Highlights from my week:

Prod access: Needed it for my last four tickets; just got it approved this week. No longer need it (urgently, anyway). During setup, sysops didn’t sync accounts, and didn’t know how. Left me to figure out the urls on my own. MFA not working.

Work phone: Discovered its MFA is tied to another coworker’s prod credentials. Security just made it work for both instead of fixing it.

My merchant communication ticket: I discovered sysops typo’d my cronjob so my feature hasn’t run since its release, and therefore never alerted merchants. They didn’t want to fix it outside of a standard release. Some yelling convinced them to do it anyway.

AWS ticket: wow I seriously don’t give a crap. Most boring ticket I have ever worked on. Also, the AWS guy said the project might not even be possible, so. Weee, great use of my time.

“Tiny, easy-peasy ticket”: Sounds easy (change a link based on record type). Impossible to test locally, or even view; requires environments I can’t access or deploy to. Specs don’t cover the record type, nor support creating them. Found and patched it anyway.

Completed work: Four of my tickets (two high-priority) have been sitting in code review for over a month now.

Prod release: Release team #2 didn’t release and didn’t bother telling anyone; Release team #1 tried releasing tickets that relied upon it. Good times were had.

QA: Begs for service status page; VP of engineering scoffs at it and says its practically impossible to build. I volunteered. QA cheered; VP ignored me.

Retro: Oops! Scrum master didn’t show up.

Coworker demo: dogshit code that works 1 out of 15 times; didn’t consider UX or user preferences. Today is code-freeze too, so it’s getting released like this. (Feature is using an AI service to rearrange menu options by usage and time of day…)

Micromanager response: “The UX doesn’t matter; our consumers want AI-driven models, and we can say we have delivered on that. It works, and that’s what matters. Good job on delivering!”

Yep.
So, how’s your week going?

I closed my work laptop yesterday around noon and dumped water on it. I was just so fed up.

Some spilled off onto my desk, though, so i gently moved (read: threw) the offending piece of plastic frustration onto the floor and carefully dried my desk.

On my way to the trash can, i stepped on the laptop. I stepped on it again on the way back, and later, on my way out the door.

I came in to get something half an hour later, and stepped on it again. It remained a stepping stone for the rest of the day, and accrued considerable foot traffic.

I spent the day drinking peach whiskey and playing with my children instead of working on reports. It was a good day.

Don't worry: my laptop still worked this morning, though I declined to.

Hey Root, we have a high priority ticket for you! It's adding some columns to a report. Should be simple. Details are in the ticket.

First: reports are some of the most boring, drool-inducing drudgery i have ever worked on.

Second: Specs for these reports are a nightmare since everything is ... very indirectly tested, and the specs are everywhere but where you'd expect them to be, so it's a lot of spelunking and trial/error. It's also slow as beans.

Anyway. The ticket's details are in ... not the worst engrish i've ever seen, but it's bad enough that i have no idea what they're asking despite (thus far) five attempts at deciphering it. There's also a numbered list of "fields" to add, so you'd think it would be straightforward. It is not. Half the list is crossed out, and half of the remaining items are feature requests (in yet more engrish), not columns to add. Also, one of the actual fields is impossible as the data it's asking for is not recorded anywhere.

yeah...

I cringe every time I see this person's name as the reporter because it's always the same. and honestly, there are more of these engrish people every month, and believe me: it isn't just a language barrier...

I was interviewed by the Clearpath Robotics about my experience with using their Dingo-O platform.
You can read about my project and the robot's journey here:

https://clearpathrobotics.com/blog/...

I managed to get a group of people to use an open source and privacy respecting service instead of its proprietary (surveillance) competitors today.

The experience was good for everyone and I wouldn't be surprised if at least some people who participated will remember this good working FLOSS solution.

My work is done here for the day :)

We made a Tetris cake 😁

It should have been named Monty and not Python. It is so misleading, now everyone thinks it is because of the snake

We got the report made by the EU committee that is assigned to evaluate our project (robotics in the service of healthcare).
I was full on trashing the reviewers for writing some seriously dumb shit, and low-key dissing my professor. Until I got to the part where they addressed the work package I was responsible for. They referred to my work as impressive and innovative, and I was like, well, maybe they're not that bad 😂

Shoutout to the homies wihout a horrible father figure in their lives. Can't say I'm part of the gang

"Why did you bring Wagyu beef to the meeting?"

"Because the calendar description said: Engineers should proactively add value for our steak holders"

(True story -- They told me to do what management instructs, without correcting anyone and without asking questions. And I love playing that game!)

I'm a tech lead for a digital agency.

Digital agencies are universally known for being shite. Why? Because they typically push through sub-optimal code with very little testing over tiny deadlines for maximum profit. Maybe I've just had bad experiences but this is the 5th digital agency that I've worked at that does this bollocks.

I am currently sitting on a Teams call at 8:39pm because the fuckwit project/account managers are unable to face up to the big scary client and ask them terrifying questions like "Is this bug a blocker for the deployment?" or "We don't have enough time to fix/change these things, can we delay another day?". They just assume that A - We will work into the evening, and B - that all the issues are P1 and that we should all 'pull together' as 'team players' to get this done in time.

No, Me and my team have to work into the evening for seemingly free because these pricks can't do their jobs properly.

The funniest thing of all? When I speak to the CTO about overtime payment he tries to make me feel bad about "we don't typically pay for overtime..."

Fuck Everyone.

Time to find a new contract.

If you touch me without my consent, I won't fight you. Instead, I'll be there for you, at your home, at night, wearing nothing but a cheaply made papier-mâché Shrek mask, in all my five-inch glory, with a cheese grater, telling you that you, my friend, are like an onion, that you have layers

I finally did it! I met my goal! After 6 months and a ton of interviews I finally found a new job! Good pay, good culture and actual options for career paths!

I was so sick of working were I wasn't growing or being valued. I can rant enough about what a weight off my mind this is!

Ref: https://devrant.com/rants/4792256/...

I didn’t. I went for an interview and quizzed this multi-million £ business about their architecture: it sounded awful.
I made some diagrams on how I would’ve done it, how it would scale etc and why. They were blown away and wanted me to implement this structure including the job they wanted to hire me for.
They sent a contract over: had the wrong name on it
They corrected the name but I noticed the salary was incorrect
They sent a third and by this time I was offered an interview elsewhere so I went

The hirer then called me to say he was frustrated I hadn’t signed a contract yet making it sound like it was my fault for not wanting to sign an illegitimate contract. he then went on to say that the salary had been reduced, I asked why and they said they felt I wasn’t a senior developer.
So I took the other job and they kept their shitty architecture 💁🏼‍♀️

Dear children let's talk about how to ask a f***ing question.

You don't just go "I need help. I can't figure it out." We had trainings on this, I sat through 3 hours holding your hand to help you try and understand things.

And yet now we have scheduled another 3 hours to help you figure this out because you said you were having difficulty with it because you couldn't figure it out. How about instead of just saying you "Need help", you start by
1. Explaining what you are trying to accomplish
2. What specific issue are you facing? Is there an error message or something?
3. What have you already tried thus far that didn't work?

Instead of "I NEED HELP I CAN'T FIGURE IT OUT!" that is the sign of a lazy f****ing engineer, someone who doesn't want to think, who doesn't want to learn something new who wants to just coast by. Especially when this is going to become an increasingly important part of your job.

And of course you currently are still a whole job level above me because sitting around and keeping a chair warm for 10 years means you are a valuable contributor, instead of what you can actually DO!

This bugs me so much. So remember kids, when you need help, or need to ask a question, ASK IT THE RIGHT F****ING WAY!

My advisor thought that my MCL algorithm behaves a bit strange, so he wanted me to investigate it. I said I'd be happy to review the code because I anyway considered refactoring, and asked if I can have another pair of eyes to help me.
A more senior PhD student was assigned to help me, and by the suggestion of my advisor we tested my code against a very well-written and well-performing implementation of MCL. This implementation was written by another professor, who is a close friend of my advisor and the actual supervisor of the student assigned to help.
But this implementation was optimized for a very specific type of maps, and on the maps I worked on it just failed consistently. The student, in a misguided attempt to protect the pride of his advisor and subsequently his, wasted days adding code and fine-tuning the implementation.
In the meantime, my MCL has a stable configuration that converges on both types of maps. It behaves differently, but the outcome is about the same as the other implementation.
I am a little sick of wasting my time (week+) on someone else's attempt to reassure their ego, so I'm doing my planned research work on the weekend...

> See unintelligible error from stuff that used to work and now it doesn't
> Ask colleagues if they ever met the error
> Fucktard colleague says "try using the debugger, if you run the code line by line you may probably understand what's wrong"

Dear Fucktard, I've been writing code for 7 years now, you can safely assume I know how to use a debugger if need be.
The thing: when I ask "have you ever met this error" I'm asking if you actually know what's going on, BEFORE diving in a 3 hours long debugging session of code written 6 years ago by people who have left the company in the meantime.

You don't always have to say something. Sometimes it happens: you may not have anything clever to add, and a simple "I'm sorry I don't know" is perfectly fine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Going through some terrible shit in life atm.. Didn't open devRant for a while and sure as the sun the stream made me smile.. Thanks..

Why?! Just why?!
I just upgraded LibreOffice on my Linux machine. To version 7.3.0.3.

Now every time I press save it just selects the save button box. Then I have to press it again to save. What is the reason for such a massive UI fail?

To cope I will probably just hit ctrl-s.

It has been a few years since I havn't touched any code, IDE, git or anything else.

And now, I'm trying to create a new personnal project for Warhammer with Laravel, Node, Tailwind and trying to understand all the webpacking thing ...

Dude, it's hard af to get back in business with all the new things ...

Any advice on how to get back ?

#Story time.
Been working on a project for 2 months with Colleague "Jim" doing the code reviews. Project is finished in a stable form and can be extended if needed. Then my other colleague/boss "Mo" decided that we need to do a refactor. Fast forward a bit and the conclusion is "Mo" and "Jim" are going to discuss every step with me. And we started a new project that should do the same as the project I just finished

Here some facts:
Every day a meeting/ code review / discussion.
Decisions they make I do not agree with.
I need to redo my work multiple times.

Now this does make me look like a toddler that needs supervision which is not the case.
They want something future proof and something that fits his new coding standard "Mo". and certain things I do agree with and is clearly the better architecture. however somethings are just stupid, time wasting, making it worse. I'm getting so frustrated by the fact that billion dollar companies have clear coding standards that work. and are correct. and this company decided to do their own thing of stupid rules!

- shorten variables
- Keep lines under 90char
- put multiple things in 1 file
- Keep function names short
and many more of removing stuff and let you guess stuff..

I just... *sigh* get so tired of this shit.

*names are randomly chosen

Up for a rollercoaster?

I had a super motivated day where i could focus and wanted to get my work done. My stupid work lappy instead kept throwing tantrums and totally prevented me from working. (Everything caused disk thrashing, took multiple minutes instead of seconds, etc.) Total shit day, but I felt great.

Next morning, I woke up all achy and cold. Ignored it and went to work. I was able to fix everything, and got my benchmarks running smoothly in all of fifteen minutes. Got good results, too! Left work and got married at the courthouse. :)

Went to a restaurant afterward, and two jolly fat guys (Off-duty Santa?!) bought us lunch.

Got home and… started feeling really awful. A little while later, I had a 102*f fever. Collapsed on the floor with an electric blanket and was absolutely miserable. Just kind of stared for hours, aching everywhere. Eventually went to bed, and my wife (!) made me all warm and comfy. And then I proceeded to be completely unable to sleep. Or move. Or think. Laid there for four hours unable to move, and shaking violently at any touch of cold air.

Now it’s 1am and I’m here at the freezing kitchen table writing this.

I am miserable.
Absolutely miserable.
But still happy, too!

🥶👰‍♀️💍👰🏻‍♀️

Sometimes I wish I was driven by positive reasons, and not by self-loathing and sense of worthlessness. I didn't have an actual vacation for over 3 years.
I am now in Thailand with my parents, and I am working my ass off to meet IROS/RAL deadline instead of chilling. The urge to continue working is really compulsive. I am very tired.
On a brighter note, the early experiments I ran look promising

Because DevOps in a lot of organizations is really “help desk for clueless developers”, conversations like this happen a lot:

Dev “hey the thing seems to be not working right”

Me “what does that even mean? I need you to be a good deal more specific. What thing. What isn’t working?”

Dev “I dunno”

Me “Are there error messages?”

Dev “yes”

Me “….would you like to share them with me?”

Dev *sends error*

Me “ok did you actually read this error message?”

Dev “yes”

Me “…so you’re good then? It says you’re trying to use a variable that hasn’t been declared yet. You should fix that. “

Dev “…”

Me “good luck”

Ruby is beautiful!

3rd week at my first developer job. Did a couple PRs with the help of my mentor. Still feel absolutely useless. I feel like a complete imposter.

My whitewashed LinkedIn profile keeps getting harassed by recruiters when no one looks at my real LinkedIn profile under my Chinese name.

To save everyone's time typing fuck you because I am using LinkedIn. I will type it for you: fuck me.

My company is 8 days late to pay my salary.

The government (uae) recommended a 4.5 work week and my company hinted they wont abide by it

My company promised us bonuses and shares a year ago that we still didnt get

Altho we have been working remotely for 2 years due to covid, they are also trying to enforce going to the office...

Everything about the company is way too toxic

I want to leave ...

but all my applications get ghosted so i feel like a slave, its like i need this company otherwise im jobless. I haye this

Oof, scope creep

Come back to an 8 month old project and I can't update the website because something in webpack needs something in python to compile... Um why. Literally just a poster with some images and a markdown parser.

So I spent 5 hours and 850 lines of code later modernizing the code and... I have the same website again but now it compiles. Woo?