Management : "How long you think it would take?"

Me : "now this is a rough estimate, but I think building the back-end and database alone could take 6-months minimum"

Management : "WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? YOU ARE NOT SERIOUS"

me : "its a big proj..."

Management : "I thought it will be something like 10 days, already told the client it can be done"

me : "but we are not ready"

Management : "how are we not ready? we already have the virtual 3D shop, and we can use this ready-to-deploy eCommerce service as our data base "
... "you need to figure this out, this is not acceptable" he continued

* 2 Days Later -talking to my direct boss *
Boss : "since you don't know how to do it..."

me : "what ? I didn't say I can't do it, all I said it will take six months"

Boss : "yeah yeah, anyway there is this studio, a professional polish studio, we called them and they can do it, we will sign a contract with them, this will let you focus on the front-end. good?"

me : "well alright then"

Boss : "please write a doc, explaining everything needed from the backend"
-to me that was the end of it, took a long time to tell me they made the deal-

* 5 Months later *
- "Abdu, can you come here for a minute..."
- "yes boss?"
- "the document we asked you to do for the Polish studio, did you specify that we needed an integration with the API we are using for eCommerce?"

scared to death I answered : "why of course I did!"
I ran to my PC to check it out because I didn't know, I forgot because no one even comment on my doc. I check it out, and it was clearly explained... I got relaxed...

turns out they didn't even do what we asked them for. took them 5 months, and with no communication whatsoever. all their work was useless to us. complete dump waste.

----------------
never mentioned this until a year later... in a heat of moment when they were asking me to make an impossible task with no men and no time... I reminded them of this story... management didn't like it. but it was the truth. they didnt push this crazily this time

Dev: this task is done, can I put it in review and do something else?

Me: sure, of course.

Dev: cool, just be aware I'll make some changes to it later.

Me: ... wait, then it's not done.

Dev: no it is, I just need to re-read it and make some changes.

Me: yeah, so it will be done when those changes are made.

Dev: but I don't know what those changes are.

Me: ... I get that ... but ... ok I'm extremely confused. Why do you think it's done.

Dev: because I've written everything I need to and I'm happy with it.

Me: ok so why do you want to make changes.

Dev: I don't.

Me: ... ... ... ... you ... you are really not being clear. If you don't want to make changes, and you are happy with it, why are you planning on making changes later ... after marking the task as done.

Dev: well if I re-read it and see something I don't like, I would like to change it.

Me: ok, so re-read it as many times as you like and make as many changes as you like. But don't mark it as done until it is done.

Dev: but it is done.

Me: no it's not.

Dev: it is, look.

Me: ... yeah looks ok at a quick glance.

Dev: ok so I can mark it as done?

Me: are you going to make more changes?

Dev: yes.

Me: then no.

Dev: why?

Me: BECAUSE ITS NOT DONE.

Dev: ok maybe I'm not explaining it clearly.

Me: ... we can both agree on that. Ok so to summarise, we don't mark something as done until we have stopped touching it. We don't half finish something and say it's done and comeback to it later. We mark it as done when we are happy with i.....

Dev: but I am happ.....

Me: *raises hand* I repeat, if it's done, we lock it away and stop touching it. If someone reads it and complains, we can come back to it with a new ticket. But it's not done until we think we are ready to send it on.

Dev: I am ready to send it, I just may want to change it.

Me: ... ... ... ... ... due to a new policy implemented just now, we are only allowed to send 1 email to a person each week. So unfortunately we can only send on 1 copy. So when you have that 1 copy, let me know.

Dev: ok, let me re-read it a few more times then.

Me: there you go.

The hardest part of being a programmer wasn't the education, the self-teaching, the sleepless nights or the hours of agony trying to fix a bug that would break a program I'd spend weeks working on.

It's the realization that my family, friends, coworkers...nobody understands at all what I do. They don't know of my failures or my triumphs. I can't talk about it with them and it's becoming more apparent to them that it's taking up more of my life. And in a way it feels like a part of myself has just become, well, alien.

Best way I can describe it is, it's like the "Tears in the Rain" scene from Blade Runner.

I'm stuck, I think. I know I've been shutting out people from my life more and more as I don't want to "deal" with people's issues, but I don't think it's been good. I'm can verify that I'm depressed beyond my normal levels.

It's time for me to make an appointment with a therapist.

Remember that you are loved here, and appreciated. Don't let anyone tell you different.

Stay strong.

I put a lot of work into trying to explain to you muggles what I do all day in a way you can understand (it's hard, trust me) and you still reject it as boring nerd crap. I'm sick of it! What if you told me working at that restaurant is "putting water on plates, wiping it off, and putting meat and cheese between slices of bread" and I said "wtf is that, and who cares?" Wouldn't that hurt your feelings, that I didn't even attempt to make a connection with you, friend? That I didn't even attempt to step outside my experience to meet yours? Isn't it equally insulting how far you have to dumb it down, just for me to lose interest entirely? And yes, I know that's not your specific task. That only proves my point further.

And why, exactly? Conceptually, you handle pre-digested poop all day.
_I teach plastic to think._ Sometimes it even thinks better than you do.
How is my job less interesting?
And what's more, why does EVERYONE seem to think so?

How do you expect people like me to keep your iPhones, bank accounts, and self-driving cars working if you alienate us like an alternate species for building those things? I mean really. You people treat us with a disinterest harmonious with homophobia. "Don't ask, don't tell." Except you do ask. And then you condescend as if working with my brain makes me less worthy of your attention than your exciting minimum-wage restaurant job.

Have fun with that, by the way.

Oh, and you're welcome for <object I fixed that wasn't really broken>. Maybe next time, just google it.
I know you won't.

IF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES WERE DRUGS:

JavaScript = Methamphetamine:
Anyone can cook some up at home but only pros can make the good stuff without blowing everything up.
Under the influence it tries to do everything at once, in seemingly no specific order before running off and making plenty of promises - but you have no clue if it kept any until it returns.

C = Heroin:
It takes some prep before you can take a hit but when you do it's far more potent than expected. When prepped (compiled) correctly it will induce complete and utter ecstasy but any error or abuse may kill you, leave you on the floor, in a coma or wishing you were dead.

HTML = Paracetamol(Panado):
Some don't think it's a real drug and others do. Either way you should grow a pair and try something a little more hardcore.

--------------------------------------

I came up with these after I randomly explained asynchronous js to a junior as synchronous code on meth. These were just off the top of my head, please feel free to correct or expand on them :-)

*meeting with boss about a quick site for one of her clients*

Boss- "okay so basically I just want you to copy the content from -already made site- and put it on the new one"

Me- "okay sure do you want it verbatim or "

Boss-"no but something similar"

Me-"okay so you want me to paraphrase this list that's on the homepage?"

Boss-"Well no we dont actually need the list at all as it isnt relevant to us so just take that out"

Me-"okay well that is the only thing on the homepage so what should I replace it with"

Boss-"I dont know, something similar to the list. You can figure something out"

Me-"....I dont know anything about the clients business. I am not going to just make up content, you guys can at least give me some direction there"

Boss-"i didnt think it would be that hard"

Me-"it's really not hard. You're making it harder than it needs to be for me though. Anyway, do you wanna keep the same exact pages as the other site or only transfer some of them or"

Boss-"something that resembles that website but isnt exactly it so some of the pages but not all"

Me-"which ones"

Boss-"the ones relevant to client's business"

Me-*closes notebook, stands up, starts to leave room*

Boss-"where are you going"

Me-"I'm going to get another two cups of coffee cause I didnt have enough this morning for this bullshit"

Boss-*raises eyebrow*

Me-"dont tell me to copy paste a website at first and then continue to tell me its going to be "similar" but different and then further continue to be as vague as possible about what is expected of me to be done in order to make it different! Take the time to decide what it is you want exactly and then tell me, with detail, what you're criteria is so I can do the thing!! I cant read your mind."

Boss-"..... I just didnt think it would be that hard to jot in a few sentences here and there"

I left the room at that point. Irritating as fuck. You dont know tech stuff, don't expect me to know enough about YOUR job to write about it as if I'm a professional. I cant fucking read minds, I have no interest in researching anything just to create the site content myself, and its fucking rude that they wont even take the time to sit down and decide what they want for a website that THEY are paying for. For fucks sake people get your fucking shit together

Not my mom, but my wife's whole family. I'm a software developer.

So we're invited to her grandmother's 85th birthday celebration with pretty much every family member they could think to invite. 100+ people, and we all sit down in a circle in a huge room to watch a video that my wife's father and aunts/uncles put together.

They start the video and there's no sound. I'm a software developer, so I'm not an expert in hardware issues. I try to turn invisible, because every tech person knows what comes next, and this is in the center of a room of people I don't know.

After about 15 minutes of people struggling to get the audio working, one of the people remembers I "work with computer". Soon I have a dozen people calling me to the center of the room.

I begrudgingly make my way to the computer and projector. Upon inspection, I find that the computer is connected via VGA to the projector.

Me: "This cable only carries video. You need a different kind of cable, or you can hook up an AUX cable--the kind you use for headphones."
Other Guy: "I used this cable earlier and the audio was working."
Me: "...that's weird. Well, can we try plugging in an AUX cable?"
Yet Another Guy: "Will this help?" Holds up an HDMI cable
Me: "Oh, yeah! That should do it."
Other Guy: "I tried plugging that in, but it didn't change anything."
Me: "Hmmm..." Quickly unplug VGA and plug in HDMI, then click play.

The sound comes out in its full cheesy music glory. Everybody cheers, and I walk back to my seat. Throughout the rest of party, I'm approached by various other family members who ask me if I can fix X since I'm a "computer guy". Isn't it great to work in tech?

I turned 40 yesterday. Here are some lessons I've learned, without fluff or BS.

1) Stop waiting for exceptional things to just happen. They rarely do, and they can't be counted on. Greatness is cultivated; it's a gradual process and it won't come without effort.

2) Jealousy is a monster that destroys everything in it's path. It's absolutely useless, except to remind us there's a better way. We can't always control how we feel, but we can choose how we react to those feelings.

When I was younger, jealousy in relationships always led to shit turning out worse than it probably would have otherwise. Even when it was justified, even when a relationship was over, jealousy led me to burn bridges that I wished I hadn't.

3) College isn't for everyone, but you'll rarely be put square in the middle of so much potential experience. You'll meet people you probably wouldn't have otherwise, and as you eventually pursue your major, you'll get to know people who share your passions and dreams. Despite all the bullshit ways in which college sucks, it's still a pretty unique path on the way to adulthood. But on that note...

4) Learn to manage your money. It's way too easy to get into unsustainable debt. It only gets worse, and it makes everything harder. We don't always see the consequence of credit cards and loans when we're young, because the future seems so distant and undecided. But that debt isn't going anywhere... Try not to borrow money that you can't imagine yourself paying back now.

5) Floss every day, not just a couple times per week when you remember, or when you've got something stuck in your teeth. It matters, even if you're in your 20s and you've never had a cavity.

6) You'll always hear about living in the moment, seizing the day... It's tough to actually do. But there's something to be said for looking inward, and trying to recognize when too much of our attention is focused elsewhere. Constantly serving the future won't always pay off, at least not in the ways we think it will when we're young.

This sentiment doesn't have much value when it's put in abstract, existential terms, like it usually is. The best you can do is try to be aware of your own willingness and ability to be open to experiences. Think about ways in which you might be rejecting the here and now, even if it's as seemingly-benign as not going out with some friends because you just saw them, or you already went to that place they're going to. We won't recognize the good old days for what they were until they're already gone. The trick is having as many good days as possible.

7) Don't start smoking; you'll never quit as soon as you'll think you can. If you do start, make yourself quit after a couple years, no matter what. Keep your vices in check; drugs and alcohol in moderation. Use condoms, use birth control.

8) Don't make love wait. Tell your friends and family you love them often, and show them when you can. You're going to lose people, so it's important. Statistically, some of you will die young, yourselves.

When it comes to relationships, don't settle if you can't tell yourself you're in love, and totally believe it. Don't let complacency and familiarity get in the way of pursuing love. Don't be afraid to end relationships because they're comfortable, or because you've already invested so much into them.

Being young is a gift, and it won't last forever. You need to use that gift to experience all the love that you can, at least as a means to finding the person you really want to grow old with, if that's what you want. Regardless, you don't want to miss out on loving someone, and being loved, because of fear. Don't be reckless; just be honest with yourself.

9) Take care of your body. Neglecting it makes everything tougher. That doesn't mean you have to work out every day and eat like a nutritionist, but if you're overweight or you have health issues, do what you can to fix it. Losing weight isn't easy, but it's not as hard as people make it out to be. And it's one of the most important things you can do to invest in a healthy adulthood.

Don't put off nagging health issues because you think you'll be fine, or you don't think you'll be able to afford it, or you're scared of the outcome. There will always be options, until there aren't. Most people never get to the no-options part. Or, they get there because all the other options expired.

10) Few things will haunt you like regret. Making the wrong choice, for example, usually won't hurt as much. I guess you can regret making the wrong choice, but my deepest regrets come from inaction, complacency and indifference.

So how can we avoid regret? I don't know, lol. I don't think it's as simple as just commiting to choices... Choosing to do nothing is still a choice, after all. I think it's more about listening to your gut, as cliche as that sounds.

To thine own self be true, I guess. It's worth a shot, even if you fail. Almost anything is better than regret.

We build a backup infrastructure at work to make sure that clients can restore their files and databases themselves when something gets fucked up.

We also have step by step tutorial on how to do this.

Every fucking day we get requests to restore backups.

Mostly used reason is "I'm a technical so I won't understand it".
With all due respect, if you don't understand this and keep asking without even trying, please don't host with us.
Because, if you did as I asked and actually read through the entire article, you would.
In case you're wondering, anytime one of us asks what part they don't understand, that question is simply ignored and they pushing for us restoring it anyways continues.

Sometimes they get angry and want to talk to someone higher up or start complaining that they're paying loads of money already and that it would just take us a second anyways.

If you would read the fucking tutorial/manual instead of trying to eat out your mother's badly shaved pussy and hopefully choke on it while you're at it, you wouldn't come asking us for it.
If you genuinely don't understand this article, feel free to ask but also provide us with cocksucking feedback.

Why do you think you have the right anyways to ask us to do it for free? We maintain the backup infrastructure which definitely isn't cheap but we do it so that you, pubic sniffing weazel, can do this shit on your fucking own.

You're entitled to ask us for help but not for asking us to restore your bullshit for free every freaking time.

Tip: give your parents some condoms. Because that way they hopefully won't reproduce again, we don't need more of you in this universe.

OH MY GOD, MY TEACHER DOES NOT TEACH MY FAVORITE LANGUAGE!

I've seen a lot of rants about teachers who use an outdated language, or don't accept the preferred framework or library of the ranter, or even force students to use a technology or even worse an OS they don't prefer.

Whats with that attitude?

I absolutely encourage young people to learn technology in their free time and it absolutely helps at building a career and become good at programming. I don't think being around 18 and never having worked in a real job is the time to select "the most superior language and technology".

Actually, that time is never.

Technology is evolving all the time and different tech evolves in different paths for different purposes. Get rid of the idea, that there is a "best" and get rid of the idea, that you will always be able to work with what you think is best.

If you're really really really awesome, you can chose to do what you like most. Not awesome as in "i learned programming in my free time, now i'm better than my programming-for-beginners-course teacher" but awesome as in "start my own company and can afford to only take the jobs i feel like doing", that awesome. Most likely, you're not (yet).

In the real world, you will very likely sometimes be required to work with technology you don't prefer. Maybe with something you think is really bad. Probably, it's not that bad. More likely, you read it on the internet from someone whose self-image is based on on loving TechA and hating TechB. A lot of much hated technology is at least okay for it's intended use. Maybe not the most pleasant time you will ever have, but no reason to jump out of the window. Hey, and if you get used to it, you may even start to like it. At least, learn to retain some dignity when confronted with things you don't like.

You can still think that one thing is better than another, but if you make a huge drama out of it, you just make it harder for yourself. The best programmer is the one who get's shit done, not the one with the saltiest tears.

So our company hired a new COO few months ago, and he oversees digital department as well

recently he called the digital department into his office to talk about a new campaign for a client, and client's mascot is a ladybug, so he goes like this

COO: So i was thinking, we need to make people more aware about the new branch opening

COO: I have a creative / innovative idea, we probably can get an award for this and I'm sure client will be really impressed with this. Why don't we put ladybug​s on Google homepage, just walking around flapping their wings and stuff, i mean everyone visits Google right ?

Our Team: awkwardly looking at each other
Me: 😐😐😐😐
( I was confused what to think )

Then our designer calmly explained him why it wouldn't work while we were trying our best not to laugh

how the fuck someone like him manage to stay alive all these years and become a COO, i mean he doesn't have to know it all but damn this is common sense

Please don't make junior developers feel they're a burden.
Have you ever googled "how to mentor junior developers"? It's quite mind-blowing how many articles, talks and panels are on this topic. And yet still junior developers are not feeling welcomed in their companies.
Yup, you guessed it, we also have something to add (based on our own experience):

1. Asking for help is not easy. Please don't blow juniors off by telling them to read docs when they ask a question. Always assume they've read it and did a sprint to solve the problem. They ask you, because they see you as a mentor and really need your help. If you can, spend more time with them and guide through the entire problem solving process.

2. Please don't think "I learnt it this way so you should too". If you're in charge of teaching a junior developer, don't expect them to be a carbon copy of yourself. Because even though in your opinion your approach is more "pro", they might not be there yet to use it properly. And last, but not least:

3. Of course, juniors will compare themselves with seniors on their team. And there'll be moments they feel so guilty and so afraid that they cost the company too much, that they need training, and supervision, or are between projects and are not bringing in any money, and they'll fear that their company regrets hiring them. Make sure they don't feel like a burden. As juniors, we often
have this misconception what is expected from us.

Dear tech companies, please set very clear expectations and tell your juniors you're happy. Don't get us wrong here. We don't expect unicorns, roses and pats on the back from companies. We do understand- this is business, and at the end of the day we all are here to make money. To do so, companies need to make smart investments. Junior dev with a great assistance, planned support, and a clear training program will become a great asset. It really is as simple as that.

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

Seven months ago:
===============
Project Manager: - "Guys, we need to make this brand new ProjectX, here are the specs. What do you think?"

Bored Old Lead: - "I was going to resign this week but you've convinced me, this is a challenge, I never worked with this stack, I'm staying! I'll gladly play with this framework I never used before, it seems to work with this libA I can use here and this libB that I can use here! Such fun!"

Project Manager: - "Awesome! I'm counting on you!"

Six months ago:
====================
Cprn: - "So this part you asked me to implement is tons of work due to the way you're using libA. I really don't think we need it here. We could use a more common approach."

Bored Old Lead: - "No, I already rewrote parts of libB to work with libA, we're keeping it. Just do what's needed."

Cprn: - "Really? Oh, I see. It solves this one issue I'm having at least. Did you push the changes upstream?"

Bored Old Lead: - "No, nobody uses it like that, people don't need it."

Cprn: - "Wait... What? Then why did you even *think* about using those two libs together? It makes no sense."

Bored Old Lead: - "Come on, it's a challenge! Read it! Understand it! It'll make you a better coder!"

Four months ago:
==============
Cprn: - "That version of the framework you used is loosing support next month. We really should update."

Bored Old Lead: - "Yeah, we can't. I changed some core framework mechanics and the patches won't work with the new version. I'd have to rewrite these."

Cprn: - "Please do?"

Bored Old Lead: - "Nah, it's a waste of time! We're not updating!"

Three months ago:
===============
Bored Old Lead: - "The code you committed doesn't pass the tests."

Cprn: - "I just run it on my working copy and everything passes."

Bored Old Lead: - "Doesn't work on mine."

Cprn: - "Let me take a look... Ah! Here you go! You've misused these two options in the framework config for your dev environment."

Bored Old Lead: - "No, I had to hack them like that to work with libB."

Cprn: - "But the new framework version already brings everything we need from libB. We could just update and drop it."

Bored Old Lead: - "No! Can't update, remember?"

Last Friday:
=========
Bored Old Lead: - "You need to rewrite these tests. They work really slow. Two hours to pass all."

Cprn: - "What..? How come? I just run them on revision from this morning and all passed in a minute."

Bored Old Lead: - "Pull the changes and try again. I changed few input dataset objects and then copied results from error messages to assertions to make the tests pass and now it takes two hours. I've narrowed it to those weird tests here."

Cprn: - "Yeah, all of those use ORM. Maybe it's something with the model?"

Bored Old Lead: - "No, all is fine with the model. I was just there rewriting the way framework maps data types to accommodate for my new type that's really just an enum but I made it into a special custom object that needs special custom handling in the ORM. I haven't noticed any issues."

Cprn: - "What!? This makes *zero* sense! You're rewriting vendor code and expect everything to just work!? You're using libs that aren't designed to work together in production code because you wanted a challenge!?? And when everything blows up you're blaming my test code that you're feeding with incorrect dataset!??? See you on Monday, I'm going home! *door slam*"

Today:
=====
Project Manager: - "Cprn, Bored Old Lead left on Friday. He said he can't work with you. You're responsible for Project X now."

Wow this one deserves a rant. Where should I even begin? I got a new job for over half a year now doing work in an agency. We're building websites and online shops with Typo3 and Shopware (not my dream, but hey). All fine you might think BUT...

1) I have been working on the BIGGEST project we have all by myself since I started working at this company. No help, nobody cares.

2) If something goes wrong all the shit falls back to me like "wHy DiDnT yoU WoRk MoRE?". Seriously? How should one dev cover a project that's meant for at least two or three.

3) The project was planned four years ago (YES that's a big fat FOUR) and sat there for 3,5 years - nobody gave a fuck. I got into the company and immediately got the sucky shit project to work on.

4) I was promised some time to get familiar with the projects and tech we use and "pick something I like most to get started". Well that never happened.

5) I was also promised not to talk directly to our customers. Well, each week I was bombarded with insults, a shitload of work and nonsense by our customers because (you guessed it) I was obligated to attend meetings.

6) The scheduled time for a meeting was 30 minutes, sometimes they just went on for over two hours. Fml.

7) Project management. It does not exist. The company is just out to get more and more clients, hires more god damn managers and shit and completely neglects that we might need more devs to get all this crap finished. Nope, they don't care. By the way: this is not like a 200 employee company, it's more like 15 which makes it even sadder to have 4 managers and 3 devs.

8) We don't use trello (or anything to keep track of our "progress"), nobody knows the exact scope of the project, because it was planned FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO.

9) They planned to use 3 months on this project to get it finished (by the way it's not just an online shop, it has a really sophisticated product configurator with like 20 dependencies). Well, we're double over that time period and it is still not finished.

10) FUCK YOU SHOPWARE

11) The clients are super unsatisfied with our service (who would have guessed). They never received official documents from us (that's why nobody knows the scope), nor did they receive the actual screen design of the shop so we just have to make it up on the go. Of course I mean "I" by "we", because appearently it is my job to develop, design and manage this shit show.

12) My boss regularly throws me in front of the bus by randomly joining meetings with my client telling them the complete opposite of things that we discussed internally (he doesn't know anything about this stupid project)

13) FUCK YOU COLLEAGUES, FUCK YOU COMPANY, FUCK YOU SHOPWARE AND FUCK YOU STUPID CUSTOMERS.

14) Oh btw. the salary sucks ass, it's barely a couple of bucks above minimum wage. Don't ask me why I accepted the offer. I guess it was better than nothing in the meantime.

Boy that feels good. I needed that rant. But hey don't get me wrong. I get that dev jobs can be hard and sucky, but this is beyond stupidity that I can bear. I therefore applied for a dev job in research at a university in my dream country. Nice colleagues, interesting projects, good project management. They accepted me, gave me a good offer and I can happily say that in 6-7 weeks my current company can go fuck themselves (nobody knows the 10.000+ lines of code but me). Just light it up and watch it burn!

OH MY GOD

WHO NAMES A CONFERENCE ROOM AFTER AN -ADDRESS-??

At my new job, we had all day training on Friday. It was emphasized many times that we should not be late. I look at the meeting invite many times, and it says [123 Fake], with Fake being a Very Well Known Street, and I see on Google Maps that there's an office building there. Great, we must have an off-site training facility to help our clients become certified in our product. It doesn't say which floor, but I assume the small space we have in that large office building will become evident once I check in with lobby security.

Friday morning comes, I get to the office building 20 minutes early, and try to check in. They've never heard of my company. Maybe there's a computer lab we rent out? No, they don't know anything about that. I don't have work email or slack set up on my phone yet, so who do I call? I try reception, no one answers. Eventually I call our customer support line.

I shouldn't be at 123 Fake St. I should be at the office. Because that's the name of the conference room!

YOU HAD ONE JOB, ROOM NAMER!

Last night my boyfriend and I tried to think of worse names for conference rooms. The only ones I could think of were "meeting canceled" (but with that, at least I would be in the correct fucking building!) or just naming every conference room "conference room". Here's the thing: there's not just one 123 Fake St room! There's two of them right next to each other! So you can easily show up and think, I remember I was supposed to be in this room, but which one?

And I'm not even the first person to make this mistake. CLIENTS have gone to the wrong building before because they get included on meeting invitations that include conference room names! WTF!

It's pretty common to have Chicago conference rooms named after neighborhoods, or iconic buildings, etc. But nobody is going to think, "meeting in Bucktown? I'll just wander around the neighborhood until I find people with laptops". It's obviously a conference room. BUT A FUCKING ADDRESS OF A NEARBY OFFICE BUILDING? It's not even an iconic of a building!

Names matter. I care a lot about names in code. I never realized it could apply to the physical world as well. So now I am on a mission to change the names of these Goddamm conference rooms so I'm the last person to be directed to the wrong fucking building.

OH, and I'm out $9 for a taxi ride and a pair of gloves that got lost in the taxi so that's GREAT.

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.

🖕

Co-worker: hey, can you create an email?

Me: yeah, who needs one? There are no records indicating any new people starting for another two weeks.

Cw: if for Stan, he started today. Also he needs a computer set up.

Me: who the hell is Stan and why are there no records of this person?

Cw: he's new, he started today so we didn't need an email or computer before today.

Me: I get that they're new, but what happened to giving the IT department at least 3 days notice on new hires so I can make sure things get taken care of?

Cw: you know how it is around here, nobody gets notice for anything. So can you get that email and computer setup for me, he can't work without them.

Me: I get that we don't actually plan for anything around here and that 90% of my job is fixing that failure, but hiring someone isn't like a system failing, people don't just show up and say "I start today" they have to go through interviews and background checks and other stuff, someone besides this person knew they started today so I don't think it's too much to ask that I get an email when the offer is extended to the person so I can prepare a system.

Cw: well we interviewed him two weeks ago and he accepted the offer last week, he's here and waiting so just as soon as you can please.

Me: well here's an email, the computer is gonna have to wait, I have a lot going on today and I don't have any computers ready right now.

*Seriously tempted to make them wait till next week to cover the 3 days notice I've asked for 100 times*

"Hey, about that matter from yesterday..."
"Yes, what about that?"
"We need to talk about that again! How often do you trigger that system?"
"Once."
"You sure?"
"Yes, but i can check it, if you like."
*find references*
"See, only once."
"Can it happen at a random point later one?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes"
"Can you check it?"
"Okay."
*shows code"
"Look here, as you can see, it will not happen at other times."
"Do you have an idea why it could happen anyway?"
"Maybe that system does the action without my software telling it to do so, wasn't that specified that way?"
"Yes, but it normally does that roughly 10 seconds after you give the command the first time, so we thought maybe you could say what makes it do the action at other points maybe."
"Did you check that systems sourcecode?"
"No not yet. But did that happen with the older version?"
"No. But we didn't try."
"Did you change something between the versions?"
"Yes, the new feature."
"Could that make a change in behaviour?"
"I don't see how."
"Can you remove that feature for test?"
"We can take the old version."
"No, we need the new version, but without the feature you added."
"That IS the old version, there is no other difference!"
"Are you sure?"
"Would you like to see it in source control?"
"No, ~ okay. What do you think causes the problem?"
"I haven't had any new ideas since we talked yesterday."
"Okay. Mhhh,...okay. Lets talk again later."

YES SURE! BRING IT ON! I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO THAT! PLEASE COME BY OR CALL ME AGAIN! AND BRING THE BOSS WITH YOU, TO SHOW HOW SERIOUS THE MATTER IS! LET ME TELL HIM THE STUFF I TOLD SEVEN TIMES LAST WEEK!

Today was hell on earth as for user support. Phone going non stop, tickets coming in faster than we were able to process.

At the end of the day I had to make a symlink for a customer which is fine. But, the day was so busy that I just couldn't focus anymore.
I've made 1K+ symlinks in my life probably but I couldn't remember if the source or destination comes first with a symlink.... The day has been hell and I just couldn't bring up a single second of focus anymore..

Fuck it, I'll do it tomorrow. I know I can do this but I don't trust myself with this right now in case of a huge webshop (swap the source/destination: webshop gone).

I think I'll thank myself for this tomorrow.

!dev
!!misery

I'm drunk, so it's time for some faux-emotional, blunt oversharing. and lots of profanity. It won't be pretty.

------

I'm miserable. I can't sleep at night. When I finally manage to, I sleep like crap. In the morning, early, I get woken up by my children screaming or pulling my hair or jumping on either the bed or me, or talking ad furore, or any number of other miserably unpleasant things that completely prevent sleep. So I'm tired every single day, which totally surprisingly makes focusing on work fucking difficult. Doubly so because the work is fucking uninteresting and the code is awful to read and difficult to understand because it's complicated and often poorly written. And extending it takes enormous mental effort I simply do not have to give. Oh! Guess what my job is?

To make matters worse, time to myself basically does not exist, ever. I wake up, I attend standup, I cook and eat breakfast, I work while fighting against endless distractions and interruptions, I cook and eat dinner, I work some more, and finally: I can go to bed and try to sleep. The next morning, I wake up and repeat this misery, ad nauseam.

Et ad nauseam? Nauseam est nunc.
It's not proper latin, but fuck you. it's good enough. and nobody speaks it anyway.

Ego sum miseriae. Is that good enough for you?

I can't find it in myself to care about anything. I've been doing whatever I can to feel a little more normal, but mostly I just feel numb. If I drink, it helps a little because I notice my misery a little less. That's a great solution right there: drink until I don't care anymore, and keep doing the same shit without even trying to make things better. Why? Because I fucking can't. I hate this house, I hate the lack of quiet, I hate this city, I hate the dust and the clutter, I hate this state, I hate this codebase, I don't like my coworkers, I hate that I can't get a fucking thing done without spending 6x longer than it should, I hate that I can't fucking think of a single thing I want to do, I hate that I can't ever enjoy anything, I hate that I'm beginning to hate myself, and I fucking hate everything else, too.

In short:
I'm not happy. I'm fucking miserable.

And no, I'm not posting this here for you to psychoanalyze me or suggest solutions. It's for me to vent. Fuck your opinions and fuck your advice and fuck you.

It wasn't my curiosity that introduced me to programming. Actually, it was my mother.

It was about six years ago, when I'd told her I'd like to make video-games, like all kids do. She didn't just nod and go about her way. She found a free course that taught programming to kids my age and immediately enrolled me. Looking back, it was surely the best thing she'd done for me, because it gave me a purpose and a future to look forward to.

The course was interesting. We learned the basics of C++, then moved on to harder topics like algorithms and data types. But more and more, I was beginning to feel left behind. Like I didn't belong there. It didn't help that I only programmed on the course, with no practice back home.

I felt scared of the future. Thought I didn't have what it takes to become a programmer. I might have broken the last straw when I started playing truant and went to McDonald's to pass the time. Because every time I did go to the course, I felt stupid and anxious. So I simply skipped.

Time passed. I got more depressed, became more antisocial, my self-esteem took a nosedive. And when it comes to depression, people always seek an escape path.

I got my escape in fiction. Started reading books, tried writing stories, and it got to the point where I asked my mother if I could become a writer and not a programmer.

And guess what? She said, "Do what brings you happiness. This is your life."

It's funny, that such a silly line stopped and got me to think. Turned out, I didn't program for fun, for myself or for my career. I'd done it for my parents, for their expectations and I was scared that in failing, I'd become a loser in their eyes.

I dropped out of the programming course. Not because it sucked, but because I wasn't going there for myself, but for my parents. But I didn't quit programming. No, I watched countless tutorials, youtube videos, browsed StackOverflow, read some books, coded every day, and now I can say without hesitation, that I love programming. I'm hooked. And I don't want to stop.

If you've read this so far, I'm sorry for my rambling. I will now leave you with only one tip: If you decided to do something, do it for yourself. Forget about parents, expectations, career, future, time or money and do it only because you want to. Because nothing else matters. Only your happiness.

Merry Christmas everyone 🙂

This year I didn't prepare anything for it, and family won't be visited this year. I think it's better this way. My mother didn't piss on me when I was on fire - back when I was homeless and begged her to be allowed back in her home, she told me to deal with it on my own. She's been homeless herself and knows how terrible it is. I dealt with it. I hate my mother because of that, and visiting her was always an act, a formality.

Not anymore. Half a year ago I cut ties with her.. and honestly, it's for the best. I don't want to get hurt anymore by visiting the house that should've been a refuge but wasn't when I needed it most. And I got rid of it, in favor of my own stuff. And a family of my own, a community of fellow developers with whom I feel a far stronger bond than a family could ever be. You are my new family, my dearest friends. And unlike those blood bonds that make up a family unconditionally, you can bet your ass that you've very much deserved my respect.

Merry Christmas.. unlike with my biological family, I've found refuge in devRant and its community every time I needed it most. Seriously, I can't thank you enough for that. I love you all.. thank you for being my precious family! ♥️

I fucking hate Internet of Things, I think that it's a ridiculous idea to connect things, that work perfectly fine, to the internet.
The 'convenience' you get is minimalistic and most of the time non existent.
It is also often insanely insecure and expensive. The burdans it brings with it most of the time just outweigh the positive sides of it.

Now today happened something that made me hate it even more. Today was the First Lego Lego (Lego competition with ev3 robots, etc.) and one part of the tournament is to find a solution for a given problem. This year the general topic was hydro-dynamics and so the problem was how you can reduce water usage and 'save' water.

Our idea was to make reusable coffee cups and give them to the local coffee shops. One time use paper cups use take around 400ml water when produced) Basically you buy a cup once for 5 bucks and you get your coffee served in it. After drinking the coffee you return the cup to a local cafe and get a chip as pawn. When you buy your next coffee, you give them your chip and get it served in another reusable cup. The are at the moment already around 1000 cups going around the city.

Now this was our idea and we got ranked third. I am not too mad about our rank but what really drives me fucking mad is the team who ranked first.

Their idea was to make a pump (using an arduino) and a humidity sensor which you stick into a plant and the pump pumps water when the plant is too dry.
However (you probably guessed it already) they went a step further and connected it to the internet. They also made a web 'interface' for it so you can control the pump with your smartphone / computer / smartwatch / tv / whatever the fuck is connected to the internet nowadays 'thanks' to the iot 'revolution'.

So it is a pump that waters your plant when it is too dry BUT it is also connected to the internet.

WHY THE FUCK DOES THIS HAVE TO BE CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET.

"Oh look it is connected to the internet, wow awesome, oh it is also 'smart'. oh cooool. Nice I don't have to water my plants anymore"

A funny thing is that one of my friends built basically the same thing without connecting it to the internet. He built a small box with a pump and a humidity sensor that measures if the dirt is too dry and then waters the plant. It checks every few hours and the also is a small 16x2 LCD and a knob that you can turn to control how much water it should give the plant each time it waters it. He built it and I programmed it for him. Works perfectly fine and I don't see any reason why there should be any need to connect something like this to the internet.

Anyway we got ranked third, they first. I guess we should connect our coffee cups to the internet in some way ...

!Story

The day I became the 400 pound Chinese hacker 4chan.

I built this front-end solution for a client (but behind a back end login), and we get on the line with some fancy European team who will handle penetration testing for the client as we are nearing dev completion.

They seem... pretty confident in themselves, and pretty disrespectful to the LAMP environment, and make the client worry even though it's behind a login the project is still vulnerable. No idea why the client hired an uppity .NET house to test a LAMP app. I don't even bother asking these questions anymore...

And worse, they insist we allow them to scrape for vulnerabilities BEHIND the server side login. As though a user was already compromised.

So, I know I want to fuck with them. and I sit around and smoke some weed and just let this issue marinate around in my crazy ass brain for a bit. Trying to think of a way I can obfuscate all this localStorage and what it's doing... And then, inspiration strikes.

I know this library for compressing JSON. I only use it when localStorage space gets tight, and this project was only storing a few k to localStorage... so compression was unnecessary, but what the hell. Problem: it would be obvious from exposed source that it was being called.

After a little more thought, I decide to override the addslashes and stripslashes functions and to do the compression/decompression from within those overrides.

I then minify the whole thing and stash it in the minified jquery file.

So, what LOOKS from exposed client side code to be a simple addslashes ends up compressing the JSON before putting it in localStorage. And what LOOKS like a stripslashes decompresses.

Now, the compression does some bit math that frankly is over my head, but the practical result is if you output the data compressed, it looks like mandarin and random characters. As a result, everything that can be seen in dev tools looks like the image.

So we GIVE the penetration team login credentials... they log in and start trying to crack it.

I sit and wait. Grinning as fuck.

Not even an hour goes by and they call an emergency meeting. I can barely contain laughter.

We get my PM and me and then several guys from their team on the line. They share screen and show the dev tools.

"We think you may have been compromised by a Chinese hacker!"

I mute and then die my ass off. Holy shit this is maybe the best thing I've ever done.

My PM, who has seen me use the JSON compression technique before and knows exactly whats up starts telling them about it so they don't freak out. And finally I unmute and manage a, "Guys... I'm standing right here." between gasped laughter.

If only it was more common to use video in these calls because I WISH I could have seen their faces.

Anyway, they calmed their attitude down, we told them how to decompress the localStorage, and then they still didn't find jack shit because i'm a fucking badass and even after we gave them keys to the login and gave them keys to my secret localStorage it only led to AWS Cognito protected async calls.

Anyway, that's the story of how I became a "Chinese hacker" and made a room full of penetration testers look like morons with a (reasonably) simple JS trick.

A decade ago 800x600 was pretty much the standard resolution for devices and 5 sec response time was considered fast. Animations were minimal and websites were easier to read. Programmers debated around topics like which loop runs faster, i++ or ++i, while vs doWhile and so on. In general, we were closer to understanding what happens behind the browser curtain and how code needs to be organized to make it more maintainable.

Today the level of abstraction is much higher. I don't think devs can contemplate on the finer aspects of programming efficiency; they'd rather rely on a code library to do all the grunt work. With the explosion of devices and platforms, the focus has shifted from programming to assembling. Programmers need to know their tools first, then write code. The tool is expected to work well with a millisecond response time, not the programmer's code.

Moving forward, I think programming would be more about building higher abstraction utilities/libraries that are integrated by other tools, which is already happening. Marketing an App would become more important than the actual skill needed to develop it.

A bit far-fetched, but I think the future programmer would be a lot like a stock market analyst who has a bunch of windows in front, just observing data or algorithm patterns created by an AI engine and cherry-picking a specific combination of modules that might make the next big sensational app.

> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job

I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.

My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.

Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.

I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.

On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄

I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.

I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.

I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.

I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.

But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.

I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.

But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.

So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.

So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.

Fuck code.org. Fuck code. Not code code, but "code" (the word "code"). I hate it. At least for teaching. Devs can use it as much as they want, they know what it means and know you can't hack facebook with 10 seconds of furiously typing "code" into a terminal. What the fuck are you thinking when you want me to hack facebook? No, when I program, it's not opening terminal, changing to green text and typing "hack <insert website name here, if none is given, this will result to facebook.com>" Can you just shut the fuck up about how you think that because you can change the font in google fucking docs you have the right to tell me what code can and can't do? No, fuck you. Now to my main point, fuck "code" (the string). It's an overused word, and it's nothing but a buzzword (to non devs, you guys know what you're talking about. how many times have you seen someone think they are a genius when they here the word "code"?) People who don't know shit don't call themselves programmers or devs, they call themselves coders. Why? It fucking sounds cool, and I won't deny that, but the way it's talked about in movies, by people, (fucking) code.org, etc, just makes people too much of a bitch for me to handle. I want everyone reading this rant who has friends who respect the fact that YOU know code (I truly believe everyone on devRant does), how it works, and it's/your limitations, AND that it takes hard work and effort, to thank god right now. If you're stuck with some people like me, I feel you. Never say "code" near them again. Say "program." I really hate people who think they know what an HTML tag is and go around calling themselves coders. Now onto my main point, code.org. FUCK IT. CAN YOU STOP RUINING MY FUCKING AP CS CLASS. NO CODE.ORG, I DON'T NEED TO WATCH YOUR TEN GODDAMN VIDEOS ON HOW TECHNOLOGY IS IMPORTANT, <sarcasm>I'VE BEEN LIVING UNDER A ROCK FOR THIRTY YEARS</sarcasm>. DO I REALLY NEED ANOTHER COPY OF SCRATCH? WAIT, NO, SCRATCH WAS BETTER. YOU HAD FUCKING MICROSOFT, GOOGLE, AND OTHER TECHNOLOGICAL GIANTS AND YOU FUCKED UP SO BAD YOU MADE IT WORSE THAT SCRATCH. JUST LETMECODE (yes I said that) AND STOP TALKING ABOUT HOW SOME IRRELEVANT ROBOT ARM DEVELOPED BY MIT IS USING AI AND MACHINE LEARNING TO MAKE SOME ROBOT EVOLVE?! IF YOU SPEND ONE MORE SECOND SAYING "INNOVATION" I'LL SHOVE THAT PRINT STATEMENT YOU HAVE A SYNTAX ERROR UP YOUR ASS. DON'T GET ME FUCKING STARTED ON HOW ITS IMPOSSIBLE TO DO ANYTHING FOR YOURSELF WHEN YOUR GETTING ALL THE ANSWERS WITHOUT DOING ANY WORK AND THE FACT THAT JAVASCRIPT IS YOUR FUCKING LANGUAGE. <sarcasm>GREAT IDEA, LETS GET THESE NEW PROGRAMMERS INTO A PROFESSIONAL ENVOIRMENT BY ADDING A DRAG AND DROP CODE (obviously we can say it) EDITOR</sarcasm> MAYBE IF YOU GOT THIS SHIT UP YOUR ASS AND TO YOUR BRAIN YOU'D ACTUALLY GET TO PRPGRAMMING IN YOUR ADVANCED AP COURSE. ITS CALLED FUCKING CODE.ORG FOR A REASON

Code review:

- Almond: This method here is a mix of convoluted loops conditionals and ternaries... I really don't think we can pass this. Can we make sure this logic is a lot clearer?
- Bob: Oh, ok, sure. I'll work on that.

Next day:

- Bob: I've hopefully cleared up the meaning of that code now.
- Almond: Sure, let me look. Err... it looks the same to me? Have you done it in another branch?
- Bob: Oh no, it is the same, but there's a link in the code now to a PNG of a flowchart I put together in draw.io to show how it works.

...🤦‍♂️

To those that think they can't make it.
To those that are put down by those that don't understand you.
And to those that have never had a dream come true.

Not a rant, but the story of how I got into programming

I've always been into tech/electronics. I remember being told once that when I was 3, I used to take plug sockets to pieces. When I was 7, I built a computer with my dad.
There isn't a thing in my room that hasn't been dismantled and put back together again. Except for the things that weren't put back together again ;)

When I was 15, I got a phone for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy phone, the LG P350 (optimus ME). But I loved it all the same.
However I knew it could do a lot more. It ran a bloated, slow version of Android 2.2.
So I went searching, how can I make it faster, how to make it do more. And I found a huge community around Android ROMs. Obviously the first thing I did was flashed this ROM. Sure, there were bugs, but I was instantly in love with it. My phone was freed.

From there I went on to exploring what else can be done.
I wanted to learn how to script, so over the weekend I wrote a 1000 line batch (Windows cmd) script that would root the phone and flash a recovery environment onto it. Pretty basic. Lots of switch statements, but I was proud of it. I'd achieved something. It wasn't new to the world, but it was my first experience at programming.

But it wasn't enough, I needed more.
So I set out to actually building the roms. I installed Linux. I wanted to learn how to utilise Linux better, so I rewrote my script in bash.
By this time, I'd joined a team for developing on similar spec'd phones. Without the funds to by new devices, we began working on more radical projects.
Between us, we ported newer kernels to our devices. We rebased much of the chipset drivers onto newer equivalents to add new features.

And then..

Well, it was exam season. I was suffering from personal issues (which I will not detail), and that, with the work on Android, I ended up failing the exams.
I still passed, but not to the level I expected.

So I gave up on school, and went head first into a new kind of development. "continue doing what you love. You'll make it" is what I told myself.

I found python by contributing to an IRC bot. I learnt it by reading the codebase. Anything I didn't understand, I researched. Anything I wanted to do, google was there to help me through it.

Then it was exam season again. Even though I'd given up on school, I was still going. It was easier to stay in than do anything about it.
A few weeks before the exams, I had a panic attack. I was behind on coursework, and I knew I would do poorly on exams.
So I dropped out.
I was disappointed, my family was disappointed.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do. I set out to get a job as a developer.

At this stage, I'd not done anything special. So I started aiming bigger. Contributing to projects maintained by Sony and Google, learning from them. Building my own projects to assist with my old Android friends.
I managed to land a contract, however due to the stresses at home, I had to drop it after a month.
Everything was going well, I felt ready to get a full time job as a developer, after 2 years of experience in the community.

Then I had to wake up.
Unfortunately, my advisors (I was a job seeker at the time) didn't understand the potential of learning to be a developer. With them, it's "university for a skilled job".
They see the word "computer" on a CV, they instantly say "tech support".
I played ball, I did what I could for them. But they'd always put me down, saying I wasn't good enough, that I'd never get a job.
I hated them. I'd row with them every other day.

By God, I would prove them wrong.

And then I found them. Or, to be more precise, they found me. A startup in London got in contact with me. They seemed like decent people. I spoke with their developers, and they knew their stuff, these were people that I can learn from.
I travelled 4 hours to go for an interview, then 4 hours back.
When I got the email saying they'd move me to London, I was over the moon.
I did exactly what everyone was telling me I couldn't do.

1.5 years later, I'm still working with them. We all respect each other, and we all learn from each other.

I'm ever grateful to them for taking a shot with me. I had no professional experience, and I was by no means the most skilled individual they interviewed.

Many people have a dream. I won't lie, I once dreamed of working at Google. But after the journey I've been through, I wouldn't have where I am now any other way. Though, in time, I wish to share this dream with another.
I hope that all of you reach your dreams too.

Sorry for the long post. The details are brief, but there are only 5k characters ;)

DEVRANT CRASHED AND MY RANT IS GONE! I'M NOT A HAPPY MISH.

To be brief, I just remembered how my father used to smash my phone to the ground when he was angry about it.

Everytime he sees me using it. Smash!

I once made a Facebook to make more friends since I didn't have much, and still don't. (I didn't use the app btw.) He saw my search history and was furious. (My parents don't permit me to have social media. They think devRant is a school thing.)

He smashed it to the ground saying I can never use Facebook again.

He did that to 3 phones.

Fortunately, he doesn't do that anymore. Mainly because I'm the one who helps him with computer stuff and searches for the emails he needs.

So yesterday was a regular old day where I came into the office and began my work. My office mate that sits next to me happens to be having an issue with her batch script. It wasn't running correctly so she had decided to call in IT and have them take a look at it. What she was trying to do was process some images through a dedicated super-computer located on site.

So as you can imagine with both of them standing right next to me it was hard not to listen in on their conversation. The IT guy decided to go through a barrage of different troubleshooting methods to figure out what was happening with her script. And soon enough they discovered what was wrong. It happened to be an issue with how Windows decides to deal with new line characters. FYI it looks like this shit "\n \r"

The fucking \r looked like a directory to Linux. So it would squeal to a halt every single time she tried to run.

How this happened was due to her using notepad to edit her batch file.

At this point, I made a comment about her use of Notepad.
"Oh, you're using notepad? I've had similar issues like this in the past when I've used notepad. I really hate notepad." I said with a slight chuckle.

And that was pretty much the end of our encounters. However, at the end of the day, she decided to speak up about this.

"I don't appreciate you making comments about my use of Notepad. That was a form of microaggression towards me, and I don't want you to do it again."

Completely taken aback I replied.
"I'm sorry you took it that way, it was a joke and wasn't meant to be taken personally."

"Well, your intent does not change impact. And by the way, I take pride in my code and scripting. I don't need your commentary about my code nor your micro-aggressions." She said in a huff.

"Well again, I'm sorry you feel that way," I replied back

*I'd like to say that this situation is loosely paraphrased, but the essence of what happened is still there.

At this point, this is what I have to say about this situation. Why the FUCKING FUCK are you using notepad to program anything. There ARE A SHIT TON of differing programs that are available for your use and you decide to use fucking notepad?!?! $%&*@#$^

You could use notepad++, you could use Sublime, you could use every-fucking-thing except Notepad!!! If anything I think I had every right to make a comment about your stupid use of notepad. And darling, your script not working was well deserved, I hope you run into more errors like this because you deserve nothing less for your arrogance. So you can take your opinions and shove them up your fat-ass because at the end of the day I don't give a FUCK about your opinions on my micro-aggressions that you're spouting off about.
I suggest the next time you feel attacked about your code perhaps you should take a cold hard look at yourself before thinking that I'm the one that is the FUCKING problem.

This story starts over two years ago... I think I'm doomed to repeat myself till the end of time...

Feb 2014
[I'm thrust into the world of Microsoft Exchange and get to learn PowerShell]

Me: I've been looking at email growth and at this rate you're gonna run out of disk space by August 2014. You really must put in quotas and provide some form of single-instance archiving.
Management: When we upgrade to the next version we'll allocate more disk, just balance the databases so that they don't overload in the meantime.

[I write custom scripts to estimate mailbox size patterns and move mailboxes around to avoid uneven growth]

Nov 2014
Me: We really need to start migration to avoid storage issues. Will the new version have Quotas and have we sorted out our retention issues?
Management: We can't implement quotas, it's too political and the vendor we had is on the nose right now so we can't make a decision about archiving. You can start the migration now though, right?
Me: Of course.

May 2015
Me: At this rate, you're going to run out of space again by January 2016.
Management: That's alright, we should be on track to upgrade to the next version by November so that won't be an issue 'cos we'll just give it more disk then.

[As time passes, I improve the custom script I use to keep everything balanced]

Nov 2015
Me: We will run out of space around Christmas if nothing is done.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: The question is not how much space... it's when do you want the existing storage to last?
Management: October 2016... we'll have the new build by July and start migration soon after.
Me: In that case, you need this many hundreds of TB
Storage: It's a stretch but yes, we can accommodate that.

[I don't trust their estimate so I tell them it will last till November with the added storage but it will actually last till February... I don't want to have this come up during Xmas again. Meanwhile my script is made even more self-sufficient and I'm proud of the balance I can achieve across databases.]

Oct 2016 (last week)
Me: I note there is no build and the migration is unlikely since it is already October. Please be advised that we will run out of space by February 2017.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: Like last time, how long do you want it to last?
Management: We should have a build by July 2017... so, August 2017!
Me: OK, in that case we need hundreds more TB.
Storage: This is the last time. There's no more storage after August... you already take more than a PB.
Management: It's OK, the build will be here by July 2017 and we should have the political issues sorted.

Sigh... No doubt I'll be having this conversation again in July next year.

On the up-shot, I've decided to rewrite my script to make it even more efficient because I've learnt a lot since the script's inception over two years ago... it is soooo close to being fully automated and one of these days I will see the database growth graphs produce a single perfect line showing a balance in both size and growth. I live for that Nirvana.

I'm freaking the fuck out.
After months of learning from bootcamp and on my own, after a month of no resumes replied to, after almost giving up I finally got a job opportunity in front-end web development.
The thing is, I have to pass their online test to verify my JavaScript-fu.
3 hours.
4 tasks.
And I feel like garbage who can't understand even the most basic algorithms.
By the power of Grayskull, I don't think I have the power...
Wish me luck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Been reading devrant posts for a month or so, this is my first actual post. I'm hoping it will be therapeutic. ☺️ I need something to keep me from killing my boss when I see him again tomorrow..

Some backstory: Currently working in HR for the last 7 or so years with complete shit for brains boss, even worse when it comes to anything related to technology. For almost two years I've been working to get another bachelor's degree. This time in computer sciences, to make a career switch to systems and software engineer. Last week I roughly had the following wonderful conversation:

Boss: we've needed new Recruitment software for a while now. Can't you make us one as a school project?

Me: 'Make us one?' It's not really that simple.. I'm barely halfway through my education, maybe I could do it, but it would take me quite a long time even if I could work on it fulltime.. Combining a halftime job with a fulltime education is taking up enough of my time as it is and I have more than enough school projects btw..

Boss: it would be a win-win. Work a little harder in your spare time and when you graduate you have a real-life project on your resume.

Me: I'm sorry, i'm failing to see the 'win' for me here.. I work 10 hours a day, 7 days a week on average, trying to combine work and studies. I'm pretty much maxed out..

Boss: Your coworker(also extreme dumbass) told me you wrote some quick code the other day that helped him out. Don't underestimate yourself, I'm sure you can do this.

Me(in complete disbelief by now): I wrote him an Excel-macro! They don't even teach me that at school. It's a very very very long way from actual software development! I'm sorry, it just can't be done.

Boss: Thats too bad. I expected you to welcome an opportunity like this and be more motivated towards this company..

Me: ***more disbelief and silence, just staring at him***
I'm sorry you feel that way.
***walked away***

WTF, I work my ass off for 7 years for this fucking shithead.. Even before I started this bachelors degree I had at least some understanding of the work developers put in their software. It blows my mind, no, it fucking angers me how people think making software is so simple.. Why do you think it's a 3-year education you fucking cunt?

Please, someone tell me how I can keep myself from ramming his fucking head through a wall tomorrow...

The story of my webshop with this fuckin' asshole continues! I decided to stop with the webshop as my partner didn't do anything, so I handed over my shares to my business partner. This was done formally at the notary. Immediately after, we agreed that I would hand over everything that same week. 1 day later I cannot access any accounts. He said that a hand over was not necessary and that he took appropriate measures. Now, 4 months later, I got a letter from a collection agency telling me to hand over the tradename. Uhm what? Tradename? I don't own it so I replied that there's nothing to hand over. A day later again a letter that he will sue me if I don't hand over the tradename. Mr. Prick Lawyer, I understand that you mean the DOMAINname, but why the fuck do you keep referring to the tradename?! You too stupid to understand the difference? So, to get rid of this crap I made an offer to sell him the domainname, which he accepted. But mr. Asshole moved the shop to a different hostingprovider thinking that the dns would be magocally updated. Of course not asshole. So I offered (to be cooperative) to update dns so his site will work again. I did. A day later again a letter that site still not reachable and he'd sue me for all damages etc.

What a muppet show! You think ypu can sue me because YOU made a config mistake? He's a funny guy! I told the lawyer to not send me any 'issues' caused by mr. Asshole's unprofessional acting and if he does, I'll charge him for every second spent.

Today mr. Asshole's webshop says 'Apache is functioning normally' and that's it. Well done, asshole! See how eaay my job is and how little knowledge it requires? You proved ypu can do it yourself Big boy! Good luck selling shit on your website. Good luck with your seo rankings. And good luck fucking yourself in the ass!

Now I'm going to sue you because of copyrights violations. You use my software and you don't have a license. Either pay or remove it or I'll make you pay!

I think this is so far one of the most priceless WTF moments I encountered at my current work:

A coworker of mine came up to me explaining the problem he had with russian characters in the filename. He explained in detail that everything works ok (the other part of the code he was fixing) if he changes the name of the file to test1.xlsx for example which doesn't use russian characters. OK great.

Then he goes on to show me how he fixed the other stuff and of course everything blows up. The file he used for demonstration was of course the original file our cusotomer provided, he just deleted the obvious russian chars and left the rest.

МТС != MTC

I cracked up: but you still have russian chars in the name.
The guy: no way, I deleted them all.
Me: but what about that МТС in the name?! Guy: what about it?
Me: did you actually typed that in or you left it there?! Those are russian chars that are fucking things up for you.
Guy: no way, it's MTC.
Me: checked the logs, you have ??? In the filename instead of МТС..don't you find that at least a little bit suspicious?!
Guy: but it looks the same. How does it (the computer) know it is in russian?!? //Why doesn't it understand?!

O.o I still can't believe it.. Is it just me & my high standards, or should it be normal for coders to know things such as character encoding & stuff?!?

I almost died of laughter, he and some other guy had problems finding customers in the software due to not being able to type the russian chars << happened more then once before, even after I told them about a quick hack on how to use google translate onboard keyboard & other stuff to make proper chars so they can get a match..

I think when they bury me, I'll still be facepalming and laughing over this incident. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

"please use a secure password*"

* But don't make it too secure, 20 Charakters is enough.

Why would you fucking do this? The only reason I can think about is a scenario like this:
"How do we store the passwords in the database?"
"Just like anything else?"
"So I create a VARCHAR(20)?"
"Yeah why not? It's good enough for a name, and you shouldn't use your or anyone else's name as a password, so it should be perfect"

Best part of working from home? Oh boy, here I go

1. NO COMMUTE !! Fuck public transport. I can just grab my laptop straight to my bed, get comfortable and work in whatever posture I wish to.

2. Relaxation and peace of mind. The local park, library, football ground. I can go anywhere to get work done. All I need is my phone and laptop.

3. Better food - I can cook my own food. Dieting actually works by eating home-made food and not the fried bullshit we eat outside.

4. No office politics - Remote working means you don't have to think about being a circle and getting liked or not. Get your work done and that's it.

5. No "Extra" Activities - We all know HRs are just bored af people making employees have "fun" activities just to push a "culture" agenda on LinkedIn. Umm no thanks.

6. No toxicity - Well, this one is a doozie, you don't get workplace toxicity but you do get home toxicity. People assuming that you stay in ur room all day and do nothing. I'd still take home toxicity though.

7. If there is no work, I don't have to pretend that I am working and hiding my screen from my boss. I can just play video games in that time.

8. Option to start a side-hustle. You have more chances to retain some energy after your shift to start investing/putting time into something that can make you extra cash.

9. Worldwide opportunities - Because of WFH, I work with clients from Netherlands, Estonia, London and Cayman Islands. It never would have happened if I was in an office job.

10. Only work, no extra bullshit - be it smoke breaks, casual tea, conferences, work summits etc. None of that and I don't want it.

11. Your errands get done - Need to go to the dentist at 10 am? You can do that. Need to pick up your kid at 3 pm? You can do that. You need 5 pm time dedicated to go the gym? You can do that.

In conclusion, I absolutely vouch for WFH and would never take WFO for as long as possible.

WFH FTW !!!

A: Can you tell me your opinion about this? Please, be honest.
Me: Ok, I think you could do it in a different way, but let's talk about what you did and see how to make it better...
A: I don't think so, I think this is the best way to do it.
Me: Oh, OK.
A: Why are you always complaining about my job?
Me: Well, you just asked me, and I work on this too, so I thought...
A: I don't think you're collaborative enough with me!
Me [walking away]: Oh, OK...

Worst code review experience?

Hard to pick just one, but most were in a big meeting room with 4+ other developers not related to the project and with some playing Monday-Morning-Quarterback instead of offering productive feedback.

In one code review, the department mgr reviewed the code from a third party component library.

<brings up the code on the big screen>
Mgr: "I can't read any of this, its a mix of English and something else."
Me: "Its German."
Mgr: "Then why is 'Button' in English? This code is a mess."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how I should respond, I mean, I didn't write any of this code."
Mgr: "Yes, but you are using it, so it's fair game for a code review."
Me: "Its not really open source, but we can make requests if you found something that needs to be addressed."
Mgr: "Oh yes, all this...whatever this is..<pointing again to the German>"
Me: "I don't think they will change their code to English just so you can read it."
Mgr: "We paid good money, you bet your ass they'll change it!"
Me: "I think the components were like $30 for the unlimited license. They'll tell us to go to hell first. Is there something about my code you want to talk about?"
Mgr: "<Ugggh>...I guess not, I couldn't get past all that German. Why didn't we go with an American company? Hell, why didn't we just write these components ourselves!?"
Me: "Because you gave a directive that if we found components that saved us time, to put in a request, and you approved the request. The company is American, they probably outsourced or hired German developers. I don't know and not sure why we care."
Mgr: "Security! What if they are sending keystrokes back to their servers!"
Me: "Did you see any http or any network access?"
Mgr: "How could I? The code is in German!"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback1: "If it were me, I would have written the components myself and moved on"
Me: "No, I don't think you could for less than $30"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback2: "Meh...we get paid anyway. Just add the time to the estimate."
Mgr: "Exactly! Why do we even have developers who can't read this mess."
Me: "Oh good Lord! Did anyone review or even look at my code for this review!?"
<silence>
Mgr: "Oh...ok...I guess we're done here. Thanks everyone."
<everyone starts to leave>
Me: "Whoa!...wait a sec..am I supposed to do something?"
Mgr: "Get that company to write their code in English so we can read it. You have their number, call em'...no...wait...give me their number. You keep working, I'll take care of this personally"

In they nicest way possible, the company did tell him to go to hell.

"Mature codebase"
"Our entire team are senior devs"
"Almost everyone that worked on the project is still here and available, so nothing's lost! We can ask whatever we need to."

You would think this would mean the code was clean and easy to read, and you could ask the person who wrote it for help. But. no. It's kinda the opposite.

Here's an example:
I'm trying to write a mailer, and I have no freaking clue how to get it working. I talked with two of the more senior devs, and both assured me it was very straightforward, and then walked me through the quite complicated mailer structure and got lost. The first pretended not to, but glazed over a few holes in his tour, and said I could figure the rest out. The second one ended up admitting that he's totally unfamiliar with it -- his last commit on a mailer was from about 8 years ago -- and doesn't know how to get it working anymore.

So, I'm on my own.

I wrote a super basic mailer for debugging (no idea if/how it actually sends a mail, but I think I can construct one?). But whenever I call the mailer, it gets run twice? Somehow? Apparently I need to start a bunch of daemons to get that part of the system to work. Which is cool because they don't work fresh out of the repo. Got some further help, and now my ostensibly working code throws errors for an undefined var that i'm not even using, and to make it easier: without a backtrace. joy! There's so much inheritence and extending and including going on that it's going to take me hours to track this down. ugh.

I'm keeping my paystub in front of me for some desparately needed motivation.

Rant 2/n; 😎 = me, 💩 = client
The (brief but comprehensive) docs I sent my client contained the following line: "Any text that has not been translated will be highlighted yellow for the admins".

A day later:
💩: "Hey, I like the new design, but why are the titles yellow?"
😎: "They aren't actually yellow. You just see that because you're logged in and they aren't translated"
💩: "But the yellow doesn't look good with the design. Visitors will think it looks unprofessional. Make them not yellow!"
😎: "They won't see the yellow! Only you can see it so you don't miss any translations"
💩: "Hi, I just noticed some of the titles aren't in English. How do I translate them? And they're still yellow."

😐🙁😠😡🤬💥

After 16 years of porn addiction, I've finally realized that the only way to stop any addiction, is to take control of your mind. Nobody can help you, except make you realize the source of the problem or factors that cause it.

It's strange to describe how the mind works, sometimes we need stuff in our lives because we need to spend time on something to avoid the emptiness.

Free yourself from the things you love the most, in my case I love playing video games, it helps me feel complete, but in all honesty, I don't need it. I like drinking energy drinks, but in the end, I don't need that too.

My point is that once you find a way to deal with the things you can't live without, you find a way to live with it.

The only reason I watch porn is to reduce stress or have something "fun" to do.

As Bruce Lee once said: Be formless, be shapeless, be water my friend.

I like to think that he means to let the urge flow within you, but don't let it control you.

Call me old-fashioned, but... I kinda liked it back in the day, when Microsoft made proprietary software, the Community made free software and everyone's "cui bono" was quite easy to answer - even those corporations involved in FLOSS did have a clear way to finance themselves.

Now, we have Microsoft coming into open source, seemingly making projects better and offering more and more "free" stuff.

You know.

"Free" Windows 10.
"Free" SaaS Office.
"Free" "Private" Repos on Github.

In general - what happened to clear and concise "I give you money, you give me stuff" capitalism like we had it in the 2000s?

I'd rather pay 20 bucks for a game on Steam than get it "free" and with ads or microtransactions - yet, many games, especially mobile, don't even offer me that option. It wouldn't be that hard now, would it?

The same goes for software. That Canonical would need to fuck their users over after Ubuntu One went to shit was obvious - they didn't offer the kind of commercial/enterprise OS'es that Redhat or SuSE sell.

What people seem to forget is that everyone needs to make a profit somehow. You don't get "free" stuff. Even the volunteers in the Open Source Community get something out of it - an opportunity to pad their CV at least, if nothing else.

Nowadays, software manufacturers have the same legitimacy as the "free" financial "advisors" you find at banks - and who could be dumb enough to trust them? Oh yeah: Almost the entire fucking society is who.

But then again, sell something and noone will want it - because they all want it for free, with annoying, privacy-invading ads or with equally annoying microtransactions, or financing based on commission - so you don't only pay ONCE, you pay until you realize you got fucked over and quit.

Capitalism used to work until all those idiots stepped in. How the fuck don't people realize that there's no free lunch in life? When have we stopped being functional people and turned into idiots.

Even worse: Those idiots think that they're entitled to something! They, who volunteered to become merchandise instead of customers, think that they have rights! Do cattle have rights? Nope. They get their "free" hay everyday and I get to buy beef, that's how it works. Moo!

Hell, they are surprised when they get fucked over by bank salespeople or their data stolen by corporations, intelligence agencies or something... What did they expect, goodwill?

Can we please make Adam Smith mandatory reading in school?! I mean, give people a chance to understand capitalism? The nonexistent "goodwill" of traders in general?

From a design meeting yesterday:

MyBoss: "The estimate hours seem low for a project of this size. Is everything accounted for?"
WebDev1: "Yes, we feel everything for the web site is accounted for."
-- ding ding...my spidey sense goes off
Me: "What about merchandising?"
MerchDevMgr: "Our estimate pushed the hours over what the stakeholders wanted to spend. Web department nixed it to get the proposal approved."
MyBoss: "WTF!? How the hell can this project go anywhere without merchandising entering the data!?"
WebDev2: "Its fine. We'll just get the data from merchandising and enter it by hand. It will only be temporary"
Me: "Temporary for who? Are you expecting developers to validate and maintain data?"
WebDev1: "It won't be a big deal."
MyBoss: "Yes it is! When the data is wrong, who are they going to blame!?"
WebDev1: "Oh, we didn't really think of that."
MerchDevMgr: "I did, but the CEO really wants this project completed, but the Web VPs would only accept half the hours estimated."
Me: "Then you don't do it. Period. Its better to do it right the first time than half-ass. How do think the CEO will react to finding out developers are responsible for the data entry?"
MerchDevMgr: "He would be pissed."
MyBoss: "I'm not signing off on this design. You can proceed without my approval., but I'll make a note on the document as to why. If you talk to Eric and Tom about the long term implications, they'll listen. At the end of the day, the MerchVPs are responsible to the CEO."
WebDev1: "OK, great. Now, the database, it should be SQLServer ..."

I checked out after that...daydreamed I was a viking.

Client:
"Ok,. so your saying that its gonna take you 63 hrs to create a simplified CRM with basic functionality and auto fill docs or automated work flow docs as an added feature?"

My response (after already under-quoting and planning on cutting some corners because he has a smaller budget than normally necessary):
"It sounds simpler than it is. There are a lot of things I need to take into account that you wouldn't even think about.

For instance:

Making sure your emails don't go to the client's spam folder. This requires the sending domain to be verified via DNS settings. I have to ensure your email content passes a spam test (link to text ratio needs to be good). I assumed you'd want an email that has your logo and looks good. This means testing the design in Outlook to make sure it's not broken.

What if the email doesn't send due to an invalid email address, or bounces back? You'll need to be notified.

What if the client list for the week contains duplicates? You need them merged or ignored.

Generating a PDF from HTML can be tricky because the conversion isn't apples to apples so there are things I need to adjust to make them as close as possible.

Making a site completely mobile friendly (the tier 3 option) can be very time consuming as well. It's not about whether or not it fits on a mobile phone, it's about whether or not it's intuitive and useful. You're essentially getting a mobile app without paying for separate development of an app.

If I took everything into consideration and built this to be 100% bullet proof, it would cost tens of thousands.

I'm doing my best to leverage your needs with the probability of running into an issue. I'm not going waste my time/your money on something that will likely never happen."

Hello "friend", whom I haven't seen or talked to in years. How have you been? Please don't mind me, my life is boring as shit and nothing happened to me since. Yes, I'd gladly make an app for your company because you agreed to do it but apparently you lack the skills. Oh, you've been fucking around for a month doing nothing? That's sad but sure, I can do it by Sunday, I don't have plans for the weekend anyway. You say you can't pay me more than what I earn in six hours doing my day job? And your boss should think you did it all by yourself? Well, let me consider this cool little opportunity. I'll be in touch, talk to you "soon"!

Can someone explain to me why the fuck I should even care about the fact, that some companies collect, use and sell my data? I'm not famous, I'm not a politician and I'm not a criminal, I think most of us aren't and won't ever be. We aren't important. So what is this whole bullshittery all about? I seriously don't get it and I find it somewhat weird that especially tech guys and IT "experts" in the media constantly just make up these overly creepy scenarios about big unsafe data collecting companies "stealing" your "private" information. Welcome to the internet, now get the fuck over it or just don't be online. It's your choice, not their's.

I honestly think, some of these "security" companies and "experts" are just making this whole thing bigger than it actually is, because it's a damn good selling point. You can tell people that your app is safe and they'll believe you and buy your shit app because they don't understand and don't care what "safe" or "unsafe" means in this context. They just want to be secure against these "evil monster" companies. The same companies, which you portrayed them as "evil" and "unfair" and "mean" and "unrepentant" for over a decade now.

Just stop it now. All your crappy new "secure" messenger apps have failed awesomely. Delete your life now, please. This isn't about net neutrality or safety on the internet. This is all about you, permanently exaggerating about security and permanently training people to be introverted paranoid egoistic shit people so that they buy your elitist bullshit software.

Sorry for my low english skills, but please stop to exist, thank you.

* Go to sleep at reasonable times
* Watch some of those anime I never quite finished
* Read more books
* Become more proficient with rust
* Replace go with rust at work
* Setup a weeb media center I can remotely
* Finally make a personal webpage/blog without overthinking things, to actually get it done
* Find or make a storage solution for all the memes I sto- I mean collected, where I can add tags to find them more quickly. Would love to have them have the tagging be done automatically with machine learning, but I don't think we're quite there yet.

I think the hardest thing about being a programmer in college with a security emphasis is when I approach a business for a penetration test or for a vulnerability analysis (your pick) is that they almost always say, "you are pretty young don't you think?"

Ummmm not sure what that has to do with it. If it would make you feel better I have claimed bug bounties from an antivirus company, a bank, several local businesses in my area and I do this for work at my 9-5.

And this week I got this, "I think I would like someone older so we can define the goals better."

Oh so rules of engagement, yeah of course I understand that and that's something we would discuss and draw up a contract for...

"Well we really need someone more skilled."

---- End of story ----

I don't understand, you haven't asked about certifications or schooling and you glanced at my resume for exactly 5 seconds what the hell do you want? Me to double my age over night?

I couldn't sleep. I was staring at the blinking cursor. A slow, comforting blinking. Like everyone else, I had become a slave to the JavaScript ecosystem. If I saw something like a new build system, or a new framework, I had to have it.

My client changed the requirements again. I'm in pain.

- "You want to see pain?" my colleague said. Go read Apple support forums. That's pain.

I became addicted. Every time I died and every time I was born again. Resurrected.
During the night, I was crying in the Apple forums for an official answer that would never come. During the day, I was surfing StackOverflow to fix my problems. You get "single-serving" friends there. They help you, you help them, and then you never see them again.

- "Then you install Stack and boom, you're done. It's that easy to go functional."

That's how I met him.

- "You know why they make so many javascript frameworks?"
- "No, why?"
- "So that they can distract you while they put backdoors in them. So that you don't have time to check all of their code".
- "You are by far the most interesting "single-serving" friend I've ever met"

Then, my hard disk died. Of course, I didn't have backups: nobody has enough space for all those node_modules folders. All my addictions, lost.

Then I wrote him. If you asked me now, I couldn't tell you why I wrote him. We chatted a lot.

- "It's late, I should really go search another hdd on ebay"
- "Ebay? You called me so you could have my old hard disk."
- "No, I..."
- "Come on."

He sent me his old hard disk. It was a 256MB hard disk, but it was fine for running Arch. Then he asked me to rant about my problems in front of him.

- "I want you to rant as hard as you can"
- "Are you serious?"

We ranted all night about our bosses and clients and their fucked up requests. We kept in touch, and after a while more people were ranting with us. Every week, he gave the rules that he and I decided.

- "The first rule of devRant is -- you don't talk about devRant. The second rule of devRant is -- you don't talk about devRant."

I like to think this is how devRant started. This might also be the reason why we never see @trogus, only @dfox. A lot of shit still needs to happen.

My school just tried to hinder my revision for finals now. They've denied me access just today of SSHing into my home computer. Vim & a filesystem is soo much better than pen and paper.

So I went up to the sysadmin about this. His response: "We're not allowing it any more". That's it - no reason. Now let's just hope that the sysadmin was dumb enough to only block port 22, not my IP address, so I can just pick another port to expose at home. To be honest, I was surprised that he even knew what SSH was. I mean, sure, they're hired as sysadmins, so they should probably know that stuff, but the sysadmins in my school are fucking brain dead.

For one, they used to block Google, and every other HTTPS site on their WiFi network because of an invalid certificate. Now it's even more difficult to access google as you need to know the proxy settings.

They switched over to forcing me to remote desktop to access my files at home, instead of the old, faster, better shared web folder (Windows server 2012 please help).

But the worst of it includes apparently having no password on their SQL server, STORING FUCKING PASSWORDS IN PLAIN TEXT allowing someone to hijack my session, and just leaving a file unprotected with a shit load of people's names, parents, and home addresses. That's some super sketchy illegal shit.

So if you sysadmins happen to be reading this on devRant, INSTEAD OF WASTING YOUR FUCKING TIME BLOCKING MORE WEBSITES THAN THEIR ARE LIVING HUMANS, HOW ABOUT TRY UPPING YOUR SECURITY, PASSWORDS LIKE "", "", and "gryph0n" ARE SHIT - MAKE IT BETTER SO US STUDENTS CAN ACTUALLY BROWSE MORE FREELY - I THINK I WANT TO PASS, NOT HAVE EVERY OTHER THING BLOCKED.

Thankfully I'm leaving this school in 3 weeks after my last exam. Sure, I could stay on with this "highly reputable" school, but I don't want to be fucking lied to about computer studies, I don't want to have to workaround your shitty methods of blocking. As far as I can tell, half of the reputation is from cheating. The students and sysadmins shouldn't have to have an arms race between circumventing restrictions and blocking those circumventions. Just make your shit work for once.

**On second thought, actually keep it like that. Most of the people I see in the school are c***s anyway - they deserve to have half of everything they try to do censored. I won't be around to care soon.**

So just finished the presentation for my internship project. I'm free now!(and can sleep normal times too) But I have a few things I need to get off my mind. Dunno if it'll seem a bit stupid to some of you..but yeahh....
Anyway, during my demo yesterday
Lecturer: So this project of yours uses some open-source stuff?
Me: Yeah.
L: And if the company wants to use if for commercialization they need to pay for the license?
M: Thats basically it. Yes.
L: Well, see..thats the problem with your project. You need to think of all this things. If there's no other options then just code the whole shit yourself. Or maybe discuss with the management on this.
Yeah...see, I doubt the management here cares about us anyway. Oh, you're working on your intern stuff. Not important. Just resize the pictures in my powerpoint will you? Oh and you want to use the company computers for your project? No can do..confidentiality stuff. But make sure the thing will work on our system anyway when you're done with it. And even if you use our computers, they restart everytime you open Word anyway..hahaha. You want access to this thing so you can learn a bit on our company's work. Sorry but no. EVERYTHING is confidential so you can't access it since you're interns, eventhough our company is the one that took you inanyway.
Manager: Oh, the thing you're making is pretty cool. You know,all of you can just give your systems to us later.
Friend: Yeah well, maybe we can ask the company for payment? Haha.
Manager: Hahaha well the company can just take your systems for free since you're doing it on our working hours.
Fuck. You. When we ask to do our stuff you said noooo its the company hours. Do our work. And do your stuff back at home or something. Oh, but then we'll drag you around the state to see the clients, and you'll reach home at 8-9pm or something, but of course you're not tired right? So just code then. Or you're not going anywhere today? You're still not allowed to code here eventhough you don't have any work though...so just sit there and be quiet. Or maybe shred my papers for me. Fuck your working hours.
Lecturer: And well, thats the problem with some students *looks pointedly at me* they want to go to non-technical companies so that they can have it easy. Your friends who go to other companies will learn a lot more.
Do you think I fucking want to be here??? This is the only company I got so fuck that. Even when I get different offers and apply to change companies, you go nope. No can do. Stick with your current company eventhough we know that its shit for IT students because its a big company, see? And we have our university's reputation to upkeep. I came here to learn, not make you the No.1 university or something. And its not like you, or the staffs here, help us with anything.
So fuck all of this. We're gonna tell the other lecturers to stop sending students here. You don't learn anything. I'm done with this shit, not gonna think or worry about it anymore..I'll just, go get cake or something. Yeah.

Me : I found this code issue, I think we need to fix it
PO: does it affect the user?
Me: not really but we can make it better
PO: do you have a defect for it in *insert issue tracker here*
Me: no, I just noticed it
PO: is there an IM ticket for it?
Me: I don't think so
PO: is this issue already in production?
Me: possibly. Yes. That's why I was wondering if we should fix it.
PO: okay then we will fix it in the 3rd release from now if you still remember it by then.

I got unemployed 6 months ago. I tried to find work for about a month but the answer was always "we call you back when a position is available" and "let me ask the team if they think you are good". So far no one responded, then I got tired of that.
The next month I became self-employed so i can make contracts and work for more smaller projects. Not too much time later I met a company that offered me a long time contract for them. I don't hesitated to accept it.
Luckily since then I have this company and a few smaller jobs.
It was a steep change in my life but was worth it.

I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.

I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.

We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.

The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.

We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.

It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.

Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.

But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.

I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.

But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.

Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.

They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.

I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this

Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.

I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.

But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.

... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.

Some of the penguin's finest insults (Some are by me, some are by others):

Disclaimer: We all make mistakes and I typically don't give people that kind of treatment, but sometimes, when someone is really thick, arrogant or just plain stupid, the aid of the verbal sledgehammer is neccessary.

"Yeah, you do that. And once you fucked it up, you'll go get me a coffee while I fix your shit again."

"Don't add me on Facebook or anything... Because if any of your shitty code is leaked, ever, I want to be able to plausibly deny knowing you instead of doing Seppuku."

"Yep, and that's the point where some dumbass script kiddie will come, see your fuckup and turn your nice little shop into a less nice but probably rather popular porn/phishing/malware source. I'll keep some of it for you if it's good."

"I really love working with professionals. But what the fuck are YOU doing here?"

"I have NO idea what your code intended to do - but that's the first time I saw RCE and SQLi in the same piece of SHIT! Thanks for saving me the hassle."

"If you think XSS is a feature, maybe you should be cleaning our shitter instead of writing our code?"

"Dude, do I look like I have blue hair, overweight and a tumblr account? If you want someone who'd rather lie to your face than insult you, go see HR or the catholics or something."

"The only reason for me NOT to support you getting fired would be if I was getting paid per bug found!"

"Go fdisk yourself!"

"You know, I doubt the one braincell you have can ping localhost and get a response." (That one's inspired by the BOFH).

"I say we move you to the blockchain. I'd volunteer to do the cutting." (A marketing dweeb suggested to move all our (confidential) customer data to the "blockchain").

"Look, I don't say you suck as a developer, but if you were this competent as a gardener, I'd be the first one to give you a hedgetrimmer and some space and just let evolution do its thing."

"Yeah, go fetch me a unicorn while you're chasing pink elephants."

"Can you please get as high as you were when this time estimate come up? I'd love to see you overdose."

"Fuck you all, I'm a creationist from now on. This guy's so dumb, there's literally no explanation how he could evolve. Sorry Darwin."

"You know, just ignore the bloodstain that I'll put on the wall by banging my head against it once you're gone."

The system is fucked. Can't abandon ship, but let's pray that I can make my own system out of it, or rather, translate it, without too many issues. 🤞

P.S. I swore at this computer way too many times. I don't think I'll survive the robotic apocalypse at this rate. 😬

One thing I learned over the years is that even when you think you can't do something or don't have the strength to do it, you actually can.

People do nothing better than to make excuses for themselves or blame others for the things they did without even considering that they could have done something about it.

The brain is a powerful processor to the point that when you think you're sick constantly your body will react accordingly.

Thing is though. If you don't take the opportunities that present themselves or don't look for them you'll probably get nowhere to the point where it could lead to depression.

Sure enough failures and mistakes happen all the time, ardly anything will go right the first time possibly leading to becoming demotivated and sometimes even depression.

Why? Because you forgot to think "what can I improve the next time"

A co-worker of mine keeps going back to his project he's working on because the boss has something in mind but somehow fails to translate it to him. He never stops to think what the desired functionality is compared to what it should do or look like (UI/UX). Eventually he snaps blaming the boss that he had to change it a couple of times.

This has happened multiple times since I started my Internship to the point where it just starts to irritate me.

Of course it's not always your fault but there are plenty of cases where it is or where you could have prevented it.

Mistakes and failures make you stronger only if you want to learn from them.

Have a good day

When I see two fields, one for username and one for password, I expect I can fill them out immediately subsequently with only a tab in between. While typing my password I DON'T want to get sent to a page where I can enter my password only: I was entering it already! Sometimes I even make it until I pressed the enter key that was supposed to log me in, but then I'm kindly requested to reenter my password. At that moment I not-so-kindly think: FUCK YOU Microsoft, you should know better. Even when logging into Visual Studio for fack sake

I told a guy to implement an algorithm in cpp. He wrote this weird 600+ lines of code which contains only global variables and void functions then I told him to make it object oriented and he just put all those garbage in the class and gave me back and on top of that class name is Template and file name is template.cpp. I don't have words to describe his code. May be this picture can help you understand my state. Oh, if you think this matchOn_r1, r2,r3 are different then you are mistaken they are just different with one argument (one global argument). This is just part of the code. He has this shit all over the place. Why the fuck this kind of people exists?

Fuck (some of) you backend developers who think regurgitating JSON makes for a good API.

"It's all in JSON. iOS can read JSON, right?"
A well-trained simian can read JSON, still doesn't mean it can do something with it. Your shitty API could be spitting out fucking ancient Egyptian for all I care, just make it be the same ancient Egyptian everywhere!

Don't create one endpoint that spits out the URL for the next endpoint (completely different domain, completely different path structure). Are you fucking kidding me?

As if that wasn't enough, endpoints receive data structured in one way, but return results in another!! "It's all JSON", but it's still dong.

How do I abstract that, you piece of shit? Now I have to write ever so slightly different code in multiple places instead of writing it only once.

How the fuck do I even model that in a database?

Have a crash course on implementing APIs on the client side and only come back when you're done.

Morons.

Today I learned in a cafe why (some) users think that Facebook doesn't allow them data control. Due to drunkness I'm paraphrasing here, but it went something like this:

- I don't trust Facebook, because my posts that I make are visible to people that I didn't want to have it be seen to.

> Audience controls. Use them.

- This guy in town sent me a friend request, why would he be able to??1!1

> He and you share hometown. So probably friend suggestions based on you both explicitly sharing location, or he just visited your profile on name and wanted to get in touch with you. Socializing on the internet, it exists.

That's the kind of user that's roaming the facebooks on the internets and the googles I guess? The type of user that's surprised that their Facebook games and nametests expose information that they explicitly consent to? Give me a break. I care deeply about privacy, but this is just ridiculous.

On a different note, why the fuck is not a single one of those very same fucking Facebook users worried about 25-ish% of websites running their JavaScript (which you can check and block using NoScript and co.), which is the *actual* privacy threat? But muh nametests!!!

Fuck ignorant users!!!

So, today a client said: "If you are a web developer, well you can make me a damn mobile app. It's the same fooking thing, you just write code and make it go on my device. I want a whatsapp-like app for my company."

I really, really wanted to punch him on his godamn face... At the end I spent tbe rest of the meeting explaining that I don't develop mobile apps since I'm a web developer and that it is NOT THE SAME THING. He went angry and said "Well, I think I'll find a better dev somewhere else. You are a useless one"

TL;DR: If you make a contest where people get to vote online fucking make it right!

And here's the story: I play in a local coverband to make some cash on the side and because I love making music. We entered a contest hosted by a local radio-station. The first round was determined by judges and now 5 bands remain and of those 5 only 3 get to be voted into the final round. In the final round every bands wins something: 3rd place 250€, 2nd place 750€ and first place 5000€.
Now that stupid dipshit of a web-designer of that radio-station made a website where you can vote and it only fucking sets a cookie. You can delete it and vote again. You don't need no E-Mail and nothing. It doesn't even block multiple votes from one IP. It doesn't do shit.
Even my bandmates (who don't work in IT) where smart enough to figure out that you can just delete the cookies...
I think that now every band except for one is cheating. (we have over 5000 votes and combined all bands have like 4000 FB-Likes and sometimes and Band gets like 400 more votes in an hour) This is such a fucking messup and I don't know what to do. Maybe they'll look into stats but if they're so stupid to make a contest like this in the first place, maybe they won't. And even if they look into the stats it wouldn't be fair to kick out a band with much votes because how the fuck would they know if the band themselves cheated or if it was a fan of the band or even an enemy of the band just to get them kicked out.
I'm afraid of talking to the radio-station as a part of one band because maybe the web-designer there just gets frustrated and bans us from the contest entirely.
This is just fucking frustrating.

I kinda hate my life right now.

I hate my job: I've been working as a flutter developer for a month and a half (even though I was hired to do backend) and I discovered I don't like frontend, it doesn't give me enough challenges. Every once in a while I have to do something complicated and have fun working, but most of the time it's just boring layout shit.

I can't do any side-projects, everything bores me. I want to get into really low level programming so bad but the steep learning curve makes me lazy.

I don't feel like I'm doing enough. I'm learning quite a bit about flutter, but I don't want to work with that, I hate it, so I feel like I'm just wasting my time. I'd like to work on something complicated and meaningful, like developing flight systems for rockets or whatever, but there's sooo much road ahead of me I just feel like I'm never gonna make it, plus I have to be very smart to do that and I'm starting to think I'm not as smart as I thought I was. I've been programming for almost 10 years now, but I can already see my college friends getting practically on my level in 2-3 years. I can't let that happen and this thought is making me stressed and burning me out. Programming is literally the only thing I'm good at (or at least I think I am), if I don't have that I don't have anything, because I suck at everything else (I'm not exaggerating, I wish I was though).

I can't see friends because of the corona. I've met with friends about 7 times in a year and I havent been with a girl god knows since when. Meanwhile, practically everyone I know is partying, having fun, going to the beach and I'm here, at home, typing this fucking rant and feeling sorry for myself.

I also wanto to get fit but every time I try to do so something happens and I have to wait 2 months in order to start again.

There isn't anyone I can trust enough to share some feelings and thoughts I have and this is eating me up.

I am unhappy and have been like this for a while now. Every once in a while I smile, yes, but most of my day is endless boredom either because of work or the lack of it. I just want to go back to normal, I don't want to think about my future, I want someone to talk to, I want to be able to cry.

I hate this.

Ya know I don't mind Windows updates, I get it the OS needs its updates, so last night a pop up asked to when to do the update I thought hmm maybe Sunday (probably be driving my motorbike so I'll be out of the house), set the time and done.

Afterwards I go to shut my computer down and accidentally hit update and restart out of shear annoyance. So I wait it out, I thought well okay now it's done I won't have to wait. I go to shut down and it says "update and shut down", ... Right after I just updated...

I thought okay at least I'll be going to be knowing tomorrow I can just turn my computer on and play some games to chill for the night.

Oh but no, nope not gonna happen, I have to wait for it to "actually" update. Been waiting for about 30ish minutes :/

I think I'll make sure that updates don't happen anymore, I'm pretty annoyed at this waiting :/

Honestly wouldn't have had Windows 10 in the first place but somehow my computer decided to just install Windows 10 after I kept saying nope to it's damn pop-up, I just turned it on and boom "we're fucking​your day up by installing Windows 10"

I actually take off anything that makes Windows 10 look like it and make it look more like win7.

70% done :/

I think the worst work culture you can experience is nepotism and corruption in hierarchy. What do I mean? Well, this happened (and I think is still happening) in my last job. It was a huge logistic/delivery company. I was an intern, working as assistant developer of the only developer of the site. There was also a guy that was the technician, his assistant, a DBA and that's it.

Well, my partner and I were working on a system that managed almost all the operations of the company in this city.

Well, I supplied the dev two weeks when he was on vacation. I knew almost all the system. what happened? the manager from other city came with another Dev, and I'm not saying that I was an expert or something like that, but that dev from the other city was an incompetent. He couldn't even make a small GUI change without messing it all...

Guess what? The company paid him weekly round tickets to come and go from his city to ours (two hours of flight).

I was too disappointed I started searching another job. A week after getting my degree, I left my job and started in the one I am now. Before leaving, I asked my boss if there was a realistic chance to grow up. He answered no. To be honest, that didn't surprised me :/

The thing that makes me angry about this is that a lot of companies give chances to people that come from other cities, even if they don't know anything >:v

Oh, I almost forgot it: The last five months I was working there, they quit our office and send us to trailer-offices :/

After investigation, I'm just refreshing my os and hoping I can reconfigure work applications. Feel bad, but help desk friends are getting me the software to install and are helping me out on a day off.

Wasn't the application like I thought. It was the useless update that won't install and therefore can't be rolled back but is still getting in the way of my work, therefore they can all daisy chain their dicks together in the sane manner little kids make daisy crowns, and then have a steamroller head towards them with faulty brakes (steamroller operator is innocent in this scenario, he jumps out safely).

I'm planning on calling Microsoft in the morning to tell them what I think of them at the moment. But I'm too angry to form words that don't sound petty and childish. I'm open to suggestions.

I get really defiant when i repeatedly get micromanaged with bullshit instructions, such as asking me to have my just started c++ library poc which also involves a lot of learning and will earliest be usable in a few months, "ready for our customer devs" in 2 weeks from now.

just no, you fucking retard.

also, the lib alone wouldn't make any sense, since the code parts working with it don't yet exist at all.
and then getting instructed to ask customers if they can provide you with c++ code that solves the task for them in their own software, which of course will somehow magically fit in my existing codebase. even if it existed (which it fortunately doesn't because they do everything in C#), i don't think i'm going to be faster trying to somehow solder in their code into my library, of which i'm still brainstorming about the general architecture.

if you have so fucking unrealistic expectations, maybe stop sniffing glue all day and don't make this my fucking problem.

Throughout the years I have completed many projects successfully. Some projects really stood out and were awesome to do. This is not about these projects. It is however about one of my very first projects for my first real software development client many years ago, somewhere around the year 2000.

I was working for some years at TNO, a well known Dutch organization, and the lady at the reception asked me if I could help her husband out because he was strugling to get some web app developed. So I said sure, I can talk to him and see what I can do.

So I went to their house and talked to her husband. They were living in a huge villa and turns out her husband owns an international flower export business for which he needed some web app for. So we had a nice talk and he showed me some software designs he got from a couple of different big companies. He asked me my opinion about these designs. I remember answering something like that it looks very fancy but for me it didn't make much sense.

He replied that it didn't make sense for him as well and was disappointed that these companies didn't seem to understand him properly. It took about 3 months to get these designs which he thought were useless. So, I asked him to explain me what he was looking for.

Actually a pretty simple thing. He was using paper forms to have his clients order the flowers they need. Think of them as Excelsheets with 3 columns with a list of flower names and besides each column a column for the amount required. He would go to the flower auction at 4 in the morning to collect all these filled in forms, manually aggregate them on new forms, and then go to buy the flowers ordered.

This man had many clients and truck drivers. Some of them only worked or ordered at specific days. It was also important that one could easily indicate which flowers were really important to get.

Then comes this 20 year old guy (me) who delivered a working prototype in 24 hours. You can imagine how happy this man was. He said: if you built this for me I will pay you 10K. In the meanwhile for fun you can borrow one of my sports cars if you want.

I took the deal, drove a big fat sports car for about 1.5 months, I delivered and the man payed me as promised.

The web app I developed is today still being used every day. I don't think there is any other project out there, at least not that I'm aware of, that I have worked on and is still being used today in its form as it was originally developed.

I lost one of my idols, there are few people I have that much respect for. I literally can not think of anyone else infact.

Ive just been taking a second.🙁 I mean you live your life thinking there's time or that you can wait to do things , like I'll just do that one thing a little later. But it's not true. The reality is there's so little time.

There are few truly great people. It's going to take me a little while to get over it properly.

But when I do I hope I don't switch back into old patterns.

I want to be just like him, his work was amazing. He worked all the time not because of fame or money but because he just wanted to make cool shit for people to enjoy. Because he enjoyed it himself and he liked seeing people amazed and happy due to his work.

The best people are the types of people who bring a smile to your face by just being who they are.

It was enough to know he was out there doing his thing being that incredible, it never occured to me he could just be gone. The world needs more people like him especially now with everything so fucked up. He died far to young. 33 isn't old it's not even middle aged

All I want is to be like him, I hope I will be one day 😞 and I'm going to start trying right now.

And I will try harder.

Users and Bosses.

I honestly don't know who is worse, the end user or the boss.

The boss thinks all you do is click a button and everything just works, so everything should take 30 minutes to complete, why on earth would it take a week to do something?

The user seems to think every tiny idea is the most important thing ever to add, so they tell said boss it must be added, and boss normally agrees.

I get it, Marge (Fake name), adding in a copy button because you're too dumb to press ctrl + c is way more important than updating the security after a Ransomware attack.

No boss, I can't add in 30 new things and make sure the security protocols are updated all before the meeting in 15 minutes.

If you think it's all so easy and just pressing buttons, why did you hire me? Anyone who can read and press a button should be able to do it....

10 PM (after a very busy working day), CTO calls me and tells me: "We decided to hand in the new version to [random client] one week earlier, so they can test it."
Me: "I don't think is a good idea, the app is still unstable, we started working in it yesterday, it *will* crash"
CTO: "Don't you worry, at least they know we are working on it"
20 minutes later
CTO: "WTF why did you make my app crash?! I can't send this to a client!"

Told you. That is why that code is on develop and not on master.

I make a presentation to explain to the boss why we had to tweak around the requirements in order to keep backwards compatibility and stuff. I take 15 minutes explaining how our system currently works and how these requirements would change it, etc etc.

"So... is this workflow okay for our customers?"

They stared into the presentation slide for a good minute.

"I think we should align this row over here with that square over there."

"Oh don't worry this is a demo. But do you think our customers will still be okay with these changes?"

"Yeah, but these two elements are unalligned and they look pretty bad."

I'm starting to think that fancy speech can deter people from questioning or complaining to you. I'm pretty sure they don't know their own product as well as I know it.

Ladies and gentleman, I've done it.
Remove your hacker game trophies from your wall.
That nasty bug you fixed a couple of nights ago? Meh.
Your top devRant post? You'll delete it after reading this.
Every awesome accomplishment you can think of: it all means shit now.

>> I have SUCCESSFULLY changed my business Microsoft account password into something I can remember AND Microsoft accepted it in under an hour of trying!!!!! <<

I want to say a big FUCK YOU to MICROSOFT for WASTING MY BLOODY TIME.

FUCK YOU for giving me a max of 16 characters. DASB&(*(&G*HH*& for telling me every time my password is 100% strength and then after every submit tell me I have to change it AGAIN because it should be harder to guess. WUT?! It was 16 characters including a (capital) letter, number and multiple special characters, WHAT ELSE DO YOU WANT FROM ME?! UNICODE EMOJI'S???!!! ALLOW ME TO USE MORE CHARACTERS SO I WILL MAKE IT HARDER TO GUESS IT, IT'S 2018 FFS.
I don't even understand why my new password is accepted compared to the other one, but fuck it I can access my account again.
Now I might have to find a new job before the company password policy kicks in again.

/me drops everything and walks out of the office to get wasted (not sure if celebrating or just really pissed off)

"It works on our end", the sentence that made me lose my shit.

I've been working on a project were we're supposed to integrate an API into our system.

When trying to get some user id's (UUID) from said API, we got a type-error in the response (???), so I called their integration support and asked what the fuck they were doing (not really, i was kinda calm at this point).

The answer I got was following:

Integration guy: "Uh, bro, like, I don't even know, it's probably on your end"

Me: "We literally used this endpoint with the same parameters yesterday, and got a result we expected. I noticed you updated your API this morning, did you make any major changes?"

Integration guy: "Yeah we changed the type of user id from string to number"

Me: "So, you changed the type of a UUID (uuid4) from string to number? How did you not think that would be an issue? I can see in your forums that everyone else is having the same issue."

Integration guy: "Nah, it's probably a bug in your code, it works on our end"

Me in my mind: *IT WORKS ON YOUR END?!? IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER IF IT WORKS ON YOUR END, FUCKTARD.*

What I actually said: "Uhm, I'm not sure if works on your end either, I'm not even sure how this change made it to production. But hey, thanks I guess, bye."

WHY AM I NOT ABLE TO YELL AT PEOPLE WHEN THEY ARE BEING RETARDED???

But really though, when you're maintaining an API, you shouldn't fucking care if things work on your end in your dev environment. What matters is how it works in production, for the end user/users.

And I know that 99% of cases it's the users fault by entering the wrong parameters or trying to request with wrongly setup auth and what not, but still.

Don't ASSUME nothing's wrong on your end. It's your fucking job to fix the issues.

And guess what? The problem was on their side.
I'm going fucking bald.

The Cloud Of Bullshit

Every day I wake, and I think of my one true mission in life. To mock and ridicule paint huffing idiots. Something recently that drew my ire, like the hemorrhoids on my ass is this idea of 'the cloud', THE CLOUD and the buzzword lingo-bingo bullshit that providers use to hype and sell it.

For example, airtable is an amazing service. I love that I can insert just about anything into a row, create any of my own row datatypes, that it's flexible as all hell.

I love it.

And I hate that I'm essentially locked in to the cloud.
I fucking hate how if my internet goes down (thanks you pie eating inbred dipshits at comcast) I have no access.
If the company is bought, they'll shut down like all the rest , to be "relaunched at a later time" (or never).
I hate that if the company doesn't make enough money, or it's investors change their mind, woopsie, service is shut down.
I hate that the cloud is synonymous with massive data leaks and IOT-levels of stupidity in security practices.

Every time someone says "but its in the cloud! Isn't it amazing!"

I always think 1. YEAH IF IM AN INVESTOR I GET TO MILK LOW BROW FINGER PAINTING FUCKWITS EVERY MONTH like Adobe sucking the blood from infants who are still in college.

2. Why? So I can get locked into their platform, have them segment off previously free features (fucking youtube and the 'subscribe so you can continue playing audio with your screen off' bullshit), and then have fees increase month over month?

3. Why, so every four years during the presidential selection, if I piss off some fuckstick braindead lemming literally sucking his girlfriends BFs cock, they can potentially shut me out from my own data completely?

The Cloud is built on shit-colored hype sold to knob gobbling idiots, controlling idiots, profiting at the expense of idiots, and later fucking them for buyout payola. The Cloud is a Cloud of Bullshit shat out by huckster messiahs straight into the lapping mouths of fanatics worshiping slavishly like toilet drinking scum at the porcelain alter of a neon god, invisible, untouchable, and like a spigot, easily shut off without anyone noticing. And when it happens, I'll be there, shouting "WHERE IS YOUR CLOUD NOW?"

Native any day. 100% native or I don't fucking want it
None of this node.js-gone-native bullshit either with notetaking apps taking up hundreds of megabytes of ram, where everything is bootstrap or react, in a browser, in a window container, because people are so fucking incompetent we have to hold their hand WHILE they give themselves a reach around.

Native or nothing.

For my favorite notetaking app, I use Microsoft OneNote. "OH god, a heathen, quick, stick his body up on a stake!"

But hear me out. I'll be the first one in a crowd to kick bill gates in the nuts (not because I particularly hate microsoft, just because I think hes kind of a cunt).

So when I say onenote is good, I really fucking mean it. Sure they did some cunty things like 'dumbed down' the interface, and cut out some options. But you know what they can't do?
Shut down the damn service (short of a system update completely removing the whole app, which, frankly, wouldn't surprise me).

It's so god damn good it waxed my balls, cured my cancer, fixed my relationship with my father, found my long lost brother, and replaced ALL my irl notebooks.

It's so good that if it was cocaine I'd be hospitalized for overusing it.

So god damn good it didn't just replace all my notebooks, it even replaced and sped up my mockup process three to five times. Want layers?

Built in. Just drag an image on to the notebook to import instantly.

Want to rearrange layers? Right click select "send forward/back/bring to front/send to back".

Everything snaps to grid by default and is easily resizeable.

I had all the elements for a UI sliced and diced. Wanted to try a bunch of layouts. Was gonna take me two damn days.

Did it in three hours with the notebook features of onenote.

After I started using onenote, me and my bodypillow finally conceived even.

Sweet marries mammaries I just fucking jizzed. Thank you onenote.

P.s. It really did speed up my UI design, allows annotated images, highlighted text. Shit, it can even do kanban.

And all I can think is "good job microsoft making an awesome product for free, being dumb as fuck for not charging for it, and then not marketing it at ALL."

It was sheer fucking luck that I discovered it while was I was looking for vendor STD bloatware to blast off my new install.

OneNote: Worth a try even for the kick-gates-in-the-nuts fan club.

The cloud can suck my balls.

Ohh man i fucked up bad. 5 days as intern, and i fuck up really bad with my ego and ignorance.

I love my this company. A great environment, lots of people to learn from , i am given reasonable tasks and i feel happy to complete them. But what happened today was weird and fucked up.

I have never worked at a place with seniors designers tech leads and more people with positions. I have also worked with a lot of competitive people who are always in a race to be first.
And how do we come first? Have a lot of knowledge, hear the smallest of detail and sprint towards goal (because the combination your knowledge, assumptions and speed is enough to make you reach to the top). You don't ask for specific details, because they are obvious. And that's me in short.

Today i fucked up.
Mistake #1 ) first i was given a small task by my senior. It was a 20 mins task max if i had done it the normal noobie way . But i am a pro in mind , i have to do it with all the architecture , even if i don't understand why. So i asked for 50 mins. They gave it and did not had a problem with my time, but with the way i wrote my code.

He was like "who told you to make it like this ? Why did you made it like this?" And was visibly irritated. And i was like super chill saying "i don't know the why, but i know its correct way of using it" , pissing him even more. In my eyes he's just a super friendly sr, more like a bro and wouldn't mind some cheeky answers. And he didnt show any
consequences for that time.

Mistake #2 this is super fucked up. Our office is going under some renovation & interns were asked to sit in the co-working spaces (outside of the office). It was already very disturbing and i had to go to office every few minutes.

So after lunch this happens : We are working on a new module that already has a tonne of screens and logics. I have made a small part which is from the middle and now we can go both in the forward or in the backward direction.(Also, its quite a new module whose idea was recently discussed and decided. And weirdly i am also being treated like a core member as the ceo once himself asked what would he my flow for doing things in this. i am in direct contact and under direction of backend , designers , ceo and My senior and many ppl are giving me tasks ) And... Aagh fuck it. .. its a long story and i don't feel like repeating it but

inshort :

got a task,

didn't understood it completely and thought its my task to figure it out, took a long time figuring it my self ,

techlead/designer somehow changed my and my sr. direction of flow even tho we were taking a different approach

I sit in a noisy and irritating place

Techlead/designer comes during the time when i am figuring out the solution(already overtime the one in point #2) nags for result.

I get in an argument with him, justifying for my time and arguing that it's difficult to think technical logics for that design
( truth be told, it WAS a difficult logic which he thought was too easy. It consisted of 3 variables and 8 states we were doing different works for 4 of them and rejecting 2 and ... I don't know, i had got that wrong . But that shouldn't had been my problem to solve. I should have gone to my senior and didn't get into argument with tech lead ). It think i might have offended him too.

After he left, i am so angry on him that after sometime my senior comes and i misbehave with him. He just asks to meet me before i go, and i do so. During the meeting we discuss this whole fuck up and how many times i showed him my ego and indiscipline. And then i realise what a fuckup i did due to my ego and lack of asking, blindly following my own over confidence and blindly following or arguing with others.

Fuck fuck fuck

"Graphics don't matter."

I ranted a while back about gamedev being hard to get into for me, and, today, user @DOSnotCompute posted a similar experience.

I had a couple more thoughts, so thought should post them here (FUCK! It ended up being too fucking long! sorry!)

So I was watching the making of mortal kombat 3 on yt, which was pretty amazing btw because I got to see the actors of the sprites in game which were engraved in my and thousands of others kids minds.

Anyhow, the creators of the series, John Tobias and Ed Boon, were interviewed and what not. And it hit me that while both were the designers, John was the main artist and Ed was the programmer (at least for MK1). Another game that comes to mind Super Meat Boy, and I bet hundreds of others did the same.

And it got me thinking, maybe that's my problem, I just need an artist.

And I think the reason why I never thought of that is because of this idea that graphics don't matter.

"you don't need an artist. You don't need graphics. The most important thing is the gameplay."

What a load of shit.
A lot of people believe that because they got tired of polished AAA games with automatic and predictible gameplay.

People started parrotting this knee jerk of a conclusion since then.

It's dumb. Imagine if Infiminer, one of the games Minecraft was based on, which btw looks terrible, had all the same features Minecraft had.
I would still not touch that shit with a pole.

Graphics ARE important. Games are on the VISUAL medium.
That doesn't mean you're sucking Sony's dick on every AAA release or that every game should be made with UnreUnityCocksReloadedEngine.

Some level of visual craft is required for a game ro be considered such.

(btw, I think most of you guys here get this, not trying to pander, just that I want to make it clear that I'm not accusing this community of being guilty of this)

If a game looks bad (given, bad can be subjective), if it gives the impression that it wasn't seriously made, then you kinda lower your expectations.

People get hyped on games that look good, because it means that the game could be good. Games that look unoriginal or terrible won't get played, wether they're good or not. And I think it's a reasonable reaction.

How many times did I hear things like "Look at x video game from the 90s, the graphics are terrible but it's fun as hell".

That is an absurd statement. The level of production some NES games went through is insane. We're talking millions of dollars for games that today might look primitive.

The graphics weren't shit back then, and even today you could say that they are simpler but also of excellent craftsmanship.

I'm not into creating art, I hate it in fact because you can't quantify the success of produced art.

So, duh, find an artist. Ok, how? This is the part where I have no fucking idea how.

You start spamming shit like "I need an artist" online? I dunno, something for another post I guess.

I guess the most healthy thing I could do is making demos that might look like shit just to get experience so that when I get to find an artist, I have practice already.

I've started programming when I was 12. Right now I'm 25. I can clearly say that I'm passionate, I've touched I think almost every "type" of programming ever. From game development, through IoT and finished at eCommerce. I never stop learning.

My workmates are pissing me off. For code review sometimes I'm waiting even 3 days when I've changed like 5-6 files. They don't want to introduce "new" technologies (by new I mean who are existing at least 2-3 years, got stable community). They don't want to refactor some core of the application because it's working - they don't care about it as they can later say "legacy system so this basic feature took me a week".

Code quality means for them "use shorthand syntax, this code is ugly" - the basic shit which can do any linter

When I'm doing code review, I'm checking out to this branch, test it, check if the solution is scalable. Then I make my comments. I just hear "stop bitching about it just approve".

Thank God I've made through interview and I'm going to switch job in next week.

about 18 years of "oh, you made this? that's nice, but don't you want to do/learn something you'll actually get paid for instead?" as a reaction to any game prototype i made and showed them. until i got my first programming job. after that, silence and pretending the previous 18 years never happened (except the since forever running "joke" of "oh, you're not going to finish it anyway").

also, the one time i begged my (dtp/graphic artist) mom to draw me some backgrounds for my game, because at least one time in my life i wanted to not have to work on a thing completely alone, it took about three months of begging and convincing, upon which she finally said "ok, i'll try", and after another month, and one unfinished image that i estimate took about an hour to make, she told me "sorry, i don't think i can make what you need".

also some years of having "maximum 2 hours of computer time per day, unless it's the weekend" rule.

I really don't get all the Musk fans. I mean, sure you can find some value in Tesla or SpaceX, sure you can think theses companies are truly innovating. But why give all the credit to the rich businessman who seems to spent more time promoting himself than really working on science stuff, and not to all the ingeneers and creatives who are really putting some hard work on every day ? All Musk is really doing is running a business. He seems to do that pretty well, agreed, but after all it's "just" that: business. He's not the genius, nor the creative. He has money and invests it well, that's all.
I don't get why so many people give all the credit to him, even here on devrant where it should be logical to find more people supporting the real brains behind the tech.

"He has a vision about the future, he's imaginative..."

- Well that's bullshit.

Once again: he has money, a lot, and a certain skill about how to invest it (and about doing some proper marketing too), which companies to buy, etc. That don't make him such a great visionary about the future of the human being, just a great businessman. I'm sure you can find millions of people around the world with better ideas about the future, but they're not in his position. They're not rich, they're not CEOs, they're mostly unknown.

Stop follow the stream by glorifying businessmen just because medias are talking lot about them. Instead, know where the real talent (and work) is. Give credit to Musk employees, not to him.

What a difference three lines of code can make. That's the typical case of "that seemed to be a good idea". I don't know how did I think it would work out on the long run. Next step will be reduceing the enourmous CPU usage as well.

Problem: ugly-ass php spaghetti code that has a technical debt of 16(!!!) years. I mean, it's so spaghetti that has two legacy frameworks that talk to each other inside the same monolith.

Observation: after two months my colleagues, trying to refactoring stuff, they were able to touch so little stuff that it almost made no difference.

How much is worth a rewrite? Because i don't think i can make a difference on a codebase so messy.
I know that rewrite is not the answer 99.9999% of the time, but i have tons of doubts here.

So for context, I'm doing an Apprenticeship in IT and naturally I've been put on help desk.

I've recently been given a phone on my desk since I'm trusted enough and know enough about our software that there's no risk to me accepting calls.

I get the standard ones, a number from a different country, poorly pronouncing a co-workers name, asking if they can speak to them. I give my normal response, "I'll just check if they're in a meeting and I'll get back to you" (which they somehow always are) and ask if they would like to leave a message. They obviously don't since they're usually scams.

Since Tuesday I've started getting calls from "BT Technical Support". I don't use BT. My company doesn't use BT. So, it's clearly a scam.

Yesterday, the same guy calls me up, Thomas he says his name is. I go along with it for a while, agreeing that I've noticed our network has been slow until the point where he asks me to begin to install TeamViewer. I realise what he's going to do so I ask him what the problem with our network is.

I hear him start to respond but he stops. He's got no clue what to say, so I say to him, "Thomas mate. I think our biggest problem with our BT network is that we don't have BT."

He puts the phone down.

So I ask you for help, lovely people of devRant.

I have a Windows 10 VM ready to go. I have a couple notepad files labelled as "Passwords" and "Bank Details". What else can I throw on there to make this guy think he's hit the jackpot without really causing too much damage?

Any ideas would be appreciated. <3

I dropped my kid off at preschool and went my way home.

She's 2 so I transport her on a stroller.

While coming back, I came across an old lady sweeping the sidewalk of her house, and it got narrow to pass through because there was a tree next to her.

I carefully slowed down as to not collide with her, and while going through, we noticed each other.

I did a tiny smile as a way of saying "hi" like I usually do to people on the street.

To which she gave back the most innocent and sweet smile I've ever seen a stranger give on the street.

I could honestly feel my heart crack as it happened.

I guess the stroller must have caused her sympathy thus that reaction.

(which is why I like going around with the stroller, because people tend to treat you nicely which feels nice, like butterflies)

I know it might seem like an ordinary story without a punchline, but let me explain that I walk this city everyday.

And even though the people here is very nice compared to other cities I've lived in, it is very rare to get smiled at with such joy.

You might still think that is not a good story. But I can explain its relevance.

As some of you know, I post triggering content on this account, closeted parts of me that I normally hide,

Such as sexual stuff, some people think I'm a degenerate but I like to think I just have normal sexual thoughts that don't affect others in real life AT ALL.

And I'm also very argumentative, again, some people might see it as troll behaviour. On my side though, I just don't like bullshit and call it out when I see it.

But with this post, I'm not trying to be more likable or negate all the weird shit I said. This post is just another closeted part of me, being emotional.

And the reason I hide that is because it is not generally well accepted when a man is sensitive, at least where I'm from.

For example, if a female friend at work had a nice haircut, sometimes I feel the urge to be like "omg girl you look so prettyyyy!!!!".

But if I did that I know what will happen based on DIRECT experience: people will assume I'm gay or weak, and will make fun of that.
Or the actual friend will think I'm hitting on her.

No, fucking thank you, not having that shit.

But even if people accepted that, they just can't conceive I'm also very direct and honest, so when they do get to know me better, they get shocked.

So what do I do? I just hide that. That might change in the future, but I don't have the energy right now to deal with some people's simplemindedness.

I'm not making any sort of political statement, like "people should be treat me correctly or else get fired because of offending my gender".

But I'm not gonna lie, it would feel very nice if I was around more progressive people. I wished I had just just standard male behaviour and thoughts.

I guess some people in progressive cities are more accepting of the whole gender fluid thing, so I wished I lived in one (let me clarify though, I'm not a mindless gender fanatic).

I'm also not perfect and sometimes the line between "I love your haircut" and "I'm into you" blurs the fuck out, so that's on me... I don't know if it's something I can change though...

Hopefully all this shit I'm saying doesn't make me look like a lunatic. Veeeery hopefully.

Though, If you think for real I'm a lunatic or bad person, you can suck donkey dick.

I fucking hate stupid accountants!

Yesterday we went to a customer to talk to the accountants because we want to remove one of their unused PC's in the office.

First, just the way they think (and talk if) they are the most important and it's absolutely critical everything works 100%. I see they are important but not 100 times more important than everybody else!

They called us their EDP-guys (EDV in German, that's the translation I found). That insulted me a bit. I'm rather called IT-guy, I don't know anything about the fucking EDP systems nor want I to. I'm there to make sure the hardware works. But whatever, fine, call me what you want.

Then they straight up threatened us, because their work is so important, they can't afford to have downtime in their systems. They don't really care, but the bosses of us both do and if we fuck up they (the bosses) will hold us responsible. There is a fucking update for your piece of shit software (datev)! I don't do the update, I'm just responsible that the update can be deployed on the hardware. I'm not responsible if this update fucks your system and frankly I don't care!

I could tell them all of this but they won't listen. They always talk in this patronising arrogant voice, because they are so important and we better don't fuck up the update.

I'm there to help. I don't want downtime for your systems. I want you to work with our systems the best you can.
But fuck you, I hope the server burns down!

probably the one who sent me 3 mails within 10 minutes regarding 3 different positions, and all were addressed to someone else (Hello, Mr. Completely Different Name), so i replied telling him that's not me, and gave him the info to fix it in their db. he apologized profusely and said he fixed the error.

Next day I got two mails for another two positions, with the same incorrect name.

Or the one with whom I had half an hour phone "interview" for a specific position, they couldn't answer even the most basic technical question about the project, but invited me to an in-person interview and said my questions will be answered there, the phone interview was just to make sure they don't send completely offtopic people to the interview with the client (so far acceptable).

On the in-person interview, it was partially a repetition of the phone one, but okay, lady from the company is talking to me first time in her life. We get to the part where I can ask my questions, so I ask those basics about the project again, and her answer is:
"Oh, i don't know, i'm not a technical person, you'd have to ask that to the technical person from the company, I'm an hr person from the recruiting company."

"Wait... so... not only was this whole meeting a waste of my time, but you also lied about what it is, when you scheduled it with me on the end of the phone interview?"

"Well... it wasn't a waste of time, we like to meet the candidates in person before we forward them to actual interviews in the company, to make sure that they're not completely offtopic."

"... and how exactly do you think you'd be able to evaluate that, since you're not at all a technical person and know nothing about the project??"

" Well, i talk to programmers a lot, so i've picked up quite a bit of the terms."

...

I've forgotten how to make friends.

I think I've grown to the point where I can barely tolerate myself, let alone somebody else on a regular basis. Plus, being busy makes it hard to be decent to people and actually get back to their messages and calls.

Plus, I don't code anymore...
*Starts making another cocktail before the supervisor starts yelling*

Hello fellow people,

though I'm normally just a lurker, I want to take some time to make some new years resolutions I probably won't follow after a few days, but I do have some small goals I hopefully can achieve.

1. Hopefully not regretting to post this. I get kind of anxious when I think about someone I know could see this. I'm fairly new to this site, so I really don't know what's going to face me.

2. Getting my mental health on the right track.
I could do so much more if I wouldn't be as... occupied with uncomfortable thoughts as of right now, such as feeling as if I am not able to do what I want to do because I'll never achieve anything so why even trying... I want to change that, because I'd be more able to do things I want to do; to have more energy for uni because that's what I originally wanted to do. study computer science because it was and probably is still fun to me. finding the motivation I've had a few months ago.

3. With that follows... trying new things; starting a project and hopefully finishing it.

I don't know. I normally don't do these kind of new years resolution things, but I took this small opportunity, even if it is just for me, to write it down.
Here's to... another chaotic year, as always. But better chaos. I don't know... why am I doing this? This page wasn't meant for this or was it? I'm confused now. I'm sorry if this bothered anyone ^^'

TDD.

I'm a fan of writing tests right after you write every module. I actually think it's doable.

But I'm not a big fan of traditional TDD, which is defined as: first writing the tests, making them fail, writing code until tests don't fail.

My experience with traditional TDD when writing library code is that you start with this very naive idea of what is needed, so you write classes and functions and a lot of times they look like overly simplistic pseudocode.

So what do you do? You scratch that, you delete those classes/functions several times.

I think this discovery process that your code is naive is slowed the fuck down by doing TDD.

I'd rather write a theoretical API in a readme file, then write code, and then write the tests, you can even withhold writing the tests, but never leaving them for another day, just so that you don't waste time writing tests that you're going to scratch.

There's always a time constraint, and most of us can't afford bikeshedding.

Traditional TDD feels like an esoteric thing, it tries to make programming a series of steps, it actually sounds like an infommercial.
"FOLLOW THESE 3 SIMPLE STEPS AND WRITE THE BEST CODE EVER"

I've had today a meeting with the CEO regarding some designs. Here have some quotes that he made:

1. So you can click, click, click, click, click
2. numbers are so complicated so I just said something
3. I like the vibe in Amsterdam
4. We are doing a rebranding. Our rebranding document is the color of the 2 blues and one orange
5. I've to ask my wife for the design (with no design experience) to make the rebranding documents
6. In <the app our technicians/support use>, you can brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrb
7. This is what differeniate us between most applications; FAVORITE SQUARES
8. I never watch that mess. I don't even know if it works or have ever worked with it. (talking about a simple table view)
9. You have been reported to the admins (in an admin-only application for our customers)
10. It's always nice to see developers think; when I don't think
11. But it's already an iPhone (when looking at android designs & cries in largest userbase in my country)

Different perspective.

So your friend wants you to make the next big Facebook or Google because they know you can code....lots of rants like that and it gets me as well when I'm fixing printers for family and friends. Thing is these people genuinely just want to do something cool and succeed so they can have a good life. They see what we can do and wish they had the same talent. They have an idea they think will be great, they don't know what we know, and they don't know that it could be the most amazing thing ever and still never take off.

They don't realize to be Facebook or Google you have to sell out your values, morals, and soul. They just think if we can code we should be millionaires. So on that philosophy after just over a year the devRant creators should be rolling in cash right? But pretty sure I saw they are still operating at a loss.

I'd love to be able to have the time to work with each of them, teach them, and guide them through that first failure and let down of realizing that coding doesn't buy a magic ticket to a new life.

// Like anyone ever really fixes a printer //

I'm feeling like writing this down...

So today I got told off by my boss. Why? Because my job bores me.

My current title, "webmaster", is quite similar to "plumber" where I work. I fix holes on our websites, and I tell "qualified" people (external providers) how a project should be made. Nothing exciting, nothing creative, boring.

So I got told off today for being "laid-back" in a newsletter project (GDPR, looking at you) and not being thorough in my procedures of testing and configuration. Fair enough, I didn't care and I admitted it. It's a boring drag-and-drop done in literally 5 minutes, there's no added brain-value here. Plus I got told off by my IT Manager because our Exchange server would not let me receive test emails. Still doesn't work after a day. Yay.

Then she said "we're doing exciting things here, it's not always the case anywhere else you'd work". And I'm like: "really? I love writing code, seeing things coming alive, investigating why things don't run smoothly, writing efficient code (both in performance and in readability)". I hear many friend devs telling me they're doing that and what they do during their "dev-day"... All I'm doing here is "maintenance" (a.k.a boring) stuff that apparently is "exciting". Adding a <script> to handle google tag manager is hell fun, going through compiled CSS and change color values is also thrilling, finding out if a PDF handler application can handle PDF files, re-plugging a computer monitor to make it work...

I think she meant that I'm not at my place here.

Didn't want to tell her that I have no motivation in doing things I don't enjoy making, i.e, my job.

Good thing I have an interview in two weeks

"Hello, the drive of your XYZ server is getting full, would it be possible to prune some of the unused and/or old docker images and layers there please? Alternatively, we can offer to replace the drives with a higher capacity models for FOO extra per month"

"Hello, the disk use keeps growing and has reached the 95% mark, please prune some of your images to make space for new. If you wanted to choose the alternate option of disk capacity increase, we would have to do that as soon as possible, otherwise you may run out of space before the RAID array rebuilds"

"Hello, your server XYZ has completely ran out of disk space. Any changes that would require data being saved on disk may and probably will fail. Please free some space as soon as possible"

Ugh, I hate clients that just don't cooperate until shit hits the fan...

And no, we could not prune the space ourselves, its not our data to delete whenever we think it necessary.

We merely manage the machine's operation, keeping it online and its services running.

So I have been a fly on the "wall" for last couple of months and never signed up, but now here I am!

Rant is about a serious topic - gender gap in tech industry!!
Couple of months ago Stackoverflow announced developer survey results! I was shocked by demographics results! It was disappointing to see biggest gender gap in general tech industry!
I believe tech industry can be the first one to have equal pay for women!

However.... (bad part)
I was going through my twitter feeds and saw this! Many of you have seen this tweet too.

(ohh!fuck I cant attach multiple images here, I should have created Medium post, fuck it!)

"They" continue, quoting from the tweet.
1)"....bias in society is reflected in AI"
2) "However, I do think it is our responsibility as designers/developers/users to be aware of this bias and do our best to correct it."

I want to rant about 2nd one. Some of you may not like it including grammar naziz!
As a developer/programmer I take 2nd one personally! I am currently at denial phase though!
And I have an OCD so gonna make points here!

1) Seriously tell me please, how the fuck you can write gender bias algorithm which can pass a big crazy amount of test suite?

2) Google has done many things for last decade to overcome gender gap related issues. I have met some of the nicest people from Google, and this is really hard for me to believe that google AI or that team has anything to do with the results!

3) Someone suggests use "they" in google translated result, can you fucking imagine how wrong that would be??? If I am developer working on that algo or even in that team and I see this ticket in jira with highest priority where it says, "make all translated results gender neutral using only they" - I would fucking like to die and may be in my next life ask me to do that, when I am a toddler!

4) I am an advocate for equal pay, equal rights and equal opportunities for everyone to "minify" this gender gap in tech, but showing google translate results of a gender natural language to make a point is wrong, it is simply undermining the efforts of something really helpful thing.

5) Moving on to the core point - What can be done to lower down the gender gap? I have seen amazing women who can code/manage far far far better than what I ever could imagine, and they are at really good place and deserve to be there. Are they doing enough to inspire other women to join tech industry?
Collective efforts are very much required. And need to keep in consideration that tech industry is highly competitive roles are also changing rapidly.

6) Many big companies have women at higher positions(CEO, CFO,....) what are their efforts to bring more women in tech industry?
(Some of you may not like this, as this is implying that it isn't only men's job. )

7) Going slightly political here, everyday we see really disappointing news related to women and their rights and health, I strongly believe women don't have to ask for or even have to mention about "equal rights" about anything. Everyone is equal!!!
This is 2017 and still fucked up!

Thats all for today! Heading for breakfast!

I think that two criterias are important:

- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind

1) Some simple anti examples:

- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-

2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.

E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.

Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.

When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
--
One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.

It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo

Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.

Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.

My worst enemies....

Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(

Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.

I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.

Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?

XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????

Last Monday I bought an iPhone as a little music player, and just to see how iOS works or doesn't work.. which arguments against Apple are valid, which aren't etc. And at a price point of €60 for a secondhand SE I figured, why not. And needless to say I've jailbroken it shortly after.

Initially setting up the iPhone when coming from fairly unrestricted Android ended up being quite a chore. I just wanted to use this thing as a music player, so how would you do it..?

Well you first have to set up the phone, iCloud account and whatnot, yada yada... Asks for an email address and flat out rejects your email address if it's got "apple" in it, catch-all email servers be damned I guess. So I chose ishit at my domain instead, much better. Address information for billing.. just bullshit that, give it some nulls. Phone number.. well I guess I could just give it a secondary SIM card's number.

So now the phone has been set up, more or less. To get music on it was quite a maze solving experience in its own right. There's some stuff about it on the Debian and Arch Wikis but it's fairly outdated. From the iPhone itself you can install VLC and use its app directory, which I'll get back to later. Then from e.g. Safari, download any music file.. which it downloads to iCloud.. Think Different I guess. Go to your iCloud and pull it into the iPhone for real this time. Now you can share the file to your VLC app, at which point it initializes a database for that particular app.

The databases / app storage can be considered equivalent to the /data directories for applications in Android, minus /sdcard. There is little to no shared storage between apps, most stuff works through sharing from one app to another.

Now you can connect the iPhone to your computer and see a mount point for your pictures, and one for your documents. In that documents mount point, there are directories for each app, which you can just drag files into. For some reason the AFC protocol just hangs up when you try to delete files from your computer however... Think Different?

Anyway, the music has been put on it. Such features, what a nugget! It's less bad than I thought, but still pretty fucked up.

At that point I was fairly dejected and that didn't get better with an update from iOS 14.1 to iOS 14.3. Turns out that Apple in its nannying galore now turns down the volume to 50% every half an hour or so, "for hearing safety" and "EU regulations" that don't exist. Saying that I was fuming and wanting to smack this piece of shit into the wall would be an understatement. And even among the iSheep, I found very few people that thought this is fine. Though despite all that, there were still some. I have no idea what it would take to make those people finally reconsider.. maybe Tim Cook himself shoving an iPhone up their ass, or maybe they'd be honored that Tim Cook noticed them even then... But I digress.

And then, then it really started to take off because I finally ended up jailbreaking the thing. Many people think that it's only third-party apps, but that is far from true. It is equivalent to rooting, and you do get access to a Unix root account by doing it. The way you do it is usually a bootkit, which in a desktop's ring model would be a negative ring. The access level is extremely high.

So you can root it, great. What use is that in a locked down system where there's nothing available..? Aha, that's where the next thing comes in, 2 actually. Cydia has an OpenSSH server in it, and it just binds to port 22 and supports all of OpenSSH's known goodness. All of it, I'm using ed25519 keys and a CA to log into my phone! Fuck yea boi, what a nugget! This is better than Android even! And it doesn't end there.. there's a second thing it has up its sleeve. This thing has an apt package manager in it, which is easily equivalent to what Termux offers, at the system level! You can install not just common CLI applications, but even graphical apps from Cydia over the network!

Without a jailbreak, I would say that iOS is pretty fucking terrible and if you care about modding, you shouldn't use it. But jailbroken, fufu.. this thing trades many blows with Android in the modding scene. I've said it before, but what a nugget!

Lately I've noticed a lot of people complaining about webview apps (electron and so on)... While I see their arguments for resource hungry apps, slow and unreliable - I strongly think that it's just complaining for no reason....

It's slow - yes
It's stupid to make web work in native - yes
But guys, isn't it awesome that technologies allows us to do such things? Even a simple web developer can quickly prototype an application on mac/windows/linux/android/iphones - even if it's not a great one, you still don't need to learn all the corks and quacks of the languages... You just need to get it out there!

So, I'd like to say that we should actually appreciate things we have more, even if it's as stupid as emoji coding language :)

ps. I really admire the emoji language as it's amazing on the spectre of what is possible.... :D

I have a VP constantly harassing my people about some reports that we need to do as per federal law.

The thing is, these live inside of such system that I get to see exactly how many "hits" they get on a yearly basis. The only traffic we have on those sections is of people going ahead and putting the information from our reports there.

That's it, literally. Our user base does not go there. Federal agencies do not go there. No one gives two blips of shit about those sections. Yet she continuously acts like they are the most important thing in the fucking world. To make it better, I was told not to generate actual analytical data from said reports, since people with PHDs will come down on me to ask me who the fuck do I think I am from gauging them with such systems. So shit is a mute point on all fucking accounts.

I told my VP I can generate traffic information to let them know that shit is not really the most important thing in the fucking universe. His eyes glowed.

I don't want to see head rolls, but from staying till the next morning awake trying to give the best to our userbase, and just to be called out on shit like this as if I did not do enough for our people just.....well....it fucking hits man.

The worse part was me literally getting 30 minutes of sitting down after an all nighter, doing something for my users, to get to a meeting the next morning (I should not have driven there honestly) to hear this bitch complain about us not doing enough or not caring or whatever other bullshit she would spew.

I was livid, lack of sleep makes me dangerous. I turned to say something when my boss stopped me and took care of business. I seriously love this man. By all accounts and generational gaps a boomer, but one of the few good golden ones.

I just hate how unappreciated the realm of software development is by people that think that our shit is as simple as making a fucking powerpoint presentation.

Consolidate that with a director from another department taking all fucking glory during a major event of an application that I built by myself with 2 fucking weeks of no sleeping. And shit just gets glorious.

I have considered moving to other places, and heck, have gotten amazing offers, what with having a degree with a big fucking GPA and having the credentials of a senior, lead, full stack and manager role, the sky is the limit. But i know that if I leave then my users suffer, and I just can't fucking have that.

I have heard them speaking about doing something with X app that I built (with my department) I have even heard one of them saying "how is this made?" and a part of me hoped that it would be a good time to grab them and tell them of the field and the things that they can do. But I don't like announcing myself that way, always seemed to presumptuous, so I just smile, fuck yeah, my users are doing their thing with what I built to better their lives, what more can I have?

I have gotten criticisms from them, one recognized me, told me about his pain points and how it makes it hard for him to do what he must. Getting the data from the user base in an effort to make shit better for them drives me, my challenge being "how about this? better eh?"

But fucking execs man, think only of themselves, not the users, they forget about the users. Much like a shitty rock band forgetting about the music, about the fans.

I can't let that slide. But this fucking field. I sometimes fucking hate it, and I hate it because of the normies that don't understand and do not want to understand.

I do way too much, my guys do way too much and all I want is for the recognition to go to them. They do not need the ego boost, but to see my guys sitting in a meeting in which some dumb fuck is trying to drill us for taking to long, not doing something and what not, it fucking pisses me off. As their boss I always stand up and tell bitches off, but instead of learning, the bitches just keep pressing on their already defeated points.

Everything in human life gets fucking erradicated by: humans. People really do fucking suck.

I sometimes wish to go back, redo my diesel tech license and just work there, where I think one would be better of talking to an engine. But no, even then you get people, you have to interact with people, deal with people, and I am so far up my game and in my field that starting from scratch is a fucking mute point.

Maybe I need to keep fucking with stocks, get rich and just keep investing on bullshit. Whatever the fuck it takes me from having to feel the urge to choke a motherfucker in public.

I haven't really known what to post. But I've decided not to care about being relevant or care about the like count. I'm a very competitive person so things like like count tend to effect the way I see the quality of a post.

I want devRant to be a place where I can be honest and feel safe even if I don't get the validation I sometimes wish I had. And hey maybe someone will think my opinions or thoughts are interesting.

So let's start with a little about me. I'm a 17 year old kid that loves programming. I work full time as a full stack web developer and I'm really the only web person. The current system is built on WordPress because of fucking course it is. I don't like it but I gotta keep it user friendly for less techy people to manage. No one likes have all minor changes and tweaks having to go through one person when they could do it themselves. So I manage.

I'd say my passion is more backend development but I do love having a pretty UI to display the results.

I've struggled with mental health the past few years but I'm doing much better. Even just last week I had an anxiety attack during a social event. I came here for the community and I do enjoy it, but I'm gonna try to make it an outlet. My best friend went off to university and I don't really have any IRL friends I can just be me around.

I don't have anything special to say. But if you read this thank you for listening to some random kid on the internet. I hope you have a great day.

Regarding Article 13 (or 17 or wherever it moved to now)… Let's say that the UK politicians decide to be dicks and approve the law. After that, we need to get it engineered in, right? Let's talk a bit about how.. well, I'd maybe go over it. Been thinking about it a bit in the shower earlier, so.. yeah.

So, fancy image recognition or text recognition from articles scattered all over the internet, I think we can all agree.. that's infeasible. Even more so, during this lobby with GitHub and OpenForum Europe, guy from GitHub actually made a very valid point. Now for starters, copyright infringement isn't an issue on the platform GitHub that pretty much breathes collaboration. But in the case of I-Boot for example, that thing from Apple that got leaked earlier. If that would get preemptively blocked.. well there's no public source code for it to get compared against to begin with, right? So it's not just "scattered all over the internet, good luck crawling it", it's nowhere to be found *at all*.

So content filtering.. yeah. Nope, ain't gonna happen. Keep trying with that, EU politicians.

But let's say that I am a content creator who hates the cancer of joke/meme because more often than not it manifests itself as a clone of r/programmerhumor.. someone decides to freeboot my content. So I go out, look for it, find it. Facebook and the likes, make it easier to find it in the first place, you dicks. It's extremely hard to find your content there.

So Facebook implements a way to find that content a bit easier maybe. Me being the content creator finds it.. oh blimey! It can't be.. it's the king of freebooting on Facebook, SoFlo! Who would've thought?! So at that point.. I'd like to get it removed of course. Report it as copyright infringement? Of course. Again Facebook you dicks, don't make it so tedious to fill in that bloody report. And look into it quickly! The videos those SoFlo dicks post is only relevant in the first 48h or so. That's where they make the most money. So act more quickly.

So the report is filled, video's taken down.. what else? Maybe temporarily make them unable to post as a bit of a punishment so that they won't do it again? And put in a limit to the amount of reports they can receive. Finally, maybe reroute the revenue stream to the original content creator instead. That way stolen content suddenly becomes free exposure! Awesome!

*suddenly realizes that I've been talking about the YouTube copyright strike system all along*

… Well.. maybe something like that then? That shouldn't be too hard to implement, and on YouTube at least it seems to be quite effective. Just imagine SoFlo and the likes that are repeat offenders, every 3 posts they get their account and page shut down. Good luck growing an audience that way. And good luck making new accounts all the time to start with.. account verification technology is pretty good these days. Speaking of experience here, tried bypassing Facebook's signup hoops a fair bit and learned a bit about some of the things they have red flags on, hehe.

But yeah, something like that maybe for social media in general. And.. let's face it, the biggest one that would get hurt by something like this would be Facebook. And personally I think it's about time for that bastard company to get a couple of blows already.

What are your thoughts on this?

The site I work on is a market where you can buy magnets for dolors, insomniaque, bla bla bla (I don't believe a sec in this).
Just saying that to settle that 80% of our customers are +45 years old. They weren't born with a computer in their hands, and they sometimes manage to make a lot of mess in the site.
We are based in France, and we sell the most in France (no shit) and Switzerland. And this is the third time that a Swiss pass a command, puts all her address in Switzerland EXCEPT for the country (still on France) so she doesn't have to pay the shipping fee. I should do something about that, like a regex when verifying the zip code, but I have more urgent work to do, and the best has to come.
This smartass doesn't know she is the joke, because by saying she is in France, she has to pay the VAT that she wouldn't have if she said she was in Switzerland. She buys in general for around 350 €, so she has ~ 70€ (20%) in VAT, and she would only pay 14€ in shipping fee.
Maybe one day she'll see how dumb she is (my boss already mailed her so she pays attention to it, no change). But I think I would have set the regex by then.

I think I might change my middle name to "I told you so"

Couple of weeks ago I proposed integrating a daily process job into an existing WPF application (details of what+why would be too long to explain) and the manager suggested I make the changes

Me: "I can do it, but Jay has the most experience with that application. I don't have his WPF skills"
Mgr: "How hard can WPF be? If it uses the MVVM pattern, it should be a snap."
Me: "Its nearly an 8 year old WPF project with several chefs in that kitchen. I pretty sure I could figure it out, but that is a difference between 2 weeks and 2 days. Integration is pretty straight forward, Jay could probably do it in a day."
DevA: "WPF is easy. MVVM makes it even easier. I worked on the shipping app."
Me: "That's was a brand new, single page app, but yea, it should be easy."
DevB: "WPF has been around a long time and the tools have really matured. I don't understand what is so difficult."
Me: "I didn't say anything would be difficult, I know with that application, there is going to be complexity we need to figure out."
DevB: "It uses the MVVM, so all we need is the user control, a view model, controller, and its done."
DevA: "Sounds easy to me."
Mgr: "If you need more time to work on the vendor project, I'll have DevB work on the integration."

<yesterday>
Me: "How is the integration going?"
DevB: "This app is a mess. I have no idea how they got the control collections to work. If I hard-code everything, I can get it to work. This dynamic stuff is so confusing. Then there is the styling. Its uses dark mode, but no matter what I do, my controls show up in light mode."
Me: "The app uses Prism, so the control configuration is in, or around, the startup code."
DevB: "That makes sense. Will it fix the styling too?"
Me: "I have no idea. When I looked at it, some controls loaded the styles from the main resource, other's have it hard-coded. Different chefs in the kitchen, I guess. How far have you got?"
DevB: "I've created invoice button. That is as far as I got"
Me: "I'm finished with the vendor project and I'll be wrapping up the documentation today. I can try to help next week."
DevB: "Thanks. I think we might have to get Jay to help if we can't figure this out."
Me: "Good idea"

Two weeks and only a button. A button? I miss Delphi.

For the first time that I can remember I see ordinary people everywhere are unhappy with windows. In XP through win8 days I'd see people complaining about one crash here or there, but most of the times you had to be more experienced to notice why windows sucks.

Now, this week I already heard three complaints of people wanting to back to windows 7.

And I feel so happy... I feel waves of joy growing in me, as I burst in a sarcastic, obscure laughter.

Why do?

Because somewhere deep inside I hate windows.

Not becausebthe great amounts of frustration I used to have with it. But because it's so crazy I don't even consider it an OS, but rather a patchwork.

Microsoft's code base must be so fucked up they don't even know what to it with anymore.

That's my idea at least.

Buy it's good to see ordinary people are getting fed up of windows. This might be a way one of my dreams will come true, the day which Microsoft will not be able to maintain Windows anymore, and I think it's not more than ten years until we reach this day.

As a final result, if one day windows really gets to die, I want to be present, but not unnarmed, so I can shoot it at least 15 times, just to make sure this piece of crap is already dead.

Bye

just my useless opinion - I don't think bitcoin will every see a big drop

at least, not for ten years

in reality, every bitcoin transaction you make is just a number in the blockchain, just like any other coin. but unlike other coins, bitcoin is #1, has hype in the media, etc.

bitcoin is essentially the name brand of coins. when people think crypocurrency no other name comes to mind.

ethureum, litecoin, dogecoin? nope. nada. null. nil. None. the rate at which bitcoin will increase will become even more astounding. people can now profit of it more and more mining will happen because more people want to buy.

unfortunately I didn't buy it and 5¢, nor $4000, but I don't think we'll see another >$3000 drop for a while.

as the enthusiasm around it decreases, the price will increase at a slower rate, but nevertheless, growing.

my recommendation: buy now. and even if it does go down $2000 after you buy it, it'll probably come back up. so when it's work $110,000 in 2020, I don't think the $2000 will mean as much.

just my two cents.

I'd love to head some other opinions.

Hey guys, I have a serious question for you: How do you define science?

And yes this is going to be a long Rant. This topic really pisses me off.

A bit of context first. I come from a "humanities" background. I study history and dude, I love it. The problem is that even though we fucking pull our brains out studying historical phenomena with a fucking ton of conceptual tools, our work is mostly seen as literature to entertain the elderly during their lonely evenings. But that's not really the point of this rant.

My fucking problem is that while we try to do some serious work; actual work that could help society for real, it all goes into that magical fucking kingdom called "humanities". HOW THE FUCK DO THEY DARE TO CALL SOMETHING "HUMANITIES". IT'S A FUCKING HISTORICAL TERM THAT MEANS "TO FULFILL MEN IN ALL IT'S ASPECTS", AND NOW THEY'VE REPURPOSED IT, MAKING IT CONTAIN ANY STUDY THAT ISN'T "EMPIRICAL", "OBJECTIVE", ADD ANY FUCKING SCIENTIFIC DELUSIONARY TERM YOU CAN THINK OF.

And don't get me started on "objectivity". Oh boy, your fucking objectivity is hollow as a kid's balloon. There is no such thing as a objective study, even when it applies your "rational" "godly" scientific method. Some guys follow that shit as if it was a fucking religion. I do understand it's useful and all that, but in the end it's just a tool, you can't fucking define "science" by it's tools.

"""Q: What is carpintery?
A: Well, it's hammers, nails and wood. Yep. Hammers, nails and wood."""

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD WAS FUCKING INVENTED DURING THE XVIII CENTURY, WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK WAS GALLILEI BEFORE THAT? "HUMANITIES"?

Why do I say objectivity isn't posible? Well, guess what? YOU ARE FUCKING HUMAN. Every thing you know is full of preconceptions and fucking cultural subjectivities invented to understand the world. And it's ok, becouse if you understand your own subjectivity, at least you can see yourself in a critical sense, and at least "tend" to objectivity, in the same way functions tend to infinity.

And here comes the best part: people studying "cs" in my university pass most of the time studying a ton of shit that isn't really science, but is taken as scientific becouse it is related to "science". These guys spend entire semesters just learning programming fundational stuff that in my opinion isn't really science, it's just subjective conceptual constructs built to make the coding process better. They only have TWO fucking classes on discrete mathematics and another 3 or 4 in actual scientific fields related to computing. THESE GUYS AREN'T FUCKING BEING TAUGHT TO BE COMPUTER SCIENTISTS; THEY ARE TEACHING THEM TO BE PROGRAMMERS. THERE'S A HUGE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CS AND PROGRAMMING AND THAT IS THE WORD SCIENCE. And yes, I'm being drastic on the definition of science on purpose becouse guess fucking what? I'M PISSED OFF.

"Hey, what are you doing?"
"Just doing science with scrum and agile development."

I understand most of you guys would think of science as "the application of the scientific method", "Knowledge by experimentation and peer-review", "anything techy". Guys, science is a lot broather than that. I define it as "the search for truth", mainly becouse that's what we are all doing, and what humans have been doing to gain knowledge through the ages. It doesn't matter what field of truth you are seeking as long as you do it seriously and with fundaments. I don't fucking care if you can't be objective: that's impossible. Just acknowledge it and continue investigating accordingly.

I believe during the last centuries the concept of science has been deformed by the popular rise of both natural and applied sciences. And I love the fact that these science fields have been growing so much all this time, but for fucks sake don't leave every other science (science as I define it) behind. Governments and corporations make huge mistakes becouse they don't treat history, politics and other sciences seriously. Yes, I called history a "science", fuck you.

And yes, by my definition programming is not a science. I don't know what most of you think programming is, but for me it's a discipline that builds stuff, similar to carpintery or blacksmithing. Now if you are pushing the limits, seeking ways to make computing go further, then that's science. The guys that are figuring out AI are scientists, the guys that are using it to detect hotdogs aren't - unless they are the same person- deal with it. I guess a lot of you guys are with me on this point.

In the end, we are all artisans building abstract tools by giving orders to a machine.

I still have some characters left, so I want to thank the community as a whole for letting me vent my inner rage. I don't have much ways to express myself on these matters, so for me DevRant is a bless.

I'm so done with flutter.

I wanted to give it a little try by rewriting a small android project I wrote a few years back. It brings some nice concepts especially when it comes to UI related programming but that's all I can really compliment it for. It's nothing more than something to play with as it is right now.

Also I think this text will be hidden behind the read more. Did I successfully bait you with that cat?

The things I truly hate about it:

The ide integration makes me wanna use eclipse again. At least most nonsensical error messages disappear after saving the document on eclipse.
.
Wanna generate a new function? Yeah, let me just place it RIGHT INSIDE THIS FUCKING IMPORT STATEMENT

Over at Google: Let's just rename everything from java slightly different and put it in nonsensical context so that you have to learn all of it again. Also why don't we make it so that the code suggestions only suggest things you already imported, so that you have to look up every little piece shit feature.

When it comes to databases, I must say, I had more fun working with PHP and mysql than with sqFUCKlite. Throwing away the Room components for that? What a joke...

I already said what i think about the syntax here an devrant but I'm more than happy to repeat it here:
The syntax looks like someone looked at C#, Java and JavaScript and then decided to vomit the worst parts of it into a programming language. I can't really classify anything original about it. There are clear inspirations, but they are confusingly mashed together with the other languages making this one nuts of a language.

Android SDK documentation is a blessing in comparison to whatever the fuck flutter tries to do.

I don't think I'll want top touch that Google side project again within the next few years, if it hasn't been replaced with a new side project like billiard by then.

SCStudentRant?

I have a subj called "Fundaments of Operative Systems" (or something along those lines), and I have 2 crappy teachers, one for the theory classes, the other for the exercise classes.
The exercise classes teacher is said to be the worst in uni and every time I think about that class I get a bit anxious because I can never do anything in it. Basically we don't get taught code in theory classes and he just comes and says "do this exercise" without explaining anything first. And when he does I still don't understand it.
I bet like 90% of us have no idea how to program in C and we need that for those classes. I hate C with a passion because of this.
In the theory classes, the teacher explains most of the things without powerpoints, and when we don't understand something (either ask about something he said or what's written in the board), he REFUSES to explain or say what's written, because he has "explained it before". He even chuckles as if it was really funny that we can't read his handwriting or just didn't listen because we were writting things down OH MY GOD. So most of the times when I copy things from the boards and then look at them at home I'm like "what the hell is this, this doesn't make any sense, what did he even write" (has some word that looks like what he wrote with ?? around it)
I think they wanna watch us fail. I really do.
I kinda understand the theory classes, but half the test is writing code. How am I gonna write code if I don't understand it? I have a work for that subj to deliver until monday but I can't make it work because I don't know the code I have to write. Damn it all to hell jesus christ

Additional note: they're both in their 60s and should be retiring not long from now so maybe that's why they act so carelessly.
Love the uni, not so much some of the teachers

So I am finally plunging into continuous integration. If I make one more deploy script mistake, I've lost enough time to merit having learned a better solution than bash scripting calling git and rhc and py files I wrote. I have failing tests that are failing because they weren't updated after the million and a half urgent changes in the past 2 months, so it's time to act like I am a TDD fanatic and write the tests correctly. So much work. All from me listening to the constant req changes, listening to the urgency, letting non-devs get under my skin if you will. I'm optimistic in all the wrong places - I think I can write that by end of day let's try it. I'm lazy in the wrong places - I think that I can write that test later, because all I changed was XYZ (which took all night but I said I'd get it as close as possible didn't I?). And I think these handful of bash scripts are good enough to make sure I run tests? But remember, I didn't write the tests or I didn't go back and update them. Or the tests that fail, I'm too lazy. And so much of the tests, I would need to use, idk selenium for, and damnit if I really don't want to dig for element IDs to wait for every time I need an AJAX call.

Okay wow, I really did rant here. And discredited myself a bit lol I need to ignore the wrong lazy and embrace the right lazy. Protect myself from myself and from contributors. It really is, up to me now, to rescue myself from my bad habits. Bad habits perpetuated by clients urgency every day, to change things, that should have been finalized in November if we wanted a stable flipping system in January. It feels like the blind (client) leading the blind (me, when I do dumb shit like rush features out the door half tested).

Anyway all this came out, because I have been reading about continuous integration and stumbled upon this quote. And thought someone might laugh at the anachronism like I did

My internship is about to end in two months. I was under the impression that I'll start looking for a job towards mid August and then decide what to do. I didn't expect my company to offer me a position so early before my internship ended.

Initially I had liked the place. The work was pretty relaxed and I had quite a bit of freedom. Soon enough, I proved my worth and my team started respecting my opinions and suggestions. They even consulted me on multiple occasions.

The first thing I noticed on the downside was the company, despite being resourceful enough and having a decent turnover and important clients, was quite stingy in terms of employee welfare. There was no coffee. There was machine but you had to buy the capsule for yourself. And that sucks. I know I don't need to say more but the other problems were there was no enterprise subscription (or any subscription) to PhpStorm even though our team handled so many PHP projects. I know IDEs are personal preferences but not having any professional IDEs is not something to let slide. The lead dev uses NetBeans (and not because he loved it or anything). Even though I worked on WebDev and front end, I had no option to ask for a second screen. I had one display apart from my laptop. Usually most companies in Paris provides food tickets for internships and this company did not even give me that. And worst of all, there wasn't really anyone I looked up to. As much as I enjoy responsibilities and all, I don't think I should be in an environment where I have nothing much to learn from my seniors. For some fucked sense of security and certainty, I was willing to overlook all this when they offered me a position. But I recently had my interview and the regional manager, a fuck face who still makes me wonder how he reached his position, made a proposal for some quite a small amount of salary. What infuriated more than his justifications was his attitude itself. There was absolutely no respect whatsoever. It was more like "We'll give you this, I think this is more than enough for you. Take it or do whatever you want". I asked for more and he didn't even bother negotiating. I declined the offer.

Now this would have solved all the issues. But my manager and my lead dev like me a lot. Both of them are pretty nice people. They both were bothered with the fact that I had turned down the offer. My manager even agreed that the offer was too low and had already given me tips to help me negotiate. But after I turned down the offer, she went and discussed the issue with the regional manager and he offered me a new proposal. This time it was decent but still under my expectations. I'm pretty sure I can do better elsewhere. I said I need time to think about it. I get multiple advises from people to take it atleast so that I get my visa converted to a work permit. For some reason, I want to take the risk and say no. And find something else. But today my lead dev called me aside and asked me if was going to say no. He really tried to influence me by telling me a lot of good things about me and telling me about the number of different projects we're going to start next month and all that. Even though I'm fully convinced that I don't want to work here, just the sheer act of saying no to these two people I respect is sooo fucking difficult for me that I can already imagine me working here for the next one year. The worst part is I can clearly classify their words and sentences into stuff they say to canvass me, stuff they're bullshitting about and flattery just to make me stay. Despite knowing I'm being taken advantage of, some fucked up module in my head wouldn't stop guilt tripping me. I don't know what to do. If I only I could find a really better job.

Pardon the grammatical errors if any. I'm just venting out and my thoughts branch in 500 different ways simultaneously.

Yesterday I almost ended my programming Carrier

Long story - I am enrolled in EC course which I cannot face for a single moment. Web development is something that had always excited me, and i wanted to make a room for myself here since childhood.

I cannot study what doesn't interest me. But that does not mean I hate learning. I have strong interest in learning things. Hence, I skipped two end-sem exam in the last semester. And utilized thar time to work on my project. I've been working on it since last 6 months. I learned more things in last one year than what I did in last 3 years at college.

My brother came to know I failed two exams in the last sem, yesterday. There were clouds flying over home for hours. What my family thinks is, I should get my degree. Whether I learn anything or not, but I should I get it. I must do graduation and what ever stuff I am working on can be done later. They don't understand the value of time and how fast things are changing.

I even got a client, who is willing to pay large amount for my platform. What my family thinks, is I am running for money, which is merely true.

What world we are living in. Parents and families don't want their children to get educated or well equipped with knowledge and values but want a printed degree in hand, which they think is enough to get a job.
The colony where I live, more than 80% graduates, that graduated in last 5 years with good numbers are unemployed.

I. HATE. DELL. WITH. MY. GUTS.

Their low tiers products are full black plastic overpriced fuckshit, if you press too much the cover you can actually destroy your display. Fuck shitty laptops and fuck this shitty laptop in particular. It's slow. It's so slooooooow. It's everflying fucking slow motion, being on the web is like being in the matrix while dodging bullets made of wordpress plugins. The only good thing I can say is that is living right now, it has been... Three years? I only picked it because of high discount and ubuntu preinstalled (that made me think: oh, maybe they have components that are linux compatible regardless of distros. It was not). I'm enjoying Manjaro, when I'll have the skillz i'm going full Arch.

I will start university this fall. It's going to be a math major. I absolutely need something better than this anyway. I am also freaking out because I don't know which genre of software they could want to make me install and if they're windows/mac only. In the meanwhile I do photography, video, design and as you may suppose Adobe is often my go-to; I also have to build a workstation at home. I am freaking out because WELL FUCK WINDOWS 10 AND ITS PRIVACY NIGHTMARE PERIOD.

Which laptop I buy?
How well does heavy software run in a Windows virtual machine (on the desktop, not the laptop)?

i really wish Python would not have the presence it has on Machine Learning. I can think of a handful of languages that would be better suited for it and even though I don't hate Python it has a lot of things that just make me say uuuuuuugh when writing it. It al comes down from this: treating syntactic whitespace in a special way is fucking retarded.

Hot Take:

Subscription based products are exactly why we don't see major break-throughs in software anymore.

*** I am warning you, don't mention AI in the comments, I am gonna fucking lose it. ***

Tell me one thing, If you spent thousands to create a product that you now have a good subscriber base on, why would you invest money into making another? Why wouldn't you just consider improving the product at hand and selling it to more people to create additional profit?

In the 90s we used to get any software on CDs/DVDs and you actually got to own it. Meaning that the company can only take money from you ONCE and never again (almost). This also meant that the companies knew that soon they'd have to come up with something else that will make them money, thus them creating new software every couple or so years, some even creating ground-breaking software.

But then, there is thing called MONOPOLY.

We will never get another music app than Spotify or Apple music, because they are just too far ahead. They're built on subscription model.

You can probably think of more examples of great companies building great products and moving them to subscription model and therefore never creating another software, because frankly, why take the risk to lose money when you can gain more money by improving the product at hand?

We will never get the same frequency of good games coming to market from established companies like RockStar. Why should they bothered to make GTA 6 when they can sell millions of worth of Shark Cards every month and rake in the profits?

Subscriptions have totally killed off software creativity and motivation for devs/companies to create great software.

I have a new UNTRAINED bot on my site. It's based on openai now. And that's why it's blazing fast and blazing usless.

I can tell you why bots are so boring and will sure cause the dead internet theory. My datasets for example never contain real disturbing stuff ACCORDING TO NORMAL PEOPLE. EVERY TIME:

"The job failed due to an invalid training file. This training file was blocked by our moderation system because it contains too many examples that violate OpenAI's usage policies, or because it attempts to create model outputs that violate OpenAI's usage policies."

Now i'm really done. I gonna email them about their unusable training system.

In theory, i could test the message one by one if it is bad first. Don't want to do or pay for that. There should be an option to skip the data it considers disturbing instead of cancelling a whole data set for 0.1%. You also don't want to know how long it takes BEFORE he is finished validating you set. I think someone is doing it manually and clicks 'Uh uh..'-button..

Also, for the people who think they have gpt4o by having the API, you're lied to. The 'own gpt'-option on the paid openai is way more advanced than the ones you make locally.

They don't give us the real good stuff!

Oh, btw! The input data for my training is based on FORMER conversations with the bot. I automated a script to repeat a conversation I had and selected those messages and clicked 'train'. So it even complained about its OWN data! That data was already saying stuff like 'I can't help you with that' IN my training data. So, you 'corrected' and corrupted my data and now its still nog good enough for round 2?

I would really love to go back to local LLM's, but I can't imagine having ever a machine that generates as fast as the real GPT does. I also prefer to do it myself, but it's David vs. Goliath, even with a 5k computer. I'm sure.

Low quality rant, I know. I'm typing while still frustrated. For people who think censorship is needed often, this is the result! According to someone else, YOU are the one who has to be censored. Don't forget that.

Linux tip: if you're setting up a new computer w/ a fresh install of Linux or you got some new device you'd like to make Linux friends with, don't start by searching for drivers. Start with upgrading your kernel to the newest Mainline version you can. It's very likely it will bring your devices' support with it.

Damn I didn't think I'll like my P1 gen4 THIS much. Even better with a flavour of LMint!

If you want to make a startup but don't because there is a similar product or "every niche is already occupied", quit thinking this way.

Yahoo could once easily buy Google. They even received the offer but rejected it. But as for now, Yahoo is nothing.

Tumblr was once a top social network, but they crumbled. Foursquare once was preinstalled to smartphones, and now it pretty much doesn't exist.

Blackberry was a giant, the number one smartphone manufacturer. Where are they now? It wasn't betrayal like it was with Nokia and Stephen Elop.

Matter of fact, I'm now working for the company that entered a heavily occupied niche and over the course of three years pushed every competitor out.

Sometimes giants crumble. Small products crumble way more often, just because there are more of them.

There is always enough room in every niche of every industry. Just enough for your startup. Now, as you can't hide under "it's already occupied, and I can do nothing about it" mindset, the only reason your startup won't make it is that you don't work on it. Yes, accepting it is way less comfortable than hiding, but now you're able to change things. You _can_ do something about it.

Evaluate your goals, ask yourself whether making this startup would be just wasted time in case it never takes off, and if you think it's still worth doing, do it.

There is always enough room for your masterpiece.

Well today I feel like shit so I called in sick. Found out the lead developer called in sick as well.

The thing is, there was something really important to be done today that he fucking new that if he was not to be there I was going to get shit from everyone. He is going through some shit right now and I get it, so I would normally cut him some slack.

But fuck man, at some point you got to man the fuck up and deal with your job, if anything do it for your fucking coworkers/friends. He fucking new that I was going to get a fuckload of bullshit over something that he takes care of.

Nevermind that there are only 2 fucking developers for the entire fucking campus(2 campuses actually) and we were told last friday that we were needed. Normally, one would put up with the bullshit and make a presence, but that one of us is always me. Today I said fuck it, its too cold, don't feel good and I don't want to take my daughter to the daycare.

Today I sit at home, go over my OS books, play Skyward Sword with my daughter, watch movies with her and I don't think about work for one second.

On another note, the reason why I need to go through my OS books is that a good portion of my masters degree(which I am to start on August) covers OS development, it seems that the entire curriculum will be C/C++ galore which makes me FUCKING STOKED! finally a break form web development that I can probably use to get me out of web development professionally as well.

So, rant!

So, global-huge-paradigm-shift project moving forward. Lots and lots of architects of multiple sites world-wide, stakeholders and business peeps and sub-corp manager and head-of-fucking-everything-of-multi-billion-dollar-CEO involved with different amounts of energy and passion.

Huge amount of money involved. Not only for the multi-year project endeavour but also in licensing costs for the years and years to come.

It's a big deal for the corporation.

And it's clowns everywhere. Leadership, project leads, technical project leads, architects. Am I one of them? I don't think so because everyone is mad at me. Since I cause trouble. Since I tend to say that I don't give a FUCK about the product being a Gartner Visionary player if you can't test the fucker properly...

Last week I attended a workshop in USA (I live in Europe) regarding this change which left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I am so far away from my comfort zone.

To these people (me?) get payed for this work? Is this really relevant? Why the FUCK did I need to go to a different continent? "The "Core team" need to be on site". Yeah, right. Fuck you Mr Project Leader, I can tell you are far, far away of being on-top of this thing...

Pointless.

It's pointless.

But I guess this is why you get payed.

Work.

Tomorrow is Tuesday and I think I will raise my hand yet again and explain to all I meet that I see HUGE risks with this project as it goes along right now. We kind of make things and that has to, you know, work. NOT making things for 1 hour is... well, that is really, really bad.

I give this project ten percent chance of succeeding above the set thresholds for all different areas/functionality. (I am sure the fuckers will alter the thresholds to show off a "successful project". Fuckers.

OK Mr CEO/President whatever self aggrandizing title you want to call yourself today, where the fuck is your spine! You want to have support help boost your sales but don't tell sales that you are letting support handle some sales and sales is mad. Now you are quivering under the thumb of the Lead of Sales. What the hell. You are the leader of this company.

Why did you not stand up for your decision to begin with? I'm not going to get into whether or not it was good, but if you are going to make a decision to experiment with new things fucking stand by it and let everyone in the company know.

You've exacerbated the division between departments and ton this company further apart. If you don't start standing up for things, you are going to destroy all that you've helped build! Furthermore, I will not simply be your loyal vassal and watch all the people doing support for my products get fucked over. I will leave you high and dry if needed. I really hope you don't make it needed. You gave me a great shot to be honest, I'd hate to have to turn my back on you in anger. But don't think for a second I won't do it.

Your entire programming department has also been put in the cross fire of a fight you just made so much worse. You are the only one who can clean this up. Are you going to stand up for us? Are you gonna stand up for your self? Or will you just break and show us where the real power lies? We will find out soon.

An intern approached me for help in one of their past exam questions. They said they had already turned in the exam but just wanted to know the answer. The question was not that hard and I had a bit of time to kill so I helped them.

Me: So, to make it O(n), you have to make it a double linked list, and keep a tail.

Them: But the problem requires us to solve it with a single liked list.

Me: You can just iterate it at the end to make it single-linked again. That costs O(n), so the solution is still O(n).

Them: Oh yeah right. I don't think we even need a tail though, we could just have a variable pointing to the last link.

Me: ...which is called a tail.

Anyone else have people that seem to constantly try to "prove" themselves to you in this weird, competitive way that only makes them seem... very annoying? I'll call him Bob here, but it's always something like:

Bob: Hi Almond, how's it going?
Almond: Ah not bad thanks, PSU blew up in the PC over the weekend though so that was a bit of a faff!
Bob: Ah no! How old's your PC?
Almond: Oh, like 7-8 years old now. I don't replace it often.
Bob: Really?! I replace mine completely every year.
Almond: Ah, cool.
Bob: Yeah, I'm a dev so I feel I need to. It's like my tool, you know.
Almond: Sure thing!
Bob: I actually spend quite a lot on it. I make sure it's got the fastest memory I can afford. Like, DDR5 stuff. That's really important, you know.

...etc., while I try to get out of said conversation for the next eternity.

Or:

(while in a conversation about a frontend bug I was looking at in Chrome devtools)
Bob: Hey Almond, you know Firefox actually had a plugin that did all this stuff before everything else?
Almond: Err, yeah, I think so. Used it back in the day.
Bob: It was called firebug. It was really good. Revolutionary.
Almond: Certainly was.
Bob: It was launched in January 2006 you know.
Almond: Right...
Bob: I used it back then.

...I mean damn, I'm all for being civil, but no-one cares you replace your PC every year, or that you know the year firebug was released, or that you once set up 5 identical PCs with different versions of Linux to run some benchmarks...

I know this is the problem that I need to work it out. But still I would like to share with you guys here.

I start to feel bored after working in current company for 5+ years. I love my colleagues, I love my job actually. But after 5 years, I start to feel that there is nothing much I can learn from working in this company. And that really makes me feel uncomfortable.

So I get on LinkedIn to search and apply new jobs, I think it's good to talk with experts from other companies, to know more about what's happening in world. And perhaps to find a new opportunity.

Then I happens to find a startup which is doing something fits my background, and more advance. I feel like I will learn a lot working there.

The startup is also very interested in me. So the CEO and me have a quick chat on Skype 3 days after my application. We talked a lot and feel right to each other. Which I think I am highly possible to be hired. I am really exciting.

But later, I just hesitated. Because it is an Europe company and I am born and live in Asia. Going there may sacrifice time with my family and my friends. I am afraid I can not fit in at new company. I don't even 100% sure that I will like most of the things at new company.

I know I need to make decision on my own career. I just want to share the story, it makes feel less anxious. I am talking to my manager (which is my good friend) today. I hope everything go well.

Lets discuss Git Clients. Now I love electron, in concept. And I love what you can do with it, on paper. And I understand Github's need to jack itself off by developing its own framework just to make its own software in being what Github is, and then everyone else following suite because Github must know best. And that's my rant, I don't think it had a point. So, favorite git client and why?

I think the reason why git beginners have a hard time with it is because the api is a bit untuitive.

For example: if you want to "unstage" staged changes, you run git reset, and if you want to "delete" those changes from your working copy, you git checkout those files.

But then, you find out that you can do all of that if you git add . and git reset --hard.
So you're like "huh..."

And then you discover that if you end the resethard with a branch name/commit id then you also make current branch point to the commit or that branch/commit (respectively).
So you're like "huh..."

And also if you add a commit id or branch name to git checkout, you change the current branch to specified/enter detached state with HEAD pointing to that commit (respectively).

Oh and you don't use git branch to create branches, you use git checkout -b because it's a lot shorter.

So here's a rundown: git reset mutates things related to files, but also mutates things related to branches.
git checkout also mutates things related to files and mutates things related to branches too (in a diff way). Also, creates new branches.

I don't think this is intuitive. We users use the same commands for different purposes with just a different flag.
Commands shouldn't mutate different types of things. But don't composite commands (as in, "smart" commands that mutate different things) shoudln't be a flag in an existing command, it should be a single new command of its own.

Maybe if I reread the internals of git now, I'll be able to disgest the dozens of technical terms they throw at you (they are many). And in my mind, the api will cognitively fit to the explanations.

Here's another one that feels weird too.
If you want to make your changes start on top of someone else's commit, you do git rebase.
But git rebase -i can be used for that, and also to delete, modify changes or message of, reorder or combine previous commits of the current branch.

Maybe the reason why several things we do overlap with the same commands is because they internally do similar things, and while not separating those commands might make it less intuitive, it makes them more sensible? i dunno...

disclaimer: I'm not setting this opinion in stone though, and am aware that git was created by one of the most infuential programmers.

I didn't think this were true when I started out programming in the field, but now that I've been working for a few years, I've discovered this:

While your technical expertise does matter, it does not weigh as hard through as how likeable you are; that's right, likeable. You can be an idiot, yet if you make people like you and pull the right strings, people will think you're this grand genius (while you're not!). How perception matters..

Soft skills matter somewhat, but I discovered they can make or break it. I noticed people like to be idiots and frolic around instead of taking things seriously that need to be taken seriously.

Here I am, with my expertise. People don't like me - and it makes them judge me the wrong way, like I'm stupid. Yes, imagine that, you with more skills, being looked at as stupid by idiots with little the fewer skills.

It would be neat if I were valued for my skills, not how much someone likes me!

This industry is... disappointing.

Not a dev!rant,/but certainly a rant. Long post ahead.

First of all I MISSED YOU ALL

Had my fair issues of shit these months. And for that, FUCK EVERYTHING. End of rant for now. I am still managing somehow to do - slowly as fuck, but who cares at this point - like finally going to uni, finding a psychologist and not a psycho, unraveling a fuckton of previous trauma (hi abuse) and ~drums~ buying my new desktop! Not exactly a nasa server but a middish level workstation/gaming place. I am shopping right now. The previous days have been shaky with all the flashback business and emotional rollercoaster of death, but I feel like going the right way somehow. Is it true? Who knows! But after enduring several issues of suicide planning and luckily only one serious-bugged attempt epically hilariously failed, the slightest hope is a victory. I like p2p, so feel free to torrent and seed this little joy. If it is mine it can be yours. Take it!

Also, you know how much autistic I am, but I'd really like to make some friends. I make attempts but honestly I am awkward errrr.... I don't know how many dude/ttes I can count on. For friend I mean simply someone that honestly likes me somehow, is loyal, and has interest in sharing they like to do or think! (And if they want to give me tips on security/sysadmin/dev stuff, even better, but not required obviously).

Also, I may have some projects in mind. Will publish in the projects section when the roughest idea is finished.

Maybe I deserve an updoot. In real life.
(Which is also here....)

🎶🎶🎶🎶

I'm going to have a test tomorrow... And I still don't know the grade of the test I've done over 1m ago (2nd of November)... And people are saying the teacher told them the grade is coming tomorrow when he told us on my class (2 different shifts) that it was coming out today... Someone send help please
In the uni's regulation it says that if teachers don't release our grades for a test 3d before the next one, we can talk to our pedagogic commission and ask to do something about it. People from my course on fb were talking about asking to remove the minimum grade on the average of our 2 tests, but IDK how that situation is and I don't think there's much we can do about it so on top of tomorrow's test. And changing the date of the test isn't really an option because we have 3 tests left on the next week and 1/2 and it's all so on top of each other so the only solution would be to make it after the 20th (that's our last test, and people have already booked flights to go home)

Got back home from my last therapy session. Situation was kind of strange. I had only done about two sessions but my therapist told me they wouldn't be a good fit for me as I have a pretty good grasp of what my issues are and what I want to do to fix them.

Thing is, I'm an introverted person. And I work with people who are much more extroverted than me. And that's not really surprising, most Americans are to a fault extremely extroverted and it drives me nuts.

I hate their gas guzzling trucks and suv's that haul almost nothing so they can go to Walmart to buy shit they don't need. I hate our advertising with it's whoring to the public. I hate our media for being shallow as fuck. I hate our politicians who whore out capitalism to the lowest fucking bidder to get elected.

I do like some American companies though, and we have a lot of pretty locations you can see. I like Minneapolis, I'd probably like Seattle and Portland too but I've never been there.

I don't know. I think I'm at a breaking point in my frustration with living in the States, and I need to decide next year if I want to make a call to leave the country or decide on a different state to live in. Someplace that's far less conservative than Iowa. I'm single, I could manage to make a major move change without it affecting anyone but me.

I'm feeling a bit tense. I just want to write code and calm the fuck down a couple levels.

Sorry if I've been pissy. :(

In a meeting yesterday working through our WebAPI coding standards, starting from File -> New project..etc..etc.. and ironing out some of the left-or-right decisions so we can have a consistent coding style, working in a meeting room with an overhead projector and sharing keyboard around with one another.

Then we hit the routing 'rules' in the WebApiConfig, "api/{controller}/{id}"…

DevMgr: "Do we need the 'api' prefix? It seems redundant."
Ralph: "Yes it's needed. Prefixing the controllers with 'api' is industry best practice. Otherwise, how is anyone to know it's a web api"
Prancer: "Yea, it's part of the REST standard."
Me: "I don't think so. That is only part of the Asp.Net routing rule. We can put anything we want or take anything out."
DevMgr: "Yea, it looks silly. All the new services are going to be business process specific."
Ralph: "That's how everyone does it. It's kind of the point of why REST services are called WebApi"
Prancer: "What's the point of doing any of this work if we're not going to follow industry standards."
Me: "I understand if the service is part of larger web site, but we're developing standalone services. Prefixing routes with 'api' is redundant. I mean who are these 'everyone' you're talking about?"
<ralph rolls his eyes>
Ralph: "Lets see …uhhh… Netflix?. They're kinda a big deal."
Me: "Like I said, it's an integral part of their site and the services they provide. That's fine. I'm talking about the 12 other 3rd party services we integrate with. None of them have 'api' on any of their routes."
Prancer: "We're talking about serious web services."
Me: "Last time I checked, UPS is a big and serious service."
Ralph: "Their services are a fracking joke" – he didn't say fracking.
Me: "Our payroll system, our billing system, billion dollar companies, didn't have '/api' prefix anywhere. Heck, even that free faxing service we used for a while was a dead-simple routing path."
<I take the keyboard away from Ralph, remove the 'api' from the route.>
Me: "There. Done. Now, lets talk about error handling.."

Rest of the meeting Ralph and Prancer don't say much of anything, arms crossed…I swear Ralph looked like he was going to cry.
This morning I catch my boss…
Me: "What did you think of the meeting? I thought Ralph was going to take a swing at me when I took the keyboard away from him."
DevMgr: "Oh yes…I almost laughed out loud….blows my freaking mind how worked up people get about crap that doesn't matter. Api..or not…who the frack cares. Just make it consistent"
Me: "Exactly…I didn't care either way, but I enjoyed calling out that nonsense."
DevMgr: "Yes..waaay too much."

If I didn't call them on their BS and the 'standard' allowed to continue, I can bet my paycheck when the subject comes up in a few months (another mgr asks 'isn't this api prefix redundant?') Ralph and Prancer will be the first to say "Yea, its stupid. We fought really hard to remove it from the standard...its not our fault...its <insert scapegoat> fault."