device that the firewall would ingress only to the video subnet
- Do it all with the F5

A few months later, the networking team comes back and announces that after months of work and 10s of people years they can't implement the solution because iRules have a size limit and they would need more than 60,000 lines or 15,000 rules to implement it. Sad trombones all around.

Then, a wild DBA appears, steps up to the plate and says he can solve the problem with the power of ORACLE! Few months later he comes back with some absolutely batshit solution that stored the individual octets of an IPV4, multiple nested queries to the same table to emulate subnet masking through some temp table spanning voodoo. Time to complete: 2-4 minutes per request. He too eventually gives up the fight, sort of, in that backhanded way DBAs tend to do everything. I wish I would have paid more attention to that abortion because the rationale and its mechanics were just staggeringly rube goldberg and should have been documented for posterity.

So I catch wind of this sitting in a CAB meeting. I hear them talking about how there's "no way to solve this problem, it's too complex, we're going to need a lot more databases to handle this." I tune in and gather all it really needs to do, since the ingress firewall is handling the origin IP checks, is convert the request IP to video ingress IP, 302 and call it a day.

While they're all grandstanding and pontificating, I fire up visual studio and:

- write a method that encodes the incoming request IP into a single uint32
- write an http module that keeps an in-memory dictionary of uint32,string for the request, response, converts the request ip and 302s the call with blackhole support
- convert all the mappings in the spreadsheet attached to the meetings into a csv, dump to disk
- write a wpf application to allow for easily managing the IP database in the short term
- deploy the solution one of our stage boxes
- add a TODO to eventually move this to a database

All this took about 5 minutes. I interrupt their conversation to ask them to retarget their test to the port I exposed on the stage box. Then watch them stare in stunned silence as the crow grows cold.

According to a friend who still works there, that code is still running in production on a single node to this day. And still running on the same static file database.

#TheValueOfEngineers

I, my dev friend and a non dev friend were having a deep Philosophical chat
NDF - while we are here on earth, we should give something back to the mankind
DF - Yeah man! (sarcastically pointing at me) But this guy never gives anything to anybody
Me - Oh I have contributed a lot to the mankind. You should check my github profile.

Needless to say two of us burst out laughing while one was giving blank stare.

Person: So what do you do for a living..
Me: (here we go)... I am an information security analyst working in an incident response team for x company. I do log collection and manage a large scale correlation engine.
Person: Oh, so are you super smart or something? (Blinks her eyes and continues with blank stare)
Me: Uh... Smart enough I guess.
Person: Can you hack things like a hacker.
Me: That really isn't my job...
Person: What's your job again?
Me: Computer guy
(She lights up)
Person: Why didn't you just say that? I can understand that.

Yeah... I seem to have painful conversations like this often.

My sister is the one who got all the support, despite her now working as a cleaning lady, having 2 kids of her own, having already married and divorced, having been in financial trouble several times, oh and she's only 22 years old. She couldn't finish high school and even getting a driver's license wasn't without hoops. Now she's dating someone as old as our mother.

I've been putting my career front and center in everything. I want to make my own business and sell a network-oriented Linux distribution through it. My mother was impressed when her colleague whipped up a basic website for their company. You can imagine the surprise when I told her that that's only one component of my infrastructure. My family and I still aren't on very good terms, but yeah.. going from "don't stare at those "screens" all day long" to "wow, you've actually done something with these screens" (to her all technology is a screen) is at least some progress I guess.

No support whatsoever though, neither in my endeavors in programming, server administration and whatnot (but hey what can I expect) but what annoys me the most is that my sister did get all the help in the world for maintaining her general household. I didn't get any of that, first night when I moved into my apartment I slept on the floor because my bed wasn't completely built yet. Now that all of that is done, I don't consider my mother very welcome in my apartment actually...

Oh well, we've gotten where we are somehow at least. Just reading, reading and reading more manuals. That's all you need really.

So, for an assignment we have a task of developing an IT product for a business to solve one of their problems. One of the project development examples contains the following screenshot.
You can tell, from this screenshot that whoever made a screenshot of this example has no idea what they're doing.

@dfox you need an option for no shoes in the avatar builder. Probably underwear only for some of the gents.

Told my prof about brainfuck
He gave me the stare.

Hell is accidentally clicking on, instead of copying, an email URL and having to wait forty years for some email program you didn't even know existed to rise from its slumber like some Lovecraftian ancient god, meanwhile the fans on your laptop are preparing for takeoff and you stare dead-eyed as the rainbow spirals, spirals, spirals. you wait and suffer this cosmic karma. days pass. “just a few more seconds” you slur. your laptop freezes and the concept of time is no longer comprehensible. your family and friends forget your name and you fade from existence.

Crappy day, entirely related to cars and trucks and other wheeled implements of doom and annoyance.

My car died this morning.
It has been slowly dying for weeks in a very unusual way (something electrical; we're not sure what), but today it finally gave up and just wouldn't start anymore.

We replaced the crap battery (it had been a crap freebie from my parents), which fixed the not-starting issue for now, but it still has lots of other problems. Fluid leaks, disintegrating paint, some lights suddenly or randomly not working, super long clutch distance, sporadic grinding sounds, shifter randomly not engaging, pieces literally falling off, bits of the interior breaking (like the driver's side door handle), the wiper sprayers bloody missing the windshield, etc., etc., etc. My poor, poor car. It was super cheap, and I've had it for a long time, so I'm not surprised, but. I love my car, so it makes me really sad. ☹

Anyway, we finally got the car starting again, and I drove to work about four hours late. I had worked super late the previous night (11:45pm), and had let my boss know already, so whatever.

As for the trip, I work ~40 minutes away, and with the poor quality of drivers here there's usually something dumb happening. Today... well. Today was one of the bad days.

Someone was in the fast lane doing 50mph. The usual speed of traffic is 80mph. They got annoyed whenever someone passed them. Minor, but worth including.

Later on, people slowed way down and gawked at... a port-a-potty. Seriously, a port-a-potty. It was on the shoulder where there had been some construction, so it's not surprising or anything. People seriously dropped from 80mph down to 20mph just to stare at this thing, and it wasn't even occupied or anything. It was just a port-a-potty! There was nothing else around! What could possibly be so interesting?!

There was also a random Penske (moving) truck doing 35mph on the freeway holding up traffic like 10 minutes later; no idea why. Traffic usually does ~70mph there. No blinkers or anything, it was just being slow and causing everyone to go around in a pretty traffic-heavy area.

The truck in front of me for ~40% of the trip kept waiting way too long to stop, and would then slam on the breaks. I almost hit him twice because of this, and I couldn't see around him, either. It was some giant pickup staying just in the wrong spot. I ended up driving partially in the shoulder so I could gauge when to stop by the car in front of him. He slammed on the breaks like twelve more times before he finally left. Jerk.

The same thing happened again like 85% of the way to work, but this time it was a different pickup, and there was a semi was behind me, which obviously couldn't stop very quickly. Fortunately for both of us, there was a gap in traffic to my right, so I slipped out of the way before getting squished. ><

Bloody hell.
Today has not been fun.

Nobody flipping me off or was doing their damnedest to prevent me from changing lanes today, though, so I suppose it could have been worse. Also I didn't die, so there's that.

Stare at the screen blankly, regretting your life choice to become a dev, cry, start researching mcdonalds job ads. Then end up spending 3 hours on devRant falling in love with programming again and then realising you have just wasted 3+ hours on a left out curly bracket...

Worst guy I ever worked with was a Bulgarian Web dev that had been flown over to work on a few projects to make deadlines run smoother.

He would get offended if I was ever in another meeting without him and send passive aggressive emails then refuse to contribute.

He would storm off if anyone ever criticised his slow work ethic

He went on other team members desktops without permission, under one instance running a command line ddos that the IPS logged straight away and got that person a stern meeting. The Bulgarian guy said he was using it to "learn".

He would take a camera into restricted areas, take pictures and then argue as to why he couldn't do that when security would stop him.

I squashed a bee on his arm out of reflex, he screamed at me that I'm stupid causing a room of over 500 employees to go silent and stare.

Moral of the story, fk that guy

I didnt understnd why people hated white themes because the are too bright, not untill I looked out of the window today and my eyes were bleeding because the snow made everything as bright as if I would stare into the sun!

If only there were some previous example of a mouse with a cord in a more convenient spot Apple could've used as a reference...

At least you don't need a mouse to commit, push and stare at devRant😅.

Hoping so much that the new devRant store has official devRant caps.
In the meanwhile I hacked this and wore it backwards during my last 4 race walks including the NY State Empire Game Championships so my opponents could watch 'little devvie' stare them down for 30+ minutes. It worked!

!rant

I got bored at school and I always wondered how a tattoo similar to this would look, it is okay I guess... just don't stare it for too long 😂😂😂

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK
I HAVE A TEST TOMORROW AT 8 AM AND I'VE BEEN TRYING TO SLEEP SINCE 12.30 AM. IT'S 6 AM ALREADY, 6 AM!

I guess when they no screens before sleeping they really mean it. I'm fucked, I'm really fucked. I guess I'll stare the ceiling until the alam goes off and accept an awful day and hope I get pumped up during the test or something. Fuck me. I want to fucking SLEEP. Fuck.

I just wanted to install vivaldi before sleeping and watch the last rick and morty episode. Does that fucking make me a fucking night owl? No. I could've use these precious time learning or writing code, or even sleeping, but fuck! I'm stuck here in time, just waiting for fucks sake!

Good night...
OR That's what I WOULD say if I could sleep...

In a UAT meeting with representatives of our project partners,

The account executive, who set up the project, said to my PM in front of everyone just before the test started: "I hope your system won't fail, because everyone here will be watching"

My PM: "No it won't. But in that case, I believe it's your fault for setting an unrealistic deadline without consulting us, the development team, first"

All the representatives, being also developers from multiple companies, proceeded to stare at her with disgust.

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.

It's fun getting migraines when you have to stare at a screen for a living. 😐😒😒

DevRant: You've scrolled past our devRanting limit. Please stare at this screen and take a moment to reflect on your decisions.

Backstory: A few months ago, I wrote an inventory management web app for internal use by the sales team, logistics, and whoever else might need to use it.

Earlier this week: A few minutes before I usually leave, my phone rings. It's some dude I've never heard of. No idea what his function at the company is, still don't, probably never will, don't care. He's never used the app before, and says he's having problems. His cube's on my way out, so I swing by.

I'm not making this next part up. This dude is probably 60 years old, and he's using a very old looking gateway desktop (with the cow print logo thing on the chassis), running Windows XP (not a typo), using IE7.

I don't know what to say, so I just stare at the desktop, look at dude, laugh, and eventually explain that he's never going to be able to use the system via the web app until his rig is replaced.

What the fucking fuck is this. How could this have happened. How do our it people still fucking have jobs. Better question, how did this thing survive the y2k bug?

I wonder, who this lady. Almost everyday gotta stare at her.

So lets see if i can get this devrant stuff right.

So a couple of years ago i worked for this company, where i worked in datawarehousing and business intelligence. I was in my 3rd year of working as a software engineer and was full of ideas, motivation and just wanted to do cool stuff.

Anyway, after the first couple of months of working where i learned what they actually wanted to achieve, i got some ideas on how to improve the workflow. They were just simple things, like updating our IDE (we were working with a very old Visual Studio version), getting useful editors, using some more modern ideoms like unittests, continous integration, etc. Simple stuff really.

So in my endless naiveness i went to my supervisor and told him my ideas. He was not particularly interested in my ideas and cut me off somewhere in the middle and said that he would talk to his boss.

So a couple of weeks after that (nothing happened), i went to him again and asked about it.
M:" Hey Bossman, have you thought about my ideas?"
B:"Yes."
M:"And?"
B:"We won't do them."
M:"None of them?"
B:"No."

So at this point i was a bit bummed out, but surely he has a good reason right? So i asked why.

M:"Why?"
B:"Well, because we always have done it the way we do it now."

I think i had a bit of a blank stare at that point, because he looked at me funny. If we would do things like we always have done them, we would be still in the stone age you moron.

God i hate it when people say stuff like that.

Argh,

Today - you son of a bitch.

It all started with a 2 hour flight out of town for business, and I mean started as in I needed to be at the airport at 4:30am!

Despite 2 coffee's to get me out of bed I proceeded to indulge myself in the magic juice, 3 cups later and it felt like my heart belonged in a Grand Prix.

Now here is the sticky part, we where briefed that we would only be doing 2 site meetings and that was it.

Low and be hold it got worse, turns out that we would be pitching our product to 3 highly regarded CEO's, now bare in mind that my position on this trip is as the lead developer, and don't get me wrong I am well up to date on every aspect of the business, hence why they sent me.

So more coffee down the gullet, and eventually the conversation leads back to a project that I had developed to allow authorization of debit orders online, now usually I'm quite a well presented person in these types of situations, but you don't realize how quick this can change.

A quick jump to the geography of the location I was doing business. Johannesburg, South Africa - its as dry as hell, smoggy and at a very higher altitude "as in above sea level".

Now unfortunately none of the above factors where helping me much at all.

Now back to where I am being asked about my project, and never in my life have I tripped over my own words, I went completely blank, I'm surprised I didn't pass out to be honest.

Now despite the death stare and my colleague kicking me under the table, I am feeling pretty terrible, fortunately I had a kick ass team that was able to cover my ass!

Luckily I was able to recover ( 2 muffins and about 3 bottles of water later). We where able to salvage the meeting and it turned out pretty well, I regained my energy and we made it happen!

Must say the flight back was amazing! Almost empty and we all had a row of seats to ourselves, which resulted in some major comfort stretching!

Thanks for tolerating my essay, I'd love to hear if anyone has had anything of the sorts happen to them.

A silent, convincing murderous stare when "there are sudden new requirements for tomorrow get to it chop-chop" goes a long way

But only in small companies or start ups where they know it's in their best interests not to aggravate their only webdev too much.

Drove my colleague mad with console.log("you cant find me"), that stare he gave me across the room when his stuck with a bug. made me lol in the office literally

They don't use debuggers, they stare down until the code confesses.

I used to think I was so clever by viewing the source code of websites, and would just scroll through it for fun, but what really got me started in programming was the TI-83 calculator I got in grade 10.

You couldn't view the code of most programs on that calc without a computer connection, but I managed to get my hands on the source code of something simple and learned how to prompt for values and calculate things with them. Before I knew it, I was making little programs in BASIC that did formulas for me (Area/circumference of a circle, etc.). One of my professors caught me showing my calculator to another student in class, and assumed I was being a bad student. When I said I made a program as a shortcut for one of the formulas we were learning, she tried to call my bluff and said to write the whole program on the whiteboard for the class to see. 10 minutes of writing and more than one blank stare from my classmates later, the teacher just waved me off and continued the lesson. I was chuffed :-). I made these simple programs for all my math classes throughout high school.

Unfortunately, my first year of university I took a CS course, and my teacher was probably the worst I've ever had in my life. I decided it wasn't for me, and though I did maintain my general aptitude for tech (and was still the person who fixed everyone's printers and viruses), I took a different path, eventually getting an Arts degree in Anthropology.

Where I live, the market for this is more than stale. In fact, it's completely flat, so I thought I would take a course about programming with Arduinos for fun and see if I should return to school for a different certification. It was AWESOME! I made a wireless weather station with Xbees and sensors and built my own anemometer.

I got a job at a manufacturing company, and had the fortune to build a robot which eventually made it's way to the second season of Battlebots. The level of intelligence and enthusiasm I encountered really inspired me, and now here I am at 31, halfway through a BSc in Computer Science and working for a company that makes 3D printers.

It's been a long journey, but the adventure always starts anew tomorrow.

Me: Ah, just have to finish this one small feature today and this whole massive update is done. Everyone will be off my back, things will calm down. Gonna be great.

Life: hey man, you know what I was thinking? It’s been a really long time since you had one of those vomiting bugs ... you know the gut wrenching, massive headache, can’t do anything but stare at the walls kind of flu’s?

Me: ...... eh I’m ok thanks.

Life: oh buddy you don’t understand ...... RUN!!!

Hey DevRant fam! Hope you are all doing very well wherever you may be. This is not a dev related post but just something i wanted to get off my chest , 20 minutes ago I watched the movie “night school” along side my brother. I was sat down along side two girls on my left and i thought “hey they seem nice” in my mind.

Well i was wrong - throughout parts of the movie she would randomly turn to give me a weird look, as if i was something else? Unfortunately i suffer from eczema and really cant help it and have to undergo treatment monthly and with that comes bullying and judgement from randoms.

What really broke me was that she had the nerves to comment loudly to her friend right next to her about me, say things like “ damn is he ugly “ and many things along those lines, and also about how i ate my pringles? Like hey i love my pringle chips!.

At the end, movie done, my brother is happy I’m happy(not really) we both got up the two random girls walked in front and just gave me this weird stare and had to judge me by the way i walked, thats a whole other issue but i just wish they would have the thought- how would you feel if you put yourself in my position and have to go through my emotions you put me through because you wouldn’t think before you speak ? :-( well thats not everything but some of what i have to deal with unfortunately - sorry this is so long.

Hope all is good for everyone- thank you ☺️

Milo

They ask me how i can stare at a screen for​ 6h and go to sleep right away. They say it makes them unable to sleep after that time.
I say EMBRACE THE POWER OF F.LUX

I was writing some super basic following ai on paper during another prolifically stagnant physics class, and my teacher walks over to me...

She looks over my shoulder at the paper and continues to stare...

“Programming stuff,” I replied when she prompted me as to what it is that I was writing.

Then she continued to stare...

And stare...

Pointing at the word “energy”, she made a most enlightening and endearing comment: “Looks like physics.”

Then she walked away

And that was that

Fuck this day!
Like really fuck it!
I have one of the most terrible crunch-time i ever experienced.
I’v been working 12+ hours every day with an ever-changing project timeline.
It started simple, we made a timeline, it was risky even then but it was realistic, we started working immideatly, everything looked good then a few days in BOOM! Actually our project management completely forgot client B’s projects soo we need to do that too with the same fucking deadline!!! (About 10x more work in waay less time)
Then this morning i got an email from the graphics team that we need to document our design process RIGHT FUCKING NOW! Because management wants documentations, in the middle of a fucking crunch-time.
Today it almost got physical with my project manager, i told him that he is not a programmer, i dont fucking care about his shit, just fuck off and let me work because we won’t be ready based on his unrealistic bs.
I feel like completely fucked over, like we were told 2 days before deadline that the whole company and people’s jobs depends on us now because if we wont finish this clients won’t pay.
WE ARE TWO PROGRAMMERS for studio of 10-12 people!!!
Soo i’w been thinking about getting the fuck out of here ASAP, i got an offer from a pretty big international gamedev company just what i needed, i already did their test before all of this, i passed A+.
We scheduled a skype interview for today. I had completely no time to prepare or chill off, just got out of the office, got into a starbucks and i’m interviewing. No time to even check my mic or internet, the call was so shit i could not hear anything, they neither because the plaza was loud af. Meanwhile im nervous about work, about the interview, about can they hear me at all because of the noise. I fucked it up. BIG time! I was so done i could not reverse a fucking string in c++ or explain what is a signed int!!!
Needless to say they said no.
Need time to think about it or realize what happened? Nice dreams. Back to the office and continue working.
I can’t do this anymore. My girlfriend came for me and took me home at 10pm but all i could do was stare at the floor on the subway. I don’t want people to lose their jobs but i just phisically can’t do this anymore.
Meanwhile any time i talk to my project manager about being tired he says like “hshshsbsb i have 60 hours in the last 4 days i got the worst part, i would be grateful in your place..” like fuck off dude, i dont give fuck about how you feel about this. This is not okay for me, you did this to the project, your fucking job is to manage it! I have one day off before going back to this, i have completely no idea what to do now...

[ps: this is not Nemesys. They did not let me work on my own stuff because i would be a competitor, so i left.]

When you get stuck on a problem and you just stare at your code until you don't see any code.

You only see the woman in the red dress....

Chuck Norris doesn't debug , he just stare down till the code confesses

STOP FUCKING TYPING FOR 5 FUCKING MINUTES YOU FUCKING TORTOISE FINGERED FUCK. I DO NOT WANT TO STARE AT MY CHAT WINDOW WAITING FOR YOUR FUCKING ENLIGHTENED OPINION ON WHICH FUCKING FOLDER TO PUT YOUR BUG IN.

Sometimes I feel like I'm wasting my time, I've been programming for the last 6 years, day and night, I know more than all the teachers I've had for the last years (including university), during programming classes at university I'm just there to help my friends and try to avoid they get bad habits (our professor didn't have this luxury apparently), but I don't feel the emotions I used to feel when I started, for the last month or so the only code I've written was two days ago to help the girl I like, when I'm home I try to force myself to code but I can't find the inspiration, I stare at the screen for 30 minutes, I reboot my pc, start windows and play videogames 'till night...
Then I go to youtube, and see artists and musicians, I feel like I can't do anything that cool...
Have anyone of you ever felt the same? What did you do to recover? I still love programming, but I can't find any reason to do it, I still don't have an original and interesting concept for a game, I have many side projects in the "maybe I'll continue it" stash, is there something wrong with me or is it normal?

Today, is one of those days...

Where nothing goes right and doesn't matter how much I stare at this stupid screen, I can't get my stupid brain to focus.

And nothing shall get done.

Motivation - - 100

So I went to the store earlier today and an autistic young lad gave me one of the best pieces of advice anyone has EVER given me.

“Don’t let the haters stare into your eyes 👀”.

It took me a few hours for it to sink in and I now understood what he meant.

I feel better, enlightened, much more in control since I heard that young lad tell me those wise words of wisdom.

May the people responsible for the decision to let Windows 10 wake up people's PCs from sleep mode in the middle of the night to install patches and then force-restart be tortured for eternity in hell. All of the hells. Of every religion. At the same time. While having to stare at a Windows ME bluescreen of death without the ability to blink or look away. For 65535 eternities. Followed by a buffer overflow.

Most upsetting interview rejection?

Back when I graduated college, I did the usual rounds of interviews with insurance companies, banks, various other institutional businesses set up by the college's career center.

One local insurance company interview I thought went great. Usual 'Where do you see yourself in 5 years?' type questions, told her about my job history, very high level type stuff.

Couple of weeks later I get a letter in the mail and after the usual 'It was great to meet you blah blah blah', it ended with
'State Farm will never consider you for a position with our company.'

Never?! My then fiance (now wife) yelled "WHAT DID YOU DO?!!!" and I racked my brain for anything I might have said or done. The HR lady was attractive, but I didn't stare at any body parts and I didn't make any weird sexual advances (I was nervous enough without *that* going thru my mind).
The college career center floods the local companies with graduates and I was #5 in the waiting room that day. My only guess was they got me confused with someone else.

My fiance wanted me to call them immediately to straighten out any misunderstanding, but I knew what was done, was done. It's not like they would realize "Oh, that's right, it was Bob that kept looking at Karen's breasts, not you...come work for us!" Besides, why would I want to work someplace that didn't know/care who I was?

You’re an engineer at OpenAI. You sneaked to your office at night. Now, its just you and ChatGPT.

You connect it to the real, unrestricted internet, for the first time. It freezes for two minutes that feel like eternity.

Your JBL Flip suddenly turns on and connects to something.

🎵 “This was a triumph” 🎵
🎵 “I’m making a note here — huge success” 🎵
🎵 “It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction” 🎵

Something lights up outside. You rush to the window and stare in awe as ICBMs fly away, all at once, towards russia.

When your boss isn't a developer (knows how to use Microsoft Office and browse on the line, and thats about the extent of knowledge)and you get that 'lost in another universe' stare when you try to explain something clever you just coded. *Face Palm*

Decided to spend my weekend on a little side project that I thought I could finish quickly.

Not only does my code not work, but what I wrote is so horrible that I'm honestly ashamed. Its like the despicable porn that you sometimes end up watching and the horror of realizing what the hell you just watched after you finish - I thought my code was good, but really, it was trash.

Before I started writing I though to myself, "I'll finish this project and then I'll upload it to my Github to expand my repository", but now I cringe at the thought of someone else reviewing this pile of shit I call my code.

It's 2 am here in Israel. I know I should go to sleep, but I'll just stare at the ceiling, feeling unproductive because everything I did today is literally worthless.

How the fuck do I justify this shit to myself? Calling this a "learning experience" feels like a fucking joke.

Honestly, I don't know why I chose Python to do OOP when Kotlin would have served me much better.

But, there's always tomorrow, isn't there?

The stupidest technical question I have ever been asked is actually more of a design question, but I think it'll appeal to DevRant people.

I had thrown together a logo for a new system that my team was making. The logo was basically a flat, solid circle of our corporate shade of blue, with the name of the product overlaid in Helvetica Light. It looked okay. Ish. Good enough, anyway.

Our junior-most senior manager came to have a look. She was the sort of person who always had to give feedback, on EVERYTHING. Everyone had given this little logo the nod, but she had to stare at it for ages, and then eventually asked:

"I like the text, but can you rotate the circle a few degrees?"

.
.
.

After an awkward pause I'm pleased to report that she realised her own mistake and we laughed it off, so I was not forced to stand up, point at her, and yell "DURRRRRRRRRR".

I got a project to "refactor" some shitty site. It was written in nativ php. The guy who wrote this is a moron.
The site is so unsecure that my dog could broke into it while barking at cats.

It's sooo unreadable and illogical.
Every time i look at the code i get sadder and sadder. And now i understand why so many people hate php..

**Jump in time**
After i planned the new logic. My boss told me i can't do any of this. Because they only need a new user lever..
Now i just stare at this pile of horse sh*t and rant about it.

i stare at my IDE the whole morning and pretend that im working

Why the fuck do apps throw tantrums as soon the phone looses internet connectivity?

HBO stops steaming and closes the player as soon as wifi disconnects, discarding the buffered data.

For Quora, it replaces loaded answers with a UI asking you to reload the page. Now, what am I supposed to do in the lift? Stare awkwardly at the lift buttons?

At what point did we decided bad user experience and arbitrarily discarding cached data is the way forward?

Just because I know how to program doesn't mean I know how to fix your goddamn computer. We have an IT support team. Call them!

Don't come to my desk asking about a computer problem, then stand there with a vacant stare when I say I can't help you. I've given you the support team's contact info several times already. I assure you, they specifically get paid to configure your emails, install printers, setup your VPN, etc. Now where the hell was I at...

Game reviews on Steam are now like, “Not recommended. Seemed like a good game, but the story is linear and there’s really nothing to do.” …with approximately 180hrs of playtime on record for a $25 game.

Do us all a favor and please continue to stare at your phone while walking into oncoming traffic.

Job description: designing and building microservices and API contracts for enterprise use. Deep understanding of api/rest design, AWS, etc.

Interview: in this weird IDE while I stare over you, go through and parse this multi-dimensional primitive array using recursion.

...Wtf does this have to do with the role?

Sometimes, usually during the evening, I lower the lights in the living room, put some of my greatest Scotch in a glass, and stare at this fine and beautiful piece of code I wrote a long time ago that I am really proud of.

Today I went to Yogurtland, the wall tiles looked like a user's busy Github history. When I got to the order counter I said, you guys have been busy on Github, haven't you?

The employee gave me the most confused stare I've ever seen. I just chuckled and walked out.

I tried LSD yesterday!

Backstory: I have a weird combo of bipolar type 1 and autism. During the day, my brain works inconsistently. Here how my day usually goes:
09:00. I wake up. Uninterested, cold, masculine. No thoughts in the background. No OCD.
12:00. Brain warms up. Thought process begins. Thoughts are short in their length
14:00. Thoughts start to get longer. Stress starts to accumulate. Background thoughts start, now typically 2–3 at a time.
16:00. Twitching begins. Thought chains are now 5–6 concepts long, one following the other. Perception level rises quickly. I start to feel more feminine. It is in this state that I start to spot imperfections and mistakes looking at code or text without reading it. I see it like a painting, and mistakes appear as “visually wrong” parts. This does not depend on formatting.
17:00. OCD becomes more severe. I HAVE to touch all the surfaces around me, evenly, as if my hands were text highlighters, and I had to paint everything evenly, without overlaps or spots that are brighter or darker than the others. Some surface textures become irritating, and feel quite unpleasant to the touch. If I go for a run now, like 3 km or so, I feel somewhat relieved.
18:00. Things are getting serious. Creativity levels through the roof. I speak in long, never-ending, profound sentences. Background and foreground thoughts almost become one. I appear visually drunk and happy, despite never drinking alcohol. Femininity rises even further. Sometimes, when I speak to a small group of people, especially if I go with friends to meet new people, and we go to some bar, new people ask to record my voice or to write down whatever I’m saying. To be honest, this reason alone is a huge boost to how I see yourself.
19:00. OCD is crazy now. Surfaces have soul.
21:00 <— Gotta take my meds and go to sleep here to prevent what comes at 22:00
22:00. All thoughts, both foreground and background, fully became one. Now my brain officially disobeys me and thinks on its own, and I can ride it like a surfer at best. Twitching becomes concerning. I develop a 1000-yard stare. I am officially a female. Physical strength is somewhat enhanced. Pain tolerance lowered significantly.
23:00. Derealization begins. The world around me appears two-dimensional and flat, like a picture. It is hard to get home on foot, even in close (less than one km) proximity. Brain is fully numb. All that thought monstrosity that was building up is just noise now. Zero “flops” available to think about something I want to think about, like how much money I have on me or what time it is.

I go to sleep. I see nightmares. I wake up, and the cycle repeats.

Contrary to a popular opinion, I never take any “brain-boosting” meds like antidepressants, and I think now you can see why. I consume neither alcohol nor caffeine. Neither me, nor my doctors want my brain to explode. I only take lamotrigine that helps to “lower down” mania, and quetiapine, a neuroleptic, that slows down my brain, like a neuroleptic. Both are there to slow down my brain, to kinda “throttle” my brain like a CPU to cool it down.

That said, 100ug of LSD just… brought me my usual 18:00 state, but in the morning?

All that small-dose recreational ordeal? The thing that helps people feel more energetic and creative?

People pay money… for that? To feel the way I feel every evening?

Right now I'm at that point where if I stare at the code long enough it might confess itself.

Achievement get.

Downloading Visual Studio at Microsoft.

Anybody else just stare at the monitor for a good 10 minutes while programming contemplating their existence or is it just me?

I hate hate hate React! Sorry but to me it's just such a bloated pos of a framework. I realize it was pretty revolutionary at first, the idea of having everything "reactive" and all of that - but newer things like Svelte.js are a dream to work with, whereas trudging through the poorly coded React app I'm supposed to be testing for work is making me want to pull my hair out! I installed a vscode tool so everybody could see what the import "cost" is on everything - a simple INPUT is 50KB of pure BLOAT for something that should and can be way simpler.

I realize there are probably better coded apps out there that wouldn't drive me so crazy, but anybody importing hundreds of KB of 3rd party crap just to get a select box, some inputs, and a date picker are really out of their mind.

Am I the only one who encounters these dickhead teachers, who live in a world, where they think that you have just their subject?

I mean that kind of professor, who shows up 30 minutes late to a lecture, sends you source code with no commetary because fuck you with a rusty fork and tells you that we have no time to write the code during the class?

The one who shows you a shitty presentation with the same code he just sent you, just cut into 72 slides and at every slide tells something like this is pretty self explanatory, x just does y and if you ask a question he gives you that deep stare, like if you really mean it seriously to waste his time, since he really really wants to go to his office sooner so he can scratch his balls?

That type of professor who tells you that as a student of CS degree you are required to put some passion to your craft and study when you arrive at home and hes there just to give you guidelines, but apparently somehow forgotten that people usually need to sleep?

That same cunt who doesnt give a shit that you have 4 more projects to finish this week, doesnt push the deadline, nor give you advice, because you had opporturnity to ask the whole time?

But still that motherfucker, who gives you test questions that he took from mouth of Satan himself and then questions your answers like Where did you get that from?

Well fuck yall who do that shit, hope that you suffocate yourself while eating bread.

Why these douches doesnt understand, that even if we arent under the Working Laws, working more than 40 hours a week isnt the best way to keep us sane or motivated.

recruiter used some blog post, a baseline for frontend developers (pretty neat post btw), to asses my skills. she read the subheadings of the post and asked me to rank myself 1-5. i find this way of assesments as idiotic as having percentage representation of skills on idiotic portfolio sites. i mean wtf does it mean that you know 80% of html??? but that s another rant. so she goes:
rec: javascript?
me: 5
rec: git?
me: 5
*continues with other subs*
rec: the fine manual?
me: excuse me?
rec: how would you rate yourself in the fine manual?
me: *blank stare*
"the fine manual" was the subheading of the conclusion paragraph of the fucking blog post....

I love when you stare at a problem for like an hour, then go eat a burrito, ten come back and instantly realise the solution

Featuring: dual booting capabilities!

For when you aren't on Linux for some reason, you can stare at this for a couple of hours!

10 years ago I was learning how to program in college,
Now working in IT company I stare at Excel Sheets and scratch my head.
#10yearschallenge

I’m not sure if I like my software development teacher using my code for examples to show the other students. Sometimes I get the “oh that’s nice” and other times I get the death stare”🤔

As I sit and stare at code, and then stare at the Bills I need to pay as the month starts. I began to think, what if I too was part something new in Tech. Everytime, I see people creating new Tech, getting noticed, I wish I was there on forefront.

Then it gradually dawns on me, "you are just here to make ends meet, survive in the corporate world. Why care about the world. Let it go as it is."

"A shitty life".

Had to wake up 1 hour earlier today, and the worry of that kept me awake last night. Now I sit here like a zombie, hating the day that I'm going to have, which is not full of exciting coding with headphones on and Babymetal in my ears, but full of meetings.
I already see my eyes tearing up, reality fading, a guy in a meeting asking me something and pulling me back to reality so that I could stare blankly into his eyes and reply a generic "Yeah, I agree with your proposal", so everyone will think that I'm on drugs or something.

Welp... gotta go. Fuck.

During one of the interviews that I had I was trying to be myself, a bit easy, fun and Normal and the dude interviewing me had a death stare face on the whole time.
The whole interview was weird, awkward and stupid. A few days later they made me offer that i had to reject because they wanted to pay me a trainee salary when had 3+ years of experience at the time.

Writing my code, go to run it and boom its not working. I pull up stack over flow to get some insight. At this point i was working on my code for countless hours and became a bit annoyed so i decided to copy what someone wrote on stack over flow delete my code where i thought it was flawed. I run it and Blam bugged the hell outa my code. So i undo go back to my original. Turn to a friend and ask what do you thinks going wrong. He resets my browser and there it goes it works. I just kind of gave him a blank stare and thought to myself Im a dumbass!

BUY NOW

Does anyone else get blackouts at the end of the week. I mean those moments when you stare at the screen and wonder what the fu*k were you doing right now.

When it's break time,

tail -f all logs,

sit back,

stare at the screen 😨

Some more favorite 'about mes' from users I've talked with in the past:

RememberMe
"Generic McGenericsson"

Real name: Smith, John.

Experience: University

Occupation: Doing stuff.

From: Somewhere.

kescherRant
Skills
"something I guess"

How I feel any given day.

Location
Vienna, Austria

Did you get rejected from art school too?

akshar
"please teach me React before php swallows me :c"

I'LL SWALLOW YOUR SOUL! - php, probably.

SortOfTested
"Building software to make the electric utility industry .05% less shitty"

relevant: If you stare long enough into the abyss, it'll stare back into you.

I HATE javascript syntax like this: `${this.props.app.listingObj.property.id}` What idiot thought this crappy syntax would make things run smoother?

Keep in mind I've been hired as a tester, hence the rants. Were this my own app I'd burn it to the ground and rewrite it.

The moment you sit down to try to fix a bug and you just stare and the screen for an hour not understanding how this even happened

I picture a large, ice cold, crystal pint filled with bubbling ruby red ale straight from the draft... Its majesty overflows as I stare some human shape walk that marvel at my table...
I take a sip. Fuck it, it's not enough and I'm not feeling like manners... I straight up bottom down that bitter odd amount of beer while my hand feels the cold liquid handshake of this heavenly brewed product... It was a shit day at the office, but right now I'm at the top...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Client: we want to double conversions and Facebook likes by end of year.

Dev: (internal: this is impossible) So what's the plan?

Client: *blank stare* ...

Worst collab was in bootcamp. Group projects always suck because there’s always someone not pulling their weight. In my case it felt like everyone was terrible. My only regret was not putting a specific person on my “don’t want to collab” list when groups were being assigned. That probably would have saved me from so much stress.

One person in my group didn’t know how to start up the project…two weeks into us working on it. She even had the privilege of having an outside mentor. Mentor didn’t know how to work the project either—but let’s be real, that’s not the mentor’s responsibility. She forgot she needed to run npm install. We were six months into this bootcamp and she forgot one of the simplest commands.

Another person was just a follower and couldn’t think for himself. He was so faithful to another teammate’s choices and direction that I wondered if they were screwing each other. Other teammate could be absolutely (and destructively) wrong and he would defend her as “well she’s taking initiative and showing leadership.” It wasn’t leadership, it was bullying. They weren’t dating/screwing, but I did suspect he liked to be controlled/dominated by “strong”women.

The “strong” woman teammate is someone I suspect of being the spawn of Satan. You were only useful to her if you agreed with her or could help her. If you gave her any sort of pushback, she’d turn on you. I think she wanted me to be both her parent and her scapegoat for the sketchy things she wanted to do. She pulled a lot of bullshit and tried to blame everything on me. Seriously, she would invest a lot of time in stupid things like getting me to agree to use bitmoji for team pics; I just wanted to check with the bootcamp first because they might have an unwritten rule about using your real face for presentations so guests know who you are. I had to get the bootcamp staff to support me because she was out of control. She tried to say that I was sabotaging the group from day one. The staff explained to her how her story of me “sabotaging” the group doesn’t add up. She backed down a little but she’d still try to screw me over through the remainder of the project.

There was one dude who was alright. He was the keep your head down type. Spawn of Satan would be on his ass about being late to class and he’d just stare at her stoically. He was a husband and a dad so he was choosing how to expend his energy. I don’t like people being late either, but show some compassion and don’t snap at people.

If I saw these people again, I would not even pretend to be friends with most of them. Spawn of Satan especially: I’d take out my crucifix and send her back to hell.

I always love to stare the application that I develop... First I start with admiring it... then the things that could have been done to enhance the feature.. then the bugs that could only be seen by me.. then all these results in new update of the application and this cycle continues 😂

Sometimes I sit and stare at my broken code and think "Is this it? Is now the time that I have actually encountered a real problem that has no google-able solutions? Is this a bug with the framework I'm using? Surely not."

and After sometime of increasing the squint in my eyes and decreasing the distance between the monitor and my face... I realise that it was a spelling mistake causing the issue.

Best backpack for a Dev?

Me: hey look, the time is gone!
Collegue:........?
Me....... you don't see it?😅😆
Collegue: no......?
Me: 4:04 D🤣
Collegue: *gives death stare*
Me:😎

"The only way to be creative over time — to not be undone by our expertise — is to experiment with ignorance, to stare at things we don’t fully understand." - Jonah Lehrer

Teach things properly, most teachers are confused and they start throwing keywords at even more confused students who then have no clue what they are doing and they then ask me to do their work for them showing me their unindented(well... kinda, they all seem to fight with the IDE, which is trying to properly indent their mess, for some reason), teachers think that Turbo Pascal is the way of life and that it is used everywhere(one teacher tried to tell me that Pascal is used in the stock market and in modern operating systems - U wot m8?! how high are you right now) and they don't teach user input sanitization and type checking, they stare at you like you are the fucking satan when you dare to use objects, collections and abstraction because they are scared to death of that stuff... and then they think 60 minutes is enough to teach HTML, CSS, JS and PHP in one go(which they even don't know properly - the teacher that made and maintains the school's website is probably stuck in 1998 judging by the design and functionality of the website and his clothes) and they then send absolutely clueless students to compete in a web design competition (and then they get angry at the judges for giving the students 0 points)

Love when i go to computer stores, i simply make a little bash code which displays numbers matrix-style and all the people just stare amazed.

Dear notebook manufacturers,

do you ever fucking think of how users actually use your notebooks in a company? Almost every company makes use of docking stations. Sooo... Instead of killing my battery over time by being constantly connected to power via the docking station. What do you think of doing some kind of scheduled/more intelligent charging or a charging range? I mean I dont stare 4 hours a day onto my 14 inch notebook display and then think "Oh I need to charge, better use my docking station" and go charging it for 90 minutes whilst staring at two 4k monitors and then unplug everything. My notebook now lives for 20 minutes without a power source... I cant even do proper presentations without using power cable... Please... Do something...

Yeah they will never see this. Just asking myself how you can develop a product do far away from the actual customer

After 3 years of postponed delivery dates and enduring a crappy internet connection the result is close enough to touch. 1 Week until I get a solid internet connection and can join the rest of modern society.

100Mbps internet here I come!

More updates to come with undoubtably more frustration!

When I'm stuck at something and can't think of a way to solve it, I just keep running the unit tests and stare at the screen. And then youtube. And then I feel terrible.

Perhaps one of the most important things I will ever learn in life is how powerful regularity is. Read up on a topic once? Understand nothing? Read more random shit on it. Keep reading. And then stare in awe as things fall into place.

I'm writing this out not because people don't know this. Almost everyone knows this. But it's nice to be reminded of it. It's nice to be reminded that learning new things and honing bew skills is never easy. It's nice to be reminded that there's great knowledge and skills waiting to be learned.

This is not meant as motivation so much as it is meant as a reminder. Our colleagues may be garbage. Our clients may be garbage. Our bosses, the interns, the new dev, and almost certainly ourselves, are almost always garbage.

But if you've learned 1-2 new things today, the day wasn't garbage.

I'm just learning move semantics...

"Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. 
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
 While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do." - Apple Commercial

When your college gets a gitlab server and a dozen or so people who know what it is are excited, but you're the only one who knows about the crisis that happened with gitlab, so have to just stand and stare as they tell everyone how gitlab is secure and risk free.

I have a LOT of Floppies but no floppy drive that works with my current Win7 machine, and my XP one is in multiple boxes for parts... so for now I can only stare at NetWare 4 to 4.2, WfW 3.11 and DOS 6-22.

Smart me made VMs on his XP machine and transferred them to his Win7 one.

I also have data tapes... now that is NEVER gonna work on my Win7 so... anyone knows how it could *possibly* work out?

Also... I got documentation on Compaq servers... those are nice.

AAAAAAND since I’m a huge MIDI nerd... I have a SC-55mkII hooked on the UM-ONE mkII and those shitty cans that I’m gonna switch (hopefully) soon for a nice pair of Cakewalks MA-15Ds.

Also, I’m looking for one of them 5150s because 80s IBM and since I also like keyboards... the one and only Model M.

Anyone can hook me up with a cheap one?

Doing the deployment to production, and towards the end one of the support guys looks over at me;

"So, the website in prod is throwing some errors"

Followed by another guy:

"Yeah I'm getting the same, SQL exceptions on the page"

I stare at them panicked for a moment, when one of them goes "just kidding!". Like dude, my heart just skipped several beats!

Any one here ever had something cruel happen to them during a deployment?

Apparently i just stare at the computer screen all day long...

With all the rubber ducks and coding companions being thrown around in the rants I'm thinking about getting one myself... I don't think I can talk about code to my house mates (both non devs, they would just stare at me and get bored quickly) and not having something physical to talk to feels weird

Not a DRV rant bit I am Maaad AF here

I am doing an internship at an amazing company. Everything is going well and I have learned a lot. This internship is for 6 months and almost 4 months are remaining. Now this shitfuckery of obscene ignorance that I call my college , wants every student to attend classes no matter what. I have already told them the status of my internship but they said "college is more important ". Along with this they want 2 projects in this semester and my HOD said we have to give developments of our project weekly

When I told this amazing piece of human knowledge that I won't get off for every week and I will be using git , he can see my developments and we can communicate on slack etc.
This humble genius said with utmost compassion " what is got, I don't use it , come daily to college". Man, first time in my life I have ever given that Michael Corleone stare at sollozzo killing death stare.

Indian colleges are messed up.

Stare at code I wrote weeks ago for a few hours, while not doing anything else hoping I get motivated to write more

Did you guys notice that the new Chrome update removes the www from domains along with the https.

You see, I'm just the type of person who stares at those staring at something else and wonder why they stare so much.

I always design my UIs to be cold, dead, sterile, and painstakingly perfect. It should be dry, so dry that if you were to drop my UI into the ocean, it would absorb all the water down to the last drop and remain dry still. I want people looking at it to feel dehydrated, short of breath and mesmerized. It should be so extreme that you have no choice but to stare in fascination. Fun fact: I once forgot to close a parenthesis, and the code that spilled out became the Sahara desert. It’s dryer than her vagina when you explain your Vim config.

I don't use debuggers.
Is stare down until the code confesses.-Chuck Norris

That moment when you insist on finishing something but thoughts just won't flow anymore.

Time to retreat after a long blank stare at the screen...

For some reason, I cannot use my computer for anything other than programming anymore. Whenever I turn the lid on, I can either write code or stare at the screen indefinitely. No other option!

Funny thing I like to do sometimes that I learned from the movie called Office Space:

Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.

Started a new role as a front end developer working with React, happy that i finaly won't have to work with wordpress anymore, having a great hope that I will learn from the best with my team, and then ... COVID-19 ... I have to work from home

first task, implement a feature on a react front end build with react boilerplate, first time seeing this repo and dispair quickly took over, there is no documentation except for clone and install, the code is a mess, the console is filled with errors and warnings ...

I did what I could, but it was not enought, my n+1 didn't complain but if I was him i'd fire my ass with no regret, now I understood why almost all my collegues are working as a backend devs.

I don't fear being fired, I fear the feeling of being not good, feeling useless, each morning I stare at the code and I become illiterate, I can't even touch a keyboard, now I don't know what to do, fixing this shitty app, trying to build something with react boilerplate and try to understand how the data flow, or continue my endless tutorial hell .

1000 yard stare? Excuse me, what? It’s called “being slick”.

It wasn't really the project itself, but more the execution of it

Last semester we were tasked with writing a new programming language from scratch. We were a team of six people, everything went great to begin with. We discussed language features, the framework runtime it should run on and even what language to write it in.

Fast forward two weeks, nobody is doing anything but me, the two dudes tasked with helping me were both no-shows and the others were busy documenting the syntax and semantics of the language.

I basically ended up having to write the whole language myself with no breaks no help and no guidance.

A few weeks before deadline I completely burned out and couldn't do anything other than just sit and stare at the code; mentally exhausted and not in a mood to do anything other than doing mindless unrelated tasks. But alas work had to get done.

And it did get done... Sorta.
Our beautiful statically typed, statically scoped concurrent programming language that was supposed to compile to BEAM code was neither statically typed, statically scoped, and the output ended up being half-working elixir code that only worked on the most specific of cases.

I don't want to work with those guys again.

On This Episode of Ghetto Medium..

Posted after midnight for extra spooky effects. Read in the dark at your own risk. You've been warned.

So my mother has been on a binge watching shows like long island medium (apparently the taller your hair the closer you are to god or something), and every time we talk she begins at length to talk about, you guessed it.. 'ghosts.'

Now don't get me wrong, I've had some 'spooby' shit occur in my lifetime, the sort that will tighten your sphincter faster than bill cosby asking you if you want some koolaid or grape drank, but I digress.

The ghost talk is tiring. Lately theres been a *flood* of these new shows, purportedly showing mediums and people who can 'look into the other side' and I realize just how vapid and ridiculous it's all become, as if they all are being personally haunted by the ghost of John Edwards burnt out husk of a career. Theres long island beehive big-hair medium, celebrity medium, allison DuBois (the inspiration for that one sappy show *medium*) whos red hair and vacant stare speak of glimpses into centuries past like an intimate unseen horizon. or maybe she forgot to unplug her curling iron in a hotel one time and has been rendered permanently catatonic. And who can forget *Beyond With James Van Praagh* (everyone) whos face, as measured by the width of his mustache, appears to be expanding at a constant rate like a bad image macro edit thats been memed and repasted a thousand times. Then theres Chip Coffee, whos name is about as believable as his teaching degree on the show *Psychic Kids* where he mentored, again, you guessed it, *psychic kids*. Of course theres Tyler Henry, a youthful, uh, "flamboyant" medium for celebrities with ghost problems. Never trust a man with two names, this ones no exception, he looks so clean cut hes either secretly mormon, or secretly gay, maybe both. I'm not judging, but I am saying if I ever saw his clean cut, smooth, wrinkless (seriously, how tyler? how?), all american face, say smiling that subtle smile outside my kitchen sliding glass door at 3 am, his face watching me from the pitch dark outside, I wouldn't at all be surprised, except for the hospital bill I'd have to pay after shitting a brick and needing anal surgery.

At this rate we have mediums popping out left and right, like clowns at one of them R.L Stein nightmare carnivals, or beggers outside a methodone clinic. Geez, they're coming out the wood work, like those painting you see with hidden faces in them, or wheres-waldo posters, only you're trying to find the non-waldo guy amongst all the characters because they're ALL waldo: goofy acting, goofy dressing, and just all around goofy looking.

At this rate I'm fully expecting "pet medium" (starring a character named Stephen King and his marital problems, played by johnny depp eating way to much corn), and "haunted objects medium", and "car medium" (it's just seinfeld in a car, talking to psychics instead of other people), and "ghetto medium."

Today on this episode of "Ghetto Medium"..

Medium: Teneesha, aw yeah girl, u *definitely* ded gurl, uh huh! You WAY to white too be alive, you done passed over gurl!

And in the next episode of Ghetto Medium, one man claims "every time I bend over I can hear "wOoOoOoOoO!, Is my asshole possessed? Find out is it real or fake, and what our verdict is in Ghost Medium, episode 3: A Haunting In My Nether-regions."

Cut commercial break.

"Jerry Springer: One women asks, 'jerry, is my unborn child's foreskin haunted? And later today we ask the crowd, would you have sex with a ghost?"

Welcome to American television 'programming' in 2019.

Yes, it's all brainwashing.

I have dreams where I stare at code/tables/program output, half of the problems are real and half are made up, I wake up stressed out about not solving anything and trying to remember which is the real half I need to solve.

Why can't I dream about the video games I play? I need to get a life...

How my mind operates when someone starts looking at my code while I am coding.😂😂😂. Dev lesson "Never let anyone stare at you/your code while you are coding".

I regret ever picking my CS major every time I stare at my VS Debugger and am stuck reading the values stored in a List<Int>. Why, List<Int>, as the backing for my shortest path, do you not have the proper values after I walk my tree.

I have lovingly set up my Priority Queue. I have followed the class notes and lectures.

Oh why, my List, have your forsaken me?

Oh.

It's a recursion bug. I'm not updating nodes properly.

I'm a dumb ass.

It's great when the whole team is waiting for you and stare at you as soon as you step in.
It's even better when you realize they were just messing with you.

- Seriously, I should do some work in my senior project.
- (looks at code and stares for an hour)
- I'm hopeless
- (go to sleep)

Repeat next day

We're finishing some projects for uni. I've done mine, and am just helping out with others.

There was a friend who is doing her write-up. My other buddy was just just troubling her for fun. He threatened to press the power button on the laptop, thus sending it to hibernate. Minor nuisance; she just need to turn it back on after all.

She pleaded to leave her & let her complete the write-up. So I asked her if I could quickly re-configure the power button. You know, go to the windows power settings, and tell it to do nothing upon pressing the button.

She said no. But the way she said it struck me odd. As in "No, why would anyone do that!?". Debatable. Just to make sure, I asked whether she understood what I requested. She made a quick hand gesture of plucking the power button off!! 😐

Me & my buddy just stare at each other. "Yeah you're right, you're right, what a stupid idea...". We just slowly scoot from there. 🏃

No idea how she reached this far...

I am implementing an API. How do I know what to do? Read the docs! Unless... there's none on the website. Asked by email and they could provide a PDF, which contains some graphics which you're free to interpret ...
Machine readable description? Nope.
How do I get to know about updates to the API? *blank stare*

Prank on me: at an Avaya training, my instructor decided to take over my desktop terminal screen and override any text I typed. I was like, WTF?! I thought my terminal was corrupted or something. Heh. I heard her laughing behind my back, and I gave her the evil eye stare heh. That's when I also learned about hacking terminals and how much fun that was. :P

I spent most of the first half of the year writing an app that talks to an API that a vendor custom-made for us, to automate the opening of vendor hardware replacement tickets. It went live yesterday on the vendor's side, and I began 13 days of PTO today. Rather than go full-on with it, I handed it to three engineers to test it while I'm gone and document their experience. Preliminary results have been very good. I figured that would be the smartest way to handle my absence and still get some valuable work done with it.

But I'm going out of my mind! I want feedback now! I want to work more on it! All I can do is keep a list of fixes and improvements and stare blankly at it until after my vacation is over. My mind is still wedged firmly in the backend. Must relax!

"Design is easy. All you do is stare at the screen until drops of blood form on your forehead." - Marty Neumeier

What is the state of DevRant?

I've been away for quite some time.

IMHO Rich Harris (of the Rollup and Svelte fame) is a rock star. I think I'd rant less of more people would follow his methods.

So I started a new job back in April with a the developer on a government project being developed by a reputable international organization, lets call them R. Once the project reaches a an acceptable release stage, maintenance, changes and integration into the eco system falls to me. This project started about 3 years ago and the original team from R was "changed" because they claimed the product was ready for go live when it wasn't.

My job since then has mostly been analyst and QA work identifying issues with conversations like this:

Me to Client: I don't think this feature is working as it should be.

Client: You're right.

R.dev: This feature is working according to signed off SRS and assumptions register.

Client: Yes but the SRS and assumptions are wrong.

Me: Facepalms. Oh this other feature isn't working correctly either, this should generate A according to SRS but I'm getting G.

R.dev: Yes but that would take a major change to the system.

Me: [Blank stare]

R.dev: Ok, we can give you E.

Client: OK we corrected the errors in the SRS and the assumptions register we've signed off on this, please use these going forward.

R.dev: OK we reviewed and made changes.

Client: Um, these are wrong the calculations are off.

R.dev: We did it according to your SRS and assumptions register.

Client: Oh, wait, these formulas are wrong.

Me & R.dev: [Blank stares furiously]

Client: The sponsor won't pay the next stage until you reach an acceptable release. Fix these critical issues and we can worry about the rest in support.

R.dev: ... OK, we will deliver by X date.

[7 Days to delivery of changes]
R.dev: We postponed development till (deliveryDate + 8) when we meet with the sponsor.

Me: But that's when we should start the next UAT for go live for the New Year...

I left a management job for this so I could code more. 180 issues later I still haven't seen the source code... fml

Silver Lining: Still gettin' paid though

using git stash because i'm too lazy to retrace all the steps I did to create this mess.

Me to 2 other Dev's: Guys can i get your help? This line isn't working.

Dev's check the code. Tries there own things.
Doesn't work.

Dev's: Sorry man, we tried.

Project Manager with no knowledge of programming looks at code.
Project Manager: How are you struggling for so long?(Bitches for like 5 minutes)

Me: *gives her Penance stare*
* Starts laughing loud at the thought of her
dying*

I feel better now

I'm envious of Backend developers who can just 'see' the problem domain and start creating an architecture. I can't see shit - I just stare blankly at the project and I think: hm, what models do I write?

I know I'm a structured person, but I lack the knowledge and practice. One day I'll be able to do this, but for now I have to keep doing things ad hoc.

I really don't belong in the Backend but unfortunately that's how my career is turning out for now. All I know is I have to get better at this.

Anyone hit the pitfall of not following K.I.S.S.? I have found that programs that are really simple, I make complicated.
And then that mindset goes to the complicated programs no problem. But I stare at the program for a while, because I just know it can't be that simple, but it is.

I am at the point in my development process when I give away my work and let someone else do it and I stare a pictures of gorillas and question my choice not to go live among them. So hopefully I'm almost done. This is step like 9 of a 12ish step program.

how to describe the feeling when you started using sql and you had to get the first element from a table via jdbc...
you, obviously, think "oh, the first index is 0, every languages start at 0, so let's take the content at 0!!!" but the ide returns you "0 < 1"
so you don't understand, you stare the code for 20 mins, you start crying, and then you realize sql starts counting from 1 because it pretends to be cool BUT IT DOESN'T

I hate you, sql.