I'm completely cooked, brothers. I chanced on an office where the boss has a strong eye for visually appealing female staff. My employment there caused me to mistake myself to have gamed the hot chic ignoring my dms system, at least now I and a handful of them work together, they'll have an excuse to talk to me. Boy, was I DEAD WRONG. It makes no difference either way, I am quite simply not him. It doesn't matter whether corporate labour gives me a helping hand or I go hunting (and missing) online. None of them will be caught dead responding to me except when under formal obligation

The only other place I can see them in person is during my hour long commutes. Strike a conversation, they are only interested in me incurring expenses on their account or replying chats reluctantly. Owari da, ladies and gentlemen 💔

Those modular monolith treatises, articles and videos presenting it as the less complex cousin of microservices with same benefits, I think it was all snake oil. They sold us dreams

Yes, it's more compact to house all components pertaining to an entity under one package. But it turns out all the hoops we jumped to hide them behind an interface, it's an overkill not necessarily the game Changer it was made out to be

I say this because one controller almost suffices for managing a resource. So does its associated service class. It can grow to 1k/1.5k lines at best. But never enough to be managed by multiple people and balloon into "a service". The idea was that these things are big enough to gain full attention. But the chances are slim

As long as you aren't dumping all your logic into your controllers, you're home and dry

Was surprised to stumble on somewhere I wrote,

"Doesn't matter whether they love it or not. It must be finished, either way "

I felt like crying. It's not dated so I don't know when, but it should be early 2023. I'd been working on suphle for two years with neither assistance nor guarantee that it'll turn out great. I noted that after running out of juice to energise myself till the finish line. I strived to finish it and launched to the php community in September /October 2023, with it reaching box office bomb acclaim

BUT I did keep to my pact with my younger self. The uncertainty was insufficient to hold me back. I know suphle was not trash because even as recent as last week, I saw a method "onErrorResume", in spring webflux that provides developers with an API for gracefully handling runtime errors. Suphle is ahead of its time cuz I had this built-in without ever seeing it elsewhere

I saw parallels with nestjs too when I used it last year. They just never gave it the opportunity to see light of day. The story would have been more complete but finishing it is enough for me. At least I tried. It wasn't abandoned and we aren't now talking about pending features and how I'd never make out time to work on them or dream of how great it would have been if the world got its hands on it. Or how I'm holding myself back. We know all those details now

I inherited a nextjs project from an unknown guy and am fangirling the codebase

But the deeper I familiarise myself with it, the more the cracks begin to appear:

1) The dude Is incapable of grasping the basics of DRY concept. He actually setup a ton of stuff I may have done poorly if I'd started working straight out of the docs, so I feel like I owe him a shower of praise. I guess being new to nextjs makes it look more impressive than it actually is. He was paid off, yet getting the credit seems unearned to me. I'm just afraid reaching out to him might turn around to bite me in the ass
***

I had the above in my drafts, contemplating sending him a token to show some appreciation for unknowingly showing me the ropes. I was going to find him on LinkedIn using his commit names. But after doing everything I've done, undergoing the anxiety and severe pressure I faced at the hands of the project owners, I'm not sharing a farthing with anybody

Yes, I may not have known about zustand and persist middleware. Yes, he did all the ui. Yes, he created the base components and fancy wrappers around form and button html elements. For those, I'm grateful

But the amount of refactoring I had to do to, for an opportunity to implement my own target features, I'd say I can lay as much claim to the project as he does.

Side note #1: I have some newfound respect for front end devs. We used to discriminate against them for doing just css but that was only relevant in the jquery days. Now, they have to use cryptic css frameworks (sass, less, tailwind), they have to learn esoteric syntax of some js framework and write controllers/components as the case may be. They have to (the worst part), bind this data to an API, which would never make sense to me coming from a php ssr-natural world

Back rewarding the guy, some of the challenges I came back from were:

1) Next server outages: I still don't know the workaround this. The app terminates, browser giving an error about using up memory. I have to wait for about 10 minutes before I can access the app again

2) spring Webflux authentication not hydrating: I was unexpectedly asked to work on the back end too, where I got tortured with this horrifying condition. The most poorly documented framework for the Web has no upto date guide on how to implement jwt security measures. I opened a question on stackoverflow. A day later, both my question and the helpful answer got downvoted

3) Zustand not retrieving any data from localstorage once page reloads, until I miraculously stumbled on a hack: there's a config callback for reading state after rehydration or thereabout. So I interact with the state there. That's the only way content clearly in localstorage can get transmuted into dynamic format accessible by the code

4) Mongo database suddenly disconnecting: for no apparent reason, this bailed. Accessible on compass. This was even when I realised it was responsible for front end requests not going through. Eventually created a new database and requests surprisingly began connecting again. Thankfully, my laravel background taught me about seeders so I had them on standby from the onset. Wasn't difficult to just port to a fresh database after confirming the first one was inaccessible to the app

After this painful odyssey and the time constraints, threats of moving forward with someone else, I deserve every dime they deem me worthy of and more

Chatgpt and WhatsApp LLMs replaced the time I spend on Google, combing stackoverflow, articles, forum suggestions and documentation. Which makes sense since those primary constitute their software development training model

Its interactivity is like personally iterating with those authors in real time, yet the experimentation I do remains the same. We still do the hairpulling, catfighting, back and forth, tantrums and clawing each other's eyes out when things go awry. I'm mostly the one doing all these when it's completely useless and worse than a mental retarded thing, missing whole points, regurgitating same solutions you told it are dud

More irritating cases are times it withholds information due to ethical reasons. I get redfaced livid and cuss it out. My message gets scrubbed out for violating community policy. Days when its sympathetic, it apologises for my frustration, other days it just retorts with more venom that the umpire supervising our exchange promptly erases

Prompt engineering is probably the ubiquitous language javaScript aspired to be, and may be the future of software development

Disclaimer: This joke will be lost in translation but I can't help but make it

In my country, you can use the phrase "it's not beans" to describe something difficult eg "that ielts exam no be beans". Given my recent woes with spring boot, I can also say "spring webflux no be beans". But it's funny to me because the framework calls objects bound to the container "beans" so it's a nerdy, don't leave me joke

It's shockingly bad, Jesus 😣

https://stackoverflow.com/questions...

I know I'm just whining atp instead of moving on something else. For lack of anything else, I blame capitalism for limiting my options. I would never subject myself to this torture of my own volition. Yet, you have to wonder how a joke like this. Even a routing library developed over a code kata or aboard a flight would at least, include a regex capturing possibility of trailing slashes. How would one ever imagine that all clients of this api have to strictly either end their url with slashes, otherwise they get slammed with a 404

Unbelievable

I fucking hate spring boot. I can go unwind and nobody would hear this but boy, does it suck. Every single thing about it is a pita. I spend 98% of time I should have used for feature implementation in JAVA, struggling and battling MUNDANE functionality of the framework that ought to be nobrainers

Today started out with a project I inherited. I don't even know whether to blame its original author but he installed a couple of funny libraries for logging. The spring app doesn't build yet gradle build completes successfully. No errors are logged to the terminal, just reams and bundles of json. WHY IS THE APP NOT BUILDING??? You want me wrangling json through that pinhole console window?

I struggle with the yml settings, none works. Eventually get rid of the package (hint, it wasn't the slf4j one). I'm able to debug app not starting now, but now live reload doesn't work

I copy configs from a previous project where it worked into this. Nope, doesn't budge. Eventually enable an ide setting but now server restarts twice after file changes. The implication is that request argument annotation no longer works! So the server just restarts and has amnesia about argument type resolution

I've been sitting here for hours, without implementing a single new feature. Everything is a painstaking, avoidable aggravation VS the "framework". Never seen anything as horrendous. No line of java code yet. I just want to send a request, retrieve parameters and verify live reload is "up and running". You'd think something as low level as this shouldn't take more than two minutes. Alas, welcome to the incredible world of spring development

A few days back, I was battling to setup a spring app the old fashioned way. By that, I mean the way I'm used to securing routes in laravel and indicating model relationships. For the most part, I'd gotten used to the authentication config more than my first experience with it

But the jpa/hibernate relationship mess? Honestly, it's insane. If I can only access the relationship if I let them be defined eagerly (which stupidly breaks due to circular dependencies during deserialization btw), what's the point even bothering to define them there? Might as well pretend the relationship doesn't exist and strictly use IDs on belongsTo. That's it. At the time, it felt like Very sick, amateurish stuff but I'm calmer now so it's just disappointing. How come the framework is so popular??

They haven't figured out migrations, lazy and eager load, hydrating models while evading the circular dependency trap, etc. These seem so rudimentary in eloquent, I don't even have to think about it

Those jsfiddle/codepen snippets on stackoverflow back in the day used to replicate the same traumatic effect as the threat on injection at the hospital when I was a child

I Used to scribble my thoughts on paper. It's haphazard yet handy. And even though I can't make corrections without crossing out or drawing arrows to transfer the reader to continuation of the thought on another page, I have this liberty to express myself and glance at a panoramic view before putting them in their final resting place –soft copy

Maybe my thought process became more efficient but I no longer need to flesh things out with ink. Database designs, implementation logic. Everything goes to a special file I create on every project for odds and ends

Until today

I have something to think about. I will miss connecting the dots if they appear in fancy fonts. I need to gradually build upon each outline, pursuing it in an exploratory manner until its possibilities are exhausted. I will draw a conclusion from their character arcs

For some reason, I see parallels between this scenario and sql vs nosql. This is one of those extreme cases where structured data storage is not sufficient. I sincerely doubt nosql should be used as a main database, but instead an intermediary for an aggregator to treat each row/record as a unique blob, extract necessary information into a sql for the actual system to work with

Sql is more sane and recommended for when you know the exact end goal but need help arriving there. Today, I'm confused and need to weigh options. I need to actually cross things out, not press the back button. It's a bit of a stretch but if this were data, it feels like what nosql would excel at

I was tasked with reviving this mobile app purchased off the shelf. Initially, I was impressed with what I was seeing while perusing the codebase. I'm used to editing laravel projects written by handpicked amateurs. So this felt like a breath of fresh air. Coupled with the fact that I'd recently enquired on this very platform whether anyone has chanced upon an impressive code. All is going well, until

I start finding the multi layers of abstraction and indirection cryptic and obfuscatory; and that is coming from an idealist like me who advocates for "clean" patterns such as event emission. I wonder whether it would have helped if the emission or events were typed for easy listener tracking, instead of a black hole like vm.notifyListeners() (DOESN'T EVEN HAVE AN EVENT NAME!)

With time, I become disgusted by the tons of custom elements with so many parents

My take on production level user of the view model pattern: amazing in theory

One of the architectural decisions made on this project that had me foaming in the mouth, pulling my hair and cursing out the author's generations, past, present and future: can you believe these guys are APPENDING IMAGE DOMAINS TO THE RESOURCE? Ie the domain names are tightly coupled to the images and dictated by the api, instead of the client

If this isn't bad enough, the field names of returned entities/models don't exist on the database, of course because the stupid laravel framework abets this sort of madness by combining eloquent "scopes, attributes, and appends". A trifecta of horrors.

I eventual scaled through the horrors, but not without losing my admiration for the team behind it. App has returned to the shelves, because my company lost patience with my resuscitating it. They have the regular api authentication in place, but that's not good enough. They just had to integrate firebase as well, just because. Meanwhile, this isn't documented anywhere. I stumbled into it during my scuffle with app setup, gradle ish. Eventually got banned by firebase for "sending unusual requests". My company's last straw

Left the office pissed and frustrated by the bug that Stumped me. For some context, I've only ran to stackoverflow 3 times between now and 2022. I was making my way home, feeling crushed and downcast, when it suddenly occurred to me that this might be one of those times to seek refuge and succor on SO

Taking my chances with an answer being ready by the time I get home, I branched into area one shopping complex by 730, whipped out my system and started narrating my ordeal, buyers and merchants wondering whether I was closing a multi billion naira deal that couldn't wait or whether I was plain possessed

About half an hour later, I was done. There was no answer but I was instantly covered with the sense of calmness I imagine Christians have after casting all their burdens on their god. I certainly felt lighter, even though it's likely nobody would ever respond. Cuz I've been returning to answer most of my questions days later when I eventually figure it out

Yet, it's comforting putting something overwhelming out there, hoping it crosses paths with someone smarter or with sharper eyes to spot what I'm doing wrongly

I think I've asked this before. Just cropped up again cuz I'm pushed to do some stuff in nextjs

I Wonder how much longer before js framework devs realise they've been reverse engineering the browser this whole time, that the current browser spec was outdated since the dawn of Web fidelity and real time applications

I wonder whether there are some guys who have seen this and are already cooking in the background. The browser still treats the Internet like front end and back end, whereas with the way apps are going (eg deprecation of the front/back end roles), it seems apparent the browser needs to scale up by fading whatever js is now

I'm seeing "use server", which was one of php's infamous atrocities back in the day (lack of separation of concerns, everything in index.php). It's shocking how those who ridicule that language let this fly, but that's probably a separate thread. Point is, a bunch of these stuff done by front end frameworks seem like boilerplate but the syntax is far different from what I remember javaScript to be. I only vaguely recollect and understand what I'm reading

Why not merge all the cryptic syntaxes struggling to achieve bare minimal expectations, into advanced markup language controlled by dom attributes? Overhaul and Rethink client - server communication to fit modern standard. Someone needs to step out of the box and take a good look at the rat race. I find our lives would be made much simpler if api integration into client side behaviour wasn't a separate thing altogether

You have all these funny hoops and precarious bridges to cross. The reality is what we're fighting to overcome is the manner the architecture is setup. We need a Google/meta/amazon/apple to step in with a new browser since it's not a weekend gig and might need their reach to catch on with mainstream users. Sadly, they're the same guys rolling out new js frameworks

I actively job hunted for close to a year without success. Now I have two offers in addition to my existing position, and that, without even having to apply for either. Knowing I can't combine all three, I've turned one down cuz it offers the least compensation for the most work but the guy is insisting he "wants my skin in the game". I know he's not stupid and obviously knows nobody else would be sympathetic to such peanuts

But it's not as though my life took a dramatic turnaround after months of turmoil. All three opportunities are still within the same meagre region, albeit with minor improvements. I do NOT feel grateful because the circumstance of one of the new offers is such that I'm still tied to my old buddies apron strings. Not only did I stagnate but I've got them paying my salary now. They rub it in by telling me I might get a car in two years time if I join them now, and how many properties they've acquired in our time apart

It sucks how little headway I've made in their absence, and how much harder I have to work to have any hope of earning close to their monthly wages

If Google was created in this criminal ai era, we would have been getting charged tokens and credits for each search, map distance covered or words translated

Has anyone ever resumed at a new place and was impressed by the code inherited from their predecessor? If yes, did you see any need to communicate this information to the admin or the superiors he left behind?

For as long as I delved into code quality, I've taken great pride in my work and have been enthusiastic to show it off to anyone who cares to listen. I'm morbidly afraid of a colleague berating my work over something I didn't do correctly or don't know. But none of those I've worked with have that kind of time for pedagogy. The only thing I've witnessed them care about is how much your code breaks, to what extent your endpoints break, etc

Does this make code quality practically an overrated metric? All your fancy oop patterns and clever algorithms or business logic basically goes unnoticed. The business cares about output and your colleagues are more concerned about implementing their deliverables.

Is this just my experience or a more general situation of things?

All your web applications are just UIs/headful clients redesigning or repurposing phpmyadmin and atlas

Is using getx's `ever` function a code smell? I'm using getx as a library rather than a framework ie state management instead of wrapping the app in it and using their widgets

My background from writing reactive code in vuex is that whenever a watched variable in the overarching store is updated, it automatically calls its listeners and re-renders the view. However, my flutter widgets remain stagnant except I explicitly mount the ever worker and call setState on a local field basically duplicating the store variable/field. It feels hacky to me tbh and leads to errors about calling setState on non-mounted screens, which I'm circumventing by checking if mounted (another hack)

It feels contrived like Band-aid over an actual problem. Is there a more natural way to propagate changes? I'm neither using getBuilder nor obx cuz a significant portion of my code entails computing stuff rather than just outputting data off an api. I want ui decisions to reside on my statefulWidget rather than migrating them to getx controller

Is this really how the project functions, should it be used a specific way, or am I missing something?

The timelines at my workplace are too short that it's impossible to actually build anything or observe procedures like testing, software techniques for maintaining oop code, telemetry and other things I may have learnt along the way

So application templates are the order of the day. They pull solutions off the shelf, edit the interface, hand over to clients at an alarming rate (sometimes, within a matter of days!). So yesterday, the cto asked for ways I can recommend that the team is made more efficient. He takes what I say very seriously, owing to Suphle's appendix chapter as well as the issues its blueprint set out to solve

Like I said, those do not apply here. I mean, the developers I've met are making do and winging it. I'm the one struggling to adapt to rummaging through templates and customise shit

Maybe I'm over thinking it cuz there's no sense in fixing something that's not broken. So far, only flaw I've observed (because the product designer has complained to me bitterly that the devs hardly ever translates his prototypes verbatim), is the need for a dedicated mobile developer (not that multifunctional, confused portfolio called "fullstack). But I didn't raise this since the time frames hardly even afford time for writing apis or writing mobile code. You'd be surprised to realise that everything a client can possibly ask for is already somewhere, built at a higher standard than you can replicate

My question now is, what other positive novelty can I bring aboard? How can this process be further optimised? If it can't, what suggestions outside regular software development or this work flow can I bring to the table?

Personally, I'm considering asking him to tell me bottlenecks if he has identified any. But it's very likely that he would already have begun working towards it if he knew them. I suspect he needs someone outside the system to see what is lacking or a new addition that could even be a distant, outlandish branch of the tech market, but drive the company towards more profit

About 95% of developer jobs in my country are unevenly split between the administrative and commercial capitals, with an overwhelming majority favouring the commercial capital. I live in the administrative one. Any dev jobs outside both states pay a fraction of what is tenable

Not having much luck with my search, I reluctantly applied for this php role advertised in one of the other states. I wasn't even expecting them to write back cuz the pay is piss poor. it's on site, about 400km away. For some context the salary is 120k but the tfare to and from there is in the neighbourhood of 70 grand

Anyway, the employer wrote back to me on WhatsApp, sending a full stack sample project for me to complete in 36 hours, which frankly, I found pitiful and absurd. Call me entitled, Arrogant, etc. But I didn't anticipate a cv and github like mine, from a company requiring relocation from the capital for a paltry retainer, would demand I complete a sample project. For 120k ffs. I was already making more than that years ago when our inflation hadn't ballooned 30x over

I haven't been able to bring myself to start the project. Not like I know much else to do with my life, I just slipped into a catatonic state shortly after reading it. EVERYBODY I started software with a decade ago, is either outside the country now or earning too much fx to bother with departure. I'm not envious of them, just asking for something decent to get by or not live in penury. Comfortable enough to afford basics without breaking the bank

Shortly after leaving my last workplace, I made a dark joke that: the best ones who leave, get better jobs. The average ones are either retained or land similarly mediocre positions. But the truly incompetent employees wind up in the village, farming

One detail I left out is that this sample project guy is located in the same state as my hometown. In a sense, I made a self fulfilling prophecy

He's going to request I turn in my solution tomorrow but I might just come clean about his sample project catching me off guard. I did an assessment this morning for a coy advertising a senior developer role. 4 segments, not one single one technical /code. Just boring shits about OCEAN, time management, communication. I checked my results when I was done and saw I'd done a previous test with these same guys 5 months ago. I shockingly aced the topics back then but didn't get hired anyway

This time around, almost none of the scores ramped above 50

I have never seen core coding questions here so this is one of my shots in the dark-- this time, because I have a phobia for stackoverflow, and specifically, discussing this objective among wider audience

Here it goes: Ever since elon musk overpriced twitter apis, the 3rd-party app I used to unfollow non-followers broke. So I wrote a nifty crawler that cycles through those following me and fish out traitors who found me unpleasant enough to unfollow. Script works fine, I suspect, because I have a small amount I'm following

The challenge lies in me preemptively trying to delete some of the elements before the dom can overflow. Realistically, you want to do this every 1000 rows or so. The problem is, tampering with the rows causes the page's lazy loader to break. Apparently, it has some indicator somewhere using information on one of the rows to determine details of the next fetch

I've tried doing many things when we reach that batch limit:

1) wiping either the first or last
2) wiping only even rows
3) logging read rows and wiping them when it reaches batch limit
4) Emptying or hiding them
5) Accessing siblings of the last element and wiping them

I've tried adding custom selectors to the incoming nodes but something funny occurs. During each iteration, at some point, their `.length` gets reset, implying those selectors were removed or the contents were transferred to another element. I set the MutationObserver to track changes but it fetches nothing

I hope there are no twitter devs here cuz I went great pains to decipher their classes. I don't want them throwing another cog that would disrupt the crawler. So you can post any suggestions you have that could work and I will try it out. Or if it's impossible to assist without running the code, I will have no choice but to post it here

Is it possible to use another system's processing power?

I have one pc on pentium r, 4gb ram and 448gb hdd. I also have another pc (although temporary), but with core i5. The problem is I have the android workstation (android studio, flutter, sdks, libraries, etc) installed on the insufficient pentium r. Is it possible to piggyback the processing power of the core i5 without installing that entire workstation afresh? Kind of like the way I can project the visuals of a damaged screen to a monitor. The pentium is too slow to run the android stuff so I want to parasite the i5 with the limited time at my disposal. Is this possible?

Is there any language or framework I am guaranteed to get a job in if I learn right now?

I know this is a shot in the dark cuz if such did exist, every job seeking entrant would simply flock to it; but I don't know how developers switch between stacks. Off the top of my head, recommendation but what if such social capital is missing?

Some background: I built and published a php framework called Suphle (angry-cray-9c191b.netlify.app), which surprisingly neither got any users after a year nor impressed any php employer to hire me despite hundreds of applications sent out

Rather than throwing in the towel, I wish to switch to some other software stack but I don't know where to start, If with all my proven php experience, I'm unable to land any php roles. I have tried searching for nestjs and spring boot internships or junior but nothing comes up. I have run out of time to study a language I will never profit from

I have a flutter app on playstore, built together with a product designer who worked on the ui cuz my front end chops aren't strong. I will preferably continue in a back end environment but if I can solicit immediate employment, I don't mind brushing up on any available tech, be it devops or what have you. I've also worked with spring in a professional capacity, although a very turbulent one where the team we had issues ranging ranging from absence of adequate docs for something as basic as authentication, to using nosql (totally unnecessary), trying to separate codebase into different projects to mirror the real life department (this was my idea). I don't know if it's Conway's law but I decided project should be split into admin, user and common modules/repos since they were being worked on by different devs and had little in common. Unfortunately, there is no doc for importing/sharing local projects so we had more days chucked off

Anyway, I Built a react native app a lifetime ago. Been around the block a bit and pretty confident I won't take much time to get up to speed with a tech. Where do I go or how do I start? I stay in Nigeria so may be limited from on-site roles as well

My ex-colleague contacted me recently to help build a solution that would checkmate the case of code theft that they are currently challenged with. I tried to suggest the developers either work remotely (using rdp or similar), or physically with a company provided system. He rejected both recommendations and insisted the potential culprit shouldn't be aware he is being monitored

He proposed the following flow for what he intends I build: an obfuscated program scattered across the code base, possibly assembling at intervals or as a reaction to project build. Then signaling their server with details of the machine it's running on

The project to be rigged with the spyware is written in spring boot and I can't turn this down even if I don't think it's worth it cuz no work has been forthcoming and I'm nearly out of cash

So the question is, is the flow described above a feasible one? Can you suggest a smarter way to detect when the code is transferred to the system of an unaccredited engineer? Can you suggest any tips on how to go about this?

Tried to work in a corporate setting. Failed. After so many fights, product manager was constantly rejecting my work until I had no choice but to throw in the towel. Spent the next few years slaving away as an open source dev. Not begging for donations. Just decorum when I eventually launch. Instead, I get repudiated by the community, get my account banned at the location where I could have accessed the largest pool of relevant audience. No influencer or dev rel/advocate will respond to my supplication or say beyond a compliment

Barely pick up the pieces, to reimmerse into employed labour. Dozens of applications sent out. My inbox is silent as a graveyard. I start putting more effort into tailored cover letters for each opening, across multiple job boards. One finally rejects me

Even tried changing stack by applying for internship roles in nodejs. A dead end

So, I can't read cuz I was researching for my magnum opus. Now it has gone belly up, that's no more worth it. I also cannot work because my work is complete. It's just sitting on github like a mummy. No interactions, no stars or issues.

Posted on show HN. Not even a single upvote. The funny part is that even when I tried to lament my woes on devrant, their site has been down for hours

To think I was among those who trolled ronaldo with the "rejectnaldo" gimmick. Karma has turned around to bite me in the ass. Rejectnmeri

What to do with this enormous amount of empty time? I neither go out nor watch movies

Even though I'm not terminally ill or gnashing my teeth in physical agony, This is a rare moment when I wish not to have been born. There is no joy in life that makes unpalatable suffering worth it. Why does everything I do have to be contingent on the whims and choices of others? And I have to keep living like that, otherwise I'll return to my village to become a subsistent farmer, cultivating produce to eke out a living. Or seek unskilled labour, earning peanuts for waiting tables. It's a pathetic state of affairs.

All of this sucks tbvh

#Suphle Rant 11: Laravel board launch

The launch took almost 2 weeks more than originally slated, because I sought to install it manually, just as an outsider would. Installation steps had been documented, automated tests for the installation tests were passing. When time came to actually execute the binary from the terminal, we went from one obstacle to the other. First, were the relatively minor Composer/Roadrunner issues, eventually resolved by the helpful RR maintainers who sat with me through a Discord server for about 2 hours until their command ran the way I needed it to.

Next was the Psalm scare: One of my value propositions was the guarantee of eliminating all type related bugs in Suphle apps. I intended to use Psalm for that. Wrote tests as usual. Turns out the library behaves differently under conditions differing from raw CLI usage. I resurrected threads I'd opened since December that were left unattended, and with some help from the maintainer, we eventually got it to do what I need it to do.

I was all the more frightened by the fact that Transphporm had caused me to renege on one of my earlier promises. I can only miss so many targets. After this, the docs had to be updated with all the changes effected to accurately integrate those two. Project installation and initialization commands were ran rigorously to ensure all progresses smoothly.

Tagged one final release and suddenly became impatient to launch on our local Laravel group chat where I've been a member for the last 4+ years, where we've had a rollercoaster of emotions. In that time, I've refined my launch speech to suit that audience -- obviously, countless times. Not just a tame "It's my pleasure to announce what I've been working on", but near 40 messages going into details about the inner workings, why it was built, how it compares. An expose that dove deeper than I would anywhere else.

I scheduled a time for them to tune in and got some encouraging anticipation. Ended up deflated after posting the whole thing. Only about 5 persons interacted. 1 (who I've chatted with outside the board) was quite enthusiastic. Feverishly checked the docs but commented it was overwhelming and he'd need more time. Already starred the repository.

For some context, there are give or take 250 members on that board. Not all are active but activity there easily reaches a crescendo when the topic discussed is about inanities like what 3rd party services to use for SMS, how to receive salaries from abroad, or job openings. I was optimistic when the acquaintance mentioned above published a payment library and met a riotuous welcome as one of their own. Maybe, they are simply not fond of me and the speech should have been passed off to someone else.

I checked Packagist installs -- not more 10. For 3 years, I'd been hyped up for that night; but for some reason, the audience I considered myself closest to flopped, woefully. Thankfully, this isn't the main launch. I'm still holding out hope for that. If it fails, I would have sunk an immeasurable amount of effort and time, that nobody will compensate me for. That is the one place I go to see those more advanced than me in PHP. I constantly learn there and find stimulating conversations there.

Now, I can no longer predict reception from other presentations. All I can do now is hope

I just remembered some of the "harmless" dev-related insults I've received over the years:

1) most recently, I shared a tool with an acquaintance cuz it bears the same name as something he put together a while back. Background: this guy likes to come across as having infinite programming knowledge and brags to his fb pals about being an expert in multiple languages. While trying to make sense of the cryptic docs of the package I sent him, he implies I don't know what the iframe or html5 canvas are. Claims not to elaborate what package does cuz the docs is meant for advanced desktop and mobile devs

It hurt because this is one of few people who know I built suphle, yet thinks so lowly

2) as you can tell from the first point, I share links I consider interesting with relevant contacts. I'm also quite vocal about my (mostly contrarian) takes on occurrences within the dev space that I'm familiar with. One day on the laravel board, this dude is reprimanding me and asks me to take the opinions I read on blogs and tabloids with a pinch of salt, implying I didn't form them independently but was influenced by what was written by some stranger online

It hurt because I expected him to know better. I felt I'd sufficiently proven to have actually built things that informed my school of thought

3) the oldest happened many years ago but I remember it now because the perpetrator called me out of the blue last week. I was teaching his boss, who managed an office but preferred to keep his student status hidden, to avoid being thought incompetent. This caller guy just so turned out to be learning js at the time. Fast forward some years, we all disbanded. He'd landed a dev job and was doing well. So I sent him one of those js gotchas, asking him to explain his answer

After he replied, I told him his answer was close enough but it had more to do with js passing closure arguments by reference. Dude responded that he knew that was the correct answer but wasn't aware I knew what closures meant. That stung me like hell back then. I missed his call and didn't know who owned the contact, so I searched my chats and saw that last interaction. Pain all over again

#Suphle Rant 10: boys relax

All things being equal, Suphle will be ready tomorrow. Don't stop dreaming, kids! So long as it's got a realistic, actionable plan to achieve

Astounded and impressed by the congenial behavior of some open source contributors who have grown into household names. I'm referring to tomas votruba and Sebastian bergmann. It's almost as if they belong in another world, judging by my experience with other developers and big people in general

They aren't social media influencers but Sebastian has almost singlehandedly maintained phpunit since the early 2000s. I tend to expect them not to dignify me with a response when I engage. Tomas "disappointed" that expectation on 2 different platforms where I use different monikers, in a very jovial manner, showing that's just who he is

Sebastian sympathised and apologised to me (an obscure nobody he owes nothing), this morning within minutes of me calling him out for publishing a major update that removed some helpful utilities without explanation or providing alternatives. The humility not to lock the thread or block me like one of the php sub mods did is examplary

Even from my current standpoint, it's easy to look down on those who have not contributed as much I have to the language or acquired as much, so it's a lesson I hope to carry with me, emulating the non technical attributes of these model citizens