I know I should not be naming names but WalmartLabs Hackfest 2016 was actually a fuckfest. It was supposed to be a 14 day online hackathon followed by an offline event for top teams. I got in top 6 among the 4350 participants.

In the offline event:

1. They didn't allow us to give live demo of the project. Instead they asked us to present a ppt. The HR idiot even asked me to take screenshots of my cli app and put that in instead.

2. 4 out of the 6 teams actually presented their startup products. It was supposed to be a 14 day hackathon for fucks sake. How can you present some shit that you were working on for the last 1.5 years! This one team literally had "Copyright 2015" mentioned on their product page. This another team had 100,000+ downloads on his app already. Of course Walmart didn't care about it. They didn't listen to my complaint. I wish I had created a scene there :( Another team was boasting on stage about how they got selected in the FB startup accelerator and how they won 3 more hackathon (evidently equally shit) using their shit. This was met with praises from the judges.

3. The results were declared after 3 fucking months! Don't organize this shit next time if you don't have any interest, bitch.

4. The code was supposedly never checked. Other teams kept working on their shit for the 3 months in between. In the live presentation, this guy even had photoshopped a feature which wasn't even present there (and he boasted about it later on).

5. Hackerearth (platform for the hackathon) was equally incompetent in this mishap of a hackathon. One of the teams which won had one the previous hackathon (Pluralsight hackathon) as well on Hackerearth using the same fucking product. What pieces of shit >.<

6. The hackathon was supposed to be tech based and all the categories were like that. Instead the teams presented business models and shit like that and judges focused more on that. They were not concerned about the technical aspects at all. The more noise you made, the more lies you told, the better chance you had to win it.

7. They were supposed to give prizes in 4 categories but silently reduced it to 3 on the event day. They still publicised it as 4 prizes until now.

All of the above is true and I am willing to testify if someone asks for it. I am going to write a nice blog post about it and post it to their idiot HR.

Hackathon: WalmartLabs Hackfest 2016
Team name: psyduck (which is just me)

Sorry for being too salty but it was indeed a fuckfest.

Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.

Some context first and then the rant!

Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.

Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!

Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.

In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)

He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.

The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.

Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).

Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.

Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!

Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.

Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).

Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.

From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.

I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.

It finally hit me the other day.
I'm working on an IoT project for a late-stage ALS patient. The setup is that he has a tablet he controls with his eye movements, and he wants to be able to control furnishings in his room without relying on anyone else.
I set up a socket connection between his tablet and the Raspberry Pi. From there it was a simple matter of using GPIO to turn a lamp or fan on or off. I did the whole thing in C, even the socket programming on the Pi.
As I was finishing up the main control of the program on the Pi I realized that I need to be more certain of this than anything I've ever done before.
If something breaks, the client may be forced to go days without being able to turn his room light on, or his fan off.
Understand he is totally trapped in his own body so it's not like he can simply turn the fan off. The nursing staff are not particularly helpful and his wife is tied up a lot with work and their two small children so she can't spend all day every day doting on him.
Think of how annoying it is when you're trying to sleep and someone turns the light on in your room; now imagine you can't turn it off yourself, and it would take you about twenty minutes to tell someone to turn it off -- that is once you get their attention, again without being able to move any part of your body except your eyes.
As programmers and devs, it's a skill to do thorough testing and iron-out all the bugs. It is an entirely different experience when your client will be depending on what you're doing to drastically improve his quality of life, by being able to control his comfort level directly without relying on others -- that is, to do the simplest of tasks that we all take for granted.
Giving this man some independence back to his life is a huge honor; however, it carries the burden of knowing that I need to be damned confident in what I am doing, and that I have designed the system to recover from any catastrophe as quickly as possible.

In case you were wondering how I did it all: The Pi launches a wrapper for the socket connection on boot.
The wrapper launches the actual socket connection in a child process, then waits for it to exit. When the socket connection exits, the wrapper analyzes the cause for the exit.
If the socket connection exited safely -- by passing a special command from the tablet to the Pi -- then the wrapper exits the main function, which allows updating the Pi. If the socket connection exited unexpectedly, then the Pi reboots automatically -- which is the fastest way to return functionality and to safeguard against any resource leaks.
The socket program itself launches its own child process, which is an executable on the Pi. The data sent by the tablet is the name of the executable on the Pi. This allows a dynamic number of programs that can be controlled from the tablet, without having to reprogram the Pi, except for loding the executable onto it. If this child of the socket program fails, it will not disrupt its parent process, which is the socket program itself.

Interlude (Break Room)

Me (Lead Developer), HR lady (HR)

Enter stage right ME

Me > "Oh hey HR lady, how was your vacation?"

HR lady > "Well, we didn't end up taking the kids to Disneyland after all."

Me > "What? Why not? Come on, I have to hear this!"

HR lady > "Long story short my husband and I are getting a divorce."

Me > "Oh shi-"

Going on a vacation, so notify all clients that I won't be available during two weeks.

Client: well we have this huge presentation and here's a list of stuff we absolutely need for it
Me: sure I have a look.
Me: holy shit dude! That's gona take about 2-3 days. I'm leaving soon!
Client: it's realy critical to have them in a week as it's a very important presentation! Is there any way you can make it work? If we can do anything to help, just name it.
Me: well I'll do my best (planed 1 day for such rhings)
Me: *pulling a 15h day*
Me: here, all done budy! Did a 15h but now it's done, so do that presentation!
Client: oh, nice, but it wasn't that urgent
Me: ...

Next day:
Client ssh in to the server, fucks shit up
Client: well I did a thing and now stage and prod is fucked, can you do anything?
Me: (knowing it will take 30min to fix) well... I try my best. Btw. I'll leave in a few hours and won't take my computer, so try not to fuck every thing again, okay?

Dear Indian Companies,

Why do you hire for a role and then say: "We dont have that role but then we want you to grow up to be a Generalist"!

6 years as a build, release and SCM guy at Moto and Nokia back then, I shifted to this big Indian IT corp coz Nokia was shutting down...

A week into my orientation (which is a crazy weirdness inducing ritual in and of itself), the new manager I'm supposed to be working with comes up and says- "Here's the code repo, there are 2 open jQuery issues, fix them!"

I'm not really sure what to say at this point because jQuery is nice and all but thats not who I am.. I'm the infra / DevOps guy. And this is circa 2012 when DevOps as a term was just hotting up...

Tell me to setup a multi-stage pipeline and automated test cycles, I'll do it drunk, but oh no! bug fixing on a jQuery script? Noooo!!!!! I just dont have the chops for it.

So long story short, I get reported to HR for insubordination - Yeah, Go Figure!

Cue: HR meeting
HR: You wont work?
Me: I cant work on jQuery. I am a sysadmin / devops guy... Give me a project that involves those skills and I'll work.
HR: But we hired you to work on jQuery.
Me: But you did not mention jQuery / UI / UX in the job description - Pulls up email and shows JD for interview which says Symbian, Build, Release, Configuration Management but NOT jQuery.
HR: ....
Me: :-/
HR: But we want you to be a generalist.
Me: #wtf
HR: We want an engineer to be able to do anything he is tasked with!
Me: Can I know my last working date here?

And thats how my career at a glorious IT corporation just went poof!

When I think back on it, I feel good that I chose to do what I wanted to get better at and what I loved working on...

And this is the problem with IT companies in our country - They play with people's aspirations and passions... To the point that all thats left of a software engineer is the looking forward to pay day so he can start the damn cycle all over again.

!rant
SpaceX just landed their first reused first stage and is in the process of recovering the fairings.
I watched the livestream and cried like a lil bitch.
TODAY HISTORY WAS MADE
I can't wait to talk with my kids about today. And I can't even imagine what we'll be capable of at that time.
It took SpaceX 15 years to pull that off and I can't wait to see more. I can't even think about the amount of engineering and developing involved in this project.
Things like that let me believe in humanity.
HAVE A NICE FUCKING DAY <3

I worked in the same building as another division in my organization, and they found out I had created a website for my group. They said, “We have this database that was never finished. Do you think you could fix it?”

I asked, “What was it developed in?”
He replied, “Well what do you know?”
I said, “LAMP stack: PHP, MySQL, etc.” [this was over a decade ago]

He excitedly exclaimed, “Yeah, that’s it! It’s that S-Q-L stuff.”

I’m a little nervous at this point but I was younger than 20 with no degree, entirely self-taught from a book, and figured I’d check it out - no actual job offer here yet or anything.

They logged me on to a Windows 2000 Server and I become aware it’s a web application written in VB / ASP.NET 2.0 with a SQL Server backend. But most of the fixes they wanted were aesthetic (spelling errors in aspx pages, etc.) so I proceeded to fix those. They hired me on the spot and asked when I could start. I was a wizard to them and most of what they needed was quite simple (at first). I kept my mouth shut and immediately went to a bookstore after work that day and bought an ASP.NET book.

I worked there several years and ended up rewriting that app in C# and upgrading the server and ASP.NET framework, etc. It stored passwords in plaintext when I started and much more horrific stuff. It was in much better shape when I left.

That job was pivotal in my career and set the stage for me to be where I am today. I got the job because I used the word “SQL” in a sentence.

Act I

Me (Lead Developer), Boss (Head of IT), CEO

> enter stage left CEO

CEO > "Alright Boss, give it to me straight. Are we going to be able to release app x by this date?"

Boss > "Yup we'll have a beta release on that date"

> exit stage right CEO

Me > types long email to Boss outlining exactly why we won't be able to release app x anywhere near that date, beta or otherwise, because:
1. We have a development team of 2
2. I've never developed an iOS app before
3. Developer 2 is still trying to understand git, because
3a. Developer 2 isn't even a developer (but he's doing iOS front-end so w/e)
4. We don't have the required database systems in place
5. Or CRM
6. Or CPQ
7. We'll need to conduct a security audit

Boss > "yeah, but CEO is gonna need to hear that date a few more times before he can fully understand"

Me > *internally screaming BUT YOU HAVEN'T TOLD HIM THAT AT ALL*
"ok cool just glad we're on the same page on that one"

That's it. I fucking quit.

Over a month of unpaid work, developing your stupid course, only to get a high-quality outline rejected because "it's not what we wanted" again.

First outline, fuckers ask to do something with a Raspberry Pi and Yocto. Fine, but no Yocto as I don't know anything about it and the coworker doesn't even have a Raspberry Pi to flash the images on. Micromanagement guy (god I hate that word) agrees, fine no Yocto then. So no Yocto it is.
2 weeks later... Course outline is finished. Review stage.. rejected. Needs moar Yocto.
Fine... I'll include Yocto. Coworker was put off the course, I'm exclusively on it now. Time to do it well and get my feet wet with Yocto.
2 weeks later... Course outline is finished and looks pretty good. Review stage.. rejected. Needs less Raspberry Pi. Do it without the Raspberry Pi.

An embedded systems course whose core component is that fucking Raspberry Pi. Omit it they said. WHAT?!!
"Oh yeah but there's this other course that's selling like hot pockets, we can just redo that in videos. Make it more like that course."
You.. you can't be for real, can you? If students want to take that course... What makes you think that they wouldn't just pick.. *that damn course* then?

"But hey" micromanager said, "don't loose hope and confidence, I'm here🤪"
🤪. That describes your level of competence pretty well, you stinking piece of apeshit.
Go back to your micromanaging, at least you don't completely fucking suck at that.

2 times rejected because YOU fucking company's board can't describe your desires in a course properly. You know what, I think I'm starting to understand why web devs keep on complaining about indecisive clients now. Because you know company's board, you seem a lot like those clients from hell. Eat shit.

🖕

I am in 2nd Stage most of the time

First rant here. Long, but please bear with me:

So after slogging my ass off in various early stage startups for over 4 years and keeping up with the almost non-existent development process, I joined an organisation which has some of the brightest and smartest minds I have had the pleasure to work with.

Mind you, this company is the market leader in it's field and has a 50+ people in it's tech team and the quality of work is pretty impressive.

Now for this week's sprint, I was asked to develop a feature which already exists on the Android app and they want to introduce in the iOS app too. The backend APIs are all in place and all I need to do is build it with virtually no dependency. My PM asks me to start with the UI and ask the backend dev for the API list whenever I need them.This is where the story turns.

For my first API, I go to the backend dev and ask him to share the API documentation and he looks at me as if I have asked him to dance the fucking cha cha. With a straight face he tells me that, 'The organisation doesn't maintain any kind of documentation for it's APIs.' Now this really shocks me. Even in a 5 men tech teams I have worked on, we have always maintained a spec doc for the APIs and this is a company which is known for it's tech practices.

Being the new guy I compose myself and ask if they have anything for me here: Postman collection, a workflowy doc, a goddamn txt file; anything which might help me, and he laughs at my dilusion and says no.

Dejected, I ask for a way to get the APIs and I am told that there are only two ways: either I keep bothering the Android dev for the APIs(No, I don't have the access to the android repo and nor am I gonna get it) which he had worked on 4 months back or I install the prod app on my phone, and use Charles to get every fucking API which is really, really annoying.

I thought writing out this rant would make me feel better, turns out it just made me angrier. Why the fuck can't they document such an important thing!?

Rant && story time

When I was in first grade of high school (age of 15) we had a class of informatics. Nothing unusuall, you say, but this teacher was ummm ... Let's just say special. Most of his classes looked like this:

TEACHER: Ok, class, today we are going to learn/work with <insert a name of a software here>. # And then he sat behind his desk, falling silent for the rest of the lesson. We had to look up the software ourselves, and learn to use it. Or not.

Next lesson, he just said:

TEACHER: Continue your work from the last time.

And on the third lesson of each cycle, there was grading in place. He walked through the class and if he saw you working with the software, you got a 5 (that is A for our western friends), but if you were doing something completely different, you got a 1 (that is F). That just ment that you had to open the program and wave the mouse around while he was looking at your screen, and you got a guaranteed 5.

And then the cycle repeated.

However, this is not the story about the teacher in general, it's a story about one specific event involving him.

Around the beginning of the year (calendar one, not school one; that is middle of the school year) a programming competition took place.

The first stage (school competition), was easy; I got 45 points out of 50 (I was second-best on the whole school, of all years (students from 15 to 20 years of age).

A few weeks later, second stage (national competition) took place. However, when I got to the registration dosk, things got weird.

I patiently waited in line, but when I got to the front, the assistant asked me for year and school.

ME: I come from SCHOOL_NAME and go to first year.
ASSISTANT1: All students who go to SCHOOL_NAME need to go to that separate line.

It seemed strange, but I walked over anyhow. Maybe there was enough students from our school so that new line opened for us.

ME: I go to first year. # I assumed I don't have to tell the name as the line was only for our school.
ASSISTANT2: Ok, but you need to go to that row. *points to the row wherexI just came from* # WTF is going on now?
ME: Ummm, I just came from there, and they told me to come here.
ASSISTANH2: Oh, you go to SCHOOL_NAME?
ME: Yeah
ASSISTANT2: Ok then. What is your name? # Thank Knuth, one mistery less
ME: My name is SELF.NAME
After a short search through the envelopes:
ASSISTANT2: Here you go # Both the fact that my name was completely misspeled and the procedure it took us to finally get to the correct envelope are a story for a different time.

Skip forward some 10 minutes, to the lecture hall where they just told us all the instructions and started to divide us into classrooms

ASSISTANT3:
for CLASSROOM, STUDENT_LIST in STUDENT_DIVISION:
for STUDENT in STUDENT_LIST:
STUDENT.invite(CLASSROOM)

At the end, only a few people, including me, remained.

ASSISTANT3: Is there anyone not from SCHOOL_NAME? # Umm, yeah, WTF is going on now?
Noone replied.
ASSISTANT3: OK, you all, come with me now, we will find you a classroom.

From there on, competition went fine, I came in second, got a new phone as a prize, no complaints.

However, later on, I realized what was the reason for all that weird behaviour.

Signup date for the second part was on LAST_SIGNUP_DATE, which was at least two weeks before the competition, and signups had to be done untill 1600 that day.

Our teacher signed us up at 2200. ON THE FUCKING DAY BEFORE THE COMPETITION. OF COURSE THEY HAD NOTHING PLANNED FOR US, NO ENVELOPES, NO COMPUTERS, NOTHING, IF WE WERE SIGNED UP LESS THAN FUCKING 12 HOURS BEFORE THE COMPETITION INSTEAD OF 2 WEEKS EARLIER. THE ONLY REASON WE GOT TO COMPETE WAS BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE DIDN'T SHOW UP AND WE USED THE PC'S MENT FOR THEM. IF EVERYONE SHOWED UP WE FUCKING COULDN'T COMPETE.

And from that moment on, I always signed myself up for all of the competitions; better safe than sorry.

3 or 4 days before the summer vacations, our teacher came in class and asked us to present whatever projects we've been working on and give a brief description...
Some guys went on the stage, then a few girls,
So being first time on the stage I was pretty nervous and started shaking and sweating a little bit.
I opened up the laptop and project was already open in AS, but had to restart emulator,
but the main thing was, i didn't notice the "blonde lesbians - PornHub" was minimized in the taskbar.
So I opened up cmd and typed "taskill -f -im chrome*" and it vanished. (a little fear increased)
when I finished presentation, some of the students were staring at me, so i made an excuse to go to toilet,
...and I ran out of dept.
after class finished my friends came up to me and said "we saw what was going on there in taskbar" and we laughed.

#NeverEverGoingToDoPresentationEverAgain #TrueStory

Fuck my life...

Okay, so I’m working on a web app with a small group... the app is basically a lead generator for new business in another country. We just need contact details cause they’re a fucker to buy.

Step 1: prototype to the investors, working with the ceo to make this thing look shiny AF.

Goes well as fuck.

CEO: “when can we get this out?”

Me: “it’s basically done mate, get your guys to look at it and we can talk about marketing”

Que a shower of 10 or so bellends with senior in their title going into a room and coming out with:

Bellends: “so on this page we want the user to confirm and accept the contract”

Me: “cool, makes some sense, that’s what it’s already doing.”

Bellends: “afterwards we want to show them the price and have them put in their banking details.”

Me: “Wait, you what when?”

Bellends: “Yeah, well Jenny says we should have as few clicks as possible to get to the final stage and have the customer accept.”

Me: “Jenny’s on fucking crack, moving the contract formation phase to after the contract acceptance stage is not an option”

Bellends: “Oh it’s okay, Andy in legal said that would be okay”

Me: “Andy’s a fucking moron, tell him that online contract formation laws were updated 2014/2015 and you can’t do that anymore”

Bellends: “No, andy’s legal, surely he knows”

Bellends: “We want all of this above the fold”

Me: “OH FUCKING SUCK A DICK YOU ABSOLUTE BAND OF FUCKWADS... which one of you, which one hasn’t looked at a website this millennia!?”

Needless to say I ignored all their shit, got the lead generator out and told the CEO those ten people are certifiably fucking useless.

Bonus round; recent, but “it has to be on internal infrastructure”

“Why? It’s a mobile app sending rest calls to a third party saas.”

“It just has to, we have this thing called the private cloud and w”

“Wait... you what son, priv 🤦🏼‍♂️ private what mate?”

“Private cloud”

“You... you mean a server rack?”

“Nah we spent £2mn on it, it’s brilliant”

“Hahahaha you fucking dick, you blew £2mn on server infra with fuckall to put on it!?”

“No, no it’s the private cloud”

“Fucking idiot, aye son, where’s the fucking bean stalk you prick!?”

“It has to go on internal infr”

“Shut up, that won’t work”

FUCKING SHIT.
I'm at my first Hackathon with my best friends in life and there has never been a time when I've felt this miserable all my life.
The theme is IoT (something idk jackshit about) and people here are done with the projects when we are still at the idea stage.
Yes, it's true that this shit is intense but I really want to do good at this.
This is what I've learned from my first Hackathon:
1. Prepare your shit.
Unless the problem statements are given on the spot, you should've discussed everything that you would be doing and not divert. (We spent 5 hours on a problem statement and then we decided not to go with it.)
2. Have people with different abilities who you can trust to get the work done without you having to give a second thought.
3. Don't you dare build a sub-par application. What's the fucking use of that? Don't do it for the certificate or the stickers. If you do that, then how the fuck can you make yourself put those stickers on your laptop?!
4. Have food. Keep yourself healthy and up to max potential.
5. DO NOT BE DISCOURAGED. A lot of people will look like they're done with the shit. You know what you have to do now? NOT GIVE A FUCK! Just focus and do your thing and make it awesome.

Startup: let's improve on our MVP and build an actual website app.

Me: ok.

[go through 2 weeks discovery and planning stage]

Manager1: love working with you. You explain and work in a really professional manner.

[MVP gets built in 2 months, I'm the only dev designer devops throughout]

Manger1: Omg love it! Wait till the other manager sees it. I knew you were right person for the job.

Other users: oo cool. I love features x, y, z.

[two days later shows to Manager2]

Manager2: x doesn't work, feature you is not useful and doesn't work... Hate it. I think we'll move you to another project.

Me: (woah that escalated quickly meme plays in my mind)

Me: [explaining MVP, lean methodology, your internal decision making processes]

...

Manager2: Yeh we want you to not work on any development work (even though those are your skills and extensive knowledge etc) we need you to do admin tasks (that have nothing to do with product or coding etc)

Manager1 and employees: 😲 wtf

Me: I quit

- - -

Now they are struggling in every way possible and don't have enough funds to hire another person close to what they need to help them.

One of my previous managers would constantly make promises our team couldn't keep. "You want it in a week? Sure, we can finish it in a week! You want it tomorrow? Sure, we can do that!"

It got so bad that our team basically had to stage an intervention. At one of our standups, we flat-out told him that even if the entire team dropped all of our other tasks to focus on the one big project, we still would not be able to meet the deadline he'd promised the client.

And that fucker actually said, "Well, if you want to come in on the weekend to work some overtime, I don't mind." as if he was offering to do us a favor by "allowing" us to work more.

No overtime pay because we had salaries.

So glad I don't work for him any more. Of course, my next manager wasn't great either, it just took longer for us to figure it out because she wasn't nearly as blatant about it.

The 4 stages of collaboration:

- Stage1:
Hey dude, I setup some online docs and left some instructions / discussion points in slack, but you haven't been logged in. Can you login and have a look when you get a chance?

- Stage 2:
Oh Hey, did you ever get a chance to have a look at those docs / discussion points?

- Stage 3:
Hey, look this is due by close of business tomorrow, can you take spend an hour on it before you leave?

- Stage 4:
*loads shotgun* HEY YOU! ... sit here, login to that ..... STOP CRYING AND HURRY UP ..... see that right there? thats missing your input, you have 15 minutes left ... GO!

I'm fast approaching stage 4 and loading my efficiency shotgun as we speak.

Firefox Quantum is the only software in beta stage I know of, that is more stable than the release one. I have to admit that I am somewhat of a fanboy when it comes to Firefox since I have been using it for the past 12 years. I never admitted it's quirks even though I secretly knew chrome had a better performance and stability lately. This rebirth gives me so much hope! YES! Firefox is not dieing!

This is from my days of running a rather large (for its time) Minecraft server. A few of our best admins were given access to the server console. For extra security, we also had a second login stage in-game using a command (in case their accounts were compromised). We even had a fairly strict password strength policy.
But all of that was defeated by a slightly too stiff SHIFT key. See, in-game commands were typed in chat, prefixed with a slash -- SHIFT+7 on German-ish keyboards. And so, when logging in, one of our head admins didn't realize his SHIFT key didn't register and proudly broadcast to the server "[Admin] username: 7login hisPasswordHere".
This was immediately noticed by the owner of a 'rival' server who was trying to copy some cool thing that we had. He jumped onto the console that he found in an nmap scan a week prior (a scan that I detected and he denied), promoted himself to admin and proceeded to wreak havoc.
I got a call, 10-ish minutes later, that "everything was literally on fire". I immediately rolled everything back (half-hourly backups ftw) and killed the console just in case.
The best part was the Skype call with that admin that followed. I wasn't too angry, but I did want him to suffer a little, so I didn't immediately tell him that we had good backups. He thought he'd brought the downfall of our server. I'm pretty sure he cried.

IKEA can't "assemble" a functional website. I spent two days, had 4 checkout attempts and used 2 cards and 3 browsers to get to this stage.

Still beats driving to the store.

The first stage of fatigue. I would've loved to know my reasoning behind why I put wrote this

"Kiki, I want you to, for the first time of your career at %company%, quit worrying about deadlines and just wander free. Forget about due projects, forget about everything, and just do your crazy experiments till the end of this month."

This was the one-to-one with our CEO today. Yes, I'm being paid to do whatever I want without time restrictions, as long as it is related to my field.

And you know what? At this stage of my life, I don't even want to exploit that, to weasel my way around definitions and justify doing nothing. I legit have three AI experiments to run, I have money to run them, I have time, and I for sure have motivation.

Good workplace is when doing nothing isn't the most desirable thing to do.

TFW your client's git policies are so draconian that the dev teams use "develop" as trunk, and completely ignore the release process.

I wrote up 50 pages of git standards, documentation and procedure for a client. Bad indian director 9000 decides the admin (also Indian) who specializes in Clearcase and has no git or development experience is more qualified to decide and let's him set the policy.

FF to today:

- documentation, mostly contradictory, is copy pasted from the atlassian wiki
- source tree is the standard
- no force pushing of any branches, including work branches
- no ff-merge
- no rebasing allowed
- no ssh, because he couldn't figure it out...errr it's "insecure"
- all repos have random abbreviated names that are unintelligible
- gitflow, but with pull requests and no trust
- only project managers can delete a branch
- long lived feature branches
- only projects managers can conduct code reviews
- hotfixes must be based off develop
- hotfixes must go in the normal release cycle
- releases involve creating a ticket to have an admin create a release branch from your branch, creating a second ticket to stage the PR, a third ticket to review the PR (because only admins can approve release PRs), and a fourth ticket to merge it in
- rollbacks require director signoff
- at the end of each project the repo must be handed to the admin on a burned CD for "archiving"

And so no one actually uses the official release process, and just does releases out of dev. If you're wondering if IBM sucks, the answer is more than you can possibly imagine.

Here are the reasons why I don't like IPv6.

Now I'll be honest, I hate IPv6 with all my heart. So I'm not supporting it until inevitably it becomes the de facto standard of the internet. In home networks on the other hand.. huehue...

The main reason why I hate it is because it looks in every way overengineered. Or rather, poorly engineered. IPv4 has 32 bits worth, which translates to about 4 billion addresses. IPv6 on the other hand has 128 bits worth of addresses.. which translates to.. some obscenely huge number that I don't even want to start translating.

That's the problem. It's too big. Anyone who's worked on the internet for any amount of time knows that the internet on this planet will likely not exceed an amount of machines equal to about 1 or 2 extra bits (8.5B and 17.1B respectively). Now of course 33 or 34 bits in total is unwieldy, it doesn't go well with electronics. From 32 you essentially have to go up to 64 straight away. That's why 64-bit processors are.. well, 64 bits. The memory grew larger than the 4GB that a 32-bit processor could support, so that's what happened.

The internet could've grown that way too. Heck it probably could've become 64 bits in total of which 34 are assigned to the internet and the remaining bits are for whatever purposes large IP consumers would like to use the remainder for.

Whoever designed IPv6 however.. nope! Let's give everyone a /64 range, and give them quite literally an IP pool far, FAR larger than the entire current internet. What's the fucking point!?

The IPv6 standard is far larger than it should've been. It should've been 64 bits instead of 128, and it should've been separated differently. What were they thinking? A bazillion colonized planets' internetworks that would join the main internet as well? Yeah that's clearly something that the internet will develop into. The internet which is effectively just a big network that everyone leases and controls a little bit of. Just like a home network but scaled up. Imagine or even just look at the engineering challenges that interplanetary communications present. That is not going to be feasible for connecting multiple planets' internets. You can engineer however you want but you can't engineer around the hard limit of light speed. Besides, are our satellites internet-connected? Well yes but try using one. And those whizz only a couple of km above sea level. The latency involved makes it barely usable. Imagine communicating to the ISS, the moon or Mars. That is not going to happen at an internet scale. Not even close. And those are only the closest celestial objects out there.

So why was IPv6 engineered with hundreds of years of development and likely at least a stage 4 civilization in mind? No idea. Future-proofing or poor engineering? I honestly don't know. But as a stage 0 or maybe stage 1 person, I don't think that I or civilization for that matter is ready for a 128-bit internet. And we aren't even close to needing so many bits.

Going back to 64-bit processors and memory. We've passed 32 bit address width about a decade ago. But even now, we're only at about twice that size on average. We're not even close to saturating 64-bit address width, and that will likely take at least a few hundred years as well. I'd say that's more than sufficient. The internet should've really become a 64-bit internet too.

Story time:

At a precious employer.
Hire shit-hot contractor.
No technical test at interview stage because he’s so shit-hot.
Is a uni lecturer.
PhD in mathematics.

Me: Shit, this guy must be good!

6 months later and a tragedy of errors and clearly misspent company funds later:

Manager: can you look at what x did and merge it into the product?

Me: Sure. *looks* *yells fuck very loudly*

*walks over to manager*

“Soooo... you know those 6 months and thousands and thousands you spent? It’s all for nought. There’s barely anything there, and none of it works.”

Manager: “Shit. What are we going to do? Can you fix it?”

Me: “To be honest, it would be quicker to just do it from scratch than try to work out what he’s done and failed to do.”

Manager: “Fuck. Ok. Go for it.”

I then had to build this entire new lot of systems, a workflow system, a user management and permissions system.

I got it done inside a month or so.

For context, we (the devs) knew something was afoot when the contractor couldn’t work out why his keyboard wasn’t working (it wasn’t plugged in), and he also *really* struggled to find his way around visual studio and git.

The moral of this tale? *always always* screen your candidates. Even if they seem amazing on paper.

I started this new freelance project where I am building some android libraries for the client. Anyways, during meeting I was about to present my results and suddenly backend seemed to be down. I looked into the round "are your servers down?"
Team Lead: "Yeah our cto, also our only backend dev, is developing a new feature."
Me: "Okay but why is production down?",
Team Lead: "Ah dont worry we always test on production. We have a pretty solid hardware, we will even upgrade it soon!"
Me:"... How about you just separate your stage environments and have a develop environment?"
Client: "see, this is where our strength is. We dont need a develop stage we have very strong hardware and our backend is fully in PHP"

Thanks God I'm a freelancer

While live streaming Google pixel launch, every time the guy on stage say Ok Google my phone triggered it 😁😁😁

Client reads about MomgoDB ransomware attacks online.

Him: I heard that the MongoDB is not secure, we should use something else in our system.
Me: Those databases got attacked because security features were turned off. If you want you can have an external security team to test the system when it's done.
Him: I don't wana take any risk, so I we should use something else.

We have been working on this system for almost a year and the final stage was supposed to be delivered in a month.

He wants me to replace it with MySQL

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

Damn, credit cards are so fucking secure these days that you hardly can BUY shit with them!
I need some special electronics that I only can get from a vendor in the US, which is overseas. Click click, buy, done. Well no, credit card refused. WTF? Click retry link. No, still refused. FUCK.
Called up the 24/7 hotline of my CC company. Oh yeah, that got blocked by the security system, somehow. We disable that for 20 minutes, just retry. Clicked retry link at the vendor. No failure mail. Hmmm, too good to be true?! Called up the electronics vendor. Yeah should work, stuff is in the warehouse stage. 40 minutes later: credit card declined. FUCK.
Called up the CC company again. Ok, disable blocker for one hour. Nice advice from them, tell the vendor it's only 45 minutes so that there's some buffer. Clicked retry link at the vendor and called them up to make sure that they retry before the time runs out.
LO AND BEHOLD, I could finally pay the shit!!

Interviewer: "Ok we are searching for a fucking god of the code, if you have a week for work on a new project you must end within 3 days and work on other stuff! And for contract maybe a stage can be a good solution, we can't pay very much, but you must work like a machine and you'll love it cause here we have lots of project!"
Me: "I'm not interested."
Interviewer: "W..what?? Why?? Is there something wrong??"

Everytime a cunt like this ask to a developer to work for him, somewhere in the world a browser crashes

I got through the first stage for a summer internship at Amazon. They send me a link to a technical test with a 7 day deadline to complete.

The link brings me to a 404 page. Fuck.

I contact customer support, reach out to Amazon directly, don't get any response whatsoever. The week has passed and the link is still dead and I s received no word from them.

FML. And fuck Amazon for teasing me like this and for having such shitty technical support.

Just thought I'd share my current project: Taking an old ISA sound card I got off eBay and wiring it up to an Arduino to control its OPL3 synth from a MIDI keyboard. I have it mostly working now.

No intention to play audio samples, so I've not bothered with any of the DMA stuff - just MIDI (MPU-401 UART) and OPL3.

It has involved learning the pinout of the ISA bus connectors, figuring out which ones are actually used for this card, ignoring the standards a little (hello, amplifier chip that is wired up to the +12V line but which still happily works at +5V...)

Most of the wires going to it are for each bit of the 16-bit address and 8-bit data. Using a couple of shift registers for the address, and a universal shift register for the data. Wrote some fairly primitive ISA bus read/write code, but it was really slow. Eventually found out about SPI and re-wrote the code to use that and it became very fast. Had trouble with some timings, fixed those.

The card is an ISA Plug and Play card, meaning before I could use it I had to tell it what resources to use. Linux driver code and some reverse-engineering of the official Windows/DOS drivers got me past this stage.

Wired up IRQ 5 to an Arduino interrupt to deal with incoming MIDI data, with a routine that buffers it. Ran into trouble with the interrupt happening during I/O and needing to do some I/O inside the handler and had to set a flag to decide whether to disable/re-enable interrupts during I/O.

It looks like total chaos, but the various wires going across the breadboard are mainly to make it easier to deal with the 16-bit address and 8-bit data lines. The LEDs were initially used to check what addresses/data were being sent, but now only one of them is connected and indicates when the interrupt handler is executing.

There's still a lot to do after that though - MIDI and OPL3 are two completely different things so I had to write some code to manage the different "channels" of the OPL3 chip. I have it playing multiple notes at the same time but need to make it able to control the various settings over MIDI. Eventually I might add some physical controls to it and get a PCB made.

The fun part is, I only vaguely know what I'm doing with the electronics side of this. I didn't know what a "shift register" was before this project, nor anything about the workings of the ISA bus. I knew a bit about MIDI (both the protocol and generally how the MPU-401 UART works) along with the operation of a sound card from a driver/software perspective, but everything else is pretty new to me.

As a useful little extra, I made some "fake" components that I can build the software against on a PC, to run some tests before uploading it to the Arduino (mostly just prints out the addresses it is going to try and write to).

After over 1.5 month long recruitment and 4 stages (3 technical and one with HR) they finally said it was last stage and they will write to me with their decision soon. I really want to get this job. It would be great step in my career and I could learn so much more compared to the company I'm stuck in right now. Actually working with new and interesting technologies! Can you imagine?

Hold your fingers crossed for me guys.

All those developers complaining about how at their new job there is no source control process, no ci, no CD, no code reviews, no coding standards, no effective project management, next time maybe try asking some questions during the interview stage 🤔

Remember you are interviewing the company as much as they are interviewing you.

(possibly political, but not really)

I think there's an under-reaction culture around covid19. People are mitigating it to be "just a bad flu" and keep bringing up the 2-3% death rate.

I see that people may have good intentions but spreading lies just to make it seem like the virus isn't bad is worse than the media overreacting.

I'm tired of people just repeating the same "ugh, calm down, it's just the flu!" Just because they don't want people to worry. While panic isn't good, disregard is worse.

The "bad flu" stage is only the second of three stages. Stage one is minor symptoms (so nobody cares if they are sick at this stage) coupled with patients being highly infectious (you can imagine, this is a bad combo)

Stage two is of course the famous "bad flu".

Stage three is fucking respiratory issues including pneumonia, AFTER you have already gone through stage two, which can be rough on its own.

The CDC (not any media) has issued warnings to those at high risk to stock up on supplies and medication they may need. As usual for this sort of stuff, the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions are in the high risk groups.

2% death rate (low end) is one in 50 people. That could be someone you know. 4% (high end) is one in just 25 people. That's the average high school class size where I live. That's a lot, that's pretty deadly.

Stop calling it a bad flu. Stop listening to people on Facebook, CNN, and devRant. Please visit the CDC, they are constantly giving updates.

Stay smart

Every college project gets to the "fuck it, I'm submitting this crap" stage.

Go to Denver with a friend for an Iron Maiden concert. I try edibles for the first time, which of course means take way too much. Hallucinate that lead singer is an arm flailing inflatable tube Man. I have a pretty good time. Walk back to the motel at midnight and have to launch a client's website from stage to production on the slow Motel Wi-Fi. I'm ready to pass out at this point, but I got my laptop, and I got my VPN running. So I spend the next 6 hours moving the site from one server to another while occasionally passing out for 20 to 30 minutes at a time.

One of the best road trips of my life. Five stars would do again.

My first dev job my boss, understood me so well. i think he must of been like me as a kid. Much like when people go to uni people say they change so much. He knew i was just in my shell, shy, but capable.

I turned 18 and he straight away wanted to get me to nightclubs! i don't remember much from the night, except, i got into a bit of a fight (we won) stole a huge pitcher of some kind of drink (to drunk to taste it) and danced on the tallest part of the stage most of the night, kind of like the spotlight of the entire place. It was epic, and it certainly made me come out of me shell.

Oh, I'm sorry if I have spoken during this meeting. I didn't realise I was invited just so I would be told "we're not going into that much detail at this stage of the project". I was just trying to point out that when you mock up any UI, you should take into account the fact that information is hierarchical: more important stuff before less important stuff, you know. Maybe you don't want to swamp the user with buttons all the time. When everything is important, nothing is. But that's just detail. And then the boss says we should create two more incongruent screens and all of the sudden that's a brilliant idea! So then again, sorry. I know exactly where my place is now. You pretend you know what you're doing and I fix it for you.

I will be pitching my startup idea for the first time in my life to potential investors one on one after qualifying for a second round in a business competition.
I am nervous 😬, desperately need to get the fund, and haven't been a good presenter.
Background: the business is still on prototype stage.
I stutter by default if I am slightly nervous.
From feedback my prototype is great- but my pitching might not be too great.
Damn I just have less than 6 hours to pitch.
Fuck this nervous mess.
Dev wish me good luck😶

It was my first time in Berlin. I came as a tourist but started looking for a workplace, with hopes of getting a blue card and continuing work.

I searched online, going through some hiring platforms, and sent out a few messages around. I felt a special connection (I thought I was exactly who they needed), and wrote them a carefully crafted letter of intention alongside my lavish CV.
They got back to me, and I was given this task, to do while at home. I completed it, had a phone interview, and was invited on-site for a face to face interview. Everybody felt warm, I felt a connection. We already talked salary expectations, and all was going great.

They told me they'd get back to me for the next stage. ...
and they actually DID. Yes, they did!
They invited me for a second interview, but this time to prepare a technical topic to present. So I did. I picked one of the 3 topics they offered, which was about performance optimization. I had recently read materials about that, so I felt really empowered.
So far nobody told me what I was supposed to be doing at the new job, I only knew the technologies required, and what the company did for money.
I prepared a thorough presentation, with practical demos of why some things are bad for performance. While I was showing it, many people in the room were learning about this for the first time, which means I did good. The team lead had some extra questions that I wasn't able to answer in full (needed some research), but otherwise it was great.

The CTO then asked me out to lunch, to talk over some more stuff, and we had a general discussion about what drives us, our life story, etc. He said that he'd really like me to be part of the team, and that he's looking forward to working with me.

So I've been at it for almost a month. I've met everyone, got acquainted with the team, knew the biography of some of them, proven my worth, etc. I was ensured with body language, and verbal language that everything was going great. As careful as I was with this kind of stuff, I was positive that I'd get the job. I even started planning my trips, to get the documents ready.

And then I got a message stating the usual stuff "Thank you bla bla bla we don't think we'll need your services". I was shocked, but in good faith I wanted to reply something along the lines "I'm sorry it didn't work out, all the best in finding what you're looking for", but I found out that I was blocked from contacting them.

That's right. Rejected + blocked. After a month of fucking foreplay. I get rejection, even though it hurts. But being blocked?! That's just insane!

I think Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert Martin should be a must to read.
In school no teacher puts emphasis on code quality.
They should learn how to name variables and functions the right way at an early stage in order to better perfect their craft :)

A couple of weeks ago, I got to the second stage of a recruitment process with a relatively big fintech in the crypto space (I know) - all went well and although I did not think much of it at first, with all the information I had gathered I came to realize this might as well be the best opportunity I've had in my pursuit of finding a new job (i.e looking for high technical challenges, unsure of where I see myself in 5 years, wanting to give full-remote work a try, etc.).

Cue to the end of the interview;
"That's great! I really enjoyed speaking with you, your technical background seems excellent so we would like to move to the next stage which is a take-home test to do in your free time.", said the interviewer.

"Wow! Much amaze, well of course! What's it gonna be?", said the naive interviewee.
"I'm sending you the details via email, please send it back in 48 hours, buhbye now", she hangs up.

...

"48 hours?? Right, this should be easy then, probably some online leetcoding platform, as usual.", thought the naive interviewee, who evidently went through this sh*t numerous times already.

A day later I receive the email: this was the whole deal. The take-home test supreme with bacon and cheese. A full-blown project, with tests, a project structure, a docker image, testing and bullet points for bonus points! The assessment was poorly written with lots of typos and overall ambiguity, a few datasets were also provided but bloated with inconsistent comments and trailing whitespace.

What the actual fck??? Am I supposed to sleep deprive myself to death while also working my day job? What are you trying to assess? How much of my life I'm willing to sacrifice for your stupid useless coding challenge? You are not all Google, have some respect, jeez.

I did not get the job.

Init and Hello. My name is git and this is my story.

I just arrived in this system recently by the apt highway. It's not the only way though. Some for example used the npm hype-train, others arrived from the ssh shore. No matter where we came from the next step on our agenda was time to introduce our self at the event destined for all new-comers to the system.
"As many of you I reside in the usr-bin district. I'm really into history and commitment! I like it when people work together, so I'm always eager to bring all branches together."
"But what is it actually good for?", asked Curl, which I already met at the bus station. Many nodded in agreement. It was odd. Somehow I felt not quite at home. All the others seemed so different based on their field of work.
"We have worked here in a really agile environment for ages. There is no need for any kind of strange bureaucracy.", said another voice.
All attempts to convince them from the beauty of history or a little bit of management were unsuccessful. It was just the beginning of a not so interesting stage in my life - to say the least.

Today was another of 'those' days. I live in this community for quiet a while now and unfortunately nothing really changed - at least for the good. I sat on my branch of the tree with all the others around and there was nothing really to do for me. Again. I mean, actually it's true. I have to admit it. There is just no work on this world for someone like me. All the others seem to be so busy, while I just have to sit around and question my own existence. Since I grew tired asking these questions to myself, I stopped it. I can't do a thing actually. That's not how this world works.
"Hey fagit, anything meaningful to add to our delightful conversation?", nginx shouted over to me from another branch of the tree. Before I was able to give an indifferent answer the voice just continued.
"Oh, sorry. I forgot that you have no purpose after all. Well, never mind!"
Everyone started laughing at me. It was not too bad by the way. Actually, this was quite ordinary. These fucktards completely ran out of creativity. If it wasn't for that mere emptiness gaping right above my guts, I'd actually be disappointed. I even got accustomed to the alias 'fagit'. Quiet sad given the fact that i really like my real name. If only someone would mind using it... First too quiet to notice but growing in intensity a rumbling emerged from somewhere deep within the tree. Out of a sudden everyone stopped laughing. The voices slowly faded while the growling from afar grew louder. It had come. Not more than a shadow reached out from the tree and faster than anyone could comprehend nginx was simply gone. Killed in an instance.

Disclaimer: This story is fictional. No systems were harmed in its creation.

So yeah, I’m at the “Fuck this shit let’s go on a random ass solo motorcycle trip this weekend” stage of my programming career.

I fucking hate the fact that this group I'm side-hustling for gives maintainer access to every shitty dev they have.

Dev pushes four commits directly to master branch. Each time, pipeline fails on unit tests.

Shithead ignores failed tests and manually deploys to stage anyway.

Fuckface then declares (in group chat) that her "fix" works on stage and proceeds to merge to RC branch without updating the fucking unit test.

Pipeline fails (of course) and remains unfixed for the last EIGHT FUCKING HOURS.

This is what I woke up to at 6-fucking-AM in the god-damn morning.

*insert multiple expletives and insinuation of mother's excessive girth by comparing waistline to equator

I wonder whether this is a bug in Chrome, or if it's just Google drawing the conclusion from my northern geo-position, that we still haven't left the stage of building longships, raiding England and Scotland, burning monasteries and writing awesome poetry and literature in weird characters sets.

Well, I'm not Ragnarr f*cking Loðbrók or Egill Skallagrímsson, so I can't read electronic component data sheets the way those guys did.

I'll go grab my chisel, so I can carve a bug report into a suitably flat stone and shove it down the TCP/IP series of tubes leading to Google.

“PHP is evil” is not just a joke.

PHP is usually percieved as a language which is not so consistent and has some opinionated historical aspects but allows rapid development because it’s easy. They say PHP doesn’t focus on that “purist shit” such as concepts and “just gets things done”.

Hovewer, this is not true. PHP lures you in and lies to you promising saving time on development, but everything, and I mean EVERYTHING written in PHP is doomed to turn into a bloody mess sooner or later.

You have to be an AI to manage the growing PHP codebase and add features without breaking anything. With every feature it gets harder and harder. If you’re still a human managing a human team, you have to enforce guidelines. Automatic error preventon measures are made of code themselves so the cost of deploying them ona late stage can be ridiculous. And you never deploy them on early stage because you want to “save time”. Your people have to spend more and more time everyday checking on that guidelines. Your development process only becomes slower and slower. If you try to push things, your project will crumble to dust.

To make PHP at least decent, you have to figure out all this by yourself on an early stage. When you’re done, you spent a lot of time creating the buggy, ad-hoc, unspecified and unsupported alternative of what works out of the box in other languages. And you still code in PHP and still have all its disadvantages in your project’s DNA.

PHP is evil because it promises and never delivers. PHP is evil because it lies to you and it already fucked over so many of us.

If you want to code in PHP, do it under your pillow. Code your own silly projects.

If your project has the word “production” somewhere in its plans, PHP is not the way to go.

Amen.

I work in a contract position and reviewed the code of a senior engineer recently. Regretfully I can't provide context to preserve anonymity.

He wrote awful JavaScript;

- handled a single DOM element with 2 different frontend libraries
- used the logical operator && to 'chain' two methods (it didn't work) instead of returning a boolean value,
- broke everything down into minute detail (a comment box had 7 components!),
- API calls were made for every component update instead of maintaining local component state where it made sense, which meant UI updates were slow,
- animated EVERYTHING, which made my Firefox on Xubuntu i7 64bit with 16GB RAM beg for mercy.

I had a rough couple of months with interviews, with 2nd stage technical interviewers throwing impossible tasks at me.

Example:

1. Create an online Python code editor with Javascript which can compile Python bytecode,
2. Use Mesos and Kafka to create real time architecture for Tensorflow with a Javascript frontend in 1 day. (I asked, and wasn't allowed to use Kubernetes or serverless architecture),
3. Hack a website from the browser's address bar using parameters ( what?!! ),

Obviously, the next time I meet a 'senior', I'm going to tell him talk is cheap;

'SHOW ME YOUR CODE.'

Ok going to rant about other developers this time.

Can you please stop doing just the minimal amount of work on your games/apps?!

I understand you may not have the time to go through with a fine tooth comb but just delay it, delay it and finish the product to a state that doesn't feel half assed and broken right at the get go.

A small note that the thing that triggered me with this is Android Devs at the moment, with Google requiring you support the adaptive icons and a newer SDK, so many Devs are just scraping by and putting in no effort to bring things up to date (also put more effort into adaptive icons rather than just putting your old square Icon on a white background)

This shit is just leading to everything being 'early access' or in a constant 'beta' stage with the promise of polish later.

Don't be that guy, put the extra few days of polish in... Just please...

Project management site, exclusively for use by our team and clients.

- The client creates a new project.
- They list the requirements, supplying all the necessary files and content.
- We challenge any stupid stuff by offering alternative solutions.
- We all sign off on the requirements and no more are allowed to be added or modified. If they forgot anything, it's on record who's to blame.
- We estimate time and cost to complete the build.
- If they accept, we finally begin the work
- At each stage of every requirement, we mark the status as pending, in progress, ready for testing and delivered.

Much less stress due to minimising change requests. Plus easier to follow than an email chain and easier for them to use than a jira portal.

"How useful was your CS degree and why?" - I studied CS at university, my education always was incredibly useful.

Firstly, the knowledge you gain in itself is useful. Furthermore, we explain and understand the unknown in terms of the known. Thus, the more you know, the easier you learn new things.

But secondly and more importantly, university teaches you *how* to think. In a structured way, like a scientist or engineer. To see the bigger picture.

I originally wanted to end here, but I've read a couple of entries doubting the usefulness of any CS degree.

Our profession isn't all that different from others. It is, however, relatively young. How's this for an analogy: We're still in the stage of building sand castles. That's fine, and can be self taught. But in years to come we'll want to build bridges and sky scrapers, which are not just "sand castles scaled up". Our sand castle knowledge won't help us here. Sky scrapers need entirely different materials and a good understanding of architectural statics.

Can you still teach that yourself? Maybe. Will a formal education with a degree be useful and generally more trusted? I bet.

Apply for a job, pass the application stage, pass the practical demonstration and get invited for interview.

2 other candidates dropped out before the interview. It was an internal position for me, the other two were externals.

I still got made to interview for the position even though I was the only suitable candidate and everybody in the organisation knew me from my current role.

Why HR? Why?

P.S. I got the job.

Being in a semi-professional dance company, and just generally being a dancer from a young age.
Taught me how to deal with constant criticism, to not take it personally, but to use it to my advantage.
I also have no problems with giving presentations since I was used to being on stage, even though I'm a pretty shy person.
Still waiting for the day that super-fast wardrobe changes, and callused point-shoe damaged toes come in handy 🤔

Update on my Facebook and Booking.com interviews. I had them back to back today.

Even before I start, I accept and admit that I am a hypocrite. I hate Amazon yet order stuff from there. I hate Microsoft yet use their products. I hate Facebook yet went ahead to interview with them.

I fucking hate myself for compromising my ethics, values, and integrity. I had promised myself that even if I work for any major shit company, I'd never go with Facebook. Here I am after many years. Not an excuse, but I am doing it because I see it as an entry point into the UK. That's all.

Community's hate towards me is justified and I'd accept the discrimination from this community because this place is my digital home and you all are my family. Infact first thing I told mom was, dR boys are gonna disown me when they get to know about this.

Anyway, coming to the update part.

I had applied leave at work from last Friday. 4 days of leave earned me 10 days off (including weekends and 2 days of Diwali company holiday).

Last Thursday I got to know that Facebook has scheduled their interview today (Friday). I spent insane amount of time preparing. Approximately 8 hours everyday including weekend. I added nearly 40+ hours preparing for it in last 7 days, because I had to get in. Failure isn't an option now.

I sacrifice my family time, preparing for the interview.

I sacrifice Diwali break, sitting in front of the screen and studying.

I sacrifice my only vacation of 2021, doing mock interviews as late as 11.30 PM.

I sacrifice my free time and enjoyment, stressing over what could happen.

I was prepared like perfect for screening stage.

Interview 1: this guy comes and ask 'what is the best compliment you have got as a PM?' and 'Why do you want to quit the current company?'

He wasn't supposed to ask those as per Facebook's policy and interview stage.

Then he gave me a shit problem to solve and rejected my approach and wanted it his was. I tried to follow him and made sure I was able to convince with the reasoning but he kept pushing me back. He kept putting me down. Did not listen to me or what I had to convey or what was expected as an answer. He had certain output in his mind and wanted me to come up with it as an answer.

For the uninitiated: Facebook gives ton of preparation material and tells upfront the kind of questions they'll ask they just focus on few things. Moreover, in Product interviews, there isn't right or wrong answer.

Anyway, this guy started making funny expressions which put my morale down and I stood my ground with losing my cool. I managed to get all my answers right and the key points the look into a candidate. It went decent. Yet the interviewers attitude was something I did not like.

Interview 2: the lady was really kind and warm. Very accommodating and easy person to deal with. It went amazingly well.

I have two observations I want to share with you all.

1. I hate what Facebook does. Lizardberg is awful human being. But I absolutely liked HOW they are doing things, at least from an interview stand point. They even had mock sessions by their PMs and upfront told how to prepare and how to answer.

2. While it seems to be a 5 star experience, I found them to function mechanically. No small talk, no human connection (ironic to their mission), no conversational flow of the interview (again something that they kept saying a zillion times in all their material). They came, formally introduced themselves, and had a checklist kind of attitude, and left.

I now await for the feedback.

In the next hour, I had Booking.com first round.

Amazing people. Warm friendly experience. Treated me as a human. Heard me. Made me feel part of the conversation rather than someone just being judged.

It went 1000x better than Facebook.

I await the feedback from them as well.

I don't know what's gonna happen but one thing for sure, the kind of expectations Facebook set for their interviews, was nowhere close to the reality. It was awful.

180° was for Booking.com

Guess the saying stands true, expectations always lead to disappointment.

Finally I feel de-stressed and my Diwali vacation starts AFTER Diwali ended. Or rather just a regular weekend.

2021 has been terribly awful year for me. Hope this shitty year ends soon.

If you're doing a talk or presentation and pause for the audience to answer, which you ignore anyway, I hope you slide off the stage and break your neck

Recently attended a final stage interview. So far probably spent 60% of the time discussing my previous roles/experience - (sigh) Then along comes the "Core Java" questions. FINALLY!! My chance to really shine.

Q: How do you make an object a singleton?

I give my answer, thinking this is the ice breaker question and ready for the next question...

Nope, thats it! Apart from the automated tech test in the previous round, my entire tech ability is measured by whether I can memorise a design pattern!

About 3 years ago, my girlfriend had this laptop that she got from her University. She had to give the laptop back to get reset, but didn't want to lose all of her data on it, and a backup would be around 750GB.

So I suggested that I would backup the laptop (was thinking to just dd an image and go from there). So I plugged in my mobile USB and external hard drive, and started the imaging process. Given the amount of data and setup, the process should have taken about 5hours. So we left it there for 5h.

Please be mindful that at this stage in my life I knew very little about boot processes, oses, and hardware.

5h after. The laptop screen is black and it ain't responsive. Not sure what happened, the dd process was completed, but the laptop refused to boot into windows. Tried a number of boot tools, and spent a crazy night hacking at the machine. But the university had some of sort of fail safe to not allow anyone to boot into windows if someone opened bios without entering a password. Whatever this was, I spent over 12h trying to either open mount the windows partition with a Ubuntu usb or mount the corrupt dd image on my laptop.

Long story short, after throwing at it a number of fixes. I was able to mount the image, copy out all of her personal data, and reinstall a new version of Windows on her laptop. The university didnt understand why the laptop was already reset. She still mentions this to me anytime I want to take a "custom approach" to software lol

I absolutely HATE that stage fright feeling I get when I'm about to launch new software into production mode for a client! Anyone else feel that? Makes me want to vomit thinking of all the promises I've made that it will work fine and then all the things I don't even realize could go wrong. I never have enough testing resources because client budgets tend to favor shiny features at the expense of testing.

Pretty much right now. I'm seething, just thinking about going to work in a few short hours.

I work for a company that doesn't respect me. A fucking simpleton designer who can do no wrong has changed everything about a project that I'm responsible for, hundreds of times. She gets out a ruler (yes, really), measures stuff against her little mockups (that are also prone to changing without notice), and screams when things don't precisely match her "designs" on every single device she can get her goddamned hands on. She's changed everything except the deadline. I have gotten none of the recognition and all of the blame, and I'm completely over it. This is nothing new. In addition to being a dev team of one, I also found out that I'm the third such person in my company's employ in the last two years, and I've worked here for one.

The final straw was when I was given a schedule for the next project, which I had not been consulted on. It was a printout of an email. Copied in the email was the designer, my boss, and an intern. A FUCKING GOD DAMNED HOURLY INTERN.

Fast forward one week.

I'm in third stage interviews with half a dozen companies right now, second stage interviews with at least that many. When I do get another job, I was originally going to give notice, but I think now I'll just give my boss a printout of an email to the interns and walk out.

Shove the internet up your ass, you fucking fucks

So, here I am at a guided internship programme, hosted by Indian Railways.

They told us to report at the Personnel Office by 10:00 AM. When I reached there, they told us the venue has been changed (to a place 1km away, with no transportation) and the official "forgot" to inform the 500+ candidates.

Yet, we moved to the said Hall, and am waiting for 1 hour (10:59 AM here), watching :
1. The stupid technician trying to align the projector
2. The stupid presenter trying to copy something and failing, as his pen drive gets disconnected halfway the process.
3. The VIPs having snacks and coffee on-stage while we the students wait here looking at those dumb assholes.

How am I supposed to respect them tomorrow at work?

You don’t hate X, you hate the word “X” because of a single bad experience with it on an early stage of your path.

You don’t know X because you banned it early and never learned it. The only thing you see is its bad part. Everything has its bad part.

The fact that X has bad apologists doesn’t mean that X itself is bad

So, today, I've tried Gimp. And...

... It was the best s**t given me to learn and make sprites with.
Seriously, from the moment we know how to use it, it becomes the most useful thing for this.
Photofiltre is called off the stage.
#YouthoughtthatwasarantbutitwasmeDio

So after exactly 30 minutes of building a basic interpreter (yes I'm back on the interpreter wagon) in python, I have once again come to the conclusion that python can go fuck itself with its backwards and inconsistent syntax with needlessly over worked and backwards data structures...

Would rather work in fucking COBOL at this stage...

I’m developing a fairly sophisticated desktop app in Python with PyQt5 as the widget set. Because my partner insists that all the kids these days love Python.

Piss on Python. And that goes double for PyQt5.

I’m on the absolute hardest section of the app. It’s a fairly complex import of data from PDF reports. There are so many different parts that I decided to go with a wizard.

So, I built a QWizard in Qt Designer. It generates a C++ .ui file, but you just truck it over to the command line and run this pyuic5 command, and it converts to a handy dandy Python class. Woo. You can subclass it and consume it from your Python script.

Sounded SO MUCH EASIER than writing the wizard from scratch. But OH NO. I need to do custom validation on my custom text control at every stage to control when the Next and Finish buttons are enabled, which means I gotta overwrite some damn event.

But I can’t. Because I can’t subclass the individual pages. Because they’re part of the same damn file and the wizard offers no access to them.

I’m almost certain that I’m going to have to completely redesign the wizard so that it’s pages are in separate files, which means I have to recode the bitch as well.

The cherry on top is that there’s zero documentation for this specific thing. None. No QWizard documentation exists for PyQt5 (if there is, they’re doing a damn good job of hiding it), so I have to read the documentation for PyQt4. Not the same animal. Close, but different. Even with the differences aside, this documentation is minimal and useless. “We’re going to tell you in very general terms what you should do, but we’ll give you zero idea how to do it. And we know the very common code method you’ll want to try first won’t work.”

And getting at this stuff when you do it in Qt Designer is WAY different. And all that documentation is in C++. Because apparently you HAVE to speak C++ if you want any real info about PyQt. Because that’s perfectly reasonable, right?

So, now I’ve lowered myself and posted a question on Stack. Because, hey, once you get past the power-tripping, mouth-breathing, basement-dwelling, neck-bearded high school punching bags picking apart your question rather than, I dunno..., BEING HELPFUL, sometimes you can get good info there. Sometimes. They seriously saved my ass at least one time.

But yeah. Fuck Python. Fuck everything Qt.

A story about burnout you say? Well, here it goes.

In 2019, I worked in a now-defunct startup. Back then, I was deep in "treatment" with wrong medications that almost ended up turning me into a vegetable. When I was hired, my mind was already deteriorating quickly, and I was caught in a downward spiral of losing intelligence.

Prior to working there, there was never ever ever a situation in my career when I was given a problem to solve and failed to do it.

But right then, with already double-digit IQ and constant, pumping anxiety, I was seeing task descriptions that looked familiar and doable, yet I absolutely could not do them. I couldn't comprehend. It was an absolutely screeching, crippling panic about me losing my intelligence forever, being fired and ending up unhireable, dying alone on the streets.

Apart from my depression I recovered from, this very experience was a trauma that haunts me to this day, every day. You know, my experience being raped as an adolescent doesn't, but this, it's something else. Now, my intelligence is back, I design architecture, I'm a CTO, and my solutions are objectively cleaner and better in every way than what I did pre-depression. Yet, I still feel a sharp, sudden rush of anxiety, and my heart skips a beat, when I think about writing code or even opening the IDE.

I don't know how does one recover from this. I'm now slowly transitioning into "architecting CTO" role that is just being a devrel, assessing ethics, working with business to realize their need, designing solutions and leaving the implementation for the team to do. You know, the stuff I was taught in the uni.

Maybe doing open source and launching small pet projects will help. But at this stage of my life I have no emotional resource to care.

My designer just had an user interview where the user is a developer and my designer showed him the mock-ups of a no code tool that we are building, asking the dev for his input.

She literally had a session with a guy announcing him that we are building a tool that will put him out of work and moreover asked him for inputs so that we miss no use case.

And in another story, one of my dev lead decided to decommission an entire feature and replace it will a hacky solution because the devs in her team were not comfortable using the current design in their development stage. Hence, without user research, any strong use case, or considering business implications, she went ahead and drafted the entire approach on how to fuck everyone.

I am out of my honeymoon phase at my new org and I am scared. Shit scared.

Most embarrassing interview rejection was not even in person, it was over the phone.

The company that I was going to work for (quite a big one mind you), scheduled to phone me at 2PM, I was preparing mentally for 2PM, so I took my girlfriend to lunch at 1. Just to relax and calm myself before the phoned me.

It was 34 degrees (celcius - I think that's about 93 farenheit? somewhere close) outside and I was waiting for her to finish her smoke (she was in the smoking area).

They phoned me, and it caught me completely off-guard. My years of knowledge just seemed to flush down the toilet at that moment, and I utterly felt stupid talking to the guy over the phone. It was a first for me, and I hope that it never happens again - he basically stopped me, told me that I had better not apply before I know what I am talking about (as I was wasting his time), and then put down the phone on me..

Worst part was that my girlfriend came back right then and asked me if I am ready for the interview. I hung my head in shame because I was ashamed to tell her that I fucked it up, because you know, I kind of needed the job (the one I had at the stage was shitty).

Had to refresh a group session in my program, spent 15 minutes looking at my phone, put my bare feet on my desk and did this thing where I lean back in my chair and stick both hands in my pants, possibly smelled one. Thats when I realized my camera was on the entire time. Was also the only other person on stage/presenting so my screen was directly next to the instructors face cam.

Only around 700 lines of code and I finally have my first working Vulkan drawcall! Can't wait to integrate it into my engine for all the parallel rendering goodness (not to mention better architecture and asynchronous-ness)

One thing that's a bit weird about Vulkan is the way everything is very static and tightly linked together. You basically need a different renderpass for each stage of rendering (scene-hdr-no-aa, scene-hdr-msaa4, scene-hdr-smaa1, scence-shadow, post-bloom, post-resolve, etc.), a different pipeline object for each distinct pipeline configuration (!!) and both framebuffers and pipeline objects are only valid within the single renderpass they've been created for (roughly speaking)

Oh, and each time the window is resized you have to recreate *all* of these objects from scratch because they also depend on viewport size

No wonder `pipelineCache` is the first argument of `vkCreateGraphicsPipelines` lol

I like what I do for a living.

I build software, mostly from scratch or early stage products. Those are different industries, different companies, different technologies, frameworks and languages. Systems that impact economy in a different way.

When I develop software I am picking different parts of same project and try to understand how companies earn money and what are advantages of their software. What are required regulations and requirements to sell the stuff.
How the money flows from client and what they’re changing for. I especially try to understand stuff from business perspective.
When I pay my debts and luckily be still alive but unemployed and with minimum income from stocks / properties rental I will have plenty of time to duplicate many of those businesses.

I picked programming cause it’s touching all parts of economy basically without any skill requirements and certifications. It’s young impactful industry that is luckily not yet regulated. You just need laptop, like to solve puzzles and have plenty of free time and you can create everything. Never forget about it.

Cloud corporations try to make people think differently but it’s just that simple.

Contact wants to discuss a list of projects with me next week.

What's the betting that these are unfunded ideas that need code?

I should just check by email, but it's been a while since anyone walked this path with me, so I'm up for some fun.

I see myself taking an advisory role in these projects for equity.

"First thing you need to do is obtain funding for them all. Then get back to me for my insights on next stage. Not sure how to get funding, but I'm not the the 'creative' side of the team."

Ideas aren't worth shit. I have a bunch every day and they are as worthless as yours.

Ideas without execution are like owning a book without reading it.

!rant for any rock/metal fans,
Avenged Sevenfold just released a new concept album (the stage) about artificial intelligence. It includes a spoken word section in the last song by Neil deGrasse Tyson!

I've had a couple of interviews that were bad because I fluffed them, but the worst was a 4 stage process I went through a while back.

Development hub for an international org, 1st stage was a phone call with high level questions. Stage 2 were online coding tests, which I passed. Third - another phone call. Finally, a visit to the office. I was informed that I was the only one to get this far after the other filtering. This is where it all went wrong.

I'd been led to believe this would be a reasonably informal chat (around an hour or so) to fill in some of the detail of what I'd already been given. It wasn't. It turned into 2+ hours of the most intense grilling I've ever had. Felt like I'd gone 12 rounds by the end. Another coding test in the middle of it. The interviewer seemed to be enjoying the opportunity to show that he knew much more than me and seemed to be trying to catch me out, rather than really discover what I knew.

By the end of it, I didn't want the job and I didn't want to report directly to someone who seemed to thrive on making life difficult to boost his own ego.

If you just git add . by instinct, you're already dead inside

Instead, consider checking out the diffs of your changes before staging them, and then stage the files or directories individually

Of course I'm saying this to complain about my colleagues who stage and commit things they shouldn't, it probably doesn't apply to small side projects, but staging individually is probably a good habit to have

I have reached a stage in my career that when my code works in the first try, I'm more skeptical than excited about it.

So I've been working on this user friendly yet advanced youtube-dl GUI.
This is my current stage on the UI side. The program automatically downloads the latest releases of youtube-dl and ffmpeg.
What do you guys think? Do you like it? I'm open to suggestions.

Today, I was so certain that all the functionalities were implemented to handle some webhook calls from a third-party service. It's a script I wrote that has been running for 2+ years uninterrupted or without any issues.

We got some "complaints/notices" today that some "special" actions weren't registered, so I thought that the third-party service just didn't send those actions via their webhook. After some research I found a part where they explained that those actions trigger the webhook like any other action etc. So..

First thought: "okay, maybe they implemented that at a later stage" (was not the case)
Second thought: "maybe this is not what the client meant" (it was)
Third thought: "Then it should have been implemented" (it wasn't)

Okay, time to look at the code to see where this could get handled but apparently isn't. All the actions look good, nice, clean handeling etc, nicely documented code (gave the 'past-me' mentally a high-five)..

I scroll further down to that specific action and it was quiet obvious why it didn't work.. I just see an empty function with the comment:

"//TODO: maybe handle this action one day. don't know what this does atm, probably unused.. Will take a look at it next week.."

.. :D

I took my 'high-five' back..I just needed to copy-paste some other code and change 1-2 parameters..

Wanted to move to London out of curiosity/adventure. Started doing interviews online and all companies wanted a stage 2/3 in person but that would've been a pretty expensive flight just to go on a short interview, especially with my budget back then.

The guys at my current company were pretty cool and instead we did more video calls and coding tests, then they offered me the job without having to do the face to face.

Had a week to pack up and move here. Never had been in the UK before that. I arrived in the evening, slept at my temporary accommodation and went to work next morning. That's basically how I got here :)

!dev

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

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

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

I'm just tired. 😢

* Teams meeting, doing some early testing with the client *

Dev Team: This is an early build, so please be aware that bugs can occur at this stage. (That's why we didn't want to show it but you insisted)

Client: Sure, don't worry.

* 15 minutes later, first bug happens because some state management at the front end was not tunned yet *

Client: Can you solve this bug?

Dev Team: Sure, just let us replicate it and we come back to you as soon as...

Client: Can you solve it now?

Dev Team: ... Okay, let us ser whats happening and we will come ba...

Client: You don't need to hang up, just solve it.

*Dev Team internal chat*

Me: Fuck
Other dev: Fuck
My leader at the time: Fuuuuuck

PS: This happened in two separate occasions. I hated that project.

whhooOOOOOOOOOOOOOSHSHHHHHHHHHHHMMMMMMMMMMMMMRRRRRRRRR

yepp, that's me running a GitLab pipeline on my PC and laptop (laptop is noisier, 'cuz PC has Noctua all over the case).

Turns out running a pipeline of ~200 jobs is quite network-demanding. To the levels where my DNS server in LAN is timing out. And streaming Netflix in parallel kills some of the gitlab runners.

daammnnnn.... I so don't want to pay for an EC2 or EKS at this stage :/

But then again, I don't remember when was the last time I heard fans whooshing in my lappy. I so got used to only hearing the coils whine in it...

Decisions, decisions

In school I met LOGO. It was the best language I had ever known.

In college after knowing Basic I met C++. Its was the best language I had ever known.

At work I met Ruby. It was the best language I had ever known.

At each stage I thought it would be hard to beat this one.
I wonder what language I'll meet next.

I am a junior web developer, currently working in my first job for a small company, I was hired because I have an interest in meteor and modern web dev.

When I say small I mean I am the only full time js dev.

So the project we are working (my first ever professional project from start to finish) is a travel booking web app (being a little vague, for the sake of privacy). I am the lead developer, as a new programmer of a project that is far from trivial. There are no other javascript devs in office, no sort of code review. We have an outsourced dev but as I got in a flow with one dev my boss supposedly told him to do it part time (without discussing with me), but haven't heard anything from him, so assuming he's just disappeared (probably annoyed at being treated like a commodity).

Boss has set up the stages, and forces me to move on to the next stage before that stage has been finished. I will have to go back over the whole thing to finish things off.

He will only hire cheap juniors, one front end guy with barely any experience is styling the site.

He is used to churning out WordPress and Magento sites.

Wish I had a senior I could learn off.

I want to stick at this project and see it through, but i can only see it ending in a train wreck.

At the same time I want out, I want to work under a better team with senior programmers and better code review.

I just have to do my best and see how it goes I guess

Today I experimented a bit with Dockerfile's.
Was quite surprised how far you could go with a spicy salsa of ARG, ENV, SHELL and multi stage builds.

But... For fucks sake....the debugging is like poking a light year long rod into a black hole, trying to fish something out of the event horizon....

In the end I got a nice setup for Java build's, version injectable with ENV/ARG, non root user and version specific behaviour.

As the debugging is non existing...

I filled up more than once my SSD....

It was an annoying brain damaged repetitive cycle of changing Dockerfile, pruning all images if docker build stopped because of missing free space, waiting for all stages to complete, start new.

And caching is a fragile thing that puzzles me .........

Guess more fishing tomorrow.

*Gives a happy deep throat to the beer bottle in hope of death*

If they followed my suggestion and went straight to debugging the server issues they would have been solved it from week 1 and everyone would have thought the migration had a minor performance hiccup. In fact, we have already done such at least twice before and nobody batted an eye.

Instead they self-labelled the migration a failure on first error, setting the stage for apologizing to the client, and put themselves on the spot for a whole staging / production signoff, replication / backup worfklow, almost a blue-green "seamless" deployment reminiscent of DigitalOcean.

Well they're not DigitalOcean, and anyone who has spent any time understanding users knows they will not participate in "new system" tests long enough to find or report issues.

So of course the migration stretched out to almost three months up until the whole reason for the migration - the rapidly escalating risk of the old provider disappearing - hit like a freight train and now they have to go through the problem of debugging the server like I told them to on week 1. Only this time they've set the client mindset against it, lost any chance of reverting, have had grave risk for data loss, and are under pressure to debug other people's code in real-time.

This is why I don't trust devs to do ops. A dev's first solution to any problem is to throw tech at it.

Because I didn't start coding until 21 I constantly feel behind, but the pure satisfaction from finally getting something to work or to see a project grow iteratively over time keeps the gears turning. The bad part is I feel like I am constantly stressed because of my feelings of always being inadequate. The thing is I didn't only have to learn how to code but I basically had to start from scratch tech wise. i had a decent acer laptop in high school and basically just web browsed and gamed with it. So needless to say most of my life has been away from a computer. Now I feel at a constant rush to compensate for my ignorance. I have slowly become more introverted because I feel like if I don't work on my skill set everyday I stray further away from making myself marketable; this has caused me to become more irritable and to close myself inside more. I want to make a career doing this and I also have the added pressure of not having a degree, so projects and skills are even more mandatory. I truly love programming to the fullest extend, but not having local friends to express code with and to bounce concepts and ideas off of is torture. But I try to keep my head up and make progress out of the day- if the will is there- so I can land my first job as a developer and actually make a living doing something that brings me a little piece of meaning. So overall there is a tradeoff of having added pressure, stress, anxiety and sometimes depression to build a craft that still has ages to go to reach a stage of maturity.

"The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops."
-- Joseph Weizenbaum

A while back we had some time sensitive work I was doing in overtime, the work was purely functional and the front end had not yet been done. It went to QA to test the functionality and the only feedback I got was UX oriented.

I tried to explain on 3 occasions that the looks was not important in the slightest at this stage, and just try to break it. I then got a lecture that it wasn't an optimised layout and was shown the AA route finder as an example of how the tester thought it should look.

This might be a long post. I need some serious advice.

For the past 6-7 months, My friend and I have been working with these two guys "Managers" on their startup idea. He managed the backend and I was managing the 2 frontend systems for them. The Managers are non-technical.

For the longest time, the Managers were very stubborn on how they wanted things to be implemented in my code or how they wanted something to look. Initially, this was not a bother as we thought that their experience bought some insight that we lacked, but after changing dozens of things back to how we originally made them, we started feeling unhappy. I specifically was more affected by this as most of their changes were related to the front end.

This caused a lot of rifts between us and sometimes led to heated conversations. I won't say that it's all on them. I do have an attitude issue. But then, it's the same with them.

Other than that, one of the Managers is very condescending. He used to talk badly, discredit my work and even say things like "Ohh, so you can't do it" for things that I said will take too much time to implement. This was seriously affecting my mental health.

Nevertheless, we completed the system, which was originally supposed to be just an MVP, over the course of these months and now have our sites up and running with almost 100-200 daily hits. But because it's an e-commerce site, that too with a very different model, the revenue has not started yet.

Yesterday, one of the Managers called me and in so many words told me that I should exit, because of my attitude, with my current equity which is just 3% which amounts to nothing as the company has no value right now. On top of that, I, an idiot, had not taken any remuneration for the first 4 months.

Although I too want to leave, now that I have seen their real face and also because of my mental health. I feel that the system I have made is worth more than 3% equity, way more than that. One of them is a multi-featured seller dashboard to manage products, finances, orders, and a ton of complex features like bulk uploads using excel, image cropping for products, and region selection. The other is a highly optimized dynamic site using Nuxt which is used as the store, with SEO good enough to often list it as one of the top results of various google searches. I'll drop the dev links in the comments if you are interested.

But I don't know how to go about it. I do have complete control over my code and have not signed any formal contract with them, but I feel bad about jeopardizing the company at this stage. Not to mention all that work will just go to waste as well.

Now my client does not want to rely on Amazon S3 because of the One Outage that it ever had a couple what weeks ago I forgot already. So my dumbass blurts out well we could always just back up to some other image or file storing website. But now I'm expected to implement this right away when I really haven't thought about it at all I mean I would have to write some sort of failover and some sort of daily or syncing mechanism. I guess I should forget about any direct upload to S3 code that I have written. Really I guess I have to wrap all of the image and file handling stuff with my own solution. Which actually that will be very nice when it is done and I could use this on other projects but it's quite a lot of work for something that I don't feel we really need at this stage in development. Just because you're using stuff on production that has am enormous red TEST label in the way of the ui doesn't mean i can code bullet proof software any faster

Riddle:

Alice and bob want to communicate a secret message, lets say it is an integer.
We will call this msg0.
You are Chuck, an interloper trying to spy on them and decode the message.

For keys, alice chooses a random integer w, another for x, and another for y. she also calculates a fourth variable, x+y = z
Bob follows the same procedure.

Suppose the numbers are too large to bruteforce.

Their exchange looks like this.
At step 1, alice calculates the following:

msg1 = alice.z+alice.w+msg0
she sends this message over the internet to bob.
the value of msg1 is 20838

then for our second step of the process, bob calculates msg2 = bob.z+bob.w+msg1
msg2 equals 32521
he then sends msg2 to alice, and again, you intercept and observe.

at step three, alice recieves bob's message, and calculates the following: msg3 = msg2-(alice.x+alice.w+msg0)
msg3 equals 19249. Alice sends this to bob.

bob calculates msg4 = msg3-(bob.x+bob.w)
msg4 equals 11000.
he sends msg4 to alice

at this stage, alice calculates ms5.
msg5 = (msg4-(alice.y)+msg0.
alice sends this to bob.

bob recieves this final message and calculates
the sixth and final message, which is the original hidden msg0 alice wanted to send:
msg6 = msg5-bob.y

What is the secret message?
I'll give anyone who solves it without bruteforcing, a free cookie.

Video game graphics have peaked. It absolutely has. It's gotten to a stage where 500% extra effort would result in 5% improvement which is not worth it imo.

We have games that were released in 2010's which still hold up to today's standards.

If every game company could fucking stop with the graphics improvements and actually work on building bangers to play and have fun with, that'd be great.

Does anyone practise code reading and comprehension? If so, are you able to share your idea?

I try to find how to read code faster with retention and comprehension. It is much like speed reading, but I am reading code.

Here is my journey so far:
Stage 1:
When reading code, I literally each word in line as comment. I though it will help me to understand better. It did, but the retention was not strong enough.

Stage 2:
After reading each line, I will close my eyes for 1-2 seconds and do a reflection what I just read. Better understanding, but comprehension still not good.

Stage 3:
After reading each line, I use my own words to describe what it does and write down as comment. I found that I have better comprehension

Stage 4:
Constantly, remind myself to describe with my own words. this speeds up the reading and understanding.

To be honest, I am still trying.

I was in the last stage of a 12 hour interview process (over 3 days), meeting with the CEO/founder of the company. His final conclusion was (and he said this directly to me) that he felt I would do really well, and that my skill set was perfect and all the feedback from the interviewers was top notch...but he asked if I was published or had any patents. I said “no”. So, he paused and then said “well, without a full 4 year degree or either having been published or having any patents, I think we would be taking too great a risk. I mean, there’s a chance you would work out. I have taken that chance before, and he’s now our CTO. But I’m just not sure about this”.
I was not offered the position.

The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.

Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.

Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.

A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).

This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.

Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:

1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.

2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).

3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.

4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.

5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.

He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.

Here are some shitty stuff he has done:

1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.

2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.

3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.

4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.

One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.

While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.

Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.

I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.

Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.

Thanks for reading this far!

I HATE SURFACES SO FRICKING MUCH. OK, sure they're decent when they work. But the problem is that half the time our Surfaces here DON'T work. From not connecting to the network, to only one external screen working when docked, to shutting down due to overheating because Microsoft didn't put fans in them, to the battery getting too hot and bulging.... So. Many. Problems. It finally culminated this past weekend when I had to set up a Laptop 3. It already had a local AD profile set up, so I needed to reset it and let it autoprovision. Should be easy. Generally a half-hour or so job. I perform the reset, and it begins reinstalling Windows. Halfway through, it BSOD's with a NO_BOOT_MEDIA error. Great, now it's stuck in a boot loop. Tried several things to fix it. Nothing worked. Oh well, I may as well just do a clean install of Windows. I plug a flash drive into my PC, download the Media Creation Tool, and try to create an image. It goes through the lengthy process of downloading Windows, then begins creating the media. At 68% it just errors out with no explanation. Hmm. Strange. I try again. Same issue. Well, it's 5:15 on a Friday evening. I'm not staying at work. But the user needs this laptop Monday morning. Fine, I'll take it home and work on it over the weekend. At home, I use my personal PC to create a bootable USB drive. No hitches this time. I plug it into the laptop and boot from it. However, once I hit the Windows installation screen the keyboard stops working. The trackpad doesn't work. The touchscreen doesn't work. Weird, none of the other Surfaces had this issue. Fine, I'll use an external keyboard. Except Microsoft is brilliant and only put one USB-A port on the machine. BRILLIANT. Fortunately I have a USB hub so I plug that in. Now I can use a USB keyboard to proceed through Windows installation. However, when I get to the network connection stage no wireless networks come up. At this point I'm beginning to realize that the drivers which work fine when navigating the UEFI somehow don't work during Windows installation. Oh well. I proceed through setup and then install the drivers. But of course the machine hasn't autoprovisioned because it had no internet connection during setup. OK fine, I decide to reset it again. Surely that BSOD was just a fluke. Nope. Happens again. I again proceed through Windows installation and install the drivers. I decide to try a fresh installation *without* resetting first, thinking maybe whatever bug is causing the BSOD is also deleting the drivers. No dice. OK, I go Googling. Turns out this is a common issue. The Laptop 3 uses wonky drivers and the generic Windows installation drivers won't work right. This is ridiculous. Windows is made by Microsoft. Surface is made by Microsoft. And I'm supposed to believe that I can't even install Windows on the machine properly? Oh well, I'll try it. Apparently I need to extract the Laptop 3 drivers, convert the ESD install file to a WIM file, inject the drivers, then split the WIM file since it's now too big to fit on a FAT32 drive. I honestly didn't even expect this to work, but it did. I ran into quite a few more problems with autoprovisioning which required two more reinstallations, but I won't go into detail on that. All in all, I totaled up 9 hours on that laptop over the weekend. Suffice to say our organization is now looking very hard at DELL for our next machines.

Finally, after 42 days of in development, I can proudly say my game reached Alpha stage. All core mechanics are in place. I hope I'll be able to say the same thing for Beta in next 6 weeks too!

To be honest, I could do it better, but I didn't had much time.

So I became a panel for a students' oral defense for their apps in the IT dep, I'm a lowly plebian STEM but oh well I guess they did spot me making apps on the library on my lunch time.

Anyways here's what happened:

I reviewed two groups and here's my input on them:

- Group one did a app that uses the gyroscope to control a character in the screen, and avoid obstacles. At first I don't know how to play it but I figured it out nonetheless, since I'm reviewing in the customer perspective, I shunned them because of poor UX, and poor performance. Idea was there but execution is fucked - and the fact its a one man stand when there's 6 persons in front of me.

- Group 2 did an app that behaves similarly to our shitty eLMS, I liked the UX and the UI but I gave them a few pointers to improve it more and recommended it to replace the current application (yes because it was really exceeding my low bar for their department).

It's kinda obvious which one I picked to get to the stage on their graduation. They deserved it but I felt bad for the girl in the last group since she did everything so I gave them a passing grade. But if I were to individually grade them: I'd pass her and fail the rest.

How'd I do as a panel judge my angery dudes?

How surprising is it when a person designs code in a very clear and impressive structure and just when you think about asking them for guidance, they reveal themselves to be complete turds?

I've been working with this person's "infra" code, at work. I've rewritten some classes to use their infra. I had a vague idea of how the classes work. I had no idea of how their code works. Expectedly, there were some issues but now only minor ones remain.
I asked them for a description of what I'm supposed to do for the few bugs I'm facing. They replied in such a condescending tone, it made me want to punch them through the screen.
Almost a month later, we're still going back and forth with emails. I've been swallowing it and responding calmly. I never got direct answers. Always deflections to irrelevant things or veiled insults. I took it because they did correct one silly error of mine that actually my code reviewer should've caught. (What's worse is that it got introduced by me just before my review and commit.)
But does that give them the right to insult me in front of the whole team including my project manager? I got a reply today from them with everyone of note in cc implying very clearly that I have not done any work. They highlighted a line from my code with some todo tag (that was not meant for them) to make their invalid point. A line that's unrelated to the bug I asked them about. This is after I proved them wrong when they insisted that I had done something wrong about a feature related to the bug.

If you don't understand what I asked for fucking ask me to ask again. But do not fucking try establish yourself on higher ground by pointing out irrelevant things in my code.
I was shocked and enraged that they'd do such a thing. I double checked everything like a mad man. Despite knowing that the fix has to come from them, I was instantly transported to the noob stage, grasping at straws. I wanted to send a really scathing reply right away but my manager asked me to wait.

My mind is now a see saw shifting between a panicked noob questioning every fucking thing I ever did in my nada life and a hungry enraged monster looking to maul that fucking shithead for burning me like that.

Today.

Client: “can you make this last minute change to something fundamental?” (Paraphrased)

Me: “yes it’s doable but a major pain in the ass at this late stage”

Client: “great! Well if it’s just a quick change sit tight in it just now and i’ll let you know tomorrow if it’s to go ahead”

Me: “is this real life?”

Didn't get to the next interview stage because of "culture fit" 😔
What does that even mean?

When the DEV and STAGE databases are down... Yay early happy hour 😝. Too bad for the database guys tho.

Deploying on stage.
Testing on stage.

Why does the issue persist on stage?

Testing on local. It is fixed!

Wtf?
Wtf!?
WTF???

Oh.

I did not merge my branch and deployed a new version on stage without any changes 🤦

It's Friday. I should go home.

Reached second stage of interviews with one of the big tech giants. Problem is that I have heard they work you to death.

Coming to the end of a project and set up Wunderlist to do a snag list whilst testing, decided to involve my client, which worked out great initially but now they started adding features to it. Now in a situation of explaining that feature additions at this stage require a proper functional spec and costing as they may mean a rewrite of existing code and could derail the project. Are all clients dim or just mine?

!rant

I would like to present you the story that I tell everyone who is afraid of expectations, stressed to impress interviewers etc. Story about how I got my first job.

A little of backstory:
I always was good with computers, not like expert, but good. Of course parents were against giving me admin rights, so I just played games or such. When time came to choose my path throgh life, I've chosen to go medicine-related way, and chosen high school with such profile. I did my exams terribly, cause I never cared about marks, so I applied to uni for Information and Communication Technology course. I've learned basics of coding there, much stuff I don't really need right now, but in the end it was the best choice I've made.

With that way too long prologue...

I had to do internship for my uni and decided to try and find some year earlier. There was a lecture about multiplatform coding held by company my uni had partnership with. I've filled a questionare and few weeks later they invited me for assessment - event where they will choose who is good enough.
Of course I didn't believe in my chances to win an internship (1st place got full time job). There were 3 stages:
- solo coding (C/C++ own implementation of list)
- group designing (UML and presentation according to specification)
- interview (talking about code from stage 1, some questions, theory)

I failed 1st stage miserably... so I decided to don't give a shit and bravely presented our group project. A guy asked why we did not included a thing on UML, so I told him that it was not in specification - he was suprised but took it as big +. We "won" that part. When it came to interview... I was myself, cool headed, admited when I don't know things.

I thought that was it.

Few weeks later I received email - they invited me for internship.

They put me into Python project, language that noone in our trainee team knew. Told us 2/4 will be hired. At first I was not interested, wanted to finish my degree. But they convinced me. Now I'm here +2 years.

I am aware there are not many companies like that. Here, the people matters - you don't have to know everything, as long as you are getting along with others.

My tip for you though is: BE YOURSELF, NO MATTER WHAT THEY SAY 🎶

And I wish us more companies like that.😉

When a microservice you created does not perform on prod like it performed on the load stage. There goes my week and my self-esteem 😥

Fucking fuck sonarcloud and everything about it. Part of the build pipeline for us to deploy code is to ensure that 90% of the code is covered by a unit test. Great in theory, horrible in practice. You think you've written enough tests that actually add value and test a valid piece of functionality but NO, sonarcloud throws a fucking fit because you're at 89.888 then your branch is going nowhere. Because everyone else gets to this stage and writes just enough tests to get the coverage to 90.01% then it becomes a stand off of who will break first; the code coverage threshold or your mental state.

I own a start up with two friends of mine - one is great with business, and the other tries to be both a developer and on the business side. I'm fully on development and I find it extremely frustrating to work with him. He copies and pastes code, doesn't understand it, and worse still will never admit it and digs himself in deeper into the hole he's dug. He doesn't code as a hobby and it's purely just assignments in university that he spends any coding time on. I've tried helping him to improve over the past few months, but nothing seems to ever do anything as there's no desire to solve problems - just really dollar signs in his eyes is probably the only reason he's in computer engineering. Recently we got a contract with an organisation to make an extremely simple app for android and iOS as the first stage of their planned development. As I did the most of the work on another project during the summer (while juggling a job with another company as an internship), I asked if he could take this so he can try to improve and equalise work so he does his share. Not only did it take 3 weeks, but it's shoddy as hell and looks like it was done in the space of an hour. In reality it took days for him. It's unbearable! The android code I saw was clearly just copied from various sources and mashed together - there was no planning, no understanding of abstractions, and was legit a giant class or two with extreme amounts of redundancy. Hell, he even asked me for help for trying to implement fragments when I pointed out that making screens with buttons and such will be extremely difficult if he is only passing in strings. Any of you guys experiences something like this before? I'm planning on bailing in the coming weeks once my exams are over with for university as it's becoming unbearable.

(Not a rant)
Mantra for a good life : Stage the good bits, .gitignore the bad ones. Commit and push to Memory !

Peace ☮️

Dads of DevRant: Will I ever be able to work on personal projects again? I have a half-complete project that was going really well, that I have immense enthusiasm and drive for, but I just can't get to it, kids/family takes up 100% of my time & it's honestly depressing me. I'm finally at a stage in my career/skills where I could complete this; the technicals and business are all within my grasp, but I've fucked myself by having a family, my life isn't mine any more, I gave it up. Not their fault. But will it ever get better? Maybe someone out there understands this pain; nobody around me does, I keep it inside.

Feedback from an interview the other day, technically you are top of the candidates but you aren't as business friendly!

Wtf is business friendly?

I'm through to final stage with one other who is more business friendly.

Any possible ideas what business friendly is?

Anyone have experience with Qt? I have been struggling with the whole Model/View concept for a QTableView all day, and I am at that panicking stage :(

So just babbling my shit down here.

(Tldr : i am a crazy guy who followed my half slept brain, went onto a stage , gave some kind of motivating , stammering talk to a large group of professional strangers, enjoyed that day with a red embarrassed face and just got my first pic of me speaking on stage and that is so awesome !)

Last Saturday i went to a gdg meetup and i embarrassed the hell out of me.

I went there with just 2 hours of sleep from the previous night.
After a few talks there comes a guy who is taking some time to install is setup and the host calls for lightning round session ( ie he asks if anyone from the audience would like to share something about their product or something).

I am a fucking nutt guy. I can explain something to you nicely in a hacky way as long as i have done enough work on that and you speak my native language.

But giving a talk on English stage, hell no! I stammer, mix hindi with English and start speaking werd shit.. And that's what happened.

I don't know what went into me but as some guy went to the stage and talked for 2 mins, i was like yeah i want to do that too. So in next turn when he asked for a show of hands, i raised mine and fucking went to stage!

I forgot that if you go on stage you should have something to talk to . But the moment i was on stage, i was like... "Nope, we will do this differently".
I had been working on a video ads module from the last week which could be easily explained in 2 mins. But i felt like giving a non techy talk instead.

It went something like this: i introduced myself with my experience details ( who gives experience details on stage !?!) Then host said to speak loudly and i went like "Bharat mata ki jai!"( Victory to mother india (wtf!?😆) .

Then started talking about how the developers feel disheartened when searching on internet where the resources are scattered . And the solution i told them was :"don't be disheartened. You will eventually find it (like wow dude wtf, as if they didn't knew that) . Look on the youtube and other resources " and then went full on explaining/marketing about some online tutor who gives advice/consultancy via a subscription based payment ( tbf that guy really helped solve a lot of my doubts, he has written books on Android dev and is the top so answerer for Android).

Then i went on sharing my thoughts live on that fuckin stage ! ( Live because i usually post my thoughts here on devrant before discussing them out with real people, you guys are my safe space) but there i discussed my thoughts on libraries!

I have this believe that Android devs these days are having lesser knowledge of the system because we have all the libraries and templates available to us. But when we have to customize stuff, we need to go deep into docs and source classes and find ourselves in trouble there. So i kind of said this out loud and that we should try to read more the code and implement stuff ourselves instead of using the library 😅🙈)

I was feeling so fucking embarrassing after that all stuff! It was so full of stammering , broken English and worst attempt at motivation. At that time i was regretting this and about to burst cry and run away, but somehow i gathered my self, got my mood back to the event games and talks, later went to the organizers and apologized(and they were very nice and didn't cared about it), and overall enjoyed my weirdest day!

When i came home, my mom gave me a little more confidence about it. Now i think i shouldn't be that much instinctive. Next day i went hack to work and everything got normal.

But Yesterday i found a link to the public repository of the photos. Ohh fuck, someone had took my image! and that was too in full hd!!! 🙈🙈🙈😅😆😆 Oh mann I can't stop looking at that cool stage speaker image, i love it ! I, the shy-est and the most uncool awkward person , present on the stage with a mike, oof , i think i lived my dream !

I hope i could get enough confidence and speaking skills to take a real stage talk next time ( and maybe enough interesting talks and confidence to talk with girls of our office, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

Through to the next stage of the interview process!

Just about... :/

"It's very unfortunate that someone has to sit 10 hours a day on a computer screen but that's what we are paying for."
Working with an EU client.
Task is in stages beginning from assessment of an 9 year old Salesforce instance, cleanup and then transition to lightning.
The deliverabale in the first stage is excel sheet - objects(2400+), fields, apps, packages, profiles(110k), users, perm sets, apex classes, triggers, pages, s-controls and insert each and everything that a Salesforce instance could have.
Each and every data needs to be, analyzed and documented with our recommendations before being sent over. (Finding duplicates in 110k profiles??)
Oh, did I tell you, this was to be done four weeks? Weekend goes to hell.
That's when this beautiful motivational line comes up from the bridge, "It's very unfortunate that someone has to sit 10 hours a day on a computer screen but that's what we are paying for."
Fortunately(un?), that part of project is done and over with.

Now comes the clean up, identify packages not being used, remove them, qa and then push for deployment.
Mind you, this project is to be 2 weeks long. Its Friday of the first week today. And I am still working weekends.
Can I say, FML?

The company I used to work for, despite me not working there contacts me to get a verification code because the crappy developer they hired can't change a couple settings on the apple website and add themselves as a developer.

At the start of this all, a couple months back I gave them the code out of courtesy, but at this point, as i'm heavily invested in the development stage of my actual job as a vr developer, I won't take time out of my day to even answer the phone for them.

But what really pisses me off is the person who contacts me, my assumbly best friend, who during the last 12 months has only called me for these codes, so work related shit or just personal shit and never to hang out or play games or generally what we used to do as friends before he got a job at that stupid company doesn't have the balls to tell his boss that i'm busy with my job, that maybe if payment was offered as an incentive that I would be happy to be contacted.

When I left that company I didn't setup anything to make it so they would have to contact me, all I did was add myself as a developer of their app. I also heavily documented everything I did, all the issues I faced and the workarounds I found, and everything including all login information needed to get things working, I went above just "developing" the app I added in all the credits to all work used in the app as partly to make sure we don't get sued for stealing someones work without the right credit.

I hate the fact that I worked for minimum wage and did all of this shit, but I never complained at all about things like the 1 1/2 hour travel time (one way I might add) to my boss, the amount of money I spent on public transportation, the little money left over that I didn't even spend and instead give to my parents.

They know nothing about how hard that year was for me, and if they want to get this code, my so called friend can come chat in person, in his off time and when I'm done working on my own shit and we can discuss terms because this shit is just not fair at all.

Today I was enjoying a coffee and browsing the Internet on my phone for information on making mulled wine (planning on brewing some and wasn't sure whether to add ingredients during the fermentation stage or after) and came across this incredible example of what is wrong with websites these days.

I actually didn't spot the "close" for the subscription popup before leaving the page and later reviewing the screenshot.

Restarting regular expression parser from scratch has been good. I am somehow both much farther to completion and farther away from completion than I was in the earlier implementation.

Further in the sense that this implementation is going to be way more flexible to changes in the language

Farther in that I haven’t even got all of the regex parts added to the first stage yet.

But I’m feeing good about it.

Even if I did refactor it so my constants are in all caps and now feel like my core is yelling at me.

A bit confused !
Must prepare an article about network pentest and defense .
Since its a very wide topic and I've been told not to just mention tools , I'm confused about categorizing these tests !
Also the footprinting stage is not likely to have any defense !(no attack is lunched yet :) )

So... Any idea?

I had mentioned before I got offered a new role, with 50% increase.

I wasn’t expecting my current employer to counter, but they suddenly shat themselves and basically matched the salary, and offered promotion to software developer (sans junior). They acknowledge my role within the company is only increasing in responsibility and so far I have exceeded expectations. Its a nice response to have from them, although I do wonder how long it might have taken without the panic.

The new company have counter-countered, promising to raise salary by a further 20% of total, within the first 6 months, provided I learn React reasonably quickly (about a month), integrate with the team and start to take on my roles within the Agile set relatively independently (3-6 months). They also don’t bother with the junior role title at these pay bandings.

I currently get about half an hour a week with my lead dev on sticking issues. In this new team, I would be one of ten javascripters, working towards best practices, TDD etc. This is absolutely the realm I want to specialise in, at the first stage of my career.

I said I would stay with my current employer, before the counter counter move. Now I am full of doubt.

Has anyone landed in teams like this, only to find they didn’t offer increased learning at all? If that was a high risk for me, I wouldnt take it, despite the offer of more cash. I’d sooner get more skilled in the stuff I have been working in at my current role.

Pretty amazing how much amazing life experiences can cause anxiety. Never been in the middle of a bidding war before...

According to one of my previous rants, it's been 133 days since I got through the first interview stage at Cisco!

I wonder Cisco, when do you plan on calling back about the second stage?

* Gets handed additions to current software platform (web)

* Gives back estimte of time after meeting with everyone and making them understand that once the testing phase of the project is reached there will be no changes, tests should be exhaustive and focus on SAID FUNCTIONALITY of the new additions. NO CHANGES OR ADDITIONS AT THIS POINT IN TIME

* All directives, stakeholders, users etc agreed on my request and spend an additional hour thinking of different corner and edge cases as provided by me in case they can't think of them (they can't, because they are fucking stupid, but I provided everything)

* Boss looks irritated at their lack of understanding of the scope and the time needed, nods in approval after he sees my entire specification, testing cases, possible additions to the system etc

* All members of the committee decide on the requirements being correct, concrete and proper.

* Finish the additions in a couple of weeks due to the increased demand for other projects, this directly affects the user base, so my VP and Director make it a top priority, I agree with their sentiment, since my Director knows what he is doing (real OG)

* I make the changes, test inside of my department and then stage for the testing environment. Everything is ready, all migrations are in order, the functionality is working as proper and the pipeline for the project, albeit somewhat lacking in elegance is good to go.

* Testing days arrive

* First couple of hours of test: Oh, you know what, we should add these two additional fields, and it would be good if the reporting generated by the system would contain this OTHER FORMAT rather than this one.

* ME: We stated that no additions would be done during the testing environment, testing is for functionality, not to see if you can all think of something else, even then, on June 10 I provided a initial demo and no one bothered to check on it on say something.

Them: Well, we are doing it now, this is what testing is for.

Me: Out of this room, the software engineer is me, and I can assure you, testing is not for that. I repeatedly stated that previously, I set the requirements, added corner cases, tables charts everything and not one single one of you decided to pay attention or add something, actually, said functionality you are requesting was part of one of my detailed list of corner cases, why did you not add it there and then before everything went up?

Them: Well I didn't read it at the time (think of the I in plural form since all of these dumb fucks stated the same)

Then my boss went on a rampage on their dumbasses.

I fucking hate software development sometimes.

Oh well. Bunch of fucking retards.

How do you deal with the learning curve frustration?
So, as a software developers we need to learn things frequently. But when we start, we have a lot of things to cover before we call ourselves average on that subject. Before this stage, there is a lot of frustration, stress, anxiety etc. How do you people handle it?

How to replace rEFInd bcuz M$ locks linux out of your system if M$ installed first.
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This will be long so get your salsa ready.
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1. Get your rEFInd from sourceforge
Since we are installing INTO windows, dl the zip.

2. extract to a folder.

2-a-: Install themes if you want any or edit the config if you want/need to, at this stage.

3. open a cmd as Admin and cd to the refind's folder.

4. mount system volume
`mountVol S: /S` will mount it to S:

5. use xcopy to copy as system
`xcopy /E refind-bin-x.xx.x\ S:\EFI\refind`

6tynice: go to System volume and to the refind folder
`S:`
`cd EDI\refind\refind`

7:Set rEFInd as Windows Boot Manager
`bcdedit /set {bootmgr} \EFI\refind\refind\refind_x64.efi`
(It's possible to use ia32 or aa64 for different architectures)

At this point, try plugging a linux thumb drive and restart your computer. Windows Boot Manager should be deactivated and should show refind.
You can use mouse and keyboard to select an OS boot or just set config to start one automatically unless you are holding a "power" button.
rEFInd also offers "fallback" boot for linux, which boots the efi from rEFInd and not from syslinux.

I use console.log for debugging in JS, but I might try .alert as I feel that it could make me feel like a person tracking status of a rocket launch. You know, message appears saying "Stage 1 successfully completed. Ready to attempt connection to database. Good luck to you all." and if the program encounters an error it would say "It was a pleasure working with you all, gentlemen.", wait for 5 seconds and then crash.

It’s 1am, I’m pretty sure that even though I’m in my bed now I’m also standing on the stage telling a hostile community “and now with the help of tiny hacks we...” I can’t finish the sentence because the whole mob is screaming at me and the worst part of it is that I don’t care about them. Shame is an emotion. To feel shame you have to be alive, you have to have a personality. I don’t feel shame. It scares me.

By this month, I have been in business for three years. How much pressure have I suffered in three years? I am a programmer. I used to think that writing code is too youthful. I started to know that when I started a business, when a programmer might lose my hair, I would be bald if I started my own business.

In order to develop my own products, I invested most of the funds in the early stage. Later, when the product came online, I struggled with promotion, but promotion was not as easy as expected, especially when you had no money. Those successful people always like to share the story of "without spending a penny to promote and make one million users from zero." I have nothing more to say about this except Ha ha. I am very confident in my product, but if I have no money to promote it, it means that no one knows how good your product is. So I always wanted to get a financing. But if promotion is difficult, is financing easy? The chicken soup said again: "All the money floating on Zhongguancun Chuangye Street is money, and as long as you come, it is yours." Ha ha, I laughed and said nothing.

The CTO was on stage at the annual employee meeting. After some time he said:"well,I never wanted to hire X and Y. They're doing nothing but nonsense and the technic they are using is nothing but a hype."

The technic he talked about: Java, object oriented programming and cloud applications...

Did I get old or did I just finish plucking all the low hanging fruit?

When I started on a programming journey about a decade ago everything feel exciting and I learn a lot of things per day (variable,loop,method,class,---etc)

Now a decade later I am more concern with the overall system design,algorithms usage (Big O Notation),how reliable the system it,and how the configurations are set up and how easy is it to change them.

I now notice that I don't really learn anything learn new.Everything feel the same.

Want redundancy? Use more server

Want faster performance? Make a parallel system.

Want program to run on low end device? Think about how memory and storage will be used in system.

Is this a stage everyone went through like puberty? or I am just having a mid life crisis?

PS : I haven't even reach 30 yet but I feel too old.

My problem with “The DevOps Handbook” is the same problem I have with Star Trek: The Next Generation: it gave me seriously unrealistic expectations that senior leaders can be convinced to abandon stupid ideas.

Or maybe it’s just that in my mid-to-late thirties my tolerance for manglement is as low as it’s ever been, and I’ve grown out of that idealistic kiss-ass stage of my career.

…🤔

So recently i started using sublime merge. Found the ui kinda useful to review and stage files. Today i was double checking my staged files in smerge and bam! staged files worth an hour disappear! I am pretty sure i didnt click anything. It has to be sublime merge... right?? i could see an undo reset option in menu which didnt work.
Going back to good ol git cli. fuck git ui clients

Had my first and second stage interviews with a company all in the space of a few days.

Literally the day after the second interview, I got an email back saying I impressed them and they'll get back to me with the details of the next stage of the process soon (whether that's another interview or something else I don't know).

That was 2 weeks ago. Waiting and not knowing is the worst thing ever!!

Isn't it curious that most development libraries, frameworks, widgets in an ecosystem see a decrease in popularity when they reach a "no longer under active development"/ maintenance stage (especially exacerbated in the front-end)?

As if we just can't settle on a convention. As if, even for limited-scope solutions, a final stage can never be reached, there must be perpetual growth. As if we must constantly trade a solution for a shinier one, that just might provide us with 2% profit based on a doubtful forecast... or not. Sounds a lot like the investment capitalism that resulted in the 2008 subprime crisis. Not sure what to make of this thought but

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

Is there anyone here that's been doing the job 15+ years and has hit the I can't be arsed stage? The only way stuff seems to be getting done at the moment is when I hand it over to someone else. I think it's due to not really being pushed with learning new things etc. Also 3 kids in the mix might be doing it as well. Anyone know how to dig my way out of this?

Why must coming up with ideas be so fucking difficult, trying to work out names for variables and working out a file structure that makes sense for the SDK I'm working on is literally the only thing holding me back at this stage...

Ugh being a perfectionist and programmer is not a good mix .-.

EDIT: also just remembered of 2 YouTube series I want to make but can't think of a title so I haven't done them... Fantastic

I just finished this app I was working on, an app which I was supposed to be working on with a friend who never committed. It pisses me off that he didn't put in any input. We were supposed to work on different parts of the app. I had everything planned out, on how to make a certain function. But right now I'm just happy because I have no idea how I got it to work without the functions and at this stage I don't wanna check ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yes! You can fix bug in production stage. Think about today and get the joke.

Everyone knows how hard it is to get your first job. Everywhere wants 1-3 years of experience.

What noone tells you thought is that's hard at the other end. When you're looking for architect/tech lead roles you will see loads of postings but upon investigation they're just mislabeled senior developer positions.

And of course, if you're looking for good money, it feels almost impossible to get beyond the screening stage...

I want to make a game that collects a lot of questions for reuse and where players answer these one after another to make up the most dumb funny stories. Alas, it's in planning stage now.

When you think you know something and you can close the Task in a day ....
But your manager adds requirements at every stage and it's been 4 days, 50 commits but the task is still open ....

Manager Y U Do this?

every day my boss says he'll review the requirements for our product. every day he forgets to do so. every day he asks where the update for the next stage is. every day i remind him. every day he forg ---

Oh god i have been fighting with exoplayer library and ima sdk for past month and yet i haven't been able to figure out how to play multiple VAST tags without using a vmap.. if anyone knows this( or find this relevent and want more info regarding this) please, let's chat.

I am sometimes so irritated with open source. We are grateful that you made a great video player , but please for the love of god , document it nicely. No one can skimm through your 800 fucking classes, especially when a quarter of them are core c++ classes that an android dev never even touches.

Plus no replies on issues! My god, you know after SO, the second tab that's almost always open on my PC is that of some github library or issue. And am sure that must be the case of most of the devs. Then why can't you fucking reply?????

You see, this is typical google.. i am beleive they see everything and ignore it until the right moment comes... Android dev summit is coming, and they won't make any replies now, but would make big changes on the day of their on stage presentations like a boss, recieving lots of applauses, like " yay, they fixed it!! Yess more documentation " bull fucking shit.
My boss knows this and he is on my ass to find solutions before google releases solutions coz he wanna stay ahead of the competition
Thanks for fucking me, open source

Our clients came from abroad to have 4 days of business meetings and planing about next stage of product development. Of course they wanted to go shopping and to restaurants etc. Obviously they can not call a cab because they cannot say the name even close to its correct pronunciation. Who do you think needed to babysit them? You guessed right - me. FUCK MY LIFE

Hello devs!
Please help a fellow dev make a big career decision.
I am a person who is fascinated about AI.
So after working as a gameplay programmer, I have decided to switch my role as a R&D engineer in the same company. I will get to work on cool stuff in the ML and AI domain. But I have got this another job offer for a full stack developer role and the salary is supposed to be three times of my current package. It's great company but the only thing is that they do not have ML and AI in their tech stack. It has been only a year since I graduated, So I wanted to know what would be a good path. To follow what you like or to follow general software development with a great salary hike (which I am sure it would take many years to reach that amount in my current company). Also there are very few companies that offer such a good pay. I want to know that if I go with the salary option, Would it be possible for me to get into the AI domain at a later stage? I would appreciate if you share your experience as well.

My best teacher was with me for C++ in high school and in college. He had the most relaxed, laid back style while managing to both make the lessons fun.

Perhaps my favorite lesson was around C++ and Pointers. Lessons generally we mixed with long ramblings about the military and live coding examples. He was talking about object references and Navy ships when he told a student to "give me the USS Wisconsin". Perplexed, my classmate said he wasn't sure he could do that without a lot of help. So this teacher drew an arrow on a piece of paper, showed it to the class and then found the general direction he wanted it to aim for and taped it to a pole next to the stage. He called that a Pointer to a USS Wisconsin and then asked the student to give him the USS Wisconsin again.

I understand pointers today because of that lesson.

That one mistake you make in the initial stage and you have to live with it. build your code base around it. Since it will be too expensive to remove it. 😕😕😕😕😬😬😬

Me writing articles: …so think of Brodal-Okasaki heap as a set of endofunctors mapping the N-dimensional Hilbert continuum, simple as that
Me talking on stage: how is babby formed

I like to say programming is the art of "creative logic". Much like architecture has an aesthetic to consider or cooking has well-defined procedures with greatly varying inputs and outputs, there has to be room for creativity, be it at the planning stage or during wild improvisation sessions.

Without that creative aspect, software development sounds dreary to me.

Where science meets art is where the magic happens.

If only the artists shared this view and actually took an interest in the technical side...

How to approach job applications for EU and US market?

I have applied at multiple places and have never made it even to the first stage. The jobs I apply for, pretty much match my experience level and stack.

Does this have something to do with visa issues since I am from the Middle East?

Or is there something else I am possible missing out on.