It saved me from suicide.

You have to understand first that things in India work differently. Academics are not personal, but a social business. Academic competition in India is very high and not in a good way, or for the good reasons.

As a teenager was sent off from my home to the other side of the country. I didn't like it. My studies suffered, and I failed my exams. Came back home and faced months of emotional abuse (guilt trips, scornful comments, plain insults) from my parents, neighbours and relatives. Indian society is just built that way. They didn't know they were damaging my psyche, or they were too angry to care. Lots of other shit (lost friends, lost love) happened at roughly the same time period and everything started to fall like dominos.

I fell into severe depression. Lost appetite, lost sleep. Nothing mattered anymore. There were mornings when I would wake up and not get up from my bed for hours, and not even move a finger. Self-hate became the motto of the day. I became violent and anti-social. I would either be angry or trying not to break down and give up all the time. Many a night, I considered suicide. I would end up googling for easy ways out to take.

But what gave me a way out of the pains of my reality was programming. It helped my keep my head, figuratively and literally. It kept my mind distracted and gave me a sense of purpose. I would shut myself in, plug in my headphones, shut the world out and just experiment.

I am not saying that I am the best at what I do, but those sleepless and troubled nights, and many other similar nights over the years have given me a definite edge over my colleagues.

Even today, when everything is falling to pieces, I know I have something to fall back on. I still get episodes of depression every now and then, but I know I can always pick up a new project and distract myself. It probably isn't healthy, but eh...

I am alive. I code. I kick ass. My colleagues respect and value my opinion. I love my job.

Computer does what I tell it to do (mostly :p) and I feel good. Because for that small moment, I am in control of everything. For that infinitesimally small moment of my average, boring, and somewhat painful life, I am God.

Well, it happened. The stupidest request, no demand, I have ever, and most likely will ever receive...

Me: So what is it you're looking to do with your website.

Client: We're not showing up Facebook's home page. We need you to fix that. We have a budget of $10,000 to make this happen right now.

Me: As much as I'd love to take your money, that isn't something I can control. Every "home page" is profile-based, which technically isn't a homepage, but a "feed" that changes constantly. So say you create a profile on Facebook, only those you follow, and paid posts show up on your feed. What I can do however is use your budget to create and promote posts from your company page to show on users' feeds. If you're serious about marketing, we can start slow at $250/week, then work our way up or down based on results until your budget is exhausted, then re-evaluate the budget at that time. I can tailor a retainer for you based on the number of ads per week that you'd like to make.

Client: No, this is not what we're asking for at all.

Me: Okay...what is it you're looking for exactly? Run through this in as much detail as possible so I can get on the same page.

Client: We want to be on the main home page of facebook.com. We want our logo on that page when people sign up to make an account, linking to our website.

Me: That's simply not possible. That's Facebook's own home page. Nobody has a right to edit that other than Facebook itself.

Client: Bullshit. There's a Facebook developers section with APIs to edit and view Facebook's entire website. We would do it ourselves, but we signed up and don't understand how to change it in Chrome. That's why we need you and [referring client] said you were the best guy for our needs.

Me: That API has no control over Facebook's corporate data, including their own home page. That API designed ONLY for sections in which you are authorized to access or modify, such as your personal profile or created page for your business.

Client: We know that it can be done. If you don't do it, we'll find someone else who can.

Me: Well good luck with that, because the only way it would be remotely possible to do that WILL involve prison time, since that would be illegal. The only legal way to do it would be to buy Facebook, and they'll laugh you out of the building with that offer. But I'm done with this conversation because I have work to complete from clients that aren't delusional. Have a nice day! [hang up]

----

What. The. Fuck.

My sister is 16yo and she is not interested in the C.S field. I gave her last year my laptop and it has Debian on it, since i bought a new one. She never told me that she has to deal with any problem, she was just using it.
Today she got a new laptop from our grandma and she texts me "hey, is there any way i can install Linux on that? I don't want to use windows".
Well i told her that she has to wait me to come back home next month and i will take care of it.

I had never thought that i will listen something like that. Good day.

"We're letting you go"

"Oh, why?"

"Well we gave you a laptop to work on for a reason, we expected you to take it home and have passion for your work"

"..."

Could've saved me a lot of time if they had told me from the start that they just wanted free labor

I fucking love people like this.

Yesterday I met a 'friend' who I hadn't seen in a very long time. Just a guy I used to know tbh but let's call him Friend anyway. After a while in the conversation this happened...

*Friend doesn't know I have a degree in CS*

Friend: "WHAT?? YOU LIKE PROGRAMMING? NO WAY! ME TOO!"

Me: "THAT'S AWESOME! You've been programming for long?"

Friend: "A little over a year now. I know almost all languages now. C++, C#, Python, Java and HTML. Still a couple left to go. Once you're on the level I achieved programming becomes really, really easy. How long have you been programming?"

Me: "Almost a decade now"

Friend: "Damn dude you must know all languages by now I suppose?"

Me: "I've been mainly doing C++ so not really haha"

Friend: "I can always help when you're struggling with one language. C++ is pretty easy tbh. You should learn others too btw. HTML for example is pretty important because you can program websites with it"

Me: "Yeah... Thanks... So... What project are you working on right now?"

Friend: "I'm making a register page for my very own forum. The only problem I have is that PHP won't save the login details"

Me: "Hahaha I know the feeling. MySQL?"

Friend: "What?"

Me: "What do you use to save your data"

Friend: "Just a txt file. It's easier that way."

Me: "Hahaha true. Who needs safety right? *smiles*"

Friend: "Actually it's 100% safe because only I can see the txt file so other people can not hack other users."

Me: "Yes! That's great! Cya!"

Friend: "I'm working on a mmorpg too btw! I can learn you to make games if you want. Just call me. Here's my number"

Me: "Alright... Thanks... Bye!"

*Arrives at home*

*Deletes number*

I do not make this up.

I can understand that someone who isn't in the CS industry doesn't take it too seriously and gets hyped when their "Hello World" program works.
I'm fine with that.

The thing that really triggers me is big headed ass holes like this. Like how much more like a absolute dickhead could you possibly more act? Fucking hate people like that.

6pm - arrive home from work, log into my computer and start working on side projects.

4am - Finally go to sleep after staying up all night setting up arch in a vm.

7am - Start drive to work in the snow and ice.

7:20am - car runs out of wiper fluid.

7:30am - round corner so that I’m driving towards the sun, windshield is covered in mud and I have 2% visibility.

7:35am - take off ramp towards gas station so I can buy fluid and wash window.

7:36am - Car mysteriously parked in center of off ramp, nearly smash it but have a narrow miss.

7:40am - can’t find the freaking pully in new car to pop hood

7:41am - found it.

7:50am - drove the back way to work because it cuts out traffic, but includes many steep hills that I forgot existed, come to a skid at bottom of one and am pushed out into the main road, luckily nobody is coming and I’m able to continue on my merry way.

8:01am - sit down in desk, lead staff person comes over evoking Lumbergh from Office Space and lets me know I need to be on time to work and that the snow doesn’t give me an excuse. I agree and smile and suck up and he leaves.

8:02am - pull out phone to write down notes about personal project that I thought of on drive here, phone dies. I forgot to plug it in last night.

8:04am - found power bank charger thing in desk but it uses a micro-b type usb and I only have usb type c on me.

8:10am - borrow usb from old headset in office surplus.

8:11am - writing notes. Have sudden realization that I didn’t shut down my vm and that when my computer went to sleep and subsequently locked it probably halted virtualbox and everything would be lost for the second time.

8:12am - got on devRant.

Not a specifically dev related story, but absolutely rant worthy.

Today I was working from home, and my wife called me to tell me that some awful person had thrown a young cat into the dumpster at her work.

To that person - you are a scumbag. You’re lucky no one left you alone in a hot car as a kid, let alone a dumpster. Seriously, why? Why is it so hard to take it to a shelter?

Anyway - I went and bought a whole bunch of cat stuff - I grew up with cats but I’ve never had one on my own. We’re at the vet now. I think we’ll name her Curry (after Haskell Curry, and lovely spicy dishes).

Came home late last night and told my wife I'm skipping dinner to take a 1hr nap as it's going to be a long night of bug fixing and testing. Woke up, my wife and 1yr old son are already asleep. Saw the pic below posted on the wall above my work area at home. She's a teacher, she's never heard me mention it, and I don't use this method (I prefer music on my headphones). But she does know I lurk devrant so she must've browsed here while I was napping. Feels good. Code fixed, checked-in, unit tested and released for user testing.

HR: "We want to hire you, but we shouldn't until after we finish this migration and set up an onboarding process. That should take about two weeks; is this okay?"
Me: "Yes, of course."

... two and a half weeks later ...

Me: "Hey, it's been awhile since our last chat. How's the migration and onboarding process going?" etc.
HR:

------

Ugh.
This is the same company that had me sitting by the phone waiting for an interview an entire day, and let me know their schedule got booked for the day three minutes before they went home. gg.

I should tell them to get bent.

Years ago I was an application developer at a medium sized corporation and was also responsible for support for an HR department. This occurred early one morning shortly after I arrived at work.

User: My app doesn't work.
Me: What's wrong with it?
User: I just get a blank screen.
Me: A blank screen? What happens when you hit a key?
User: Nothing.
Me: Do any apps work?
User: No, I just get a blank screen.
Me: Is your monitor on?
User: Yes, I turned it on.

This type of witty banter went on for several minutes when the answer suddenly hit me.

Me: Is your computer turned on?
User: Do I need to turn it on?
Me: Did you turn it off before you went home last night?
User: Yes.
Me: And do you normally turn it on in the morning when you come in?
User: Yes.
Me: Then why didn't you turn it on this morning when you came in?
User: I didn't know I needed to.

It was at this point I heard the programmer over the cubicle wall from me burst out laughing. He had been listening to the conversation and couldn't take it anymore.

The really sad part is that this was not an isolated incident. This kind of stuff occurred on a semi-regular basis with this individual's department.

What a great way to start your day and begin your fucking 2018

The cat just pissed on my laptop (it’s a macbook air)

Wet af

Stink af

Dried the fucking wet stink af laptop

It still works

But the fans gone crazy and slow af

Trying to reset the smc stuff

Nothing changes, still retarded

I want to open the bottom case but i dont have the screw driver

With its fucking limited 128gb storage i store my shits in cloud storages like google drive, dropbox and mega and my projects are stored in bitbucket so nothing to lose

Me : 1 vs Cat : 1

To my beloved cat:
I work hard using this damn laptop to provide food and home for you and you just take a piss on it.

So before I resign from my job tomorrow I thought I'd talk a little about a couple of things at work that I won't ever tell my boss in person but are generally some of the reasons I want to leave.

---------- warning long rant ----------

1. The CEO of the company finds out I only have my learner's and take the bus, goes on to belittle me about taking the bus.

(It may have been meant as a joke but I was offended, and we don't have any actual HR to complain to)

First off my real reason for not getting my restricted is mostly related to the fact public transportation does the job it needs to, I don't really complain unless the planning is fucked up (Adele concert rant lol) but typically I don't need a car. The other reason is because with a car I'd have to wait in traffic 1-2 hour each way. Also cars cost money which I don't have.

2. CEO buys himself and general manager brand new Range Rovers, you know those giant monstrosities box jeep looking things.

I hate this because I earn $31k, those things probably cost around $50 each (so typically 3 years worth of my wages).

When I had a talk about my contract at the 6 month mark, the general manager (my boss) said he wouldn't budge on my salary (yet they buy these jeeps)

3. I live way too far from work and because of it being Auckland and the current inflation for house prices, the rent prices have also increase, I wouldn't be able to get a house closer to home nor rent with minimum wage :(

4. Though it's not too necessary they mask that the app was made by me, whenever I see an email about the app to potential clients they refer to be as this app guy, and during their presentations they don't really include as part of the reason this app has been developed ( aside from my boss being the client, I came up with some interesting ideas to turn their paper form of the process they use into a digital one, I also did research for the specific topics, something I could have just asked for instead).

5. Old fashioned way of looking at so called "IT", they added fixing computers to my contract which I dread, especially since I'll be close to a deadline and then I get a call to fix someone's computer...

6. They don't seem to want to expand their "development team" to more than one person.

When I give my resignation I have to stay here for a month and I bet people will start to act differently around me, my likely my boss and the CEO. I think the other people that work will understand, given my situation.

I'm planning to for the last month to only do planning for the app they want me to work on, UML diagrams, use cases, Sprint planning (albiet, only developer here lol). Research on the third party libraries we need for the app and generally give the next guy the easiest path to getting the app done.

I want to do this because the Android and iOS app we're done via cowboy programming in a sense. (I don't have too much in terms of documentation and planning aside from a Microsoft planning website setup with to-do of which features are done for the iOS and paper Todo for the Android app.

Alright long rant over, I've got it all written down, glad I'll be leaving this place.

Story time.

Not sure it counts as data loss, more temporary corruption (and in my own brain).

> be me.
> be clinically depressed
> be recently out of an awful breakup
> recently nearly committed suicide by train
> be bored and lonely one night
> take lsd
> feel fine
> go to McDonald’s
> feel fine
> while eating question the nature of reality
> become convinced I’m an observer of a cosmic story and cannot die
> go outside in only jeans
> run in traffic at 1AM to prove my point
> don’t die
> run around the streets more sure of my new reality than I’d ever been of anything
> feel free and no longer sad
> walk around observing the world
> sit on wall and wonder why the story had the structure I was observing
> fall off wall into grass and mud
> follow cute guy into apartment building
> follow into lift
> ask what everything means
> spend better part of couple hours in lift pressing emergency button asking for help
> get no response
> scare poor Russian lady that gets into lift and finds an overweight topless man on the floor babbling incoherently
> ride to top floor
> get out
> sit on leather chair in corridor
> feelsnice.tiff
> decide I’m actualising my desires and reality
> don’t realise this is just the trip wearing off and consciousness exerting more control
> walk into random apartment (door is unlocked because why wouldn’t it be for the god that I believe I am at this point)
> explore
> gorgeous apartment
> realise it’s a family apartment from clothes in hallway and items
> find bathroom
> decide I want a bubble bath
> run bubble bath
> can’t work out how to drain water. Bath now full of twigs and mud #sorry
> decide that I’d like to go home, or onto my next adventure. Hopefully the seaside as I’m now realising I have more control.
> open bathroom door
> not the seaside. Ah well. Try to walk home
> walk home wrapped in fluffy towel from nice family’s apartment
> get home
> realise what had happened
> throw remaining drugs away
> sit and rock in utter paranoia and guilt for hours until flatmate wakes up.

MFW first bad trip ever.
MFW I wonder whether that family knew I was there and were scared / discovered the mess in the bathroom the next morning and not knowing which is worse.

MFW I still have the towel because it’s fluffy AF.

The moral of the story kids, is that when it comes to the OS rattling around in your brain, installing a virus that is sensitive to what apps you have running is a bad idea when those apps make the virus go to fucking town.

Terrible analogy I know, but fuck it.

This was at my first internship (ranted about this before but hey fuck it).

- discovered several high critical vulnerabilities in their product. Wrote them down and kindly gave them to my boss/manager (they were the same person). He looked at me like 'the fuck' but I just went home at the end of the day. Next day, I got called into his office. I was a fucker, cancer guy who knew nothing about security, who would never reach anything and I shouldn't criticize their product (I had no right to because I was an intern).

- Bossman went to a meeting with a coworker to present their product. They came back to the office and it very clearly had gone pretty wrong. (we had nothing to do with anything related to the project including the meeting) he called us all bad things he could think of and it was all our fault and so on.

- I do have a transpiration problem but I can partly contain that when it's not too hot and the stress levels are okay. I was only allowed to sit in front of the window. YES IT WAS A MOTHERFUCKING HUGE WINDOW, 35-40 DEGREES FEELING TEMPERATURE AND NO MOTHERFUCKING AIRCONDITIONING. (okay gotta admit that one of the installation guys fell off the roof during the installation BUT THEN AT LEAST GET FANS OR SOMETHING).
Got called into his office multiple times because I smelled and 'couldnt take care of my hygiene'. I was literally sweating my ass off full-time so what the fuck could I do in those temperatures?!?

- my only project there: Google translating their whole CRM. Took us five weeks and the bossman kept pressure on us at all times which didn't FUCKING help.

Was fired after 5 weeks for hygiene reasons and because I didn't do my work well appearantly (still fuck translating all day).

One of the worst things? He pretended everything to go well until the first review came with my mentor (mentor == awesome guy). Then he talked shit about me like it was no-one's business.

I literally cried when I walked home after being fired.

Me: *listening to some random semi-obscure track on spotify, liking it, add it to playlist*

Come home, girlfriend playing the same track. "Yeah I've had that in my playlist for two weeks now". Our accounts are not linked in any way, and I only use Spotify on a PC at work, while my girlfriend only uses it at home.

It might just be coincidence, or us having similar tastes.

But the issue is that it's getting more and more difficult to know whether me and my girl are spiritually linked unique snowflake soulmates who are so perfectly in sync with each other, or whether an algorithm suggestively linked us both that song based on scraped location and behavior data.

And whether it matters. Maybe it matters. I don't know yet.

In twenty years maybe humans will be unsure whether it was a wonderful coincidence bordering on cosmic fate that you ran into your new love, or whether Google purposefully drove you towards the same lunch cafe at a specific time because it calculated that she was the perfect candidate to strengthen your susceptibility to advertisements over the coming decade.

Malicious AI will not come into lives bearing guns.

It will not instantly take all of our jobs and enslave us.

It will just know you better than you know yourself, it will know everyone around you better than you know them, and it will play incredible mind games. It will not be designed with malicious intent, just perfectly execute on top of the malicious systems we already have, and even arise as an emergent property within new systems.

It will rarely be clearly visible, but you will increasingly say to yourself: "That's odd, I was just thinking about that". It will detect depression from a smile, physical attraction from a glance, reliability from patterns in your voice and illness from the bloodflow in your cheeks.

It will not just make our cars autonomous, it will make our lives autonomous. It will protect us, decide for us, keep revenues and human satisfaction in a "balanced maximized" state, it will make everything feel easy, slightly abuse us, and when one of us suddenly crashes at 140 mph into depression, debt or addiction it will prove impossible to know whether the humans or the algorithms were at fault.

I'm incredibly afraid and excited about the coming 10 years.

I was very troubled as a teenager. I had some pretty intense family issues that led me to smoking cigarettes at 12, marijuana at 13, and drinking everyday at 15. By 17, I was using other "party favors", as we called them, on an every day basis. I left high school at the beginning of my final year, about a week before I turned 18, moved out of my family's home and started working three different part time jobs.
This was the lowest point of my life. I've never felt so much like a fuck-up and loser than back in those days. I hated myself, hated what I had become, hated everything I did. Hate hate hate. I spent a year like this, pitying myself, seeking sympathy from people when I shouldnt have been, basically seeking out someone who would tell me that I wasnt so awful.
That never happened. I only deepened the hole that I had dug for myself.

Then I got angry. I thought it wasn't fair that everyone else was enjoying life except for me. I wanted to find a passion. I wanted to find excitement again. I wanted to look forward to something else besides going back to bed.
When I turned 19, I decided that I was going to take control of my life because I was so angry with my position at the time.
I put myelf into college. I made myself stay awake and focus on schoolwork and internal improvement. I started facing my flaws and defects head-on and conquering them rather than letting them eat me from the inside out.

Now, I am only a couple months away from turning 21.
I rarely drink now. I quit smoking cigarettes after almost 9 years.
I graduate this December, and enroll into my next degree program in January.
Today, I signed employment paperwork with the company I interned at over the summer. I am now a full-time DevOps Engineer with salary, bonuses, 401k, and full health coverage.
My boyfriend and I just moved into our own house that we are renting together. No more needing shitty roommates.
I have most of the debt that my mother left in my name paid off.

A couple of years ago, I couldn't have cared less about my life or how I turned out. I truly expected to get arrested, wind up homeless, or just flat-out end up dead.
I never thought I would see myself where I am today.
I am extremely proud of myself for turning my future around. I know some of you may read this and think I'm an idiot, or that this seems trivial because I am so young. Thats okay.
I have learned that hard work always pays off, and that sometimes you must sacrifice what is expedient to gain what is meaningful.

At one of my former jobs, I had a four-day-week. I remember once being called on my free Friday by an agitated colleague of mine arguing that I crashed the entire application on the staging environment and I shall fix it that very day.

I refused. It was my free day after all and I had made plans. Yet I told him: OK, I take a look at it in Sunday and see what all the fuzz is all about. Because I honestly could fathom what big issue I could have caused.

On that Sunday, I realized that the feature I implemented worked as expected. And it took me two minutes to realize the problem: It was a minor thing, as it so often is: If the user was not logged in, instead of a user object, null got passed somewhere and boom -- 500 error screen. Some older feature broke due to some of my changes and I never noticed it as while I was developing I was always in a logged in state and I never bothered to test that feature as I assumed it working. Only my boss was not logged in when testing on the stage environment, and so he ran into it.

So what really pushed my buttons was:

It was not a bug. It was a regression.

Why is that distinction important?

My boss tried to guilt me into admitting that I did not deliver quality software. Yet he was the one explicitly forbidding me to write tests for that software. Well, this is what you get then! You pay in the long run by strange bugs, hotfixes, and annoyed developers. I salute you! :/

Yet I did not fix the bug right away. I could have. It would have just taken me just another two minutes again. Yet for once, instead of doing it quickly, I did it right: I, albeit unfamiliar with writing tests, searched for a way to write a test for that case. It came not easy for me as I was not accustomed to writing tests, and the solution I came up with a functional test not that ideal, as it required certain content to be in the database. But in the end, it worked good enough: I had a failing test. And then I made it pass again. That made the whole ordeal worthwhile to me. (Also the realization that that very Sunday, alone in that office, was one of the most productive since a long while really made me reflect my job choice.)

At the following Monday I just entered the office for the stand-up to declare that I fixed the regression and that I won't take responsibility for that crash on the staging environment. If you don't let me write test, don't expect me to test the entire application again and again. I don't want to ensure that the existing software doesn't break. That's what tests are for. Don't try to blame me for not having tests on critical infrastructure. And that's all I did on Monday. I have a policy to not do long hours, and when I do due to an "emergency", I will get my free time back another day. And so I went home that Monday right after the stand-up.

Do I even need to spell it out that I made a requirement for my next job to have a culture that requires testing? I did, and never looked back and I grew a lot as a developer.

I have familiarized myself with both the wonderful world of unit and acceptance testing. And deploying suddenly becomes cheap and easy. Sure, there sometimes are problems. But almost always they are related to infrastructure and not the underlying code base. (And yeah, sometimes you have randomly failing tests, but that's for another rant.)

This is me.. Earlier this week... At work 😂 when we get tired of coding or get stuck, we take a swim... Or just go home 😂

Friend: "the blablabla company is offering a free Java spring course"
Me: "free??? Nonono they might have bamboozled you but they won't take me"
...
Goes to course
Awesome experience and free
...
Gets home...
Me:"WTF? It was free"

*creates a freelancer account on some website.
*builds portfolio and gets things running.
*meets his first client.

Client: Hello. so your profile says you are an experienced full stack developer. You are just the kind of person i've been looking for.

Me: Yep.

Client: Okay I have a project for you. I am looking at developing a simple website that has a few functions and the budget is 100$.

Me: Okay smooth. Hit me with the descriptions.

Client: it's going to be a dating website. Once a user signs up; the website would automatically take control of the user's media devices in his/her home; automatically playing something romantic. You get me?

Me: Em... Idk about that it seems a bit...

Client: it can be done! Develop the algorithm.

Me: Em... Ok.

Client: Well, next the website uses some complex sorting algorithm and sorts existing members based on their past real life relationships. It puts the best people above the messy ones.

Me: o.0

*client goes on with his bullshit in like another 10 lines of messages.

Me: -_-

Client: so what do you think? How soon can you begin and how soon can we be done?

Me: Do you also want a "butt scratcher" feature? Like a hand pops out of the monitor and asks to scratch the user's anus?

*client leaves the chat.

Me: Oh. I guess he a thing against family guy.

Well, here's the OS rant I promised. Also apologies for no blog posts the past few weeks, working on one but I want to have all the information correct and time isn't my best friend right now :/

Anyways, let's talk about operating systems. They serve a purpose which is the goal which the user has.
So, as everyone says (or, loads of people), every system is good for a purpose and you can't call the mainstream systems shit because they all have their use.

Last part is true (that they all have their use) but defining a good system is up to an individual. So, a system which I'd be able to call good, had at least the following 'features':
- it gives the user freedom. If someone just wants to use it for emailing and webbrowsing, fair enough. If someone wants to produce music on it, fair enough. If someone wants to rebuild the entire system to suit their needs, fair enough. If someone wants to check the source code to see what's actually running on their hardware, fair enough. It should be up to the user to decide what they want to/can do and not up to the maker of that system.
- it tries it's best to keep the security/privacy of its users protected. Meaning, by default, no calling home, no integrating users within mass surveillance programs and no unnecessary data collection.
- Open. Especially in an age of mass surveillance, it's very important that one has the option to check the underlying code for vulnerabilities/backdoors. Can everyone do that, nope. But that doesn't mean that the option shouldn't be there because it's also about transparency so you don't HAVE to trust a software vendor on their blue eyes.
- stability. A system should be stable enough for home users to use. For people who like to tweak around? Also, but tweaking *can* lead to instability and crashes, that's not the systems' responsibility.

Especially the security and privacy AND open parts are why I wouldn't ever voluntarily (if my job would depend on it, sure, I kinda need money to stay alive so I'll take that) use windows or macos. Sure, apple seems to care about user privacy way more than other vendors but as long as nobody can verify that through source code, no offense, I won't believe a thing they say about that because no one can technically verify it anyways.

Some people have told me that Linux is hard to use for new/(highly) a-technical people but looking at my own family and friends who adapted fast as hell and don't want to go back to windows now (and mac, for that matter), I highly doubt that. Sure, they'll have to learn something new. But that was also the case when they started to use any other system for the first time. Possibly try a different distro if one doesn't fit?

Problems - sometimes hard to solve on Linux, no doubt about that. But, at least its open. Meaning that someone can dive in as deep as possible/necessary to solve the problem. That's something which is very difficult with closed systems.

The best example in this case for me (don't remember how I did it by the way) was when I mounted a network drive at boot on windows and Linux (two systems using the same webDav drive). I changed the authentication and both systems weren't in for booting anymore. Hours of searching how to unfuck this on windows - I ended up reinstalling it because I just couldn't find a solution.
On linux, i found some article quite quickly telling to remove the entry for the webdav thingy from fstab. Booted into a root recovery shell, chrooted to the harddrive, removed the entry in fstab and rebooted. BAM. Everything worked again.

So yeah, that's my view on this, I guess ;P

Boss: Oh can you add this feature?
Me: I added that function already and you said to take it out.
Boss: Can't you just copy and paste it from an earlier version?
Me: No its really not that simple, I removed a bunch of tables and went to town cleaning the code so it's super quick and "sexy fast" as you put it.
I go home, work all night and forget to eat.
nextDay++;
Boss: Actually just hold back on that, I'm having second thoughts.

When a project seems to be in an endless for (fucks sake) loop.

My friend: My laptop is not working. Can you please fix it?

Me: Ok. I will take a look at it.

*After 1 hours*

Me: I think your hard disk has failed.

My friend: Can't you fix it? You always spend day and night on your computer. So, I think you can fix it.

Me: Sorry. I can't.

*Next day I went to his home*

His brother to my friend: You said he is a genious. He can fix anything related to computer. He can't do anything. I will take it to a best repair shop in the area.

Me: *walks out of his home*

A while back I had a coworker who was just strange. I took a personal day one day, and came back to find my monitor (that I had brought from home) was gone. I was asking the people who worked around me where it went and after no one knew, I found it on someone else's desk. When I explained to him how I had brought it from home he denied he took it from my desk and continued that it was HIS from home! Turns out he had been taking other people's equipment around the office as well. He would rearrange furniture and even take down other people's personal decorations. He was eventually let go...

RANT Incoming
Not necessarily dev related but I need to get this off my chest.

So a bit of a backstory. I had to stay late from school the other day and ended up having to take an Uber home. The ride was fine lady was nice. Everything seems to be going well and there were no signs of any payment failure.

Then yesterday, I had to stay late again. I never said that I had an outstanding balance on my account. Apparently Uber was having problems charging my Android pay account.
So I ended up being stuck at school for like 3 hours. Great!😑

So I emailed Uber when I got home. And this is when I started pulling my hair out. I don't know how many replies I had, but each time I had to tell them that I was not using a prepaid card.

This was one of my replies:
"I'm sorry, are you real? If you are, here is a quick summary of the issue. I am using ANDROID PAY with my CHASE DEBIT CARD. Not, NOT, NOT a prepaid card. I happen to know that CHASE DEBIT CARD(which is the card I use, in case you have already forgotten) works with uber because MY FATHER USES THE EXACT SAME TYPE OF CARD with uber. He uses a CHASE DEBIT CARD(again I use that same type of card as well). So by using LOGIC I am able to deduce that a CHASE DEBIT CARD is in fact compatible. AGAIN THIS IS NOT A PREPAID CARD!!! If the card is incompatible, WHY DOES THE APP ALLOW BE TO ADD IT?!?! Also in response to your last email... Because I am using Android pay, do you really think that an ANDROID would be able to use APPLE pay? Also Google wallet is DISCONTINUED! Finally, PayPal DOES NOT CONNECT TO UBER. Returns a "Server Error." So please stop wasting my time with generic help solutions. Believe me, I have already googled my issue, and nothing comes up. That is why I contacted Uber. I want my driver to be paid, and, uber had made it SO painful with unhelpful "Solutions" to problems that don't even APPLY TO MY ISSUE. No not even mention PREPAID cards in your reply or I will consider you a robot built by monkeys banging their heads on a keyboard. Uber HAS my VALID payment information, USE IT! If there is a phone number I can call, please, enlighten me"

And the response was:
"Thanks for reaching out with this.

Happy to help with this issue you are having.

After reviewing your I can see that the only payment method associated with your account is an ANDROID PAY card and it is also a prepaid card. Some cards and methods are not compatible with our billing processes and can't be used with Uber. This includes prepaid cards."

So I concluded that they are monkeys.

Then Uber banned me from logging into my account because I didn't pay.
So now it is impossible for me to pay because I can't do anything with my account.

Now they want my SSN and a bunch of other shit that I won't give them.

I told them that they were being illogical, and I got the exact same response about the prepaid bullshit.

So I sent them this photo as a goodbye.

I get my driver's licence next weekend, so I won't need Uber anymore. YAY!

Also mind grammatical errors, I talked it in and am to lazy to proofread

Slowbro: Do you have time tonight?
Me: No sorry, I can't stay late tonight, I have a thing with my wife.
S: Oh yeah, I'm not staying late either.
M: Oh, so what do you want?
S: Can you help me install linux?
M: Uh no, I can't stay late -
S: No, no you don't have to stay, you can do it from home.
M: What? No I don't have time tonight. Wait you want me to take your computer home?
S: No, no I need to use my computer tonight.
M: So... What do you want me to do?
S: You can do it on your computer.
M: You want me to install an OS on your computer, but on my computer??
S: No, no *sigh* just try it on your computer so we know it will work on my computer. It is a proof of principle.
M: Reinstall my OS?
S: As a proof of principle. So tomorrow when we do it on my computer, we need not waste any time.
M: ... No I'm not going to reinstall my OS just as a test for you.
S: Not a test, a proof of principle.
M: What are you.. I'm sorry, I don't have time for this tonight.
S: Just a proof of principle!!
M: Ok see you.

I find it super annoying, this trend where no one wants to write learning documentation anymore, but instead put up a bunch of demo videos and video "training courses."

I don't want to spend 5 minutes watching you do something that would take me 10 seconds to read. I can't search for terms in your video, and I can't use them as a general reference manual. I can't go at my own pace, easily keep my place between devices, enter code as you go, the list of cons goes on and on.

I would rather pay you money for a good eBook (and no, PDFs don't count), than to have the only realistic way to learn about your software be a playlist on your YouTube channel.

This, however, this...

Went to check out Ansible again, because I've heard good things lately and it's been a couple years since I've looked at it.

Took me a while to find their docs because there's almost no mention of anything on the home page except trying Tower for free.

Found the docs. The first item there is the Quick Start Video and I think, "Cool. That's a good use of video, showing off the product."

I dig out some headphones, click play:

"Ansible is a powerful" BOOM!

Enter my email to watch the video?!

Ah, forget it. Maybe I'll see you next time, Ansible.

As I was walking to the store, I found yet another piece of evidence of nature rape (aka fucking nature by littering of harmful substances). Just like last time I brought it home for proper disposal.

But if I ever find the motherfucker who did this, I have a nice punishment for you. I'll knock you unconscious, drag you home, take your phone and desolder its battery. Then I'll strap a plastic bag around your stupid face, and put the battery in there while it's being shorted. Quickly it'll heat up and you'll start to turn blue with that little bag being your only oxygen source. And when that battery puffs, boy are you going to fucking gasp it all in. Hopefully that'll be poisonous enough to kill you on the spot. If not, I'll have some fun watching you die from oxygen deprivation. Or I'll jam that very same AA battery that you dropped down your throat - you choose.

Call me a psycho all you want, but what does that make you, whoever attempted to further fuck nature by uncaringly dropping a battery on the sidewalk? Oh and let's not mention the results of it - a heatwave that's been going on for over a month now. Thank you so much for bringing the place that you deserve to be in - hell!

One colleague was that good, that he did the job of 3 people without bteaking a sweat...
He put up with shit from the client, where others would have gone on a killing spree.

One day he was blackmailed by a colleague and a project manager.
And then he had enough... This 100kg guy went kratos -spartan rage mode- yelled at all the guys who deserved it... Came to the office, where i was placed. We shook hands, he wished the other competent guys and me the best of luck and fare thee well...

Then there was an argument, which resulted in including lawyers between him and the company... He had to support us for 2 months in order to fulfill his contact... Which he did with as much detest as possible...
He didn't come into office once... Home-Office all the time...
We are still talking over social networks... Learned/learning a lot from him...

Aspecially not to take all the shit...

This is my first post on devRant!
Story time:
It was on my first job as a developer, learning a lot but getting paid less than 50% of the minimum monthly wage of my country.
It was settled in the interview that as I gained more experience, I could handle more projects and earn more money.
At the time, I was living with my parents and didn't have to pay rent and some stuff, so I was like "Well, I'm gonna learn a lot and, if I put a lot of effort into it, soon I'll be making more money".
We agreed that I'll only develop, but 4 months into the job, I was already going to clients
and started coding there (having the client on my back every minute, not being able to work properly) and fixing some computer/network issues they had,
because my boss said I should do it.
Things at home started to go south, and suddenly I needed more money, so I kept doing the work and getting paid a little bit more
A year goes by, devs came and go beacuse of the work/payment situation, and I was still there.
From my first "paycheck" to the last day I never got paid on time, and that was the same for everybody else
The last month I was there, I had a job offer with a better salary and weekends free, so I wanted to take it (I worked saturdays there).
We were working at our biggest clients place at the time (a hospital, working in the server room, desk and chair were a total crap),
so I wanted to have a good conversation with my boss and tell him whats up, after all, I was really grateful for the job despite all things.
We headed outside and started talking. He basically begged me to stay, said that he will pay me on time and offered me more money (less than the other company was offering me),
and that he needed me to finish the implementation and "minor issues" with the app.
I thought about it for a couple of days, and decided to stay. I politely rejected the job offer, and even recommended someone else.
As the days passed, regret was building fast inside of me, until the day that I was supposed to get paid.
He never showed up to the client, told me in a call that he will be there sometime in the morning, that he had the money for me.
So I stayed until my day ended, and still no sign of him. I had no money on me, needed some for gas so I could go, and I called him 5 times.
He picked up the last time, talks to me like nothing is happening and I started to shout at him like I never shouted to anybody before,
got all the things of my chest, and when I was done, he said that he will send the money to my account right away.
This happened on a Saturday, so I quit the following Monday, and lost the other job offer.

"We have another major incident spinning up. QueenMorgana, are you free?" NO, I'M FINISHING UP THE NOTES FROM MY LAST TWO CALLS THAT JUST ENDED, WHY DON'T YOU CALL IN, LAZY FUCKWAD.

Why is it so damn difficult for my boss to cover a call when we're all busy DOING ALL THE LITTLE POINTLESS SHIT HE GIVES UP. He had me follow up from my coworker's call yesterday, not seeing the logic in, IF IT WERE STILL A FUCKING ISSUE, THEY WOULD HAVE CALLED US BACK THIS MORNING.

So now, I have to sit on the line AGAIN and take notes for shit that's not even a major issue BECAUSE IT'S BEEN DOWN FOR A WEEK. IF IT'S DOWN THAT LONG AND YOU DON'T SUBMIT A TICKET TO ME OR CALL OUR MAJOR INCIDENT LINE, I DON'T GET PAID ENOUGH TO RESPOND LIKE IT'S AN EMERGENCY.

Also, fucking lazy asswipe of a "teammate" bitching about being on a call for over 8 hours, while the rest of us are on back to back calls. He's never been on a long call and has been here a year longer than I have. I've been on a 14 hour and a 16 hour, and my other teammate has handled a 26 hour call. 8 HOURS IS FUCKING NOTHING AND YOU WORK FROM HOME SO DON'T EVEN HAVE TO WEAR PANTS.

**spilled 3 cups of coffee this morning, and have an expensive maintenance on my car today, likely to explode on just about everyone**

When pandemic hit in 2020 I found myself out of work. Until then I used to have a java based pirate gameserver of a MMORPG as a hobby.

When pandemic hit I noticed that online players count increased from like 70 to 200 without much advertising because purely of people being stuck in home. So i decided to scale and spent 2 years with that. What a wild ride it was.

So i invested a bit in ads, managed to reach around 500 online players, opened my own company and launched a couple other successful spinoffs of that gameserver.

First year it was a goldmine but I was doing 10-14 hour days because I had to take care of everything (web, advertising, payment integrations, player support and also developing the server itself, ddos protections and etc.). I made quite a bit of money, saved for a downpayment for mortgage and got an apartment.

Second year I noticed that there was a lot of competition and online players count dropped, but I double downed on this and invested a lot into the product itself and spent most of the time developing a perfect gameserver that would be the big bang while also maintaining existing ones. Clasic overengineering mistake. As you can guess, I crashed and burned on all levels, never even managed to launch my final project because simply the scope was too big and I had trouble finding decent devs to outsource it to, since it was a very niche gameserver.

In the end I learned a lot especially about my own limits and ownership, now Im back to being a dev but working as a contractor.

I believe having actual business owner experience allows me to have different perspective and I can bring more to the table rather than focusing on crunching tasks.

PRO LIFE SAVING TIPS FOR DEVS (long rant, not clickbait 😝)

I have a medical condition called DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis). It clots blood in veins near lower body parts. Affected leg swells and become red and it is very painful. It happens when you very frequently sit for very long.

I used to play games, code and stuffs for hours and sometimes I used to stay at home without taking decent walk for weeks. I am only 18 and did not see it coming. But its really early stage and I might be fully recovered real soon.

This condition is not rare and happens to millions of people every year. And it can be avoided if you avoid sitting at computers for long hours and take 5 mins to walk or stretch. Even if you can avoid this condition, there are many others if you dont pay attention on your body. Please take some time to google how you can avoid anything such.

(Please don't comment sympathies, I really know you wish well for me. Instead you can throw tips what you do to relax after long hours of work).

TL;DR, employers are often penny wise and pound foolish.

One morning, my vehicle had a potentially life-threatening condition that I needed fixed before I could drive to work. I was 3 hours late but made a productive day of it. Plus I had stayed late after work, for no pay, a couple of nights because I have the kind of work ethic that compels me to do weird stuff like that occasionally.

When the time clock report came out it showed I was 3 hours short for the pay period. I brought up that I had "paid it forward" a few weeks prior and asked for an exception based on that. I was told that a) all "extra" work had to have been approved prior to doing it and b) that pay period had already passed, so no, I'd need to make up the hours. Being pretty miffed at being so nickled-and-dimed, and for being expected to drive to work in spite of the possibility of losing my life, I just had them take it out of my time off.

Fast forward to my latest monthly review: After another potentially life-threatening vehicle breakdown and fix, I decided to ask whether I could have a couple of telecommute days per week to offset fuel and mileage to recover the repair cost for the wear and tear on my vehicle. The answer was "No, because then everyone will want to work from home and then we'd have no way to know if they're really working."

On that same day I got an offer for doing the same job at another company for 100% telecommute and at nearly twice the salary. I turned in my resignation two days later. Now they're scrambling to try to replace me.

So last year in highschool, everybody had to make a website project with stores and stuff. Everybody was in groups and you could plan your time on you own, working in class or at home.

So my friend spent hours at home designing his website for his group, and to be honest, it looked amazing.
There was only one problem, all files were located on a server which was accessible by all groups without the teacher even being able to know who had accessed which file.

There was this one group which just spent their time in class playing stupid browser games, 3 people in a group, one of them looking at kpop and puppy's for what seemed like to be hours at a time.

Well to get to the point, about 1-2 days before deadline, they noticed they hadn't done shit.
SO THOSE FUCKING BASTARDS JUST COPIED ALL THE FUCKING CODE MY FRIEND HAD MADE.

AT PRESENTATION TIME THEIR "PROJECT" CAME UP FIRST AND MY FRIEND WAS TO ME LIKE "OH NO THOSE FUCKERS DIDN'T JUST COPY MY WHOLE WEBSITE".
ANYWAYS, THEY CLAIMED MY FRIEND HAD COPIED THEM AND GOT AWAY WITH IT!!! (They got an A on the Project, my friend got a C because the teacher thought he copy pasted the design.)

I spoke to diz dude who copied the code, we knew who it was, because the others in the group probably dont even know what the copy and paste keys were.

He laughed at me and said, "C'mon, it's not a big deal.."

IF YOU ARE TOO INCOMPETENT TO WRITE A SINGLE CODE OF LINE, THEN DONT FUCKING STEAL SHIT FROM OTHERS WHO PUT IN HOURS OF WORK, AND MESS UP THEIR GRADE. TAKE YOUR FUCKING F AND LEAVE THE CLASS!!!

Wtf, really??? Are they trying to liyerally KILL ME????

Got home from hospital today wth my family. Baby got sick. Wife also caught cold... Bad news. It was just me still healthy like a raddish [we have such saying].
So I got home. Started feeling somewhat funny. Sore thighs, feeling nauseaus, chilly, a bit dizzy.

10 minutes later I'm fucking trembling! It felt as of I was kicked put bare ass to -20C outside! I'm not exaggerating [probably made some typos.. Pls correct me] - i live where winters get like -35C. Everything around got like twice darker. And my lower teeth got itchy af [NOT the best feeling, trust me].

I must have caught cold too - I thought to myself, cuz I know what these sympthoms mean. I always have 'em all when I have fever. Since shivers are caused by rising fever I got my Microlife remote thermometer out of my drawer. Click, blue light, wait, beeep. 36.5C. Allright.. Maybe I got it wrong... Try again -- same result. Wife also gave a couple tries - nada. Nil. Nullpointerexception. Healthy like a pickle!

10 minutes later I couldn't stand the cold. Got under my blankets wife made some soup, tea,... I still have this analog thermometer, the one with quicksilver. Pop it into my armpit - jusyt in case. 10minutes later I take it out. It says 39,5 and rising. Try the microlife again. 36,5. WHAT THE FUCK?????????

If I weren't so fond of old-school stuff I'd be in a fucking ER now!!

Fuck you medical digital equipment made to be used at home! FUCK YOU!!

I'm pissed.

Do you folks kbow where could I get those q-silver thermometers? Just in case. They're already out of matket in my area for quite some time... For being dangerous [i give 'em that, okay?] and.... Lisen to this.... "unreliable"!

FUCK IT!

Absolutely hate the awful Machines we have to code on at the office, went through three laptops in the space of a year.

All of the them the exact model and specs probably purchased from some tech museum. They would hang and BSOD several times a day and made me look bad when my bit of code wasn't ready on time for a delivery.

Lol , even running spotify while running a couple of dev tools wasn't possible without causing the music to stutter.

After a year i managed to get my hands onto an old Dell desktop when a colleague left that had better specs that would sort of do the job. Wished i could reformat it but alas we aren't allowed to do anything remotely like that.

Finally got fed up of it all, since i bought myself a little treat, an Intel Skull canyon.

Awesome little piece of kit , pretty damn powerful and looks cool too.
Oh an on quiet afternoons I do get to game a little 🤗
The integrated iris pro gpu is surprisingly powerful, it can handle some of the older AAA titles although I haven't really put it through the test yet.

i leave it in the office
Secured with a kensingon lock and locked in my desk drawers
But I usually take it home over weekends

You can believe or not but it’s just one of those stories. It’s long and crazy and it probably happened.

A few years ago I was interviewed by this big insurance company. They asked me on linkedin and were interested. They didn’t specify who they were so I didn’t specify who I am either.

After they revealed who they are I was just curious how they fuck they want to spend those billions of dollars they claimed in their press notes about this fucking digital transformation everyone is talking about. The numbers were big.

I got into 3 or 4 phone/skype interviews without technical questions and I was invited to see them by person.
I know that it would be funny because they didn’t asked me for CV so they didn’t know anything about me and I was just more curious how far I can get without revealing myself.

They canceled interview at midnight and I was in the middle of Louis de Funès comedies marathon so I didn’t sleep whole night. I assumed they would just reschedule but then they phoned me at 8 am if I can come because they made mistake.

So at first talk I was just interviewed by some manager I knowed after 5 minutes he would be shitty as fuck and demand stupid things in no time because he is not technical. He was trying to explain me that they got so great people and they do everything so fast.

From my experience speed and programming are not the things that match. ( for reference of my thought see three virtues of a GREAT programmer )

So I just pissed them off by asking what they would do with me when I finish this transformation thingy next year. ( Probably get rid off and fire at some point were my thoughts )

Then I got this technical interview on newest gold color MacBook pro - pair programming ( they were showing off how much money they have all the time ).
The person asked me to transform json and get some data in javascript .

Really that was the thing and I was so bored and tired that I just asked in what ES standard I can code.
The problem was despite he told me I can do anything and they are using newest standards ( yeah right ) the “for of” loop didn’t worked and he even didn’t know that syntax existed. So I explained him it’s the newest syntax pointing mozilla page and that he need to adjust his configuration. Because we didn’t have time for that I just did it using var an function by writing bunch of code.
When he was asking me if I want to write some tests probably because my code looked ugly as fuck ( I didn’t sleep for more then 24 hours at that point and wanted to live the building as fast as I can) I told I finished and there is no time for tests because it’s so simple and dumb task. The code worked.

After showing me how awesome their office is ( yeah please I work from home so I don’t care ) I got into the talk with VP of engineering and he was the only person who asked me where is my CV because he didn’t know what to talk about. I just laughed at him and told him that I got here just by talking how awesome I am so we can talk about whatever he wants.
After quick talk about 4 different problems where I introduced 4 different languages and bunch of libraries just because I can and I worked with those he was mine.

He told me about this awesome stack they’re building with kubernetes and micro services and the shitty future where they want to put IOT into peoples ass to sell them insurance and suddenly I got awake and started to want that job but behind that all awesomeness there was just .NET bridge with stack of mainframes running COBOL that they want to get rid off and move company to the cloud.

They needed mostly people who would dump code to different technology stack and get rid of old stack ( and probably those old people ) and I was bored again because I work more in r&d field where you sometimes need to think about something that don’t exist and be creative.

I asked him why it would take so much time so he explained me how they would do the transformation by consolidating bunch of companies and how much money they would make by probably firing people that don’t know about it to this day.

I didn’t met any person working permanently there but only consultants from corporations and people hired in some 3rd party company created by this mother company.

They didn’t responded with any decision after me wasting so much time and they asked me for interview for another position year after.
I just explained HR person how they treat people and I don’t want to work there for any money.

If You reached this point it is the end and if it was entertaining thank YOU I did my best.

Have a nice day.

It's weird reading about everyone bitching about their PM / manager, and I'm here and have the best boss anyone can ask for. I work from home whenever I want, if I work extra I can always take that extra time off. If I work weekends I get 100% overtime pay. If I want to learn new tech for a project he tells me to go nuts.

What I'm really trying to say here is.. in all yo faces I guess. \o/

My sleep pattern is royally fucked. I searched around for alarm apps that can help me get back on track. I found one called Alarmy. The list of features was mindblowing. Fast forward a couple of weeks and I’m on vacation. I’m using my mobile data as a hotspot to browse and do research as there are no other internet options here.

My alarm goes off at 6 AM. Everyone besides me is sleeping. Here is where the first problem arises. The only way to turn the alarm off is by taking a picture of something I have at home (This is how I force myself out of bed). I start panicking. How the hell am I going to shut this damn thing off. I try to turn the phone off, and that’s when I realize I’ve made a huge error. The pro version of Alarmy has a setting that allows you to prevent yourself from turning it off at all. Genius me thought that was a good idea. I fumble with my phone as the 1 minute mute timer they give you is slowly ticking down, before all hell breaks loose. That’s when it hits me. I have an LG G3 with replaceable batteries. My violently pounding heart rate start to slow down as I take off the case and slamdunk the phone until the battery falls out. I did it. I’m saved. 5 minutes later I turn my phone on, start the hotspot and get back to my browsing.

BEEP F*CKING BEEP. Alarmy is not done with me yet. It turns out they’ve implemented a new feature that continues the damn alarm after a shutdown. At this point I have ran out of options. I take the battery back out, and now I’m sat here without no phone or internet for the rest of my vacation, and with no clue what to do.

Had a recruiter contact me at home on my day off.

Recruiter: We have a company that would be interested in hiring a C# developer because of your programming skillset.

Me: Does it involve ASP.NET?

Recruiter: Yes.

Me: I apologize, but I don't have any skills in ASP.NET. I've been instead focusing on building my skillset with Java Spring/Hibernate and soon JavaScript to start building front end skills with my backend skillset.

Recruiter: Oh, is Java an in demand skill that companies want?

....Why are you talking to me mate? Take off your headset, go home, and rethink your life choices.

Do something brainless.

Like taking a shit.
Showering.
Hear music loud and dance.
Talk to people but don't listen.
Surf in the internet.
Masturbation.
Sport.
Take a walk.
Watch TV.
Cook.
And so on and so on.

Most of them are doable for hobby projects at home. Some are also suitable for work. Choose appropriately.

But if I am stuck, then continueing to try solve the problem most often keeps me stuck. So doing something else is my solution. So far it worked well.

*Me, sittting in a sprint planning meeting*

PM: We are going to start a 2 weeks sprint and everyone is expected to meet the deadlines no matter the cost.

*Scrum master being an intern doesn't still know how to plan the sprint*

Me: we are having a week long holiday due to elections next week and how do you expect to finish within the deadline when office is closed.

PM: we are aware of that, but who is ready to take this as a challenge and be proactive in completing the tasks?

How many of you have faced this situation where the company expects you to work from home and get the tasks done even during the holidays. The company only values their work and not the employees. They want us to work as slaves without valuing us. They expect us to be loyal to the company through work but they aren't ready to be loyal to us through payments.

DONT DEVELOPERS HAVE THEIR HOLIDAYS TO SPEND TIME WITH THEIR LOVED ONES? ARE WE MACHINES?

Going on vacation in a few days bug tonight is my last chance for getting ready at home.

Am now applying loads of stickers to my netbook which I'll take with me 😊

A few years ago, I used to work at a very small company. It was a compact team, we all got along quite nicely and work was very good too, but the salary was very low.

Then I got an offer from a big company in the big city for thrice the pay, and I understood how great an opportunity this is, and I knew I would get a lot to learn from this. So, I decided to take it.

So, when I went to my boss to hand in the resignation, he turned red and started tearing into at me and threatening me. And I was taken aback, because, he was usually so nice. He even threatened to have me kidnapped, and I was so dumbstruck, I couldn't even understand what the heck was going on.

I didn't even finish my notice period. I just went home after that, and never went back.

My Perfect Day : Assumption

Woke up at 6. Went for morning walk or do yoga or some sort of stuff.

Came back at 7. Went for daily routine, like bathing and all.

Went to prepare breakfast at 7:45. Prepared some eggs and bread and coffee.

It is 8:15 now. Reading news papers or watching tv and doing breakfast.

At 9 check mails and prepare some stuff.

At 9: 30 went for office. Reached office 5 minute before 10, safe and sound.

Came back at 7 by evening. Did some rest. Prepare dine till 9. Take a bath. Complete the dine.

At 10:30 ready to sleep.

Actual Scenario :

Woke up at 8:30. No time for yoga or morning walk. No time for preparing breakfast as well. Went straight to bathroom. Came back in 20 minutes. Made a cup of coffee. No time for newspaper or tv.

Feeling lazy and tired already. At 9:10 went for office. Before reaching office stopped at fast food joints. buy some junk food. Eat them. Got traffic jam and reached office late.

Started working but feeling lazy. Boss asked twice about the project status and i am unable to think a single line of code.

However, days passed. Boss scolded me. I promised him to finish the work after reaching home.

Reached home at 7:30. Late for no reason. Went straight to bed. Sleeps a hour. But took 20 minutes to leave bed.

Started working on projects i did not complete in the office.

Time fly and it is already 1 in morning. No dinner. Tired as fuck but hungry as well. So made some eggs and eat. Wrapped the task but it is 3:30 in morning and i jumped to bed for sleep.

Loop.

OK.
1. So i tindered.
2. I got a really nice girl.
3. We chatted really long and good.
4. We tried to meetup it did not work because of our schedule. New
job on my end, she is a student.
5. I thought its over. Fine whatever.
6. She gives me her number.
7. We continue chat on whatsapp
8. Blablabla 3 days long, she gets bored and tries to friendzone me
9. I revert the shit and state i wanna be serious and there wont be a
friendzone/nice guy comin from me.
10. She happy and continues to chat.
11. I get emtionally invested in her.
12. We exchange thoughts dreams and music.
13 We want to meetup at weekend. I cant. Got a family wedding all
weekend.
14. We want to meetup the second week.
I cant. Im off on a company trip. Again new job here.
15. So we say in the week after I get back.
15a. Before the weekend we need to deliver an rc and go all out to hold
the deadline.
15b. We deliver, but shit happens on the customer side. His fault but we
get the blame.
15c I go onto the company trip.
16. We chat and i send her pictures of the trip over the weekend so she
sees I care.
17. She seems fine. And happy.
18. I come back from the trip late night and need to work the next day
jetlag style.
19. I work jetlag style. And try to fix the shit from last week.
20. I come home really tired and looking forward to date day tomorrow.
21. I cant do anything. My home looks like shit and the bag still
unpacked. I just eat and fall asleep.
I feel bad bcs my home will turn her down instantly if we make it to my
place.
Need to hope that it does not come to this.
22. Date day comes. Today.
23. I wake up at 6 early to plan ahead to make sure my clothes are fine
and i arrive on time in the office to exit early.
24. I expect to check what goes on today in the city and give her the
location to meet and time.
25. I enter office and immeadetly get caught up in meeting planning, dev
questions and the meeting itself because the project is on edge.
26. We have a 5hours long meeting where people go on and on and on.
27. 3h later in the meeting:
my brain was fried and around 12 i go to lunch with some people.
28. Meanwhile the city is turning into a rainy mess of a shitty day. No
way I can have a nice walk with her like that. Bars and coffeshops are
just to boring.
29. So i eat to regain some sense and we go back to the office.
Meanwhile I am thinking all kinds of locations and stuff in my head.
30. Havent given her any update since a good morning in the morning.
31. We reenter the meeting. Things continue like before. The project is
on impossible demands and impossible timelines. Still we try to do our
best.
32 3h later on 3pm I tell her i am in a long meeting and working on a
meetingspot.
33. shes not happy.
34. I get a call from a relative
35. i need to go out and take the call. not good for the collegues.
again new job here.
36. family trouble,  money trouble, goverment demands. I promise to
handle that tomorrow. Before work.
37. i get back into the meeting.
38. still super slow and no results.
39. need to focus but start to check for locations on my phone.
40. she asks me where i am
41. I send her my location.
42. she thinks i am saying she should pick me up!
43 i joke and say no definitly not.
44. shes pissed.
45.  I decide for a coffeeshop. after work. and send her the location
46. She says to call it off.
47. I go all in and go romance style. I say ill wait there even if she
does not come to show her how much i care.
U know to avoid the lets do it some other time fuckery and then it never
happens.
47. She goes quiet.
48. 2h later we finish the meeting. Meanwhile QA foudn a bug we need to
fix because why not.
49. I got 30 minutes to find the bug and fix it before I need to go to
uphold my word.
50. I find out what to do, but it might break a lot of other things
without careful test and implementation. Collegues says he takes it.
51 I feel bad but I need to go. I even leave earlier because otherwise I
would not be on time.
52. I arrive 15 minutes early. I grab two coffee2go and wait outside,
53. Shitty weather, sometimes rain, sometimes sunny, cant decide what it
wants.
54. The weather is just like how I feel.
55. I wait 1 1/2h
56. I think I should feel stupid, For gods sake its tinder. People dont
give a crap, Enough people around why should I Invest so much into this?
But I dont feel stupid. Because this is how I want it. I dont want
appointments, I dont want safety. I decided for her and I went all in.
57. I send her pics from the sceneray as proof that I waited,
58. I think I blew it. She is still quiet.
59. Friends are asking me for plans for the weekend. I wish I could say
I already have some with her.
60. I feel lost right now. But my head says I put too much stress on
her, And i fucked up with the planning. I should have been more precise.
My head also says that i am putting myself into the victim role, which
is wrong always. Should I continue to reach out to her? Is there
something I could do still?

[Little perspective: For the last 7 months I'm working in a certain project.]
[The project is full of unimaginative, non-creative devs with 0 initiative and poor technical background.]
[And they're almost all from one country which you all can figure out.]
[But I'm not going to mention it here because I don't want to come up as a racist]
[So there's US (Europeans) and THEM. 3 of US and about 10 of THEM. And we're doing 90% of all the heavy lifting]
---
Yesterday
---
D (Dev from THEM): Hi S, I have a problem with my task
Me: (sighing) Ok let's have a call
* on the call with D we were checking some stuff loosely related to task *
* code wouldn't get invoked at all for some reason *
* suddenly I realize that even if the code would invoke, D's probably doing everything wrong in it anyway *
Me (thinking): I need to double check something.
Me: I can't help you now, I'll get back to you later.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey J, I need your help, I need to clarify the work package in my mind, because I am no longer sure.
J (my European TL): Ok, fire away.
* call started *
Me: Is it true that [blahblahblah] and so D's task depends on me completing first my task, or am I losing my mind?
J: That is correct.
Me: Well she's trying to do this in [that] way, which is completely wrong.
J: You see, that's how it is in this project, you do refinements with them, split these work packages to tasks, mention specifically what depends on what and what order should things be taken in, and in some cases all tasks from given user stories should be done by one person entirely... But they do it their way anyway, assign different people to different interdependent tasks, and these people don't even understand the big picture and they try to do the things the way they think they understand them.
Me: It's a fire in a brothel.
J: Yup.
Me: I fucking love this project.
J: (smiling silently)
* call ended *
---
Me: Ok D, you can't do your task because it's dependant on my task.
D: Oh... so what do I do?
Me: I don't know, do something else until I do my task.
---
A (THEIR TL) (Oh, did I forget to mention that there are 2 TLs in this project? THEY have their own. And there are 2 PMs as well.)
A: Hey S, I need to talk
Me: (sighing, getting distracted from work again) Ok let's have a call
* call started *
A: S, we need this entire work package done by Friday EOD.
Me: I can't promise, especially since there are several people working on its several tasks.
A: D's working on hers for 3 days already, and she's stuck. We want you to take over.
Me: (sighing, thinking "great"): Ok.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey D, A instructed me to take over your task. This is actually going to be easier since you'd have to wait for mine after all.
D: Oh, ok.
---
* I switched the Assigned Person on D's task to myself on Azure *
---
This morning, email from D.
"Hey, I completed my task and it's on [this] branch, what do I do now?"

........................................
Me, hesitating between 2 ways to reply:
(and take note there are people in CC: A, J, P - the last one is THEIR PM)
1) "Hi, Unfortunately you'd still have to wait for my changes because your task is dependent on my task - the column to be changed is in the table that I am introducing and it's not merged to develop branch yet. By the way I already did your task locally, as I was instructed to do it, I'm wrapping things up now."
(y'know: the response which is kind, professional, understanding; without a slight bit of impatience)
2) WHAT FUCKING PART OF "DON'T DO THIS I WILL FUCKING DO IT MYSELF GO HOME JUST GO HOME" YOU DON'T FUCKING UNDERSTAND

Fuck ISP. Just moved to nz. Explain to this company im working at home on the internet. Need it fast.

Takes 8 days to get the 📦 in a country of 5 million people. Wtf.

Box does not contain all default connections for box to work in a default house hold.

Call them. Tells me i have to go get it myself because i didnt request it. Fuck you or did you just fuck me.

Pay 100 dollars (this is in new zealand even though it feels like afghanistan. Not trying to offenecse any on here btw) a month for unlimited internet and phoneline.

They forget to put on the phone line.

Pay their fucking stupid 4 dollar cable insurance because new zealand has houses built for fucking cave people with 0 insolation and prone to dampness.

First day connections dont work. Well is that not fucking beautiful. I actually payed 4 worthy dollars.

WRONG YOU MOTHER FUCKER.

They tell me i didnt take the insurance.i go mayhem tell them how useless they are. So they send some one 8am the next mornin while activating the insurance. Ho yeah they also told me they forgot to include landline in my account.

Now 2 days in everything works im happy. Wake up to “your account has been suspended because you went over the max 200$ of your credit. You owe us 250$ before you can re-activate your account....

Inside boiling. Rudness and caps just won`t help.... I need some blood.... Some ISP blood....

Im going to fucking murder the QA team if they don't stop sender bullshit issues!

QA: hey dev, there is an error with attached files.
Me: okay what's the issue?
QA: it's just a random file that gets attached. Can you fix it by the end of the sprint(tomorrow)?
Me: I need to investigate it a bit before I can tell you how long it will take, how can I reproduce it?
QA: idk, it was just there.
*several hours of testing later*
Me: I've tried to cause the 'issue' on my local server, the test server and the live server. But I haven't seen it and I have no clue what could cause it.
*30min. before I go home*
QA: dev you have to fix it before you go home! Because we have some other important issues you have to fix tomorrow!

FUCK YOU AND YOUR IMAGINARY ISSUES I'M GOING HOME

Old rant about an internship I had years ago. It still annoys me to this day, so I just had to share the story.

Basically I had no job or work experience in the field, which is a common issue in the city I live in - developer jobs are hard to come by with no experience here. The municipality tried to counter this issue by offering us (unemployed people with an interest in the field) a free 9-month course, linked with an internship program, with a "high chance" of a job after the internship period.

To lure companies to agree to this deal, the municipality offered a sum of money to companies who willing to take interns. The only requirement for the company was that they had to offer a full-time position to the interns after the internship, as long as there were no serious issues (ex. skipping work, calling in sick, doing a bad job etc.).
On paper, this deal probably makes sense.

I landed an internship fairly quickly at a well-known company in the city. The first internship period went great, and I got constant positive feedback. I even got to the point where I ran out of tasks since I worked faster than expected - which I was fairly proud of at the time.

The next internship period was a weird mix between school (the course), and being at the company. We would be at the school for the whole week, expect Wednesdays where we could do the internship at the company.

When I met at work on that first Wednesday, the company told me that it made no sense for me to meet up on those days, as I was only watching some tutorial videos during that time, while they were finding bigger tasks for me - which in turn required that they got some designs for a new project. They said that due to the requirements they got from the municipality (which I knew nothing about at the time), they couldn't ask me to work from home - and they said it would "demoralize" the other developers if I just sat there on Wednesdays to watch videos. Instead, they suggested that I called in sick on Wednesdays and just watched the videos at home - which is something I would register to the workplace, so I wouldn't get in trouble with the school. It sounded logical to me, so I did that for like 5-6 Wednesdays in a row. Looking back at this period, there's a lot of red flags - but I was super optimistic and simply didn't notice.

After this period, the final 2 months of the internship period (no school). This time I had proper tasks, and was still being praised endlessly - just like the first period.
On the last day of the internship, I got called to a meeting with my teamlead and CEO. Thinking I was to sign a full-time contract, I happily went to the meeting.. Only to be told that they had found someone with more experience.
I was fairly disappointed, and told them honestly that I would have preferred if they had told me this earlier, since I had been looking forward to this day. They apologized, but said that there was nothing they could do.

When I returned for the last school period (2 weeks), the teacher asked me to join him for a small meeting with some guy from the municipality. Both seemed fairly disappointed / angry, and told me what still makes me furious whenever I think about it.
Basically after my last internship period, the company had called the municipality, telling them that I had called in sick on those Wednesdays, and was "a lazy worker", and they would refuse to hire me because of that.
I of course told them my side of the story, which they wouldn't believe (unemployed person vs. well-known company).

Even when I landed a proper job a few months later, the office had called my old internship for a reference - and they told the same story, which nearly made them decline my application. This honestly makes me feel like it's something personal.

So basically:
Municipality: Had to pay the company as the deal / contract between them was kept.
Company: Got free money and work.
Me: Got nothing except a bad reputation - and some (fairly limited) experience..

Do I regret taking the course? .. No, it was a free course and I learned a lot - and I DID get some experience. But god, I wish I had applied at a different company.

Sorry for my bad English - it's not my first language.. But f*ck this company :)

So I'm sick. But my inner coder tells me that I could atleast do some basic design for my project.

So I go to sit down at my home computer and immediately feel my nose literally start dripping of snot as soon as I lean in to sit. So lile any normal man i take a tissue, wipe and blow my nose and it's now time to login on the computer.

*Wrong password*

Oh, I've must been to quick

*Try again*
*Wrong password*

Wtf?!

*Slowly type my password in*
*Wrong password*

*Fuck it, show password*

A space is missing.
Alright I'll just add it in then.

*Tap spacebar*
*Nothing*
*Tap harder*
*Nothing*

So I rip out the space bar and find a two little drops of snot that must have juuuust fallen between the cracks.
I tried to wipe it away and put the space bar back, but it's dead. :(

Was explaining a technical concept at a "family" dinner. Suddenly stepmother wanted my help for something technical.

Stepmother: Say Awlex, could you help me install some software I recently bought?

Me: (Not this shit again) I even don't know what software you're talking about. How is the software called, what does it do?
Sm: it's calles digital... *long pause*
Me: (I don't like where this is going)
Sm: software... *another long pause*
Me: (fuck me harder than that lightly clothed woman outside)
Sm: something... *long pause*
Me: (alright brain, which way out of here doesn't involves me creating a bullet hole in either one of us?)
Sm: And you can use it to sell something...
Me: (tf do you event sell?!)
Sm: but not like ebay
Me: (what is it then? A platform for selling services? I don't even know what kind of software you'd have to install, given that most of these platforms are be web applications, whcih makes sense for selling stuff on the internet)
Sm: Anyway, could you help me install it? It would take me hours to get into it.
Me: (You think just installing would solve it? As soon as I install it, you probably expect me to be your walking manual as well, don't you?) Look, I'm gonna be honest with you, since I started working I don't have nearly as much free time as I used to have (Not everybody works when they feel like it, you know that?) I get home at around almost 7pm (most of the time) and don't really wanna work afterwards. Most of the time there's a support service from the people who made this software and they would be glad to help you. (Sorry support team, for pushing this bundle of incompetence onto you, but I guess she didn't even listen to my advice).

After that she didn't back down and still wanted my help. Then my grandmother derailed the conversation and got me out of this. When I thanked her later she yold me that she saw I saw uncomfortable and wanted to help. I love my grandmother.

So I am not going to be your "family" tech support. You b(r)ought this onto yourself. Are more than twice my age and still can't use your brain to solve problems like these on your own and you can even less reason abiut your motives and desires when asking for help. I am sick of you and shutty opinions about people, just because I work as a software engineer doesn't mean I'm exist solely for satisfying your unreasonable desires.

Stop offending me and my profession and get yourself some common sense.
Protip #0: Give me one fucking reason to help you, because you're not family enough and your personality really doesn't bring forth any emotion but annoyance

So we're hiring for a new junior dev and for the most part it's been going great! We have some promising candidates and I am so glad to finally have a new dev on the team!

However, I would like to take a moment and offer a few suggestions to the people who wish to work for this great and illustrious company:

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE APPLY FOR THE JOB USING THE METHOD INDICATED IN THE AD. Please use our fancy, top-of-the-line, whiz-bang, cloud-based "talent acquisition" system that we paid way too much money for. I promise you, it's easy! Please don't send in your application by email, mail, telephone, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, telegram or carrier pigeon. But most importantly...

FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS BEAUTIFUL IN THIS WORLD DO NOT SHOW UP AT OUR OFFICE UNANNOUNCED RESUME-IN-HAND. Believe it or not I do have an actual job that I spend my day doing! If I'm not in a meeting or at lunch or working from home, the best possible scenario is that you'll get 30 seconds of awkward small talk and be pointed to our whiz-bang, top-of-the-line "talent acquisition" system which you should have used in the first place (you did read the ad, right?). And at this point whatever you do...

DO NOT DEMAND AN ON-THE-SPOT INTERVIEW WHEN YOU SHOW UP UNANNOUNCED TO OUR OFFICE! Like, really? Do you think that you've wowed me so with your 30 seconds of awkward small talk that clearly I cannot wait to see what you will do with an entire hour? Look, I prepare for my interviews. I research you, your previous employers, your school and the hobbies you list on your resume. I check out your GitHub and LinkedIn. I may even Google your name! If that is all in order, I try to hassle some people into sitting in with me, find a time that works for everyone, and hope that there is a meeting room available. I'm not going to interview you at reception at 4pm on a Friday afternoon.

Please submit your application through our whiz-bang, top-of-the-line online "talent acquisition" system. Once I figure out how to log in, I promise I will spend an evening and read through all your cover letters with the utmost care. If you seem OK, you'll get an interview. There aren't that many developers in this town.

Worst part of being a dev?

THERE'S A NEW FREAKIN FRAMEWORK EVERYDAY.

Where are we supposed to get time to learn everything the job applications require? And even worst, have 2 years of experience with the thing?

And how about when developing a responsive dynamic website? If you are crazy, like me, and you are the kind of dev that always wants to deliver something great, customized to the needs of your client, and that doesn't smell bootstrappy, you probably can't stand too when people ask you about time guesstimates. Especially when you are the ONLY DEV in your company.

Also, our gear is EXPENSIVE.

Sorry, I guess I'm stressed... Had to bring some work home, due to the bosses deciding to deliver a project one week early to the client, without consulting me first.

Still, luckily for me, all this bullshit can't take my love of coding away.

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.

Best work prank?

Get a random friend to burst into my home office during a zoom call, wearing a ski mask, gun in hand, speak foreign language, and drag me out of the room. Have another masked friend go up the camera and threaten to kill me if my coworkers go to the police. Disappear for a week, then email my boss saying I need 100k or they’ll start killing my family members one by one, take the money, then go on vacation while I fill out job applications. Get a new job and repeat the prank every few months until I retire.

For some reason my manager freaked out after her non developer husband told her that each of the web pages for our main service would take months to build. Shit man its just static content with some animations here and there. It is a total of 15 pages and this dude estimated that I (as in yours truly) would only be able to do 2 per month. Bato stfu. Stick to banking (hopefully your time estimates don't suck ass there) and let me woo your woman with my frontend godspeed.

So what did I do?

Simple, asked her to show me one of the design models she already created on photoshop. Saved that thing to my computer and coded it at home. In 2 hours (It was originally one but my dumbass gor tab trigger happy with rm rf autocomplete so I had to do it again...fking dumb) and showed it to her this morning.

Eat a dick dude. The woman is already going apeshit over all the other shit we have to do plus working on her masters and attentind 100+ pointless meetings a day whilst still being able to be the best fucking manager I've ever had. I really don't need her freaking the fuck out over your dumbfuck estimates. Why in the wholy fucking world she listened to your dumbass is beyond me, probably stress made her freak out.

Its cool b.....I got it under control.

Fucking chill woman damn.

**drops mic

Me: Man this has been a killer week! Coding bootcamp has been better than I ever could have dreamed. Home life is good. Nothing could kill my good mood.

*opens up Facebook*
*Sees Microsoft is trying to pay billions of dollars to take control of Github*

...

FUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCKKKKKK

*Starts cloning repos like crazy*

If you are sick...

STAY THE FUCK HOME!

It has nothing to do with how YOU are feeling. It’s about RESPECT for those around you.

Especially if you work in an open office. Coming into an open office when sick is like coughing right on someone’s face repeatedly, it shows that same level of (lack of) respect.

Almost every company I have seen fucks this up so bad. It’s the same shit every year....

People are afraid to take days and stay home. They go in and make everyone sick, then everyone is taking days off and we are “short” on people. Then the incompetent CEO is scratching his head as to why this toxic work environment could produce such a toxic result.

And one more fucking thing.

If you got a cold/flu on Monday and your in the office on Wednesday because you are “feeling a bit better” then your a fucking idiot. At day 3 you are just starting to expel germs while still being highly contagious.

If you come into an open office while sick then I would say...

“Smarten the fuck up! And start showing some respect for the people you work with!”

If you have created (or are creating) a culture that encourages this then I would say...

“Fuck you! You should be fucking smarter than that.”

————

If your still sitting there thinking something like...

“Well I have to attend the meeting” or some other shit. Then let me add this to the pile.

Not everyone has had a rosy fucking life.

You may be working next to someone who has a lowered immune system due to past medical problems. What may be a week of sickness for you could end up being a month in the hospital for them.

You may be working next to a person who has a family member dying of cancer. If you make them sick then they can’t visit that family member (colds can kill cancer patients) and you may be stopping that person from seeing their loved ones one last time before they die.

Don’t be a fucking asshole.

STAY THE FUCK HOME!

You know. I have mixed feelings on the way people have been reacting to senzory's rant regarding the way he deals with clients. Some people believe that he is unethical, some people see it as just business(me included) but to see what the community says is somewhat interesting.

First, let me be clear on something: i have been fucked over by clients many times for being a nice guy and trying to play it nicely.

Because of this I am selective of who deserves good treatment and who gets to fuck off. But regardless of the client I do the same thing: regardless of who it is, nice or otherwise. If a project will take 1 week to complete then I tell them that it will take 3 to 4 weeks. Why? Well because I have many things on my plate, I am married and have two children, one lives with me and I try to spend as much time with them as I can. I work from 8 to 6, sometimes later and when I get home I sometimes don't do shit since at work I maintain the web services of 2 fucking college campuses.
I don't look for my clients. Through word of mouth they come to me. And being in a privileged position(there are about 5 devs here and they all suck) they can either do with my times and fees or can fuck off over the border where Pedro will do their shit on vbscript and classic ASP(which I like, but you know why this is not an option in 2018)

Apps can be sold for large quantities of money, regardless of what their use case is, if a company wants to outsource their apps to an external developer(such as yours truly) that means that they are willing to play the game. And that is what business is: a game, a survival game.

Where I live, a company will not think twice of firing a single mother for whatever reason. In the U.S of A, and specially in Texas, you can be fired for whatever reason. I have automated people's jobs without knowing it, I have made people lose their jobs and saved companies thousands with my apps. Things like that were not know to me, had I known that someone would have lost their jobs I would have tried differently.

If a company is willing to tell employees(loyal employees) to fuck off, then i do not regret charging what I do and hustling the way I do with rat faced dickheads that care not for people. If I could I would destroy entire companies here. But that is for another story.

I have been used, insulted, gambled with and have been lied to, to my face by these companies. Which has left me jaded.

Oh now, trust me. I am still highly optimistic and nice. And if someone has a small business and I can help them out, then I will lower my rate and give positive vibes in the hopes of making things better through karma. I want to see the best in people. But this does not stop me from being a shark and giving quotes the way I do.

Because companies, as an overall entity are not people with the best intentions(sometimes) and they will not take your kindness, they will take advantage if possible in an effort to save money. Its just dickhead business.

So why, as a professional and privileged developer that obtained his skills through intense study and practice, a wizard by all means, should lower to these nameless, Faceless entities?
Why should i give them the fairness they do not give others? Why should I play the high morale game and come out as a loser?

At the end of the day, I get to swim in my own pool of success, knowing that they did not get the chance to fuck me over

So if you tell me that you took advantage of your hard earned skillset, and built a cross platform app(which compiles to native binaries) and sold 2 products for one, I will tell you that you are an excellent player at their game. If you tell me that you finished before and got to charge for 2 weeks of work doing just 2 days I will say that you are an excellent time manager. And if you tell me that at the end of the day you managed to keep said customer I will tell you that you are a true professional.

There is a difference lads, in selling a product to big momma jamma's cajun restaurant, to the largest logistics company around.

Be nice to those that desserve it.

I did it - I went outside! Felt strange, like Y2K and Maya doomsday would have been together. Of course I went out only during daylight because THEY hide in the dark. Infrastructure was mostly still intact, I've even seen some houses. Occasionally, survivors scrambling the area.

GPS didn't work so I used my magnetic compass. OK, it was because I forgot my mobile at home, but anyway. Should I take petrol with me so that I could burn my clothing upon return? Or would this attract THEM? Occasional gunfire in the distance. Might also be some pneumatic hammer, that's what the media would try to tell me.

The local supermarket had still trolleys outside. I took note because I might need them to bar the stairwell, along with the land mines that I still have left over from New Year's Eve.

Deserted cars standing around. Looked like neatly parked, but that doesn't mean anything. When Germans turn into zombies, their last human action is to park their cars. That's so genetically hardwired that no virus can override it.

Dusk set in. I better returned home.

Worked with a European consulting company to integrate some shared business data (aka. calling a service).
VP of IT called an emergency meeting (IT managers, network admins) deeply concerned about the performance of the international web site since adding our services.
VP: “The partner’s site is much slower than ours. Only common piece that could cause that is your service.”
Me: “Um, their site is vastly different than ours. I don’t think we can compare their performance to ours.”
VP: “Performance is #1! I need your service fixed ASAP!”
Me: “OK, but what exactly is slow? How did you measure their site? The servers are in Germany”
VP: “I measured performance from my house last night.”
Me: “Did you use an application?”
VP: “<laughs> oh no, I was at home. When I opened the page, I counted one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, then the page displayed.”
Me: “Wow…um…OK…uh…how long does our page take to load?”
VP: “Two Mississippi’s”
Me: “Um…wow…OK…wow…uh, no, we don’t measure performance like that, but I’ll work with our partners and develop a performance benchmark to determine if the shared service is behaving differently.”
VP: “Whatever it is, the service is slow. Bill, what do you think is slowing down the service?”
NetworkAdmin-Bill: “The Atlantic Ocean?”
VP got up and left the meeting.

1. Keep your rythm: 7/8 hours of sleep each day and DON'T take your work home. Unless you have your own business ofcourse. Still: don't wear yourself out!

2. Put on music. Me personally like fast punk when i'm struggling with a deadline. Makes you want to go faster.

3. Close ALL communication like chats, mail etc. Hell i even thought of a sign "do not disturb"

4. Coffee. Lot's of coffee

5. Use a time tracking method like pomodoro

> Me on call
> Notice that our Echangeserver is not working, strange that I did not get any alarm?
> Start working on it, the services are slow as fuck. They dont start
> Nvm reboot
>10 minutes later the same problem, start to dig deeper.
>Everything goes slow because I am not a Windows guys
>The big boss calls, clock is 7 AM (our office opens as 8AM)
> She is angry that I am not at the office, because the mail does not work.
> I am working remotely from home, 30 min drive to work
> Told her that I have a 30 min drive and I was supposed to be home to take care of wife that was sick
> She is annoyed, pissed.
> She demands that I need to be at the office to solve the problem

omg,,, I don't work better if I am in the office.
Also, it turns out that a colleague has turned of the alarms from Nagios/OP5 for the exchange environment because is once spammed his phone.

Skipped my lectures at university just to get my new Dell laptop at home.

Here is my experience of dell account portal:

There is a 50-50 chance that your order will appear in the list of orders. It has it's own mind, sometimes it will appear, sometimes it will say it has found no orders.

Now if somehow you do see the order in the list, there is a 50-50 chance that clicking on the order number will actually show you the correct order. Most of the time it will take you to a completely different order, where you can see the name, address and other personal details of a person that you don't know. THANKS DELL!

Now if somehow clicking on the order number takes you to the right order details page, there is a 50-50 chance that there will be no courier information, it will be blank without any information. Sometimes it will show the tracking number, but no courier details.

Right, now let's say that I don't give a fuck about any of these. I stayed home, skipping my lecture, just so that I can get my laptop. They promised me that they will deliver it today and I trust them 🙂

BUT YOU MOTHERFUCKER, not only that they will not deliver it today, they haven't even bothered to give me a call and say that they won't be delivering it today. YOU PIECE OF HORSESHIT, I skipped my fucking lectures for you. Now I have to skip my lectures for another day, just to get my GODDAMN laptop.

FUCK YOU DELL, DIE IN HELL!

Spend quite a while at work trying to get two divs inside a centered div next to each other and especially get them the same height as the parent div.

Got it working after numerous tries, was going to take the code home to continue.

Forgot to take the code home, have to start over again and I hardly understand CSS 😥

Fuck me. (Writing a new service thingy by the way)

I have a Windows machine sitting behind the TV, hooked to two controllers, set up as basically a console for the big TV. It doesn't get a lot of use, and mostly just churns out folding@home work units lately. It's connected by ethernet via a wired connection, and it has a local static IP for the sake of simplicity.

In January, Windows Update started throwing a nonspecific error and failing. After a couple weeks I decided to look up the error, and all the recommendations I found online said to make sure several critical services were running. I did, but it appeared to make no difference.

Yesterday, I finally engaged MS support. Priyank remoted into my machine and attempted all the steps I had already tried. I just let him go, so he could get through his checklist and get to the resolution steps. Well, his checklist began and ended with those steps, and he started rather insistently telling me that I had to reinstall, and that he had to do it for me. I told him no thank you, "I know how to reinstall windows, and I'll do it when I'm ready."

In his investigation though, I did notice that he opened MS Edge and tried to load Bing to search for something. But Edge had no connection. No pages would load. I didn't take any special notice of it at the time though, because of the argument I was having with him about reinstalling. And it was no great loss to me that Edge wasn't working, because that was literally the first time it'd ever been launched on that computer.

We got off the phone and I gave him top marks in the CS survey that was sent, as it appeared there was nothing he could do. It wasn't until a couple hours later that I remembered the connectivity problem. I went back and checked again. Edge couldn't load anything. Firefox, the ping command, Steam, Vivaldi, parsec and RDP all worked fine. The Windows Store couldn't connect either. That was when it occurred to me that its was likely that Windows Update was just unable to reach the internet.

As I have no problem whatsoever with MS services being unable to call home, I began trying to set up an on-demand proxy for use when I want to update, and I noticed that when I fill out the proxy details in Internet Options, or in Windows 10's more windows10-ish UI for a system proxy, the "save" button didn't respond to clicks. So I looked that problem up, and saw that it depends on a service called WinHttpAutoProxySvc, which I found itself depends on something called IP Helper, which led me to the root cause of all my issues: IP Helper now depends on the DHCP Client service, which I have explicitly disabled on non-wifi Windows installs since the '90s.

Just to see, I re-enabled DHCP Client, and boom! Everything came back on. Edge, the MS Store, and Windows Update all worked. So I updated, went through a couple reboots-- because that's the name of the game with windows update --and had a fully updated machine.

It occurred to me then that this is probably how MS sends all its spy data too, and since the things I actually use work just fine, I disabled DHCP Client again. I figure that's easier than navigating an intentionally annoying menu tree of privacy options that changes and resets with every major update.

But holy shit, microsoft! How can you hinge the entire system's OS connectivity on something that not everybody uses?

I've recently received another invitation to Google's Foobar challenges.

A while ago someone here on devRant (which I believe works at Google, and whose support I deeply appreciate) sent me a couple of links to it too. Unfortunately back then I didn't take the time to learn the programming languages (Python or Java) that Google requires for these challenges. This time I'm putting everything on Python, as it's the easiest language to learn when coming from Bash.

But at the end of the day.. I am a sysadmin, not a developer. I don't know a single thing about either of these languages. Yet I can't take these challenges as the sysadmin I am. Instead, I have to learn a new language which chances are I'll never need again outside of some HR dickhead's interview with lateral thinking questions and whiteboard programming, probably prohibited from using Google search like every sane programmer and/or sysadmin would for practical challenges that actually occur in real life.

I don't want to do that. Google is a once in a lifetime opportunity, I get that. Many people would probably even steal that foobar link from me if they could. But I don't think that for me it's the right thing to do. Google has made a serious difference by actually challenging developers with practical scenarios, and that's vastly superior to whatever a HR person at any other company could cobble together for an interview. But there's one thing that they don't seem to realize. A company like Google consists of more than just developers. Not only that, it probably consists - even within their developer circles - of more than just Python and Java developers. If any company would know about languages that are more optimized such as C, it would be Google that has to leverage this performance in order to be able to deliver their services.

I'll be frank here. Foobar has its own issues that I don't like. But if Google were a nice company, I'd go for it all the way nonetheless - after all, they are arguably the single biggest tech company in the world, and the tech industry itself is one of the biggest ones in the world nowadays. It's safe to say that there's likely no opportunity like working at Google. But I don't think it's the right thing. Even if I did know Python or Java... Even if I did. I don't like Google's business decisions.

I've recently flashed my OnePlus 6T with LineageOS. It's now completely Google-free, except for a stock Yalp account (that I'm too afraid to replace with my actual Google account because oh dear, third-party app stores, oh dear that could damage our business and has to be made highly illegal!1!). My contacts on that phone are are all gone. They're all stored on a Google server somewhere (except for some like @linuxxx' that I consciously stored on device storage and thus lost a while back), waiting for me to log back in and sync them back. I've never asked for this. If Google explicitly told me that they'd sync all my contacts to my Google account and offer feasible alternatives, I'd probably given more priority to building a CalDAV and CardDAV server of my own. Because I do have the skills and desire to maintain that myself. I don't want Google to do this for me.

Move fast and break things. I've even got a special Termux script on my home screen, aptly named Unfuck-Google-Play. Every other day I have to use it. Google Search. When I open it on my Nexus 6P, which was Google's foray into hardware and in which they failed quite spectacularly - I've even almost bent and killed it tonight, after cursing at that piece of shit every goddamn day - the Google app opens, I type some text into it.. and then it just jumps back to the beginning of whatever I was typing. A preloader of sorts. The app is a fucking web page parser, or heck probably even just an API parser. How does that in any way justify such shitty preloaders? How does that in any way justify such crappy performance on anything but the most recent flagships? I could go on about this all day... I used to run modern Linux on a 15 year old laptop, smoothly. So don't you Google tell me that a - probably trillion dollar - company can't do that shit right. When there's (commercialized) community projects like DuckDuckGo that do things a million times better than you do - yet they can't compete with you due to your shit being preloaded on every phone and tablet and impossible to remove without rooting - that you Google can't do that and a lot more. You've got fucking Google Assistant for fucks sake! Yet you can't make a decent search app - the goddamn thing that your company started with in the first place!?

I'm sorry. I'd love to work at Google and taste the diversity that this company has to offer. But there's *a lot* wrong with it at the business end too. That is something that - in that state - I don't think I want to contribute to, despite it being pretty much a lottery ticket that I've been fortunate enough to draw twice.

Maybe I should just start my own company.

My one goal is to build something that lets me stay at home with my lil girl all day. Have been thinking about my own company for a while, there are 2 software companies in town with very weak tech stacks. I know I am better and can do better. So my goal is to build my own company and hire enough people to take care of it while I spend more time with my daughter. I get sad when I have to drop her off at the daycare while me and the wife have to go to work. All I want to do is be with my family.

This kind of random stuff happens to me often:

*comes home from going out*
*wants to sleep badly*
Brain: heyyy, why don't we take a look at some vps discounts!!!
Me: please, I want to FUCKING sleep.
Brain: oh come on...
Me: pls don't do this to me..
Brain: But vps discounts...
Me: oh FUCK YOU, I'll go look up some stuff.

My brain can be weird and annoying.

Customer: *brings in laptop and printer* My internet has been terrible lately, so this printer hasn't been working very well as a wireless printer. Could you fix it?

Me: Well, it wouldn't help much because it would be hooked up on our network, so when you take it home it won't work on yours.

Customer: I don't understand...

Me: *thinks for a second* okay, so it's like you have two streams of water. Whatever you do in the first stream doesn't effect the second stream of water.

Customer: I still don't understand....

Me: Never mind. Just go home and give us a call. We'll be able to help you better that way.

Customer: Okay, thanks!

Coworker: You can't cross the streams, Rider!

I'm exhausted.
After one and a half year after my last rant, I'm here again. I left the previous job as web developer after almost 12y. At the time I found 3 new jobs as developer; I chose the one with the largest company, the premises were really good. My 3 interviews were excellent. But what I found next was almost a nightmare.
I was literally "confined" for the first 2 months, no internet connection, no email address, very little communication with colleagues. My near colleague was sharing the code were I would work via a usb key. All this for "safety" purposes, because "here you start this way".
For me it was not so bad, I could take my time to study my work and do it (without Stack Overflow and only by reference guides, when needed - I felt proud in an old way). But the next months were really tough: no help to understand what I missed about the work I was doing (consider that I was working on a large database, previously used by an old ERP, on which other developers - prior me - wrote a lot of code, to make the company continue use all the data after the expiration of the ERP licences - speaking about a year 2000's Java application).
Now I find myself struggling, because the main project on which I was working has been set aside (apparently for some budget decisions); my work team constantly make me do some manteinance on the old code, but the main tasks are done by the old mate, "because deadlines are always pressing and there would not be enough time to explain you anything". I'm not growing.
I'm really becoming reluctant to write code, and whenever I do it, I constantly feel under pressure, and this makes me nervous and inclined to make errors.
Don't take me wrong, I was/am good at my work, but it's like I'm loosing that sparkle I had till a few years ago.
When I'm at home I try to study or write code, just to keep training my mind, but I'm really struggling and I'm worried about losing my brain for doing this job. I constantly forget things and lose focus.
Never felt this way. I am thinking about the chance to switch again and search for another company.

!dev，

I have a baby. He doesnt like sleeping. He has GERD (reflux).

He rarely sleep more than 2 hours at a time (probably 1 a week).

The best he has ever slept in his 11month of living was 5 hours. That day he was sick and he ended up in hospital.

All good， he is still alive and well.

But he goes down at 7pm and wakes every 2 hours if not less.

Somestimes he is easy to put down and thongs are bearable， but many times it can take up to 30-45 minutes to out him down.

I dev during the day but i am longing to have nights where i can completly concrntrate. But my partner has been survivjng on broken sleep for about a year now.

She lets me have longer stretches but i either stay up late and havr to feed the baby and jiggle him， which breaks concentration and has pbliged me to get an extra desk and screento be put into an uncomfortable place so i could code at home (my orfice is a rent out 10msquare batch in the garden).

Or sometimes i just get up at 3 or 4am so that he can sleep on me 2eme i can jiggle him when he wakes.

I cant deal with being woken every 2 hours. I throw tantrums like im a 7 year old.

Ive rarely had such a sucking life quality as now.

Its a good things babies a cute i tell you that!!!!

Disclaimer: Long tale of a tech support job. Also the wk29 story is at the bottom.

One time I was working tech support for a website and email hosting firm that was in town. I was hired and worked as the only tech support person there, so all calls came in through me. This also meant that if I was on a call, and another one came through, they would go straight to voice mail. But I couldn't hang up calls either, so, sometimes someone would take up tons of time and I'd have to help them. I was also the "SEO" and "Social Media Marketing" person, as well; managed peoples' social media campaigns. I have tons of stories from this place but a few in particular stick out to me. No particular order to these, I'm just reminiscing as I write this.

I once had to help a man who couldn't find the start button on his computer. When I eventually guided him to allowing me to remote into his computer via Team Viewer, I found he was using Windows XP. I'm not kidding.

I once had to sit on the phone with a man selling Plexus Easy Weight Loss (snake oil, pyramid scheme, but he was a client) and have him yell at me about not getting him more business, simply because we'd built his website. No, I'D not built his website, but his website was fine and it wasn't our job to get him more business. Oh yeah, this is the same guy who said that he didn't want the social media marketing package because he "had people to hide from." Christ.

We had another client who was a conspiracy theorist and wanted the social media marketing package for his blog, all about United States conspiracies. Real nut case. But the best client I've ever had because sometimes he'd come into the office and take up my time talking at me about how Fukushima was the next 911 and that soon it'll spill into the US water supply and everybody was going to die. Hell, better than being on the phone! Doing his social media was great because he wanted me to post clearly fake news stories to his twitter and facebook for him, and I got to look at and manage all the comments calling him out on his bullshit. It was kinda fun. After all, it wasn't _me_ that believed all this. It felt like I was trolling.

[wk29] I was the social media and support techie, not a salesperson. But sometimes I was put in charge _alone_ in front of clients for status meetings about their social media. This one time we had a client who was a custom fashion-type person. I don't really remember. But I was told directly to make them a _new_ facebook page and post to it every day with their hot new deals and stuff. MONTHS pass since I do that and they come in for a face-to-face meeting. Boss is out doing... boss things and that means I have to sit in with her, and for some fucking reason she brought her boyfriend AND HER DAD. Who were both clearly very very angry with me, the company, and probably life. They didn't ever say anything at first, they didn't greet me, they were both just there like British royal guards. It was weird as fuck. I start showing them the page, the progress on their likes goals, etc etc. Marketing shit. They say, "huh, we didn't see any of these posts at home." Turns out they already had a Facebook page, I was working on a completely seperate one, and then the boyfriend finally chimes in with the biggest fucking scowl, "what are you going to do about this?" He was sort of justified, considering this was a payed and semi-expensive service we offered, but holy shit the amount of fire in all three of them. Anyway, it came down to me figuring out how to merge facebook pages, but they eventually left as clients. Is this my fuck up? Is it my company's? Is it theirs? I don't know but that was probably the most awkward meeting ever. Don't know if it comes across through text but the anxiety was pretty real. Fuck.

tl;dr Tech support jobs are a really fun and exciting entry level position I recommend everybody apply for if they're starting out in the tech world! You'll meet tons of cool people and every day is like a new adventure.

Grr the feeling when one of your interviewers has a hard-on for trying to find ways to sink your boat.

Went to a job interview yesterday during my lunch break for a mid level dev job in central London , i have been trying to transition from a junior role.

First were two senior devs , that went quiet well...

Next up was the tech lead and a team lead, lets call the latter Mc-douche for some problem

The tech lead was fine, very relaxed and clam guy more interested in seeing the logic of my answers and questions as to why i did certain things in this or that manner....

Mc-douche, he would always try to find something wrong then smile smugly and do that sideways head waggle thing

His tech lead is like " yup that's correct"
But he would be like " yeeess but you didn't think about bla bla bla" then talk about shit not even present in the context of the question

Ah also he would ask a question then cut me off as soon as I begin to say that i didnt mention or take into account x or y even though literally my next sentence is about address those details he wanted.
let me fucking finish you dickbag 😡

Had a js question, simple stuff about dom manipulation, told not to bother with code... yet McD starts asking me to write the code for it....managed it , quite easy stuff

Then a sql and db test , again technlead was happy with the answers and the logic am approaching the question when writing my query, yet mc d Is bitching about SQL syntax....
Ok fine, i made a simple mistake, I forgot and used WHERE instead of HAVING in a group by but really?! Thats his focus ?!

Most devs I know look up syntax to do stuff , they focus on their logic first the do the impl.

Then a general question on some math and how i would code to impl a solution on paper
That was a 20 mins one, the question said they didn't expect me to finish it totally so
I approached it like an exam question.

First
I focussed on my general flow of my process, listing out each step.

Then elaborated each step with pseudo code showing my logic for each of the key steps.

Then went deeper and started on some of the classes and methods , was about to finish before it was time up.

Mc douch went through my solution
And grudgingly admitted my logic was "robust enough" it was like he really had to yank that deep out of his colon.

I didn't really respond to any of his rudeness throughout the whole interview,i either smiled politely or put on a keen looking poker face.

Really felt awful the rest of the day, skipped the gym and went home after work, really sucks to have a hostile interviewer.

Pretty sure i wont be hearing anything good from them even though the three other interviewers were happy with me I felt.

Debate (with rant-ish overtones):

FYI, while it is a debate, its a practiseSafeHex debate, which means there is a correct answer, i'm just interested in your responses/thoughts.

Ok lets kick off. So the remote team I work with had an opening for a new iOS developer (unrelated to anything to do with me). They interviewed and hired a guy based off his "amazing" take home challenge.

The challenge consists of 4 screens and was for a senior level position. For the challenge the interviewee created a framework (a iOS library) for each screen, included all the business logic for each screen inside, each one needs to be built separately, exposed some API/functions from each one and then created a main project to stitch it all together.

Now, my opinion is, this is highly unscalable and a ridiculous approach to take as it would add so much unnecessary overhead, for no benefit (I am correct btw).

The interviewee said he did it like this to "show off his skills and to stand out". The remote team loved it and hired him. The challenge said "show us the code standard you would be happy to release to production". I would argue that he has only demonstrated 1 extra skill, and in exchange delivered something that is unscalable, going to be a nightmare to automate and require huge on-boarding and a paradigm shift, for no reason. To me thats a fail for a senior to not realise what he's doing. This person will be required to work alone (in part), make architecture decisions, set the foundation for others etc. Having someone who is willing to just do mad shit to show off, is really not the type of person suited to this role.

Debate!

Fucking Amazon rant again...

TLDR: Amazon specializes in “the last mile”. They are repeatedly allowing a 3rd party shipper (Purolator) destroy their main value proposition. Thoughts at the end.

Me on the phone with their support...

Me: so it says my package was attempted to be delivered today. I did not get a call or notification or anything and I have been working from home all day to wait for the package.

Support: -Sigh- yes, I can see it was Purolator we have been having trouble with them lately.

Me: ok, so are you able to see what happened?

Support: let me put you on hold.

.......

Support: So they said they will not call for a delivery, did they use your building buzzer?

Me: Nope, just stood outside the building and then left I guess.

Support: -sigh- Well you can pick it up at their depot. Let me get you the address.

Me: The one by the airport?

Support: Yes it looks like it is about an hour away from where you are. And they are only open during work hours.

Me: So, after working from home to get this package you advice is to take 3 hours off work and go there to pick it up?

Support: Well, we can refund it? If thats what you want.

Me: No, I would like the package I ordered please.

Support: There is nothing I can do sir.

Me: So before I hang up let me see if I have it straight. When I order a package from Amazon, do I have an option of who ships it?

Support: No, I’m sorry but that is decided on our end.

Me: And I have had this problem before with this shipping agent. So, your telling me that when I ship things to me with Amazon that I have no control of wether I even get the package? Your telling me it is literally a coin toss as to wether or not I ever get my package?

Support: yes sir, I’m sorry but that is all I can do.

Me: So you realize that, for example, if I went to my local grocery store and it was a coin toss that I could take my groceries home (even after I paid for them) then I will always go to another store....

Support: yes, I know. There is nothing I can do.

Me: So from now on I have to order items, wait for them to be shipped, check the shipper and then cancel the order of it is them?

Support: -sigh- you cannot cancel an order after it has shipped...

Me: wow. Sure is great being a prime and audible member. I get fast delivery of 50% of my packages and no delivery at all of the other 50%. Sorry for the sarcasm...

Support: I’m sorry I can’t help more.

Me: So just to clarify. I can expect NOT to get the package I ordered?

Support: sorry

Me: have a nice day.

————

Here are my thoughts as a student of business...

Amazon specializes in “the last mile” (in their delivery service anyway) and when they deliver the package they also deliver on that value proposition.

However, now it seems that one of their shipping providers is failing at getting packages that last mile, which is resulting and destroying the idea of their value proposition in a customers eyes. (Affecting more than me as the rep said)

Now, instead of believing that Amazon will get things to me, saving me that last mile trip to the store etc., I firmly believe that it is a toss up as to wether I will ever receive my package (based on carrier)

I know that if I was in Amazon’s position (a carrier hurting my overall value proposition with consistently unacceptable service) that I would come down on them with a force they have never seen or drop them entirely.

But of course, every company reaches a point where they have such market share and sway that they take their eye off the ball when it comes to their value proposition to customers.

This is a shit post:

Once upon a time, I went to work.... and decided I can shit at work... it was very nice.. I did that a couple of times... at some point, while siting there.. alone, I thought... 'I am getting paid to do this',

so I started shitting everyday at work as it was very worthy but then...

one day I went back home and I had to take a dump.... and though... 'but why should I, no one is paying me to do so'?!... and I didn't...

With time passing by, My ability to shit at home was deprived, the joy that I had shitting at work became a necessity... and the weekends.... long and stagering, but Mondays made me fill... everything with joy.

Capitalism has manipulated me... into making me love Mondays, making them innevitable for me, Capitalism has brainwashed me into being an obedient slave, we must rise and destroy each and every toilet in the companies in which we work or else...

I don't see how I would be able to go on vacations... for 2-3 weeks...

Recruiter is contacting me out of the blue for a vague job position. Tells me he is very interested in my skillsets as they are apparently difficult to find.

I don't hate my current job but it has some problems. My interest is piqued.

I ask for more details and tell him what minimum benefits I would expect, given I won't quit my job for less. I tell him I have a very tight schedule at work and at home right now but I could fit in some time for a 1-2h interview.

He tells me I'll get more details in the next interview and tells me there will be a little coding test. Ok sure...

Dude proceeds to send me a test description by email. It consists in designing an actual small python project. Would take at least 1 full day of work (tests, doc and functionality included). I have 3 days to complete it.

fuckThat.jpg

Is this guy for real? In this market?

getting into dev work is such a shit show. thinking back 2 years ago I decided to switch career so went on bootcamp and starting looking for junior role.

as you know full well all jobs requires 5+ years when the tech has only been around 3. Anyhow, got a junior full stack role at a start up, all good , great pace (cos of startup) and wide range of tech to learn. one minute i am doing great , next day I am not good enough and got let go (WTF?) ,also whats up with some backend devs Jesus why wouldnt you let me put a " on aws because you are the backend dev what the fuck is wrong with your ego man?

fun story number 2: after being let go of my first role due to being good dev for one day and bad the next. I went for an intern role for really low paid. well fair enough I am here to learn right guys? nope, i have experience with the main tech from my last job and I managed the take home test and despite I told them i have more experience front end they criticise my backend code , despite i was able to tell them what I have done not so well and I have found a better solution AT THE INTERVIEW. still not good enough. I was really doubting myself If I am that shit at being an fucking intern with a stack I have experience in.

fast forward another job interview I landed my current role with fantastic culture, good line manager & tech lead. nice colleague and I am being treated like a prince with the work i put in. Why is this industry so fucked?

so, folks out there trying to get into this game. dont lose hope, you can do it , you just need to get fucked a bit to know whats good out there!

So here's my setup.
Minimalist and clean, the only environment I can work in.

My laptop spends way more time at home now-a-days since I bought the iPad Pro 12.9 2017... It's just so practical to take to lectures.

As for my desktop... well my keyboard definitely needs an upgrade... Any suggestions on a good keyboard?

My alcohol shrine, keeps me sane 😂😍. Let's see your setups.

Although today Friday,

It was a very sad day for me, I just got relieved of my only remote dev job, now to unemployed, I have a wife and home to take care in a semi bankrupt country, I need help.

Do you know where I can get good remote contracts?

A guy who's parked next to me in the RV asked me today if I know anything about computers. Sure, what's it about?

He has forgotten his password for a Word .doc file, already installed all possible tools for password cracking, but none of them worked, and now
he can't find his vacation photos and surfing the internet suddenly doesn't work anymore.

Okay, no problem, I'll take a look at it. Windows 7 Home Edition, completely covered with malware, everywhere popups with pr0n ads.

I told him that I can't do much more than trying to recover the data and reinstall the OS. But before that, I'll make a image of the hard drive (thank god, only a 250 GB hdd). Then we'll see.

Unfortunately neither he nor I have a Windows DVD, so he will probably become a proud user of Antergos tomorrow.

26 or so hours up now. And I've got a few stories to tell :) feel free to refresh your cup of coffee and take a seat.

Last few days I've been going into this odd place called intown.irl to get in touch with its inhabitants. An odd place I have to say. But in some cases quite rewarding, even got a MILF home with me and into bed at some point. Anyway...

3 days ago I think it is now? Thursday evening I took my laptop to this local bar where I had this issue about dihydrogen monoxide with one of the bartenders earlier (you'll find that rant on those keywords). Still wanted to visit it regardless though, as I met that first woman there earlier that approached me. Unfortunately I didn't see her there that day.

Some bald guy who was clearly drunk approached me. Many people were already giving curious looks at this laptop I brought to the bar. I finally tuned it up with the stickers from FOSDEM.. I'll put a picture of it in the comments. My theme was one of privacy (central), distributions and Google's open source initiative (which aligns with the keychain token I got from them as well). But of course.. that guy.. he thought that a pimped/riced laptop obviously meant that I was a hacker.

Guy went to the toilet.. went back.. and suddenly grabbed my laptop and turned it towards him. Boy was I never more smugly satisfied that those rubber pads on the bottom are quite resilient. Could've almost damaged my screen by trying to grab it like that. But it's a CCFL display.. so high voltage. If it were to become broken.. worth it. 😈

On it at the time was a terminal, pinging Google (had network issues at that bar, to the point where one of the - I think - staff members got up to me and offered the WiFi password and got to talk with me.. more on that later), and my usual Linux desktop along with the Arch anime wallpaper with the quote of Da Vinci.. simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Of course the guy saw the terminal.. and probably reaffirmed.. yep, that's a hacker. At least he wasn't too wrong about the general term.. but the hat.. most likely he was wrong on that one.

Guy left with this question.. "you are a hacker, aren't you."
I replied to him: "No sir. I'm not a hacker. I've got no idea what you're talking about."
Guy kept looking at me weirdly for the whole night to come.

Back to that companion guy though. Mac user, yada yada.. but he told me about his backup solution. Apparently - I shit you not - he has not only the photos on his local device, he's also frequently backing them up in Time Machine (which I was really curious about whether it uses mirroring or snapshots.. he couldn't tell, lmk if you do) but not only that.. he was storing another offsite backup in that very bar, in case his house went on fire.

Now that is a proper backup scheme!!! If only more people were like that.

Seriously though.. that bald guy who took my laptop just like that... I just let it slide for that one time, but I tend to treat my machines as an extension of my very self. I think that was a very uncalled for move. Asshole...

How would you have reacted to such a thing? And.. maybe that's why we technologists don't get outside too often? Fucking everything is hacking these days if it's not Knopkes and Blinkenlights… Not every shell is a h4xx0ring console for h3kk1ng de fasbuk…

TL;DR: My devices all hate me and I needed to fix them all.

My Devices really love me.

I rooted my smartphone (LG G5) just yesterday. Everything went fine. Installed TWRP, SuperSU and some nice Apps that utilize root.

Today I was on the go (at CeBIT) and already had the Xposed Installer App on my phone, but didn't attempt installing it yet because I needed my phone for Maps and Messaging and the app had given clear warning about the bricking-potential.

So to the end of the day I get bored, send my last important Messages, installed the Xposed Framework...
... aaaand got stuck in a boot loop.

So I got on my way back home (thanks God I remembered all the trains I needed to take). On the way I had a lot of fun in the Recovery-Terminal and figured that I should be able to fix my phone with no problem at home because the installer made backups (unlike myself).

Coming back home and my pc was still running (should've shut down after installing updates).
The pc behaved odd and I couldn't shut it down properly, which led to cutting the power.
And upon booting my pc I got a ... give it a guess ...
...a bootloop (technically the animation just never ended).

So after I fixed my phone with my spare laptop (just transferred and executed the uninstaller for xposed) I fixed my PC too, which had an old broken dkms-driver.

The odd thing about this is, that this isn't technically a rant. I guess you can confirm that you can't find any swear words.
Because I ENJOYED fixing the devices. I already fixed my pc a couple of times was well as unbricking my rooted phones, so there was fairly little research involved.
I guess I'm now offically twisted.

Now, after my smartphone backups are transferred, I'Ll take my device apart and replace the camera glass which arrived today (and hope, no pray, that my sim card does still work after that)...
... after I blatendly copied a meme to get more attention. 😉

- be me
- get home hook laptop up to tv, realise you left your wireless mouse at work *fuck*
- remember you still have a wireless keyboard and are pretty handy with shortcuts *duh*
- use keyboard magic, launch Netflix and play the show you want to watch *yay 🎉*
- realise the fucking cursor is over the play bar so you have to get up anyway. *fuck*

These days keyboard shortcuts can only take you so far.

Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer

Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....

Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while

But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...

The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm

He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.

I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.

Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.

My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"

I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)

He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)

Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.

Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.

I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.

Am really Fed up with it all

How come it is so hard to find good developers. Have been doing interviews for a couple of weeks now (for a senior PHP developer role).

First round is me talking about the function and company, asking questions about candidates experience, wishes and we usually end in some tech conversations. Most of the resumes I got are pretty fucking good. I mean, experience with low-level languages, experience with the problems we need to solve here, contributions to open-source, experience in R and MathLab etc etc. On paper they look perfect.

For the second round I give them an assessment which they can do at home on their own machine in their own time. It's not a hard one, just some mathmatical problems they need to solve. A quick google GIVES the answer (no joke!!). But that's OK, I look at their code cleanliness, proper use of commenting so I can determine if they are solo-developers or fit good in a team and if they abstract repeated functions and make sure that they take their work seriously, you know the drill.

It pisses me off that I get BROKEN FUCKING CODE WHICH DOES NOT EVEN RUN and that I get code back which I look at and makes me vomit instantly, I mean, DO YOU EVEN TAKE YOUR PROFESSION SERIOUS? How dare you to ask for 50k the year, a lease-car, extra bonusses AND YOUR FUCKING CODE SPITS OUT COMPLETLY WRONG ANSWERS OR DOES NOT EVEN RUN WHAT THE FUCK DUDE GO BACK TO FROM WHICH EVER HOLE YOU CRAWLED OUT AND STOP WASTING OTHER PEOPLES TIME WITH YOUR FUCKING INCOMPENTENCE...

I thought I'd always be a die-hard proponent of working from home; it can be great for the right person: and I thought that would be me; but with the family I have? It's turning into a disaster. They're too used to having me around, my wife is becoming too used to making arrangements that involve me taking an hour or two out of the day here and there; she doesn't know the impact of context switching in the middle of the day. If I refuse to help her out, that makes me the asshole. Then I get ratty because I feel the stress of being unproductive, and guess whose fault it is again? Mine. The kids rush in and out of my work area, or get upset when I come out for a coffee and don't want to spend time with them, but it's not their fault, at 2 and 4 they don't understand. Take me back to the fucking office, I'm done.

I just want to work. How hard is the concept of being left the fuck alone.

Me trying to take a screenshot with iOS 12:

*holds home and presses lock* (the only way I had found to reliably take a screenshot in previous versions): Siri

Fuck off Siri I want a screenshot!

*tries again same way*: Siri

Fuck OFF Siri!

*holds lock + home*: phone locks

Christ almighty.

*unlocks phone, presses home and lock at the exact same time*

Nothing happens.

*continues holding* I just want my fucking screenshot.

Phone powers off. Hard reset.

Fuck this shit.

How hard is it to monitor two buttons being pressed at the same time? And if it is so damn hard why make it the ONLY WAY TO TAKE A SCREENSHOT??!

Now whenever I want a screenshot it’s basically a crapshoot whether I will get a screenshot, Siri barging in, or my phone locking on me.

Couldn’t they have just used the volume buttons instead? 😡

I just realized with this pandemic it's better to live in a dirt-cheap country, in a house you own, have a second hand car, work as a dev from home, become good with tools in your spare time, grow your own food in the garden.
Fuck this impossible system with it's promises of finding a cure and it's high pay but high taxes and expensive rent for living in a shitty rented apartment with no friends around, nothing to do than watch YouTube and play video games and be depressed half the time, then die because of lack of phisical activity.
I used to think countries that had good infrastructure were the best. Now public transportation is the worst idea around here, since no one wears masks and pretends all is well.
This is actually a decision I need to take next week. If you believe things will "get back to normal" please give me your input as it is valuable to me.

Since this post was too long for devrant's 5k sign limit, I split it in several parts. I will try to make each part comprehensible as a standalone post. This is part one of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU? saga. A tale of empathy, competence and me being a dick, even though I didn't really want to be one. The part one is titled: "Bad times, good times". It may or may not have any value. It probably won't be funny.

I dedicate this to every single junior or entry level dev out there, struggling to find a job in their field.

=====

What do you think, how long does it take for junior with 6 months of commercial experience to find a dev job? If your answer was "idk", you're right. If your answer was "3 montths maybe", you're also right. At least this is how long it took for me. I am writing this at 2am, couple of hours after I managed to get employed. I am happy. My employer probably is happy too. My recruiters certainly are. The guy whose offer I had to reject after we were almost ready to sign the contract, on the other hand, isn't. He probably hates me. We'll get to that one post at a time.

Let's move back in time a little bit. It's December 12th, 2019. It is third month after I left my family home. I don't ha0ve a job, I was living first in my older brother's apartment for a month, then I started to rent my own. I have literally no money, I'm in debts. I moved out because reasons that would make up for another couple of posts, and for said reasons I refused to get 'any job just to pay the bills'. You can imagine that I was in pretty bad situation, and my psyche didn't really take that shit too well either. My daily meal was a bowl of rice with a little bit of self-hatred on top. Gourmet.

At that time, my daily routine would consist of practicing music, practicing programming, trying to get a job and surviving. Some of my friends just turned their backs against me. I did a small rework of my contact list as well. It was a *hard* time. I had sent my CV to around a hundred different companies with very little to no response. Some of them required at least bachelor's in IT for their frontend dev. Some of them required experience I didn't have. Some of them just didn't care to answer me. And then that one day happened. Three different people wanted to meet me and talk about internships/job offers. I will share what happened next in next posts, but here's a quick spoiler. I got a job. Yes, I am hyped.

Dear fellow Dev. This is a small reminder. If you're having bad times, just remember that if you focus on what you need to do, you will be just fine. Sometimes it may take days of struggling, sometimes it will take months of eating mostly rice. We all... Most of us have been through this.

Next posts will be less inspirationalstufftelling and more storytelling. Let this post be a setup, a small context to keep in mind upon reading my next stories. Because it is quite important. For me and for the story.

In the pandemic era i have become allergic to delivery fees. Fucking $5 to get pizza delivered? Fuck you I'll take the 15 minutes it takes to go down to the damn restaurant! Pisses me off sometimes.

Maybe it's because i enjoy getting out more since I've started working from home, but tbh i don't even care, because paying $11 to have someone else bring your groceries to you just makes me irate.

for the final fucking time

i'm the one who did the 8 hour garbage take home challenge and submitted it

i shouldn't be the one who has to reach out two weeks later to figure out what the status of my application is

oh and you ignore me on whatsapp

fuck you

Well, everytime I build a pc for a friend I'll always end up telling myself "this is the last time". Not bc I have a problem with building pc's, I love it, but its the "free of charge" 24/7 IT-support my non techy (techii?) friends expects from me after the build is done I hate.

So here's the deal.
A week ago I built a brand new pc for a friend, as usual (bc he's a good friend) I told him that my "fee" would be a couple of beers and the train ticket up. So I got there, built the pc and we hooked it up to his monitor. About 5sec in to windows the screen went black. My friend started to panic, and I started to check if all the components and cables were hooked up right (tho I've done this a couple of times, shit can happen) but found nothing was wrong.
I had to take the train home, cause it got late AF and I live in another city, but I told him to try another cable. Felt bad AF for not being able to help him.
Flash forward 2 days, my friend started messaging me late in the evening, complaining about how he had tried everything and ultimately had to leave the pc at an (as he called it) "proffesional" who charged him 100$.
I felt even guiltier about that one, asked him if he tried to change the hdmi, but he said that's in The hands of this guy now.
Two days later this PC God gave him an answer.
Guess What he told him?
CHANGE THE ***** HDMI CABLE.
Well, shit..
Afterwards he wanted help installing drivers over fb-messenger.
I love my friends, but man why do I do this to myself.

Well, I suppose there's no rules against talking about a non-tech company situation.

Before I made it into my career as a developer, I wrote code as a self-learned hobby programmer. I had a job though, which was selling chips. No, not ICs... potato chips. Funny enough, I made a killing doing it.

Anyway, this isn't about me. It's about the guy who quit shortly after I showed up. You see, we all had company trucks and most of us parked them at the warehouse and commuted in our own vehicles. We'd load the trucks up with product and lock them up in the yard for the next day.

It used to be that there was an option to take the truck home, but after this gentleman, that was reserved for special instances.

That would be due to the fact that the guy played "hide the chip truck" and called up to quit his job, forcing my former boss to hunt around an entire city to find the damn thing.

I've found it isn't so different in software, except when people quit, it's more like "hide the actual deployed branch you didn't commit".

It's my end of probation and I just got demoted, from originally "Senior dev" to "dev".

My manager found it a bit difficult to tell me but funny enough, I am completely fine with it apart from the little dent on my pay check. Let me talk about the bad first: money. I believe I have been on the lower end of the market pay range anyways so this step-back gives me about 5% cut, which is acceptable and fair enough.

And the good? Quite a bit. When I got this job offer 6 months ago, it was when everything literally went to shit. I was upset with a somehow not so smart but stubborn tech lead and I desperately wanted to quit. Then I got the offer, which even after 2 interviews I still didn't recall it was a job ads for "technical lead". The manager thought I was not there yet but wanted to keep me as a senior dev. Then, this pandemic almost took away this job. My manager brought my case to the CEO and convinced him to keep me, by saying a lot of good things about me (which I think might not be true for the tech side...)

Throughout the whole 6 months I have been working remotely from home. WFH is not new to me, just this time it's very challenging as I was starting a new job. I have been struggling to keep my pace. All people in the team are nice. However if I don't reach out, no one would notice I need help. And with zero knowledge for this job, I got stuck with "I don't know what I don't know". This ranges from company culture, practice, new tech.. everything. So, that's how this 6 months feels long, but also short.

In our review meeting I think my manager finally realise this. Otherwise he would have gone for the "terminate employment" option. Taking away the "senior" title also takes away the expectation of "I should know XYZ", which I don't. I told him I am kinda happy with it because this sets me up for a more comfortable position to catch my breathe. He told me he noticed my improvement along the way. I told him yes I have been putting in efforts but just given the situation it's not as quick as anyone would expect. We're on the same page now.

So compared to my previous job, I got paid less. But in return, I get many more opportunities to expose myself to new tech. I get a good team who are respectful and open-minded. This is exactly what I was looking for and the drive for me to quit my previous job.

Not to mention I got a reality check. This is also an indicator for me starting to become an imposter, which is the thing I despise most in the industry. I don't want people to value me for how many years I have got in my career. I want to prove myself by what I am capable of. If I'm not there, I should and will get there.

And the last thing which I'm not very keen but it's 100% worth mentioning, is that my manager said I should aim for taking the "senior" role back. He said the salary raise is waiting when I get there. But... Let me just take my time.

Crazy weather in here. There is a little sandstorm. It's pretty windy, even the outdoor advertisement letters are moving and the sky is brown :v

The thing is that, in order to go back home, I must walk 4 or 5 blocks (from the place one of my co-workers can leave me), but with this wind I'm afraid of getting sand in my eyes (I don't have glasses). Another option is to take an Uber to my house, but it takes too long to arrive to the office.

What can I do? Do I take the Uber or do I run to my house?

Personally I am starting to think that any development tools, resources and sites should not be allowed to use marketing dribble.

It should go
-> Land on home page
-> Hi, we are a realtime database cloud host
-> no you cannot host it yourself
-> here is code to speak to our servers
-> here is the cost
->now take it or go.

Something like that, and not

We provide clients with the leading cloud and hosted data solutions that can scale vertically and horizontally on and offline data management keeping people connected and saving kittens.

Fuck you show me one kitten you saved? Lying pieces of shit that do not want to just say hey this is what we have , this is ours, it may not be much but it is what we believe in and if you would like to use it here is how , thank you now move the fuck along our server can't handle so many concurrent connections.

One job I picked up was for an IoT Start Up. It was quite interesting work, reporting to the technical director, who was an electronics engineer, who was designing the hardware himself, they had a couple of firmware guys already, and just needed someone to take care of the software.
So they said they needed something in Azure that they could stream their data to and provide analytics for their clients. It had to be Azure, and it had to be Azure Native, and was to be Multi-client, as they had a deal with Microsoft to showcase how well Azure works in the IoT space at an exhibition/conference in 3 months time.
So I worked flat out for 3 months, on a whole variety of technology, from C++ to get the radio packets from their IoT chip, Python to run on the hub to take the data from the C++ and stream it to the cloud, Azure IoT Hubs in every continent to receive the data and store it an a Cosmos DB, and then Power BI analytics wrapped up in an Angular front end that the clients could log into.
Got it finished 2 days before the show, and they were so pleased I got flown business class to Singapore to be on the stand and talk to customers.
The first sign of trouble was when we arrived at the show to find we just had one of those little circular tables with two stools in the middle of the floor, about two feet across and no power.
No problem, I was able to sort that, swapping laptops in and out.
Microsoft were really happy with what we had, and couldn't believe I had thrown it all together in 3 months.
We picked up a potential customer for the system, a major Asian Telecoms company.
Then when we got home, the CEO swooped in. I had never met this guy before. Imagine one of the VC guys from Silicon Valley, or the CEO from the IT Crowd. You get the picture. Could talk the hind leg of a donkey, and real street smart, but no brains. He insisted on "taking it from here" and flew alone to strike the deal with the customer. Came back with an MOU in his pocket and said to me, their guys will be in touch with you.
Then I got a call. Can you send us the source code and tell us how what servers we have to run this on?
Um, its cloud native.
No, we can't use a cloud it has to be on our servers - your CEO told us that was no problem..
He hadn't even taken the trouble to find out what it was we had built, and what he was selling.

I was given a take-home assignment during the interview process of a startup.
They gave me a vague 24 hours to complete it and submit it the day after.
The instructions read like - most candidates don't complete the assignment, so if you finish 70%-80%, that's good enough.
I read the instructions; I was supposed to follow the "mock design" they sent me. It looked a tad bit ridiculous. But still, I thought I'd be able to finish most of it.

I worked on it for around 10-12hrs total (including procrastination because it was such a slog). I finished most of the "features" they mentioned, so about 70%-80% done.
I submitted it the next day. They got back to me saying they're not moving forward because they expected more features considering 24 hours.
🤨
They didn't expect me to spend 24hrs on it, did they?
I learned a few things, so I guess it wasn't a complete waste of time.

It was not until 20 that I had access to regular computing. In school I had to take up Finance as my Maths was weak. I couldn't take Sciences including computers and how could I , my childhood wasn't as fortunate as my peers.

When I entered college I got my brothers old gaming pc as we had a couple of work laptops at home. I was always the inquisitive one. I got interested in web development just because of curiosity while I was on my first job and I hated it. I used to write article and freelanced and ran a website for friends where I learned a lot by trial and error. I single handedly learned mySQL, PHP and basic web development.

The main job was a core night from 11pm -8 am . Drained me and my social life drowned. I lost my brother in an accident. Silver Lining: I quit my job.

I understood I was interested in computers like nothing else. I single handedly learned a programming language. After leaving the job I took up classes to learn from root level in a structured manner: Web design and Development.

Now though I am jobless and I am searching for my second job it is for something I love. :)

Hi devs, newbie here and i want to tell you my story for introduce myself.
I work for a company that develop web-app for managing taxes and sell it to locals cities.
We develop this web-app in Rails framewok and i litterally learned and work with this company from 2 years.
But i'm not happy at all. I was always hated and blamed for my work. My boss always take impossible deadlines and pretend ti finish the work in time, even if i had to overstay at work, even at home, even saturday. I'm not a really smart guy, so i often do dumb errors and I really suffer the nervous burnout and stress. Now i want to change work and i'm search far away from home but still in Italy, like Milan i.e. but i'm still confused. What i should do? I'm the problem?

PS. I want to thanks all of you that with your post get me laugh, inspired me and make me feel part or a great group.
Sorry for my base english

This is my first post. I felt like if I'm wrote this I'll just be a big fat crybaby, but i need to release this pressure from me.

I've been pretty burnt out past 6 month.

So a little bit backstory here, I've come from broken family, and currently on my 7th semester of college. But I've been part of small startup as mobile apps developer for a year and a half now.

6 month ago, it just a year of recovery from a toxic relationship that basically ruins my college life. I have really bad GPA (bad score for being absent from classes), basically no friends, and a barely passable (or even bad) skill in Android Dev. Then I got new girlfriend that really supportive for me. But after 2 months, her parents ask me if I would marry her or not. because if not, I have to broke up with her (We're in Indonesia and both of us is Muslim, so outside marriage relationship is kinda in "grey area" depend on who you ask). So I have to choose to marry her or not, and I choose the marriage. I think I have enough saving and just enough income to support both of us.

Then it's been a downward spiral from there.

The startup that I've been working on were in a pretty bad shape. I've been underpaid since the beginning (and that's not really a problem for me at that time, that's my choice and I blame no one) but abysmal growth and some miss management force us to scale back and makes me basically in a non-paying jobs.

So I take college break for a semester and been trying to find projects here and there for marriage savings, but because the weak employee protection here, lots of the projects I have completed have yet to pay the fee (even until today). And even if they paid me, most of it were really low paying jobs (we're talking $200 per 3 weeks project here, to be fair, for our average GDP, it's not bottom-low).

And the deadline is approaching, our marriage date is settled in (very) early January 2019, and i've been in this "not yet graduated but needs job" limbo. Most of employer here still has the old "Degree Based" Job specs, and not "Skill Based" one. so because de-jure I've still a "College Student" no Job listing is willing to take me in. I've apply to almost 30 Job Listing and just get interview once, and still failed because I can't move to the company area, too far and have too expensive living cost vs the salary ($300 living cost vs $450 salary, while i need to give money to my girlfriend back home for a living).

So I switch my direction to Competitions with Extra Job offering as a Bonus, and I've been pretty close to winning one, held by CIMB Bank, but still failed. It's little bit better now because CIMB came interested with me but there is red flag which I need to graduate with decent GPA before July 2019, and in current GPA? it's practically impossible.

Can it getting worse? oh it can. Remember I come from broken home family? it's inherently hard to keeps communication with both of my parents that to this day still despise each other. And while my mother is still supportive to my marriage, my father isn't. He even basically disowned me last week because my one-sided decision to marry my girlfriend, and blame my mother for being the "bad influence" for me.

And now, today, December 16th, and I'm still in this weird Limbo and have nowhere to go. with $0 in my pocket (have spent all of my savings for marriage preparation) And our marriage is approaching. I almost given up.

Lost my main job due to corona. All I have left now is my few personal gaming projects which generate decent money (usually around 2k euro a month but during corona jumped 3x 4x). I am trying my best to take care of my projects now because its all whats left. Last 2 weeks spent applying for jobs and did really well in 2 of them however didnt received an offer because they cancelled recruitment proccess all together. Meanwhile my gf lost her job and spends most of time in home. While Im trying to cashout as much as I can from my projects so that we could have a better future, she started nagging me about how I work too much and seems depressed. Srsly this fcking pandemic is killing me. Working from home is already hard enough, but being stuck in home with no opportunity to have time for myself while Im the only grown up is fucking killing me. Fuck off everyone Im tired of your needs, I have my own needs as well. If Im telling you that I need a couple weeks to finish my projects then fuck off leave me in peace. 2 weeks wont change shit but at least I would be able to make money for our house women. Stop being needy and start being fucking supportive or this will not going to work out.

I have this pact with my neighbor - if someone delivers a package to them, I knock on their door when I notice it to let them know and if they don’t answer, I take it into my apartment and leave a note. Same goes if she or her kids see a package delivered for us and we don’t answer.

So last month, we have a flooding incident in our complex and her flat’s damaged so they have to leave to stay at a hotel for a bit. It’s only supposed to be until the 20th (of last month).

So when she gets a package a few weeks ago, I knock and when there’s no answer, take it into my apartment and leave a note.

Note stays on the door for days.

And then it disappears, so I assume she’s home.

But she never answers the door.

And then I see workers in her place.

So now I don’t know if it’s the workers who picked up the note or if she was back and I missed her.

But it’s been a couple of weeks and I’m starting to worry about her. Like, the day of the flood she almost died and I ended up coming over to help (getting her oldest to do CPR, talking to 911, trying to keep people calm), so I know she’s not feeling great lately.

And I’m the kind of idiot that never thought to exchange numbers.

So I’ve resorted to internet stalking and messaging her on Facebook.

And knocking on the downstairs neighbor’s door since I know they’re related. They didn’t answer. I’ll try again later.

I have no idea what else to do. I mean, I don’t think I can contact the office and be like “Can you please provide me contact information for my neighbor? I have their stuff. Thanks.”

#awkward

My current situation:

Manager: How is Project A coming? Project A is top priority. I would like to see a PR today with fixes to the current tickets.

Me: Project A is priority! Sure!

*after 2hours*

Manager: How is project B coming along? I did not see any PR’s coming in?

Me: I am working on project A as it is priority.

*after 1 hour*

Manager: How is project C coming? There is one ticket pending. We need a fix for it today asap!

Me: Starts project C as project A would take more time. Starts Work on project C.

*after 1 hour*

Boss: How is project A coming? Where is the PR?

Me: As you said you need a fix for project C today, i started working on project C as it has only 1 ticket to be fixed.

Boss: I told you project A is priority, why are you working on project C?

Me: *doesn’t reply*

*after 1 hour*

Boss: There is a ticket pending in project D. Did you make a fix for it?

*This is my usual day at work.

*I am the only developer in my current company. It’s not a software development company.

*Note: I do complete all the work and create PR’s for all “pending” work at the end of the day for all projects and leave for home at around 10pm :)

What do you think? Lol

!rant I need job advice. Please reason with me.

I am 26, got 2 years of experience in c# and unity3d.
I did some research and it turns out that the minimal paying average with my job/experience over the whole country is at least 300€ a month more than what i get payed currently.
I made a list of pros and cons, and am just not sure what would be smartest to do in the long run. Here is a list for both options, please chime in on me if you can!

Points for current job:
Permanent contract (hard to fire me etc.)
Get to make mostly mobile games but nothing really big
Fun small team whom i get along with (i am on the spectrum and can be hard to deal with social or costumer related things)
Rarely any overtime (i like to know my hours)
Easy but slow jobs (badly organized, drag on forever)
Rarely challenged and thus boring me
I get to shoot nerf guns at colleagues whenever
Low chance of a 300€/m pay increase (not worth it to boss, financials aren't that great but the company is promising)

Points for any other job:
Unknown working condittions
I am probably bad and uknowledgeable about any tool they give me to work with because my experience is so monotone
Start on short term contract again all over
At the least a 300€ net increase a month
Prob closer to home then 1h drive away
I get to learn new things but give up on games/apps as i know them
Probably get knowledgeable seniors
Probably end up in a bigger more serious company where i am just a number
I am bad in new social envirnoments, oh the angst is real

And a few things besides it are that i personally only have as goal to own my own house with my fiance as soon as i can. And this means i will need to take out a 200k loan or something along those lines, to be paid off over 30 years max.
This means that the permanent contract is very valuable in my eyes, but so is monthly pay increase.
I want to have fun in my job, i want to learn new things and better ways. But i also want to be able to say "enough" to something if it overwhelms me. I just know some things are not for me and i would mess up if i were made to do them. I fear that to not be an option in a big company. I would be forced out of my comfort zone without any regard for me or my learning curve.

Any advice is welcome. Please keep it general if you can so others can learn from this as well. Seniors advice will probably be helpfull to all starting programmers!

I need a hobby or someone to yell at me until I take a break from working all day every day.

Then again if I had a home office I probably wouldn't need to put in 12 hours to get 6 hours of work done.

But I still need something to do besides work and family. And someone to kick my butt until I do it and relax.

Project in college, many moons ago.

Team is building a robot for a project. Nothing too crazy, it does some simple tasks like walk along a path and shit.

3 weeks for the project. 3 team members.

The largest graded part of the project is the ability to follow a path based on vision.

The 3rd member INSISTS on doing that part, he says “I want to prove to the professor that I am the smartest in the class so he helps me get a work term.”

Of course, my other partner and I see this as the complete selfishness of a child who will never be employed anywhere worth talking about anyways. He is a big asshole about it and we end up giving in.

## Week 1

We get our parts done (working together the way a team would) without his help.

He struggles, hits walls, complains. You know, dumbass grown child stuff...

## Week 2

We offer to help since we are done. He refuses. The teacher sees all of this and doesn’t like it at all.

After class the 2 of us go to the teacher and let him in on the details. The guy insisted, he is struggling and will not take help etc.

Teacher goes and talks to him and tells him it is a team project for a reason and that we should be helping. He says yes.

Then he misses the rest of the classes that week and send an email saying...

“Since everyone decided to keep interrupting me and breaking my train of thought, I could not get anything done in class. Therefore I will be staying home to finish the project from there.”

And to top it off, he didn’t even take home the robot’s connectors he needed to do the damn thing. Haha.

## Week 3

We know he wasn’t going to get it done, so we approached the teacher. We make it clear that we have done all we can and that we are not ok with losing marks because of this.

Since we are both good students that he likes, he decides to give us an option.

You can take a 50% on his part even if he doesn’t get it done (for trying to help) or we can do it ourselves and he won’t get the marks if he doesn’t finish.

## Night before

We say fuck it and do the thing.

In fact, since we were learning Java at the time we decided to do it in Java. Our other prof sees us playing with robots and gets excited, he stays with us and suggest improvements.

In the end we rewrite all 3 robot functionalities in Java and hand in the project the next day.

## The day of

Partner 3 comes into class and says this...

“That walking path part is impossible, I didn’t get it done, but I bet nobody else did either. So at least we will get a 60% on the other 2 parts!” (With a big shit eating grin)

Prof calls our group up. We walk up and the prof looks at the 3rd guy and says.

“Since you have decided to do your part alone, we will have you present your part alone at the end of the groups”

He tries to say something but the prof cuts him off and tells him to sit down.

We show all of our code and the robot does everything perfectly.

Groups go by, now it’s that guys turn.

He says that the walking part was impossible but seems to realize right away that he just saw EVERY other group get it working.

The teacher ask him to stay after class.

## Result

We got a 98 (prof said he was hoping we would have done in VB like asked but he liked the result a lot).

Other guy gets a 5% for his non-working spaghetti code on 0s on the other 2 sections. He blames us, of course.

Bonus Content:

That same asshat above once said this to me...

“I don’t indent my code so that if I work for a company and no one else can understand the code then I am unfireable!”

Yes, he wrote all code like this...

const Example = () => {
Stuff
More stuff
For() {
Stuff
If() {
Stuff
}
}
}

Fuck that guy🖕🏽

Please take sleep deprivation seriously!
Take care of it and don't allow stress to take you over.

Here's a little story of what happened to me:

I've had sleep problems for all of my life, but the beginning of last summer 2018 it went too far. I turned 18 and somehow all the school, dev and personal work started to pile up, I stressed about them and started to have no sleep every other day and little sleep another. Immediately I took time off from everything for trying get better sleep.

Having no sleep means that your brain starts to run in really low gear but you might not even notice it. So I started stressing about every little detail, making ridiculous decisions and doing stuff that didn't really make any sense.

I went to a doctor and was ordered to take time off for a month or so and start medication with bunch of different pills. At the time I thought the medication could wait for a day and went to an old work friend's place for night stay to discuss about everything. That wasn't obviously the thing I should've done. I was up all of that night, he slept, and in the morning he noticed something was really a bit off about me.

We went to the hospital and I agreed for a treatment in there. They got me to sleep normally again and I rested there for a while. I went back home or actually my parents' place and the problems continued, and back to the hospital I go. This time there was no choice. After a really long while, my mind started to stabilize enough that I was allowed to return to my everyday life: enjoying my summer break. It was an awful summer. I often felt lonely and bored. But at least I slept normally.

In the fall I returned to my usual busy schedule. And life's good again. This time I will manage my stress and sleep better and take them to account when planning schedule.

I tought I'll buy a new laptop last week.

Went to the mediamarkt. I've choosen one with hdd. That was cheaper and I have a nice ssd at home, so I tought I'm gonna change that so I've asked the salesman about the hdd. I mean if I take it out and replace it with an ssd, it'll invalidate my warranty? Said yes. But they gladly change it to me if I bring my ssd in for a dirt-cheap €79. I said you are defenetly lost your mind. It takes 5 screws and around 5 minutes.

Anyway. I've choose an another one with ssd. But there was a sticker on it too, means it is prepared to use out of the box. It means as always, the windows is full with advertises, demos and annoying settings. And I don't use windows anyway. Ohh and it costs €29. I wanted one without this thing. Said ok, he'll check it. Comes back and said these modells are all prepared with this. I've asked him to show me a product which is 'clean'. He replied "actually all our laptops came prepared".

So I went mad and left them. This whole procedure takes more than an hour with one lesson: never go there again to buy a computer.

But at the end I've found a solution. Configurable laptops with 2 year warranty even if you upgrade it. Thats what I'll buy soon. I've had enough of big brands bullshits about unnecessary features and other bullshit. I'll buy what I need, not more, not less.

I'll write down the brand if anyone interested.

So it's been a while since I've posted as my first few months at the new job have been amazing. But now I'm running into issues with a team member that I need to get off my chest.

So my new job is front end development in React. I'm brand new to it but I was promised time to learn on the job. On my first day the team member I'm now having a conflict with offered me help. He's the most experienced so I gladly took it.

But now several months in I've noticed his teaching style doesn't work for me. He'll go into long theoretical explanations whenever I ask a question and I get overwhelmed with info. And he gets frustrated with my inability to process all that, because he feels I waste his time. So frustrated that at one time he just walked out of work and drove home, which was really upsetting to everyone.

My direct manager and my mentor in the company (our software architect), as well as our scrum master (a consultant) are all aware of the conflict. I've been assigned another colleague to help me out. Things were going ok but he got sick so I had to turn back to the team member with the conflict for assistance. Of course frustrations arose again.

Now yesterday during our sprint planning meeting we had to say what we liked and didn't like about the past sprint. And I brought up I feel I need time for learning and that I don't know where to put that, since we don't have a task for it. I said I also felt past approaches weren't working out and that I'd like to take up the offer to go on training. I was trying to word it very neutral to not upset my colleagues, as they tried their best. But the colleague who I had previous conflicts with took it personal and accused me of not listening and that is why my code is awful. While all I've been doing is rely on his code to learn. Long story short it got very heated and direct manager and scrum master who were present had to shut it down.

I'm thinking of talking to my manager and mentor today. It really hurts when you're accused of maliciousness when all you did was try. I know my code isn't perfect. But I get no help in improving it beyond long winded explanations about theory. If I ask for practical help he says he won't write my code for me. Which isn't what I expect. When I say I followed his example he says I shouldn't copy. But two sentences later he says if I don't know what I am doing I should listen to him. It's really very confused and demotivating as a beginner, but he makes it about how I waste his time and ruin his job for him. I understand he tries his best and that it has to be hard when someone seemingly is as dumb as a bag of bricks. But my manager and mentor told me they support me as long as I continue to show improvement. So I asked for alternatives (training, time to study, or whatever I haven't thought of) and now I feel like the bad person. I'm already someone with crippling low self esteem, and I'm thrown into the deep end. It kinda sucks when someone then tells you from the sideline you can't swim and how swimming works. How about tossing me one of those floaty things and then maybe accept I need to hold on to that for a bit and my technique will need work until I can make it on my own? :(

Had given my laptop at the repair store. They were just suppose to do a checkup and then give a choice on whether to repair or not. They repaired it and charged me 2.8K. No unit replacement or anything, just service. I didn't mind it (was actually happy seeing my laptop boot up and not have a blank screen). It's a dual-boot (Windows/Antergos(Arch-linux)). It booted to Windows instead of GRUB. Didn't care too much, because it had happened before and I had handled it.
After I take it back home, I discover that the WiFi doesn't work (it doesn't even seem to be a driver issue). Live boot of arch doesn't have access to WiFi either. Reinstalled GRUB, only to discover it doesn't boot successfully (issues with video card). So, now I'm stuck with fucking Windows WITHOUT WiFi and an arch-linux that doesn't fucking boot.
Gonna reinstall Arch now.

P. S. : Windows is super fast, because I haven't really used it and don't really like using it. I feel very limited by Windows.

RANT:
Google is just a steaming pile of shit!!

I've recently installed LineageOS onto my phone and wanted to degooglify my life.

So my current Smartphone doesn't have any GApps installed and I get along fairly well.

Should I need anything, I should just be able to use it in my browser right?
RIGHT?

Nono!! As soon as I want to log into a third party Service using Google (older acccounts with the other choice only being Facebook) I need to "verify my identity". And the only option are my old smartphone who still have Gapps on it but are slow and don't accessible when I'm away!

For those who say: "Google is just beeing secure. They don't want anyone to steal your account.". I USE 2FA AND HAVE BACKUP CODES.
BEFORE DEGOOGLING MY DEVICE IT NEVER ASKED SUCH A THING!!! WHAT A PILE OF SPYING SHIT!!!

And the best part, after I remotely started my PC at home and just want to take a screenshot of the message for this post before just using a working session, the message didn't appear.
Somehow google decided that me logging in 15 mins later (same ip) proves my identity?!?!?!

IF THIS CAN BE ATTRIBUTED TO AI. FUCK THIS SHIT. GOOGLED SHOULD BE TREATED LIKE AN ONLINE CASINO BECAUSE THE CHANCE OF JUST GETTING LOGGED SEEMS COMPLETELY RANDOM!!!

(I also had this prior when using my smartphone browser. There I couldn't "circumvent" this and I was at home. But having this shit on my browser which should've a session is unacceptable.)

Our relationship is like a diode, you take and never give (I demand sex as compensation).

Btw, I really used this but with simpler words with two girls who wanted a ride to go and have fun with other boys in the clubs...

My best friend gave them a ride for over a year.
When we denied more, they started calling me... Wonder why.

Took them one time, asked for gás money.
Only called me one-month later, didn't ask for gás but said I wanted some snug and fun in return... OK, you can have us both (OH YEAH!!!).
On the club, they go for the muscular guys, leaving me alone.
When I got tired, got to one of them and said, ask your friend a ride home because I'm going now. (they ran for my ride since the guys they picked were all pricks and would probably dump them somewhere).
Never called me again...
Told what I did to my best friend, next time they called he demanded sex for both of us, never called him again.
And that's how you fuck opportunistic people. Fuck them.

I fucking hate morning people like the one in the story below!

Before we begin story time I want to acknowledge some things.

This is largely a case of a person having a lack of awareness and giving in to their base instincts (which are wrong).

People all tend to think that everyone else is like them (most children below a certain age cannot make this distinction and many adults never learn it either).

To take it a step further, anyone who isn't just like them is Lazy/Bad/An Asshole/etc.

FUCK THOSE PEOPLE

Now it's story time...

---------

I worked for a startup. We used a modified SCRUM, and we had standups every day @ 10 AM, the other team had then at 11:30 AM.

We get a new product owner. He is a morning person. But basically, he is a day-trader so he wakes up at 5 AM to trade and is in the office by 8 AM every day.

The problem is, he uses this as a reason to leave every day at 3 PM when EVERY other member of the team is there until at least 5 PM.

So he says one day (when I am not there) that we are moving our standups to 8:30 AM...

"Because he wants to make more use of the time and wants to get more done!"

So the next day a bunch of us miss this standup, the second day I was there in time but instead of going to the standup I sent them a picture of myself sitting in a coffee shop across the street with a message saying...

"I will be holding a meeting today at 10 AM, I expect EVERYONE to be there. If anyone on our team is absent then we will sit there and that absent person will be responsible for the time we waste waiting for them."

10 AM rolls around and the Product Owner is nowhere to be seen. The team starts complaining about the early standup and I tell them that this meeting is for me to take care of it. I tell them to sit silently and let me handle it.

We all message the PO saying the same thing...
"Come to the meeting, You are wasting our time!!!"

So he shows up at 10:20 AM and it begins.

(Now I'm going to do this as a conversation)

PO: "So I assume this is about the standup?..."

ME: "Feel free to ramble on as long as you want, you have already wasted 20 minutes of our time so we will sit here quietly and wait for you to decide you are ready to stop wasting our time with your ramblings. That's fine."

<PO then shuts up in disbelief>

ME: "So are you finished?"

PO: ...

ME: "I'm expecting an answer PO!"

PO: Yes, for now.

ME: I am moving our standups to 5 PM, end of discussion.

PO: Becuase your too lazy to be here by 8 AM?

<I expected this>

ME: No because I'm an asshole who expect everyone to conform to my schedule.

PO: ..., Well, I am not here at 5 PM.

ME: Sounds like your too "lazy" be here at 5 PM, eh?

PO: I have other things I do then.

ME: Ah, now the truth comes out. You care more about your life than our business. That's unacceptable! I personally don't care what you want to do. The fact is that we are working here and every day we end up having PO questions that need to and can't be answered because you are not here.

PO: <To the team> The standup is still at 8:30 AM.

ME: <To the team> The standup is at 5 PM. End of story. And from now on whenever we have questions before 5 for PO and he is not here we will be recording it and putting it in his report.

Then I walk away.

That day we held a standup at 5 PM. He wasn't there. He held a standup at 8:30 AM and he didn't even show up. He stayed home a video in. He then arrived in the office and said...

PO: Since no one was in the standup today we will be moving it back to 10 AM.

ME: Since PO has seen the selfishness of his ways, We will be moving the standup from 5 PM back to 10 AM.

FUCK THOSE PEOPLE

Longest I've worked without rest + why?

Over 24 hours. Why?

In our old system, the database had fields, for example, a customer like Total97, Total98, etc. to store values by year (or some date-specific value).

Every January 1, we had to add fields to accommodate the upcoming year and make the appropriate code changes to handle the new fields.

One year the UPS shipping rates changed and users didn't want to 'lose' the old rates, so they wanted new fields added (Rate98, Rate99, etc) so they could compare old vs. new. That required a complete re-write of most of the underlying applications because users wanted to see the difference on any/all applications that displayed a shipping rate. I'll throw in asking 'why?' was often answered with "because we pay you to do what we say". Luckily, we had already gotten to work on a lot of this before January 1st, so we were, for the most part, ready.

January 1st rolls around (we had to be in the office at 3:00AM), work thru changes, spend some time testing, and be done before noon. That didn't happen. The accounting system was a system that wasn't in (and had never been) in scope, and when we flipped the switch, one of the accountants comes into the office:
E: "Guys? None of our Excel spreadsheets are working. They are critical to integration with the accounting software"
Us: "What? Why would you be using Excel to integrate with the software instead of their portal?"
E: "We could never figure it out, so we had a consultant write VBA scripts to do the work."
Us: "OK, a lot of fields changed, but shouldn't be a big deal. How many spreadsheets are we talking about?"
E: "Hundreds. We have a separate spreadsheet for every integration point. The consulting company said it scalable, whatever that means."
Us: "What?! Why we just know hearing about this!?"
E: "Don't worry, the consultant said making changes would be easy, let me show you, just open the spreadsheet..click here..<click><click><click>...ignore that error, it always happens...click that <click><click><click>.."
Us: "Oh good lord, this is going to take hours"
E: "Ha! Probably. All this computer stuff is your job and I've got a family to get to. Later"
Us: "Hey 'VP of IS', can we go home and fix these spreadsheets as-needed this week?"
VP-IS: "Let me check with 'VP-FS'"
<few minutes later>
VP-IS: "No, he said Excel is critical to running their department. We stay until Excel is fixed."
Us: "No, no...its these spreadsheets. I doubt FS needs all of them tomorrow morning."
VP-IS: "That's what I said. Spreadsheets, Excel, same thing. I'll order the pizza. Who likes pepperoni!?"

At least he didn't cheap out on the pizza (only 4 of us and he ordered 6 large, extra pepperoni from one of the best pizza places in town)

One problem after another and we didn't get done until almost 6:00AM. Then...

VP-IS: "Great job guys. I've scheduled a meeting at 8:00AM to review what we did so we can document the process for next year. You've got a couple of hours. Feel free to get some breakfast and come back, or eat the left over pizza in the breakroom fridge. There is a lot left"
Us: "Um...sorry...we're going home."
VP-IS: "WHAT!!...OK...fine. I'll schedule the meeting for 12"
Us: "No...we're going home. We'll see you tomorrow."

I tried LSD yesterday!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regus sent me to collections.

Jist: if you ever think about renting an office from Regus, for the love of your bank account and your credit, just don't. Go into the kitchen and pan-fry your face instead. it'll be better.

Moral: get it in writing. What is "it"? Fucking everything.

------

I needed someplace quiet away from my children to work, so I rented an office from Regus. They said they had a minimum 6-month contract, which is fine, but at the time I was pretty sure I would be moving within three to five. They said they understood and offered the quivalent of a month-to-month plan: I could cancel my contract whenever I wanted, given a few weeks' notice, and that would be that. It wasn't in writing, but both the accounts person and the regional manager were there offering it to me, and they seemed cool. Awesome! I agreed, signed the contract, and paid a hefty damage deposit.

Long story short, I ended up hating the office, and chose to bear the distractions at home instead. Seeing how much I disliked it, the accounts person I talked to originally called me and offered to cancel my contract. I agreed, and she walked me through the steps to cancel it and request my deposit back. Done. I aske her if that was it; no more payments, no more contract. "No more," she said. "You're done." I liked the sound of that. Done and done.

The next day, I check my bank account; no deposit.
Two weeks later, still no deposit.
A month later, still no deposit.

They did say it could take up to three fucking months or something, so whatever. I waited.

Another month later, and instead of my refunded deposit, I get an overdue invoice notice? Seriously?

Apparently they never cancelled my contract, don't remember offering me the month-to-month agreement, nor does the very chick I talked to remember telling me over the phone that everything was paid up and done. Apparently my contract wasn't even for six months like they originally promised, but indefinite? despite all of this? and despite the two of us fucking cancelling it? together?

But no, the legal agreement is binding and explicitly states that they are fucking assholes and due their pound of cash.

So fuck that and fuck them.
And in response, they sent me to collections.
Huge fucking surprise.

and now collections is calling me saying I owe $1900, which works out to a lot more than the couple months it's been since I cancelled that crap, AND.

AND IT'S LESS THAN THE FUCKING DEPOSIT REGUS NEVER RETURNED!

SO NOT ONLY DID THEY NEVER CANCEL MY CONTRACT, THEY CHANGED ITS TERMS (or lied up-front) AND DECIDED TO POCKET THE DEPOSIT INSTEAD OF APPLY IT TO MY FUCKING IMAGINARY BALANCE!

FUCK YOU SHADY MOTHERFUCKERS!

Country roads ♪
Take me home ♪
To the place ♪
I belong ♪
StackOverflow ♪
Help me right now ♪
Take me home ♪
Country roads ♪

Another Developer: bro, shit hit the fan. The x web service is throwing some error. Can you take a look please. I want to go home. I'm tired.
Me: Yea sure bro no worries.
Another Developer: I go pee, after that I will delegate the ticket to you.
(Another Developer goes to the washroom)
Me: (04:59 PM) Oh time to pack-up and get the fuck out of here
Me: (05:08 PM) Receive a message on Viber from Another Developer. It reads "Fuck you, I'm going to rub my balls on your desk"

Rage!!!

Coworker checks in not working major changes and goes home for the weekend yesteday. When I ask him politely in an email to just check in a feature branch he says he has no time for that and it doesn't matter since the program is shit anyway.

Meanwhile I'm working overtime to get the program ready for a demo next week and another developer has already starting using his changes so I can't just roll it back. Spent my whole morning fixing it, and now can finally start my work in the afternoon.

Arghhhhhhhhhh!

Worst part is... He's the solution architect so anything I bust my ass to get done he'll take credit for and anything that goes wrong he'll blame on me. Can't wait for this contract to end!

Recently I receive a ton of mails from cool/hip/rockstar startups. They all run like this:

"We are a innovative Startup based on a [insert some random stuff or buzzword] blockchain! If you're a student with skills and experience in blockchain, machine learning and AI willing to change the world with our sick technology and make it a better place..."

The best thing about this: since they are a innovative Startup they expect you to work for free.

But who am I to judge something so brand-new and innovative. I contacted them to find out what these dank innovations are about.

They can't even explain what a blockchain is or the basics of ML and AI, they basically just want someone do it for free...

It's still ok since no one is gonna fall for this bait... this morning a friend of mine told me he got a new job... and he even can work from home...

I'm not even mad, I just feel sadness and sorrow specially for him, because he is a good dev and accepts big times underpay and now free work, because he thinks a day off in his CV will lead him to be unemployed 😭

Fucking hate it how people successfuly manipulate kids and youth to them to work 24/7 for minimum wage or even for free and some other douchebags trying to take advantage of this 😡

i have been working on a web-based game and this is my daily routine (also i listen to rock and metal)

college to home to coding
thinking
coding...
looks like theres a small bug
shouldnt take much time
maybe this can work
*screaming*
i am not the first with this bug *here i come stack*
dont do this to me stack... theres suppose to be a fix for it
*extreme head banging*
F*** it
*changing songs*
nope this not helping
F***
F*** THIS SHIT
*rhythmic head banging*
oh god kill me
F***
am i really that bad
*autistic screaming*
humming song instead of thinking of bug
(8 - 8:30) me: mom i am hungry
this shit is taking toooo much time
*high intensity screaming*
F*** you bug
coding, its not form me
*surfing devrant*
*felling i am normal*
(10 - 10:30) mom: when are you eating
*high pitch screaming*
i am leaving coding for sure now
its too late time to sleep
fml its late again, i am gonna miss the first lecture again
back to coding

A thousand year later...
Bug status: Still not fixed

Late post because drinking:

I’m going back to work, got a verbal offer this afternoon after being laid off two weeks ago, thanks mainly to a referral from a former direct report that I once went to bat for. Gave myself a nice 3 weeks of chill time before start date.

But the funny thing was a company who gave me a take home assignment that I breezed through in half an hour, only to say “we’re going with other candidates” after the follow up interview calling me a few hours after I accepted said verbal offer elsewhere.

They wanted me to redo the take home assignment but with different acceptance criteria and requirements than the first time.

Fucking lol.

I told them, verbatim “I think I’ve done enough to satisfy any questions about my skills from the prior assessment. If you have more questions about design and implementation choices I’m happy to schedule a call.”

Hiring manager said he’d reach out next week.

Because even if the verbal offer gets redacted, I’ve got three other final rounds coming up and this particular place just sounded way too fucking chaotic and disorganized for my tastes. If everything else flames out and I’m left with no other options for work, I’ll consider giving them some more time out of my day, but as is, redoing a coding assessment with different criteria because you can’t decide wtf you want from a job candidate?

Not gonna lie: this is not a good look for you.

As much fun it is to code and create new features for users. Take a break from the computer and spend time with real people.

A few years ago I would stay at work to get tasks done. While everyone in the office would go home I would stay and finish some task. After doing that for a few months my wife started to yell at me.

It made me realize that no matter how important a new feature, a bug or optimizing code is family and the relationships you have are more important.

Client contacts our company that his site is down, we do some investigating and the only way we can access the site is on a mobile phone. From the office computers the site never loads and times out. Since we don't host the site and I've never logged into it before I don't have a lot of details so I suggest they contact whoever hosts their site. This is where things get weird.

Client tells me that the site is hosted on someone's home server. I tell him that this is quite strange in 2018 and rather unlikely and ask if he was ever given access to the site to log in or if he has access to his domain registration, GoDaddy.

He says he doesn't understand any of this and would rather I just contact his current developer and figure it out with him. We agree that he needs to get access to his site so we are going to migrate it once I get access to it.

I email his current developer letting him know the client has put me in contact with him to troubleshoot the issues with the site. I ask him some standard questions like: where is the site hosted? Can you access it from a computer? Do you have some security measures in place to block certain IP ranges? Can you give me from access to get the files? Will you send me a backup of the site for me to load up on my server?

*2days pass*

Other dev: Tell me the account number and I'll transfer the domain.

Me: I'll have to get back to you on that once I talk to the client and set up his GoDaddy account since we believe the business owner should own their domain, not their developers. In the meantime you didn't answer any of the questions I asked. Transferring the domain won't get the site on my server so I still need the files.

*3 days pass*

OD: You are trying the wrong domain. The correct domain is [redacted].com I'll have my daughter send you the files when she gets in town. We will transfer the domain to you, the client will forget to pay and the site will go down and it'll be your fault.

Me: I appreciate your advice, but the client will own their domain. I'm trying to get the site online and you have no answered any of my questions. It's been a week now and you have not transferred the domain, you have not provided a copy of the site, you have not told me where the site is hosted. The client and I are both getting impatient at this point when will we receive a backup of the site and the transfer of the domain?

OD: Go fuck yourself, tell the client they can sue me.

If the client is that terrible, wouldn't you want to hand them off to anyone willing to take them? I have never understood why developers and agencies try to hold clients hostage by keeping their domain or website and refusing access. From what I can tell this is a freelance developer without a real company so a legal battle likely isn't going to go well since the domain is worthless to him as the copyright to the name is owned by the client. This isn't the first time we've had to help clients through this sort of thing.

Me and my friend were having a coffee in a coffee shop and then she told me the story of how she got fired.
So back then storing data on cloud was not that convenient and employees in her company used to carry softwares and other stuff in pendrives.
This one day after completing a MAJOR project for a very irritating client, my friend and her team decided to take the day off and celebrate this victory in a pub.
She got drunk and then came the call of her boss saying that they needed to showcase the software right then to the client.

Being always responsible and committed to her work my friend had decided to keep a backup in her pendrive which she kept in her breast pocket of her shirt.

So she goes into the washroom to freshen up, bends down near the toilet to vomit out liquor and lo!

The pendrive slid all the way down from her pocket into the toilet sink.
She didn't notice and flushed and down went the whole project into the sewer.

Moral - life fucks you in ridiculous ways.

Ps. She left her laptop at her home which was very far from her office and the pub. The team had to go to her home first to retain the project and eventually got seriously late. Boss didn't like it as the client was a real pain in the ass and this was a big project too and being the team lead my friend was supposed to deliver as expected.
She got fired.

Basically everything. Let me explain.

It's now.. okay what time is it? Ooh there's some dust on the clock, I wonder how do they form.. I guess I'll check Wikipedia. Page is loading, might as well scroll fb while waiting. Ooh a video on the home feed! Oh wait it's loading, I wonder what's on YouTube. Ugh, ads, let's just mute it and scroll devRant. Oh cool there's something called Google FooBar challenge, imma try searching Arraylist Java. Nice, lv1 done, let's take a break by getting a drink from the fridge.

*Walks back to room after drinking a sip of orange juice* hmm.. what time is it? Oh it's late, imma go to sleep!

*Shuts down everything and goes to bed* Maybe I'll just browse devRant before sleeping.. Ooh I have an idea for wk51!

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.

Don't feed the pigeons.
A cautionary tale.
When you feed the pigeons they keep coming back. They don't stop pestering you for help, and they don't ever listen to you.
I gave my father-in-law my old laptop, and installed the latest version of Office 2016 because I'm a nice guy.
Now, every week at family dinner there's something he needs me to help him with.
Mind you, his previous computer had Windows XP and the one I gave him had Windows 7. So it was quite the texh upgrade for him.
Except one of his octagenarian siblings wrote a family recipe book, and wrote it in Word Processor. (because Old People!) Well fuck of course it has pictures, clip art, special formatting, vertical and horizontal lines. It worked fine on XP because Word Processor was supported by XP.
The following is me explaining to him over the phone why his recipe book wouldn't load into Word. I was in his house picking up 2000 rounds of ammo for my and my wife's pistols (target practice) while he was out and about.
FIL: "It's the link on the desktop. It comes up in Word on the old computer but when I tried to put it on the new computer it wouldn't work. I used a thumb drive."
Me: "Okay well I tried to..."
FIL: "I don't know why it would work in Word on one computer and not the next."
Me: "Okay, well I clicked on the link to the file on your old desktop and it opened in Word Processor, not Word."
FIL: "No it opens in Word on the old computer, but it won't open on the new one."
Me: "It opens in Word Processor on the old computer, it won't open in Word on..."
FIL: "Which computer are you sitting at? The old one is on the left." (as if I wouldn't recognize the computer I had for three years and just gave him a month ago!)
Me: "The old one."
FIL: "Okay so it should open in Word on the old computer."
Me: "It won't. It will open in..."
FIL: "I was thinking maybe it had something to do with a screen that popped up when I logged in to the new computer. Something about antivirus software?"
Me: "It will open in Word Processor on your old computer, but it isn't formatted..."
FIL: "Yeah, it's a '.-w-p-s' file so it should work in Word."
Me: "Word Processor is a different program from Word. This opens in Word Processor."
(long silence)
FIL: "So which one do I have?"
Me: "You have Word Processor on the old computer."
FIL: "So how do I get Word Processor on the new computer?"
Me: "You don't. It is defunct software, it was discontinued ten years ago. You can try to get a converter online, but there's no guarantee it'll work."
FIL: "Alright, I'll be home in a few minutes. I'll take a look then."
This was at 10pm last night, and I'd been out all day since 7:30am. He still didn't believe me that the book was written in Word Processor until I showed him the different startup screen for Word Processor, where it says "Word Processor" plain as day.
I fed the pigeon. And it looks like there's more of this to come.

!dev, just a couple little things that happened to me recently.

First off, I just (like 20 minutes ago) replaced the save battery in my Pokemon Silver, so that's fun. Now I want to start modding my GBC (new shell, glass screen, all the fun stuff)

My friend is talking to me again, as of yesterday. The whole situation is still kinda touchy so I'm gonna be careful about talking to her for now, but after some time it should be all good.

I recently took up vaping (I know, it's bad and I shouldn't do it, but I'm an adult and that's my fucking decision).

Then yesterday, I gave a friend a ride home from school. He didn't have his house key so he was locked out and had to wait for his dad to get home. The neighborhood I live in, you don't really leave someone sitting outside for too long, cause shit might happen to them (drug deals are a regular thing across the street from my house, gunshots aren't too common, but still), so I stayed with him.

I'd never met his dad, and I didn't want his first impression to be me letting out a huge vape cloud, so if I was going to take a hit, I would check to make sure nobody was around. At one point, I checked, then took a huge hit. Then I heard my friend say "oh there's my dad". Cue me practically gluing my mouth shut, not breathing at all as I waved bye, turned my car on, pulled out of the driveway, and drove down the street some.

When I let the cloud out, it was a HUGE fucking cloud too. Much bigger than the ones I've normally had. Definitely would have been a bad introduction, especially considering that friend's family is not very fond of that type of stuff (smoking/vaping, drinking, etc) from what I know.

*Not a rant, but a very long vent*
I'm 20 and facing the worst dilemma I ever experienced.
Been working at a company for more than half a year, got the job thru a friend and started as an intern to take care of customer problems, crap they do to PC's, printers that wouldn't work, answer emails and phone calls about our point-of-sale software.
Soon everything started to change, on one day my boss asked my what I knew about coding, all I could answer was about some really basic stuff that I learnt on a previous semester at college, just some very basic coding stuff we got for C, how for loops works, conditions, that kind of thing. Soon I was being asked to code a client management software for our company, I was starting to grasp a little of this wonderful world, soon I could write some more complex code in C#, even did a program that in 30 seconds did a 3 day's worth of work, and then I got assigned to develop a mobile POS application, earned a raise, and man, is this wonderful.
I feel that I really found my place in life, found something that makes me jump out of bed every morning.
But here comes the dilemma part: I'm enrolled in a mechanical engineering school for two years now, and it's my second place already (been enrolled at a agronomy school before that) and I'm starting to feel out of place, in all the classes I'm taking, I cant help but feel that this isn't for me, I don't see myself doing that for a future, but I don't know if jumping to another boat would make it any better or just worse, I don't know how good are my odds at a tech oriented course are, I don't really know what to do with the rest of my life.
Guess I'm just afraid of doing something stupid and regret it later, don't know if I should listen to the voice that shouts to me to do whatever I want to with my life or the one that assures me of a stable path... Don't know if anyone will read this much, but if so, thanks a lot, just wanted to put it out of my shoulders and maybe get to know anyone that has been here. I'm new here, but I feel already at home. ☺