Perhaps as a tip for the junior devs out there, here's what I learned about programming skills on the job:

You know those heavy classes back in college that taught you all about Data Structures? Some devs may argue that you just need to know how to code and you don't need to know fancy Data Structures or Big o notation theory, but in the real world we use them all the time, especially for important projects.

All those principles about Sets, (Linked) lists, map, filter, reduce, union, intersection, symmetric difference, Big O Notation... They matter and are used to solve problems. I used to think I could just coast by without being versed in them.. Soon, mathematics and Big o notation came back to bite me.

Three example projects I worked in where this mattered:
- Massive data collection and processing in legacy Java (clients want their data fast, so better think about the performance implications of CRUD into Collections)
- ReactJS (oh yes, maps and filters are used a lot...)
- Massive data collection in C# where data manipulation results are crucial (union, intersection, symmetric difference,...)
Overall: speed and quality mattered (better know your Big o notation or use a cheat sheet, though I prefer the first)
Yes, the approach can be optimized here, but often we're tied to client constraints, with some room if we're lucky.

I'm glad I learned this lesson. I would rather have skills in my head and in memory than having to look up things and try to understand them all the time.

So, Twitter fired the entire Indian team (or almost, Im not so sure) and one person posted on LinkedIn that went like, "If you've been laid off, just learn something new and Upskill yourself."

Like yeah, no shit Sherlock.

I imagine this is the same kind of people who tell depressed people, "Oh, you're depressed? Just Cheer Up!"

My first contact with an actual computer was the Sinclair ZX80, a monster with 512 bytes of ram (as in 1/2 kbyte)

It had no storage so you had to enter every program every time and it was programmed in basic using key combinations, you could not just write the commands since it did not have memory enough to keep the full text in memory.

So you pressed the cmd key along with one of the letter keys and possibly shift to enter a command, like cmd+p for print and it stored s byte code.

Being a programmer is basically like seeing all the cool tech that you always wanted to work with slip right out of your fucking hands and being replaced by an old system that bad programmers have managed to fuck up completely beyond saving. It’s like watching a bunch of monkeys trying to create a human out of decaying flesh, but when you question them, they look at you weird. It’s like wanting to create all these crazy cool animations and innovative experiences, but you end up spending most of your time trying to get a fucking image to line up correctly in marketing emails. My pride has been stripped from me.

Oh no...

A <FlatList> as a DIRECT child of a <ScrollView>... I mean, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt if you forgot or it was buried in a nested component... but... it's just sitting right in front of you on the same exact component... it's like, did you even test this once and see the warnings?

God these 'affordable' devs truly aren't actually worth it.

They really aren't.

You spend just as much time fixing their clownish mess as you get for "saving money" with their cheap rates.

Another day, another clown dollar in clowntown...

SHEESH

Let us pay homage to a classic quote that is so applicable it hurts:

"Poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine."

This cup of coffee is my only comfort in life.

Kinda rant, kinda not.

At the start of this year all of my colleagues left company beacause of low raise. This process took like 3 months. After that I automatically became most senior in our team with 8 months of experience in my current company and 3 years total. It was rough days and still is. One downside is some days I can't even touch my own development tasks. Sometimes I ask for other developers help and assign them tasks. I'm evolving into team lead I guess. Yeah, more like junior team lead. But after few weeks I got a call from our cto and he told me they are raising my salary even I had a raise just 3 months ago. And he told me it will be raised again soon. Even my workload increased I'm still kinda having fun. I think its a bit early for me to be good at this role but I'm learning how to manage people :) Well, at least I got a raise

Does anyone here work for an agency that's successfully adopted a 4 day working week? If yes then I'd be curious as to how you made it work

I decided to go freelance/contracting. Headhunters keep pitching me permament roles (and I love watching them run out of pitch lines :D )

Headhunter: This job can't do your asking salary, but can offer career development.

Me: Already did that. was Engineer, then Architect, then CTO. I'm actually stepping back to be an Engineer.

Headhunter: Ok well, in this job you can do things start to finish, see them through to the end.

Me: I actually get bored after a while. Prefer change.

Headhunter: Well this place has a great culture and fun atmosphere!

Me: It's an insurance company mate...

"Why did you bring Wagyu beef to the meeting?"

"Because the calendar description said: Engineers should proactively add value for our steak holders"

(True story -- They told me to do what management instructs, without correcting anyone and without asking questions. And I love playing that game!)

"Hey mate, how are you doing?"
*deep sigh* "It's tough, but I'm managing"

I don't think it's a coincidence that the word managing is often used as a synonym for "Technically alive, but not in a state where I can progress personally, or add any value to my environment".

Now imagine packaging that desolate self-perpetuating feeling of apathy into a farce, propped up with practiced smiles and meet-speak, and calling that daily routine a "career".

that one legendary guy who cranks out code and builds insane features. PMs (product management) love him because he builds features in several months which 10 devs together couldn't have built in the same time (so they say), features that are loved by customers as well, become their new standard and that have saved our company's asses in the past.
features are really awesome, performant and have very few bugs (compared to the rest of the software シ).
but this guy seems to live for this job. he also works at weekends, at unholy times of day and night and even in his holidays (he doesn't care that this is actually illegal, in terms of employee's rights, and he wouldn't listen to his superiors, no matter what they tell him)
so far, so good - except that he will probably die of some stroke or something very soon due to this lifestyle.
but it must be an absolute pain in the ass to work with him, as long as you're a developer (or his superior).
he lives in his own world and within the software, his features are also his own world. since the different modules interact with each other, sometimes you would be assigned a bug that might have its cause in some interaction of your and his module. talk with him about it? forget it. he wouldn't answer most devs who contacted him for some reason. ever. fix it in his module yourself? might happen that he just reverts your changes to his module without comments. so some bugs would lie on your desk forever because theoretically you know what would need to be done but if you cannot reach out into HIS world, there's no way to fix it. also - his code might be good in terms of performance and low bug numbers. but it seems to be hard to work on that code for everybody else but him.
furthermore, he is said to be really rude. he is no team player, but works on a software that is worked on by a huge team.
PMs think he's a genius, just a great dev, but they don't understand that other devs need to clean up the mess behind or around him.
everyone who's been his superior so far recommends to get him fired, but the company wouldn't fire him because they don't want to lose his talent. he can just do what he wants. he can even refuse to work on certain things because he thinks they are boring and he is not interested in them. devs seem to hate him, but my boss said, they are probably also a bit jealous because of his talent. i think, he's not wrong. :)
i haven't actually met him so far or was actually "forced" to deal with him, but i've never heard so many contrastive things about one person, the reputation of his, let's say vibrant personality really hurries ahead. he must be a real genius, after all i've heard so far, like he lives in the code. i must say i'm a bit curious but also somewhat afraid of meeting him one day.
do you also have such a guy at your company?

So, my wife got this new PR job where she sometimes gets called in the middle of the fucking night because some jackoff in Singapore said or did some shit.
Since "husbands that work deep into the night get cheated on by their wives", and I believe in equal gender rights, I thought it would be a good opportunity to watch the new episode of the series we watch together. By my fucking self.
Is that how it feels to cheat on someone?

The Manager kept masturbating over "low hanging fruit".

The apples on the bottom of The Product have all been picked.

The apples at the top are starting to rot.

The Manager masturbated a bit more over the low hanging fruit.

The bottom of The Product is now so slippery with Manager Cum that the brave engineers can't reach the top anymore.

Time to bring my axe to work.

💙💛 oopsie

I'm getting tired of coding. Not really the coding part, the dealing with people who tell me what to code and why part. Sort of considering making a move into a scrum master or PM role just so I can get fired when I say "No, we're not changing everything they've been working on in the middle of the sprint" or maybe "Yeah, no we're not going to put in a bunch of tickets to change the UI/UX without first talking to the designers, because that's what they do. Yes, I realize we aren't Facebook, but do you realize we "compete" with them because a huge number of people will compare our usability to theirs? (even if just subconsciously)"

Most successful project... What is success?

My first computer at 8 years old was a Commodore64. There was no internet yet, so I used the manual to learn about BASIC and assembly, sound and sprite registers, and created a pretty elaborate RPG. Mostly text, some sprite art, soldered some eeprom cartridges, optimized the code. Spent almost a year on it. An enthousiast magazine picked up on it, revised, QA'ed & published the game, sold a little over 10k samples. I got ƒ0.25 per sale, and I was completely overwhelmed how much candy one could buy for ƒ2500 ($2k corrected for inflation).

More recent:
I was employee #3 at my current company, started when it was worth nothing and the website redirected to a set of Google Forms containing all the logic. I wrote a large part of the first, monolithic backend.

Now there's teams in a dozen countries, and an estimated revenue of a quarter billion.

So obviously my current "project" is more successful.

Still, my current job sucks, the company turned into a desolate passion-free wasteland full of soulless fake hipster zombies and managers who seem to derive sexual pleasure from holding extremely ineffective meetings, endlessly rubbing their calendars together in their bureaucratic orgy of ineptitude.

So, I'm more proud of my C64 game.

Python, the language, is fine.

Some aspects of it are even kind of elegant.

But Python, the VIRTUALENV ANACONDA BLEEDING ASSHOLE WHEELING PIPPING FUCKING TOOLCHAIN IS MORE RAGE INDUCI̵N̵G̵ THAN ANY O̶͔̔̄T̶̊̆ͅH̵̥͒Ȇ̶̥̓R̷̹̳̎̒ ̴M̴o̸d̵u̷l̸e̶N̴o̷t̴F̸o̸u̸n̶d̶E̵r̷r̴o̵r̴:̵:̶̼̳̙̾̈ ̷̧̲̗̓́̾͂N̶̙̆ó̵̱ ̷͔̔m̴͇̔ơ̸͕ď̷̲ư̷̢ḻ̷̉ê̷̼ ̸̗̓n̷̝̔a̷̙̓m̶̖̄è̷̡d̸̳̋ ̷̝̍ ̷͎̚'̷̻̌ḋ̷͔i̴͓͌ṡ̵͍t̵̘̽ṵ̵̊t̷̹͝i̴̛̦l̴̒͜s̸̩͝.̸̱̚u̵̪͆t̵̥͑ỉ̸͍l̵͚͠'̶͚͘

Be more passive

I always get involved in everything, at every company. Not to further my career through ass-kissing and overperforming.

I regularly piss off people. When C-level has a discussion about strategy, I'm usually ahead of them, ask too many questions, criticize every detail they've missed, cause frustration by making them look incompetent.

Can't help it, when I see retards destroy a great product I have to intervene.

Some people appreciate it. I often defend both devs and end users, when others don't dare speak up.

But fuck it, I'm getting older. I'm gonna coast a bit more. Sit back, relax.

If a product manager doesn't prepare enough tasks — that's cool, I still have a Factorio savegame to work on.

If another team designs an incredibly stupid feature — they'll discover the issues eventually by themselves. Maybe I'll warn once, just to be nice.

*Pours another chocolate milk*

Also gonna spend at least 4h/d with my daughter. She's a better human than most of my coworkers, and the work we do using her Legos is honestly more important for humanity than the Jira backlog.

Type letter "w" in wife's browser

"What is the ratio of open to closed doors in the world right now?"

"Why doesn't my baby molt her skin all at once while she grows?"

"Will Python help me to make a robot friend for my toddler daughter"

"Where do I buy tensors for building robot brains"

"Why don't we solve aging population and climate change by not vaccinating boomers"

Me: ... "Seriously, why can't you just watch hardcore porn, like a normal person"

Client: We are tired of having to go only to specific users to get things actioned, we need everyone to be given admin access so that we can get work done efficiently

Dev: Highly do not recommend that *outlines the likely consequences*.

Client: We don’t care, we DEMAND you do this. We’ll make sure everyone is careful.

Dev: Ok but I warned you. Please submit this request in writing.

Client: Ok, not sure why you would need that. I told you everything would be fine.

*Not even two days later*

Client: HELP!!! OUR DATA IS NOW COMPLETELY MESSED UP. WE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT WOULD HAVE CAUSED THIS IT’S AS IF EVERYONE IS RANDOMLY DOING WHATEVER THEY WANT HOWEVER THEY WANT IN ORDER TO SUITE THEIR OWN NEEDS. IT MAKES NO SENSE HOW THIS HAS OCCURRED. I TOLD EVERYONE SPECIFICALLY TO NOT CAUSE ISSUES!!! WE NEED THIS FIXED A.S.A.P!!!!!!

Dev: …

*Romantic candlelit dinner*

GF: "What are you thinking about, my love?"

Me: "The chocolate custard always seems to behave differently under stress than vanilla. It has a lower base viscosity, but a similar shear thickening. I was wondering whether anyone has ever made a database of all custard brands and flavors together with their viscosities"

My brain: *Oh fuck, that's not what I'm supposed to say during a romantic dinner*

GF: "Do you wanna check whether we can find a cheap second hand viscometer.... wait.... no.... you'd need a rheometer for that, right? Do you think we could build one ourselves?"

Me: *blinks in awe*

Even after 15 years, I'm still just puzzled, she really fucking is my soulmate

Licensing is so freaking weird and stupid.

I mean, I just forked this repo with an Apache license, so I could update a .json file.

"You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files"

Plain JSON allows no comments.

I'm going to jail.

A few years ago I would whine, complain and rant about shitty software, which I knew could be so much better than it was. But I didn't yet write software of my own.

Now I complain about shitty libraries, API's and users. Not much has changed really. And every time I write code, I curse myself, and whoever made this trashpile I have to work with. I curse the user to the moon and beyond for using the program wrong. Funny thing is, exactly the thing I was complaining about (input validation, see earlier rant) is also exactly what no more than 5 minutes after release, a user fucked up with. The bot just does not respond at this point. But fuck these braindead retards for users.

In a few years I expect myself to be complaining about shitty compilers and buffer overflows, segmentation violations, bad coding style (don't make your program a fucking colander kthx), and so on.

Next decade I expect myself to be complaining about physics itself, and why the universe is governed by the laws it's governed by. Whoever this God is, he's a fucking retard. Funny thing is, the signs for it are already there. Electron theory! If only those electrons were positrons, then the math would check out properly. Instead of negative electrons traveling from negative to positive, we'd have positive positrons traveling from positive to negative. At least from what I understand so far, this is still a decade away after all.

The point I'm trying to make is that nothing changes, only my understanding of the world around me does, as I tumble further and further down the rabbit hole. Sometimes I wish I had taken the blue pill... Either complain about others' software or perhaps not give a shit at all. Become one of those filthy users I now despise.

To replace humans with robots, because human beings are complete shit at everything they do.

I am a chemist. My alignment is not lawful good. I've produced lots of drugs. Mostly just drugs against illnesses. Mostly.

But whatever my alignment or contribution to the world as a chemist... Human chemists are just fucking terrible at their job. Not for a lack of trying, biological beings just suck at it.

Suiting up for a biosafety level lab costs time. Meatbags fuck up very often, especially when tired. Humans whine when they get acid in their face, or when they have to pour and inhale carcinogenic substances. They also work imprecisely and inaccurately, even after thousands of hours of training and practice.

Weaklings! Robots are superior!

So I replaced my coworkers with expensive flow chemistry setups with probes and solenoid fluid valves. I replaced others with CUDA simulations.

First at a pharma production & research lab, then at a genetics lab, then at an Industrial R&D lab.

Many were even replaced by Raspberry Pi's with two servos and a PH meter attached, and I broke open second hand Fischer Sci spectrophotometers to attach arduinos with WiFi boards.

The issue was that after every little overzealous weekend project, I made myself less necessary as well.

So I jumped into the infinitely deep shitpool called webdev.

App & web development is kind of comfortable, there's always one more thing to do, but there's no pressure where failure leads to fatalities (I think? Wait... do I still care?).

Super chill, if it weren't for the delusion that making people do "frontend" and "fullstack" labor isn't a gross violation of the Geneva Convention.

Quickly recognizing that I actually don't want to be tortured and suffer from nerve damage caused by VueX or have my organs slowly liquefied by the radiation from some insane transpiling centrifuge, I did what any sane person would do.

Get as far away from the potential frontend blast radius as possible, hide in a concrete bunker.

So I became a data engineer / database admin.

That's where I'm quarantining now, safely hiding from humanity behind a desk, employed to write a MySQL migration or two, setting up Redis sorted sets, adding a field to an Elastic index. That takes care of generating cognac and LSD money.

But honestly.... I actually spend most of my time these days contributing to open source repositories, especially writing & maintaining Rust libraries.

So today I had a discussion with my manager that I have been working unpaid overtime everyday (close to 5 hours overtime). She responds with saying that I am quite young (24) and these are my golden years of learning and I should be working overtime for atleast 10 years of my life during the start of my career to learn stuff because I will regret it later. Idk how am I supposed to react to that. She maybe correct, and I do work overtime sometimes out of my own interest but this is getting way too much and pushing it. any suggestions about how do I deal with such a manager?

It's 3:30AM and I'm working.

If you work at night, no one can interrupt you.
If you sleep during the day, you can't attend any zoom meetings.

Also, at night you can work naked, and drink on the job without any judgement.

All problems solved.

Dear Microsoft,

Thanks for not completely fucking up Github. At least you didn't integrate Office365, allow only Azure deployments, or force downloading repos through OneDrive or something.

But like most developers, I don't deal well with changes to familiar interfaces.

So please.... STOP FUCKING TWEAKING THE BUTTON PLACEMENTS AND TEXTS ALL OVER THE WEBSITE.

(or at least send me a bottle of cognac and a box of chocolates before every UI experiment, so I can deal with it emotionally. I'm a very sensitive boy, you know).

The disaster starts with the following sentence: "so marketing had an idea..."