Debugging: 'cause I'm in too deep, and I'm tryying to keep, up above in my head, instead of going under! ♫

!dev Job hunting: where you can get burnout before even getting a job.

There are still websites that miss the simple, modern UX feature of saving form state. No, it's not 'push a button to apply the filter' anymore, it should be 'tick the box, slide the slider' and the state gets persisted immediately.

Or something else: perform a search, apply filters, and the original search is lost. Tf, man? lol.

This just shows that some places aren't investing.

How do you compete and distinguish yourself as a freelancer from the other super-experienced freelancers? To me it seems almost impossible to get a foot in unless you're a niche expert, and even then.

Say you have 4 years dev experience. How the heck can you match up against someone with 15 years experience or someone with 5 years + several successful client projects? Or someone who's flawless at Full-Stack and you're just a mere beginner?

It seems to me you have to be super strong at selling yourself.

Accurate video on what dev life at the office is like.

https://youtube.com/shorts/...

GRAARGHHHHHHHHHHHHH POOHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

That's just my frustration with SourceTree.

This is a story all about how my SourceTree got twisted upside down, and I'd like to take a minute to just sit right there and tell you how I pushed my code to my repository on GitHub:

Iiiiiin my SourceTree, born and raised, I checked out my branch, tried to push but SourceTree said: "See ya later!" (denied/authentication failed). Sssoooo I told myself I was not going to use ChatGPT to solve this problem. I was going to use my Medior skillzzzz1!1!1!Oen and so I did solve it, but what a fucking hassle!

First I tried to remove all credentials from SourceTree and from my system, then I tried to add a fine-grained PAT, and finally... someone mentioned on StackOverflow that it was the git version that was oudated. So, SourceTree has an outdated embedded git, even on the latest version. Wtf?! Anyway, so I let it choose system git (which uses the latest git version).

And now it works!

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

Men, fak dis shit. Companies want highly experienced developers, even as Junior dev. Hellooooo, I'm medium-skilled. lol. I started out lacking some skills, then moved onto vendor-locked companies who monopolized and minimized my learning time, ending up learning jack shit in the process. That's how you get stuck. lol.

And on we go.

Linkedin takes up 4 GB RAM? Tf, man. lol

Ah, culture fit. It's funny that what highly determines you getting the job is how well you get along with the team in the warm-up phase (meeting the team). If in a casual conversation with the guys you already clash personalities, they will find a way to push you out.

I realized that now...

You are considered a junior developer when you need 'a lot of hand-holding'. Now, I can figure out most things on my own, but how do you distinguish between 'needs too much hand-holding and therefore is a junior' and 'does ok and therefore is a medior'?

For example, I can do well on basic things and getting projects set up, but then I might need more help if errors truly become too cryptic or difficult to solve and I haven't found solutions. A few examples here:
- having messed up the git branches and releases so much that you need someone with a deep knowledge and troubleshooting of git to set the situation straight
- spending a week on trying to figure out why Azure doesn't want to successfully build your super custom build and it takes ages to figure it out because it requires in-depth Docker, linux knowledge and stellar, MIT-level troubleshooting and analytical skills

And so, someone who needs help with these is considered a junior?

How do you really identify a junior? Seems vague.

You know, I'm getting tired of this HR-speak in job applications, specifically this:

- [tech] has no secrets for you

What, really? So I am the undisputed and absolute expert of - let's say - JavaScript? Do you know how long it takes to master that so that it holds no secrets? It even holds secrets to decade-long experts! The same goes for most other technologies in software development.

Sigh. Hhhhh. Ree.

It's hilarious how employers disguise the concept of 'big pile of horseshit and stress' as 'challenge'/'opportunity'.

Give. Me. A. Break.

How has your experience as a freelancer been? Ups, downs, etc.

boy running laps around garden

What is your method of dealing with states in state machines? In programming, we often come across situations where we have to model states in our head as to not get the programming wrong, e.g. in my case right now:

You have a tabular webform that gets filled in.
Requirements:
- When the user is able to search the data for a specific value, it should be a cumulative search (e.g.: search for books with "eng" in the language and then with with "19" in the publishing date)

And so the current pseudocode is:
search(e) {
if(!word) {
set(previousState);
}
const searchdata = previousState.filter((row) => row.indexOf(word) != -1);
// but wait, what if I say: searchdata = searchdata.filter() for cumulative search? Oops, I can't, because it doesn't exist at that moment yet. What if I create another variable?

setState(data: searchdata);
}

Current bug:
- when deleting characters from the search field, it doesn't filter cumulatively; it just filters the data according to the current filter.

It's things like these that get me stuck sometimes.

900 idle tabs on phone. Sync to laptop browser. Enormous file trees and indexing. 47 GB RAM used. I'm really pushing it. lmfao

!rant Writing code in a barebones text editor so that I am forced to think more about my code and debug deeper. Hah! No more fancy IDE's while learning (for now)!

The latest and greatest bullshit at the workplace: when you're asked to be an 'ambassador'. This really just translates to: 'take on more work for free'.

Whenever management approaches you with 'honorable extra role', immediately ask how it's compensated and definitely don't do it for no extra benefits (a raise should be default).

Don't fall into the trap.

Team 'leads' who consistently introduce scope creep are so fucking annoying. How can they get the basics of project management wrong? It leads to more, constant, work stress ("why didn't you finish this on time?" Well maybe because you keep reviewing PR's last minute and instead of sticking to requirements, you ad-hoc make me 'fix' things that weren't even there).

Apparently all companies are now a 'cutting-edge, digital transformation partner'. lmao. lol.

!rant https://www.imgopt.com/ (known as smush.it!) is the online image optimization tool of choice.

I came across it when reading one of my React books. I hope it proves useful to people.

You know what I find truly despicable? Consultants who grossly over-sell worthless digital products.

Take a guy who throws together 2 text boxes and a list in Figma and calls it: "The disruptive platform that will solve all your problems at once today!". Are you fucking kidding me? Such an insult to people's intelligence.

There is a saying: "A salesman will sell you a dirty cloth for the price of a house".

The average meeting: "I think that's a really great idea. Let's circle back on this and take a 60k view, leveraging the low-hanging fruit so we can identify you championed this technology".

Seriously? Championed? As if the other bs language weren't enough. And this is language that they use to convince clients. "My consultant championed A.I.". Are you fucking kidding me? It sounds ridiculous. Needless to say, we lost that client.

Shitty jobs and not staying up to date make you stale. Probably having to find a new job, my skills are barely updated and now I find myself in a shitty situation. Going to have to do my best now.

Don't let a demanding, shitty job cause you to stay behind! I can't stress it enough. Dev skills are transferrable, employer dev skills mostly aren't, especially if you are tied to their brand.

This is the nth software company where you have some asshole who for some reason (probably because they hate you) plays blame-games when it comes to code reviews, when they themselves screwed up in the first place (I know there's git blame, but..).

The guy writes shitty code quickly because the manager asked, then I take my time and patience to make it better, and in the code review they shit on me for things THEY wrote badly? Wtf man. What kind of logic is that? Fucked up people. And then putting shit in bold and exclamation marks (wtf?).

Is it just me or have you also seen this behavior with your colleagues?

Putting people on too many projects (6 projects) is bad because when it comes to reviewing your work (let's say 30 x 200 lines of code), they will spend 5 minutes on it, 10 tops, give a shitty, lazy review and then they get back to their projects.

This is just pure mismanagement. You're stressing your employees to get everything done, the 'quality' is then spread so thin everything turns to shit.

Has anyone you know used A.I. at work to write an e-mail for them? It's ridiculous.

Instead of boring HTTP error pages, some APIs now return a meme image. Wtf lol.

What modern software development feels like:

https://youtube.com/watch/...

They want perfect quality, perfect speed, no errors whatsoever, no bugs, all the while bothering us.

WAV is Mr. Bloat. Extract WAV 48 KHz from an mp4 video = 6 GB .wav file output.

More efficient is to just use ffmpeg. lmao. Result: 1:1, 500 MB. Couldn't be more efficient!
ffmpeg -i file.mp4 -vn -acodec mp3 output.mp3