During a heat wave, the basement is the place to be when you don't have air conditionning.

I got to code in a huge basement (formerly a dance room) with lots of couchs, and a nearby Wifi repeater.

And since it's the basement with no elevator, no one disturb me.

My mother used to code a good 30 years ago (embedded development for plane engines), but nowadays always fear doing something wrong on her computer/smartphone.

It's a bit depressing to see how someone who used to be a developer is now so fearful of computers.

On the plus side, she is very respective of my time, and will wait 2/3 weeks for me to come home to fix a simple thing, and generally don't bother me with things she can do herself, once I explain to her how to do it.

Last time was cleaning laptop fans. Seeing how you need to disassemble half of it to clean that, I can understand anyone not wanting to do it.

New year resolution: resume a personal project I put aside for the last 5 years, and keep at it for a while.

5/6 years ago I was pissed that no mobile game uses touch interface to detect "spells" being drawn on the screen and decided to have a go at it. I remember a game of the 90s doing that with the mouse, which was super cool at the time.

I had a working (but ugly) game, but the last 20% to publish the game was more than my motivation allowed at the time and I let it rot.

Let's see if I can get it done this time.

"Google does it". I hate that sentence. It's always the beginning of an unreasonable expectation.

Perhaps if we had as much devs as Google we could do it too. But we are 2 devs spread over 15 projects, so fuck off.

My biggest dev ambition is to continue supporting and improving the same codebase for at least 5 years.

That codebase is already 6 years old and going strong.

I don't often have reasons to rant, but today is the one.

We had a deadline to finish a project, because today people are being trained on it. I've been working my ass off on it for a year now.

I "finished" about 2 weeks ago, meaning QA could start for real 2 weeks ago. As you can imagine for a project this long, there was bugs. Lots of them.

We did our best to fix most of them, or find work-arounds we could use during the demo.

Let's just say it isn't going great so far. We have several known bugs, which at some point may crash the app, a very low confidence in the fact that it's going to work well.

Oh and obviously the client is one who already use heavily the solution. Today we figured we never tested on a device with 0% disk space. Files are cut partway because of that, and obviously things crash.

I have a feeling there will be yelling sometime soon.

Right now I'm enjoying the calm before the storm, with coffee in hand.

Why do people still continue to promise dates to clients, after me telling them for 5 years not to do that?

We are a 2 devs team, with 11 apps on 2 platforms, 2 back-ends (one is legacy) and obviously our marketing site, which doubles up as e-commerce. We just can't promise anything, because any emergency reduce our development bandwith for new features either to 50% or 0%. There are so much known bugs it's not funny anymore, and we don't even have time to solve those.

To add insult to injury, at the beginning of the month, the SaaS provider for our legacy back-end (which have not been maintained for 2 years now) decided we had to update to PHP7.1 before 1st October. If we don't do anything, on monday this thing is broken. I hate that thing, and I hate having to maintain it even though I was promised I wouldn't have to ever have anything to do on it.

Monday will be "fun"...

I just wanted to develop a cool webapp-controlled lighting for my bar.

Next things I know, there is electronics scattered everywhere, 2 multimeters to find what the fck is wrong with a PSU not outputting 1/100 of the current it's supposed to, said PSU opened on my desk, and I'm trying to find a capacitor online because there isn't any fcking electronics store selling spare parts anymore in my city.

Context:
- PSU means Power Supply Unit, in this case a computer one.
- PSU was given by a friend and is out of warranty
- the total consumption for all LEDs is 24A @ 5V consumption. A refurbished PSU is ideal for that
- that PSU is rated 2A @ 5V on the stand-by, which is perfect to power a Raspberry Pi. The issue is that there is a sharp voltage drop as soon as you try to use more than 20mA.

Skipping unit tests and documentation ...

I'm starting to recover after not writing a single test for the first 6 years of my professional carrer (wasn't taught in school, didn't know where to start, man I should have really found a mentor earlier), and barely any documentation (I was the sole developer for several years, and just didn't get into the habbit).

Unit testing is still not a habit, but now I have the first tests to serve as an example and an idea what/how to test at least, and I try to get every new "framework" function/class at least commented properly.

Wish me luck

Have my projects compile without a single warning.

The road will be long, and deprecation warnings will pounce at me, but I shall prevail.

Why the fuck does Windows still not have a fcking decent package manager?

I hear you "but but but, there is Chocolatey, it's great, try it!". Well yeah if you only want binaries.

But I do need to, you know, develop and compile things, and without includes, code, and a reliable way to produce working binaries from that, it's useless.

Guess who needs to download dependencies one by one, compile them one by one?

Don't get me started on broken MinGW, or the "recommended" way of doing a bat script to have proper includes (what the hell, that's the entire purpose of env variables), or the fact that there is NO convention on where to install things.

After spending the year after graduation trying to do a business with some school friends, that didn't make a dime for a year, I decided to look for a real paying job.

My first step was to go to a hackathon and hack for the week-end. I got involved in not one, but 2 projects: the second was because someone I met and won with at a previous hackathon asked me to, and I finished the first project early. Let's call her "S"

Then comes the end of the hackathon, and after it concludes I muster the courage to go on stage and say that I'm looking for a job, so feel free to chat me up.

No one really came to me for a job, but S came to talk to me about the startup she wants to launch, and how she is looking for a tech guy. I was close to dismiss it, because I was looking for a job paying $$$, but agreed to met so that she could show me her business plan and try to convince me.

Turns out she did convince me, because the business plan was solid, she was very motivated, and had already started validating the idea: there was a real need.

Now there we are, 5 years later, about 10 employees and paying ourselves real salary.

Am I the only one who reads CSS "!important" as "not important", because of the '!'? No matter how many times I read it ....

When you only have to support recent browsers/devices, but then a commercial promises more support of legacy browsers/devices for free.