I freaking love optimizing multithreaded applications.

(After several hours of debugging a returned "mal formed xml" error)

Me: We found out your api does accept our XML only if its elements are in certain order.

They: Oh! yes. :)

Me: ... and since XML should not depend on order, maybe you should fix that. Or at least alert about it in docs.

They: Yes, maybe we should. :)

Me: ... OK

1. The quality of the coffee and toilet paper you encounter during an interview tells you more than promises about table tennis or fruit baskets.

2. Try to determine who their primary client is: subscribers, app buyers, advertisers, etc. It's a major influence on the company dynamic.

3. Before an interview, you can just say: "I would like to sit down with a PO and run through one backlog feature and one bug, to get a feel for the type of tasks at the company". Such an activity immediately reveals team structure, whether they have product owners & scrum masters, what a sprint looks like, how they prioritize tasks, and how organized/chaotic your work experience will be.

saying git is shit (cite at the end) and nobody professional uses it.
cite:
"GIT ist scheisse, es ist schwer zu installieren und man muss die Kommandozeile benutzen. Das benutzt doch niemand."

That's true

Saw new issue on jira. When look, they are like my computer is slow or I cannot any buttons in Excel.

For fuck sake, don't send stupid tickets, we already got stupid projects the company took from the others without consulting to the IT team.

There are about 600 tickets every month and most of them are issue because of their stupidity not the software (they never read the error message). And no we are not IT support, go ask those ppl for your computer issue.

Recruiter of the day: "Hi [...] I think you will be very interested in <random startup name>. You will work on Digital Projects."
Oh, really?!? I thought I would wrote code on paper!

Just got a free Raspberry Pi 3 B+ when I bought another. So I have one without a purpose. Any cool ideias?

I think I've finally realized something:
my boss does not actually listen to me.

Quite often during out weekly conference calls, he asks me questions about things I had just covered. I always assumed he couldn't hear because a) i'm rather quiet, and b) freeconferencecall.com bloody sucks.

But it happens for written things, too. I type an update on something in Slack, and an hour later he asks me for an update on it. I always assumed (likely correctly) that he has nearly zero reading comprehension. He writes like a 5th grader and only remembers a few nouns and one verb from anything he reads. But I swear he actively skips reading anything I write.

Now, however, I have frigign' proof that he ignores me. We have both been trying to get ahold of {Clover contractor} via email for months. We have gotten three replies, but twice scheduling prevented setting up a meeting, and once I simply missed the email amongst the flood of log spam I haven't been allowed to address.

I have asked the boss multiple times for the guy's phone number -- in emails, in Slack, and in front of everyone during our weekly conference calls -- and he has totally ignored me every. single. time.

Here's a transcript of my seventh(!) attempt:

Boss [2:13 PM]
Have you and {Clover contractor} met yet? If not make it happen. Stop letting it not happen. GIve specific dates and times. {Clover contractor} let's talk Tuesday 2pm or Wednesday 4pm which works better for you.

Root [2:14 PM]
For the seventh and last time, give me his phone number.
Getting ahold of him via email has not worked.

Boss [2:14 PM]
I am sendning one more, from that I want you to make the meeting happen asap.

Root [2:14 PM]
if i call him, setting up a meeting will be _easy_
Give me his phone number and I will handle this.

It is now 3:00pm and I haven't gotten a response.

Either he doesn't want it to happen, wants me to fail for some reason, or he's totally fucking oblivious. Yet ofc it's me who earns all of the blame when this meeting doesn't happen, and I'm likely to get yelled at in front of everyone, fucking again.

I'm really beginning to hate this guy.

I can't wait to walk out on him and watch the company come crashing down in my absence. It'll be sad to watch, but bloody hell does he deserve it for his arrogant incompetence.

I'm sorry. I don't mean it. This is too dark. 😂

Ok so for the first time (doing web dev since a few years) I got this customer who insists to work via TeamViewer on the phone with me doing css edits live. It's a mess and extremely stressful. I told him I don't work like that and today I officially put a stop in this. He's saying that all the other developers are working for him in the same way and that by doing 4 hours sessions of live css edits by the pixel they save time.

Guys, what the fuck are you doing?

10 hours a Day :)

You know you're gonna have a good day when #1 ranter updoots all your stuff 😁

Meanwhile, at the @Microsoft booth… by @LinusTech

There's a girl in my team : smart, caring , beautiful, I have a huge crush on her. We have rotating oncall policy in team. Next week she's on call, followed by me N2N week. Yesterday she asked me : ARE YOU AFTER ME ? I was going to say : YES !!!! Do you feel the same way ? Then it hit me suddenly 😢, I just said yeah, I am !
fml 😣

TLDR; My 2TB HDD got wiped in one fell swoop by a 9-year old child.

You know... I've never been too great about keeping backups. Even to this day, I only keep one or two local backups and nothing on the "cloud".

So this was about 5 years ago. At the time, I was living together with my girlfriend - who would later become my wife. She had a son from a previous relationship, who at the time was 9 years old.

I had a small desk in the living room of our one-bedroom apartment, that I used for my computer, which has been a laptop for a long time now. One unfortunate thing about the layout of the apartment was that the wall plug near my desk was attached to a light switch.

I had a 2TB external hard drive - with its own power cable - plugged into my laptop. Then, things started to move in slow motion... The GF's son comes inside from playing, my GF asks him to turn off the light. He reaches over, and shuts off power to my laptop - and the external hard drive.

He must have hit that switch at JUST the right fucking time. The laptop ran on battery, no big deal. The hard drive, when I powered it back up - was wiped clean. I tried data recovery on it, but the HDD was encrypted, which makes things more complicated.

Needless to say, I was not happy. I never got that data back, but I did learn not to expose my hard drives to 9 year olds. Very dangerous little creatures.

You want to know the best part? He destroyed another hard drive of mine, a few years later. Should I tell that story?

I'm fucking tired of this so called lead developer, lead developer my ass:

- He takes two days to complete a simple task and he dares to ask me why I extended the deadline of this freaking complex feature I need to build.

- He does a half-assed job when completes a task, no validation of data, no well informative message when exceptions are th thrown ...

- He assigns me his tasks although I already have tons and we need to release soon.

- I take care of developing and maintaining 60% of the APIs and I implemented the most complex of features and he dares to always say that my code can be optimized in a vague way, never mentioning what exactly is he talking about, and never telling me beforehand, he always does it during team meetings where another thing is being discussed.

- He presents the app to the whole company and at the end doesn't give credit where it's due, no " thank you for being part of this or helping build this" even if I built most of that shit, instead he says he's disappointed in me ... WTF! What did you fucking do to build this to be disappointed in me? I'm the fucking disappointed one here !!

- He fucking keeps preaching practices that he doesn't follow or he finds workarounds to skip them while the rest of the team follows them.

- He's like "I'm only taking care of this task to help you out?!" .... wtf! I have nothing to do with that fucking task, how are you helping me! You just keep fucking lazing around when we need to be finishing features asap.

Thank God I don't expect anything from you, I get enough credit from my boss who expresses how impressed he's with my job.

I used to buy routers and see if they were dd-wrt flashable afterwards.

Just bought a router based on flashability.

Flashing dd-wrt now so that I don't have any proprietary bullshit onto the device with controls my Internet 😍

Yay for open sourceness!

Now I just hope that the flashing won't fail 😅

All Hail WSL !

In web technologies lab.

Friend copied some php code from some website and saved it.
Tries to run it and it just prints whatever he wrote.
After thinking for like half an hour he calls me.

Friend: hey u know php right? Why my code is not running?

I check the code in the editor and everything looks fine except he saved his php code with an extension .txt 😑 😑

Pigeon programming: managers who used to be Devs come to 'have a look' at the code, take a crap all over everything, and then leave.

You are not an engineer yet before your project comes into your dream!

I wanted a computer for my Christmas. Must have been 1987 and I just have been about 8.

A few days before Xmas my aunt gave me a card with £5 in it. I asked my dad “dad, if I was getting a computer I could use the £5 to buy a game”

My dad explained to me that we couldn’t afford it and maybe next year.

Woke up the next morning to a shiny new Commodore 64 AND my own little tv.

Never been happier.

Got PHP Internship interview lined up tomorrow...
First ever real interview...big step for young me
Wish me luck guys

I'm 13 years old self-taught programmer! If you had the option to learn and discover the tech field at this age, would you do that?

Atom or Visual Studio code?

What the hell is this? What was I doing? I'm done for today...

Seeing articles and stories and rants here of other devs gives me anxiety when they mention CS concepts and algorithms and stuff. My college teaches IT and not CS, so none of that more complex stuff. I begin to fear my hiring potential without that knowledge.

Luckily, there's online resources everywhere.

Helium walks into a bar.
Barman: We don't serve gases
Helium does not react.

A collaborative devRant poem by devRanters. [more details]