It's been already for some weeks that I feel some pain in my tendons close to the elbows and also in the hands and wrists. A friend of mine that is doctor says I should get a better keyboard and change my sitting position.

So here I am, asking for some suggestions for keyboards. Mechanical ones are maybe too noisy for the office, perhaps one with the red switches could work. Any options that are not much more than 70€?

Lately I'm running into quite some negative atmosphere in meetings. Raise your hand if you think we all should improve our soft skills.

For example, we had a meeting with our client the other day. It was supposed to be only with the two most senior guys in the team and a couple of the less senior (just because one of us knows better the maths of it and the other one knows better about the limitations of the hardware), but in the end some other team members also joined.

In this meeting, we wanted to discuss an issue that had to be fixed. Quite a complex one. The main speaker from the clients, even though also technical, was having a hard time trying to explain properly to us what the issue was about. He was doing quite well, but it was complex enough. Well, one of the guys in my team kept interrupting him to ask very detailed questions (that would not help us understand it better, not until we got first the big picture). When I say "interrupting" I mean that the guy would half shout a question in the middle of a word from the client.

The client was patient and tried to answer, but our nice guy would keep answering back in a "gosh you really don't have a clue" tone.

We muted our microphone and one of the senior Devs asked the guy to please let them conduct the meeting, and that if he had such questions, he could mute the micro and ask them to us, so we knew we might have to ask about that.

Good. We unmute the microphone and 2 minutes after, our star guy goes in again and he even directs his question to someone else than who was talking (from the client).

Client gets pissed - I mean, I taught 12-16 year old teenagers for years and I don't think I would have hold it together for as long as the client did - and from then on all the meeting went in a really negative tone. Ending up with a call from the client to our senior guy to finish explaining in private the thing.

Well, our friend the interrupting guy not only got amazingly mad at the senior guy that (in private and constructively) gave him some advice on this kind of meetings. No, he also ended up spiraling into a close to insulting chain of emails towards the client -with his and our colleagues in copy- when he needed some specification.

Interrupting guy is 35yo and has been working with clients quite long. Our HR department still doesn't think we all should get communication workshops or something

What do you think about this?
https://www.tuxedocomputers.com

I will need a new laptop soon and I want to go back to Linux. Is it worth it to go for something in there, or is it better to get a any other machine?

All these maths and research and autonomous driving shit are OK, but in my next life I want to be Soilwork's drummer and have some big fun.

You owe me, Universe

At the airport with the missus going back home, making time in the duty free. One of the people working on it asked a very dry "what are you looking for?" with no salutation whatsoever. I was this👉👈close to answer "a new job!"

Looking for eReaders. I had one years ago, but I forgot it the first time I left the country and it doesn't work any more. I read near to one hour a working day, so I'm not that heavy of a reader, but I mainly read while standing in the subway and the books I choose are getting too heavy.

Anyone using Kobo readers? I would rather get theirs to Amazon's... but it seems everything is more comfortable using the kindles.

Please, debate :)

!rant

Some days ago I finished "Ray tracing in a weekend" (Peter Shirley) and I'm learning a lot :D

In the new year I will start with "Ray tracing the next week", but there are still some things I want to tackle before that (improve code quality, optimize... it's my first project that is bigger than a codeforces problem solution, a part from the projects at work).

Any sources of wisdom and recommendations are welcome!!

Here I am, learning how to Excel to help my father in law with some problem he is facing at work. It feels so weird!

I need Christmas break so much... Full on sweets from home (my mother sent me a 7kg package), programming whatever I want with no one to tell me what to do and some quality time with the love ones and myself. Fuck work, we should have Christmas breaks every 2 months at least

I was hired with the promise of being able to grow by doing as a software developer. After one year of reminding them almost once a week that I wasn't being able to do any development, but put in a position where I was somehow a Product Owner, today we had a meeting where I was suggested as a PO for real for next year. Funnily enough, our manager laughed and said that he knew I didn't want that. But still... no other name came up.

Sometimes, even if you are capable of doing something and doing it right, if that's not what you want to do, you should do it wrong. Otherwise, if there is the need for someone to do that thing you hate but can do, you will end up being the one that does it.

PO my balls...

Any good "CMake for newbies/dummies" guide that doesn't require 2 hours of readikg or watching to be able to create a VS solution using CMake for a simple project??

Testers in my team have been told like 1000 times to follow the style guides that we all follow. That's not that big a deal. The big deal is that they were put on this project without having any mathematics background when the project is all about geometric stuff. So after me as a developer having to put so many hours to explain to them why the tests are not covering the requirements or why the tests are red because they are initializing the data completely wrong, I ask them pretty please to do the checks for the coding style and I have already been 4 hours reviewing code because not only I have to go through the maths and really obscure testing code to ensure that the tests are correct, but every line I have to write at least 4 or 5 style corrections. And some are not even about the code being clean, but about using wrong namespaces or not sticking to the internal data types. For fuck shake, this is embedded software and has to obey to certain security standards...

Any other 30+ year old developer that didn't start the dev career too long ago and gets completely depressed when surfing on Quora? Reading 100 about "developer career being over after 30" when mine started at 29 isn't too good a motivation

A colleague and I joined a couple of friends for dinner and my colleague was explaining how our company reacted to him showing them another offer he got. Just by thinking I am being too slow at looking for another job (even if it's to negotiate better conditions) my back got so tense is hurting...

Doing home office today, so I started to work 1 hour and a half earlier than usually. Where is my daylight, Munich?!?!

We are around 12 people working in a big project as externals consultants for another company ... For the last month all you can see people doing in the office is taking online courses, looking for other jobs, and similar.

Man do I need to grab some piece of wooden furniture for when we got the iceberg!

I work in a team where I am the only person not belonging to the main company. We have been a year and 3 months working together and they still don't realise that I have very restricted access to many of the things related to the project. So every now and then, something breaks and we have a meeting where they all tell me how disappointed they are at me because I was responsible for that and then I try to show them how I could not possibly even access the information where it is stated that I was responsible for that thing. Or that that thing even existed.

And then, the move the conversation to why they won't pay for my ramping up. This is not ramping up, assholes, this is you allowing me to access the information I need to do my job as you want!

I really don't know what to do... Other than looking for another job