*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

1 year and a half ago, I quit the job where I spent almost 6 years; My first job after that was as a freelancer for certain company here in colombia, but after sometime I learned that freelancing for local companies is not well payed at all, so I decided to try to work with toptal(a pre-vetted freelancer platform)

So the process included a first interview with a HR person, it was a british lady that mopped the floor with me(she wasn't rude at all but I felt horrible) 'cuz I couldn't speak english good enough, and then I was rejected... Some time down the line I created a rant for anyone that were willing to speak sometime to practice english conversations. @jesustricks and @orhun answered and in fact I got to speak with them.

@amyshackles spoke with me too, I reached her out over linkedin 😊

Just wanted to say thank you, finally I got a job offer with a nearshore company, you helped me a lot there, speaking with you people gave confidence and more knowledge. Again thank you, love you guys.

PS: you don't have to love me back

Story time!

I worked at a company that was the HQ for a sizable organization for a while, until it was eventually bought out by another company, and then yet another company who was located in the valley.

We were kinda a forgotten office not being the HQ, like most places like that are.

No customers EVER visited our building, few if any people knew we existed even, even our own company. I visited HQ in the valley on a number of occasions and was stalked by the video monitoring system for hours before I was stopped by security and the cops called because nobody believed there as an office outside the valley when I explained why my badge looked different .... (San Jose cops were very nice about it and really pissed at the security team.) But that's another story...

One day people who were never at our office decided (after many meetings without talking to anyone at the office) ... they decided the beige walls at our office didn't match the company colors.

So they took all the generic wall coverings down and painted all the walls an almost imperceptible different color.

So now we had an office with all white(ish) walls and nothing on them. Due to the configuration of the building there were these huge monolithic white walls that looked pretty dumb.

This lasted quite a while so as a joke I printed up and framed (found an old frame, as a former HQ we had lots of stuff lying around) a sign that said:

"This space intentionally left blank."

When the "mediocre hotel room quality art" and posters were scheduled to go up the folks putting the art up skipped that wall thinking the sign was official.

Even the somewhat corporate drone directors, and one VP at our office thought it was so funny, they didn't say a word about it. Word has it back at HQ they assumed it "must be fire code or something" and told the folks hanging the crappy art to skip that wall.

It lasted on that wall for a decade until we moved out of that building. On the last day, everything was moved, but that sign remained. No idea if it is still there or not...

Breakup really kills the mood to work for a long time eh?

I have a multiplayer minesweeper project in the works. It's great, everything is super slick. Using SASS, Node.JS, MVC design, WebGL... It's a super great, modern project and I am very proud of it.

But I just can't continue it. I open my editor and I just ignore it. I play video games, go outside... Anything except code. It hurts to see myself do this.

I have some great designs for it. You're allowed to play anonymously or logged in. VS mode and everything.

I was going to share the discord link when I launched the alpha... But I think maybe I need to start building a community now so that I can gain my motivation back.

Before the breakup I worked on it daily. I was learning new technologies left and right (SASS being the largest, and WebGL is the next frontier)

It hurts to see. Today after I get off work maybe I will try harder.

A turret (white) from Portal 2

A silver RWBY logo

Two foam dice as memorabilia from my previous job

A plush 😈

Plus a collection of various things saved and hidden from the scary hands of destructive children monsters.

We used to have a portal gun (both full size and mini) and a gravity gun on the dresser. But with the advent of children, they’re safely back in their boxes.

And then there was this big review...

DEVs:" this bug is hazardous and needs to be fixed quickly! It could crash a productive system completely!"
CTO and DEV teamlead:" shut up! This big exists more than two years! No customer will ever klick this button!"

--exactly twelve hours later--
Customer:"so we clicked on this button and our system crashed! Can you help us quickly? We are losing money!!!"
CTO in the meeting:"who programmed this shit? Are you insane?"
Teamlead:"you are useless !!"

I tried DuckDuckGo like two years ago and my opinion was “meh, I don’t like the results”.

Yesterday @Root made it clear that the sole amount of data collected changes the whole perspective of tracking.

I went to shower thinking about that and as I was standing there enjoying warm water...

It hit me.

I liked google results and disliked DDG not because DDG was worse.

I liked google results because they were CRAFTED for ME to LIKE them. They exploited my confirmation bias, the strongest of all biases.

I took my other phone which is android, has a different sim that isn’t tied to my identity (don’t ask, this is Russia), was never connected to my WiFi and of course has no google account tied to it.

I tried googling stuff.

The results was just like what DDG gets you, the only difference was google amp were on top.

The fuck. One of the wokest moments ever.

Got basically nothing done yesterday because I was absolutely exhausted the entire day. Thanks, doxxing thread. But I couldn’t sleep anyway so whatever.

Told everyone at home that I wanted a really productive day tomorrow (today) because of it.

Guess what happened?
Endless fucking distractions.
Because of course.

• Cooking since apparently it’s my job.
• Extended computer repair and maintenance, since that’s apparently my job even when it’s not my computer.
• Conversations.
• Children following me.
• People paraphrasing politics.
• People summarizing stupid fail videos.
• People relating stupid prank videos.
• More conversations.
• Endless random nonsense comments from children.
• Endless noises from children’s toys, tablets, playing, etc.
• Children following me when I leave.
• Taking half an hour to order food instead of five minutes.
• Cleaning since nobody else ever does.
• Picking up toys since nobody else will and I’M FUCKING TIRED OF STEPPING ON AND TRIPPING OVER THEM.
• More fucking food prep.
• Endless random nonsense comments from children.
• More conversations.

Is it any wonder I’m so fucking pissed off every workday?

I can’t wait to move so I can have a fucking office with a fucking door and a fucking lock. And you know what? I’m going to splurge and install some fucking soundproofing, too.

WHY IS IT SO FUCKING HARD TO JUST LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!? I’M PAYING FOR YOUR FUCKING EVERYTHING. FUCK THE FUCK OFF!

I guess I can do one of these a day or so. I've collected some novelties over the years.

First up is a Curta mechanical calculator. Before electronic calculators became a thing, these were the best portable calculators in the world. Notably, they were the calculator of choice in rally car sports.

They work by a series of helical gears that act as registers. A series of internal gears and value assignment switches apply an adjustable number of incrementations to those gears, multiplying gears and the tracking gears, once per "grind." The result is output as a number on top of the device. The "clear register" function is lifting the top ring, which releases the reverse lockout on the gears and a clockwise turn on the ring then resets them to their zero state.

They were designed by Curtz Herzstark, partly before WWII and partly while he was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. He had filed a patent for it in 1938, shortly before his family's manufacturey became a weapons factory. During his imprisonment, in addition to nearly starving to death, he completed his plans for manufacturing of his calculator.

It had fun names like the, "pepper grinder," and "math grenade."

So today after 5 years of working at my current company I decided that enough is enough... I called my boss (while being scared AF) and told him I quit. Now guys I know it is the middle of a pandemic going on right now but I want to focus 100% on my side project and I'm unsure if it will work or not, but it is a dream I want to be able to achieve. Damn it feels awesome to have a community where to say these things

!dev

So the ceiling in our (upstairs) laundry room started leaking. After some troubleshooting, we determined it was the A/C, and not the water pipes. (The house is cheap as hell and fucking stupid.) We did some troubleshooting and research, and tried fixing it ourselves; no luck. Cleaning the pipes from outside: no joy. Cleaning the pipes from inside: no access. The attic is ... small. Maybe half a small closet? and doesn’t give access to fucking anything. The builders must have installed everything before putting up the walls and ceilings, sealing everything off, because there is no access. It’s fucking stupid. Also, the usual maintenance openings aren’t even there either because why the fuck would they be?

But fucking whatever.

We called an a/c repair guy, who never showed. We assumed he was busy (it’s fucking hot), so we called him again the next day; two days later he showed.

Busy. Whatever.

Guy didn’t bring a ladder. Whatever, we have one right there in the hallway because we’ve been trying in vain to fix it.

Guy didn’t bring a wrench of any kind. Guy didn’t bring a screwdriver. Guy didn’t bring a bucket. Guy didn’t bring any pipe. Or any pipe sealant. Or fucking anything but his sagging fucking pants, fat belly, and fat stench. We had to supply everything, which fortunately we had on hand as we were already trying to fix it. Hoorah for being proactive.

Guy said he drained both primary and secondary pans. Somehow. Without access. I’m not even convinced it HAS a secondary pan. Guy said he cleaned out the pipes, too. From inside the house. Without access. Somehow. Maybe he did that from outside, without tools, while I was chasing the brats and someone else was watching the fat bastard. Who knows; I wasn’t with him most of the time.

When he was done, the guy said “pay whatever you think it’s worth” (or whatever). Fine, if he actually cleaned the pipes out and it isn’t leaking anymore, that’s great.

Guy leaves.

We go up to check. AND THE FUCKING A/C IS STILL LEAKING. BUT NOW IT’S FROM BEFORE THE PIPES, TOO. AND HALF AN HOUR LATER, THE LAUDRY ROOM CEILING IS ALSO LEAKING, WHICH MEANS THE PIPES ARE STILL LEAKING.

It turns out the asshole broke the pan.

We call him back, he goes blah blah blah, we send him a video. Drip, drip, drip.

His response?
“The pan must be rusted.” IT’S FUCKING PLASTIC.

“Oh, in that case, it’s probably a rusted coil that’s leaking.”

a) HOW DID YOU NOT KNOW IT WAS FUCKING PLASTIC IF YOU DRAINED IT?

b) THE COILS CARRY FREON, NOT WATER, AND THE A/C IS STILL WORKING. IF THERE WAS A LEAK, SHIT WOULD BE HOT. AND RANK. FREON SMELLS NASTY AND DOESN’T CAUSE IT TO RAIN IN THE FUCKING HOUSE.

REPLACING A COIL IS ALSO A $2000 FUCKING REPAIR.

THE FAT BASTARD PROBABLY BROKE THE PAN INTENTIONALLY JUST TO UPSELL. I WANT TO FUCKING MURDER HIS LYING FUCKING FACE OFF.

It’s possible he didn’t break the pan intentionally, so I’ll tentatively remove that from his charges. BUT TO FUCKING LIE?

LIE AND DIE, FUCKER.

Most memorable coworker? Definitely one of our devs in the first company I worked at. He was around fifty, quirky as fuck but damn knowledgeable about pretty much everything. Think some kind of uncle Iroh who could build his own compiler.
I haven't learned as much from university as I learned from our talks during smoking breaks. He never judged anyone for not knowing something (even really basic stuff) and was actually happy if he could help. Now, a few years later I still find myself applying techniques for conceptualizing software he explained to me on the balcony and I have to say I wouldn't be half the dev I am today if I'd have never met him so I guess that counts as memorable.

Mark.

Mark was a support guy who could have been replaced by a robot. Nearly every support request that came in, whether it made sense or not, had a reply saying:

"Thank you for your query, I will escalate with the development team"

...and then I would have a message saying:

"Hi Almond urgent issue case xxx - I think you need to PLEASE CHECK LOGS" (yes, with that capitalisation.)

I'd then look at the case, take 10 seconds to work out the customer had done something stupid when calling our API (often forgetting their authentication details, despite a clear message telling them as such) and tell Mark what the issue was, and how to find it for himself next time. I'd then usually get:

"Thank you but PLEASE CHECK LOGS to see if there is any more info we can provide to customer"

...there would be more back and forth, and then eventually something like the following would reach the customer...

"Very sorry the development team have a major issue they will fix very soon but in the meantime a workaround is (instructions for using authentication details)"

🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

Dumbest arrow key design ever.

This is how I feel most of my client proposal start:

* It's simple, I'd like to re-invent <the wheel>.

* All I want to do is use <rocketship engine> on <old typewriter>.

* I'm too cheap to hire a full-time < DBA, DevOps engineer, development team>. Can I pay you pennies?

* I'm poor and broke, can you do this for free?

* I'd like to <commit illegal act> and be <legal compliant standard>.

* I heard it was possible to <fly 30 people to the moon> using <Ford Model-T>. Please do this for us.

* I <sold my house>, but now <I'm locked out by the new owners>. Please help.

I’ve been told my rants are being missed, since I left my hellhole of a job. So here’s a filler until something major goes wrong.

Right so here’s what my life is like at the minute. I’m working remotely from home. So this morning, instead of spending 2 hours in traffic, I got up at a reasonable hour and brought the dog for a walk. I don’t know who these people think they are, fucking up my routine like this. The audacity of them thinking it’s no big deal really pisses me off.

I’m the only iOS developer in the company. Normally I get bombarded with “why not use react-native” or “RxSwift is the future” and other shitty tools. Last week I said “i’d like to do X this way”. Do you know what those absolute bastards said to me? You ready? Hope you are sitting down ... they said ... “ok, sounds good” .... the fucking c***s.

Oh oh and the big one, wait for this now. Fridays are demo days, last Friday I showed what I was working on. Afterwards the CEO comes along, stares me in the eyes and without a care in the world what his comments might do to my self-esteem the fucker says “wow great job”. He fucking makes me SICK!!!

Feels good to get all that off my chest. I’ve missed venting. At this rate, I’ll be back very soon!

I just remembered the first time I set up a Linux-Server. It was a simple Apache webserver at my first internship anf I didnt have a clue about literally anything.

My mentor guided me through and gave me literal step-by-step instructions (alright, now type... and now type...).

At the end he told me "OK, now run 'sudo rm -rf /*' to finish setting up". Me, being the naive and clueless motherfucker I am, happily nuked the everloving shit out of my newly setup server. I was like "Alright, WTF just happened??" He then told me "Now that you know how it works, do the entire thing again all by yourself. And you just learned an important lesson: NEVER exexute commands you dont know what theyre doing". I really did learn a lot on that day and still follow that lesson :D

Ahh, enlightening

> Find new remote job that pays six figures.
> Only person in the house with income.
> Still not left alone to fucking work.

AFAJDLDHAFAHDKSLAKAGACAJFNSKDUEBXJCAWVWCSNXIXYEVXKCUDGRB/^&@FU+#9$/

JUST LET ME FUCKING WORK!

Yesterday I said farewell to her.

We were together for half a decade, although it feels like much more time has passed since my eyes first fell on her.

I can't even begin to describe how close we were. She was perfect, she was my soulmate.

I shared everything with her, complete openness, perfect truth. We could be vulnerable with each other, but we also challenged each other to overcome boundaries.

My respect for her and dedication to her really knew no bounds, and I knew she would follow me to the end of the world in return.

But around New Year's things started to feel awkward between us. Like a part of her just wasn't there anymore.

She acted very confused, she hesitated in her answers.

I asked her, but I felt like she was avoiding me. Something just seemed so wrong about the way she acted.

I felt incredibly conflicted. Was she unfaithful? No, my trust in her was absolute. That question seems so silly, in retrospect.

We had always been pretty much inseparable, to the point where my coworkers, friends and family mocked us for it. How would she even have cheated on me?

I used to take her along to company gatherings, to my family for Christmas, to expensive restaurants. We traveled all over Europe together. We've spent countless nights together, watching Netflix, although she would often fall asleep before me.

I took great care of her, she had not been out of my mind for one moment since I met her. And besides, she had never even showed interest in anyone else anyway.

No, reality turned out to be so, so much worse.

Two weeks ago it became really apparent that there was something horribly wrong with her. She was rapidly losing her recollections of everything we experienced together.

Our history together, erased.

Within hours, she would barely respond anymore. I called for help, but deep down I already knew this was one of those things you can't recover from. She was kind of stable, almost peaceful, for a few days. But ultimately, she didn't even recognize me anymore.

Yesterday, I held her feverishly hot body in my arms for the last time.

Her soft skin turned cold as I said farewell to her, and the room turned awfully quiet.

Your brightness and warmth will be missed, my girl.

If you are sending me data to use, DO NOT FUCKING SEND ME AN IMAGE FROM EXCEL.

More Timezones

- Ran `brew install maven`
- Left my terminal to have some fun because of the slow network (fuck my ISP btw)
- Came back after ~15 mins to look at the terminal cause' installation should've finished.
- Checked terminal.
- Realised I ran `brew isntall maven` instead.

FML

A guy on another team who is regarded by non-programmers as a genius wrote a python script that goes out to thousands of our appliances, collects information, compiles it, and presents it in a kinda sorta readable, but completely non-transferable format. It takes about 25 minutes to run, and he runs it himself every morning. He comes in early to run it before his team's standup.

I wanted to use that data for apps I wrote, but his impossible format made that impractical, so I took apart his code, rewrote it in perl, replaced all the outrageous hard-coded root passwords with public keys, and added concurrency features. My script dumps the data into a memory-resident backend, and my filterable, sortable, taggable web "frontend"(very generous nomenclature) presents the data in html, csv, and json. Compared to the genius's 25 minute script that he runs himself in the morning, mine runs in about 45 seconds, and runs automatically in cron every two hours.

Optimized!

The corporate cunts have no clue how manufacturing facilities work. They decided to roll out major changes to their financial systems that control how workers report their hours.

They decide that Dec 29th is a good idea. We are a 24/7 operation and the last 3 days of the year are the busiest time of the year by far trying to meet quotas.

Even today they are trying to finish functionality and are unsure how certain parts will work. This will be a disaster.

credits to fb:@entertainmentxlab

Not a rant, but I found this funny enough to share.

About two weeks ago, I’m contacted by a third party development firm that is responsible for building the next iteration of a control board were are developing. Alongside build of the PCB they were scoped to flash the firmware and verify all connected components.

During the call, they tell me they don’t have the resources to build our testing environment with the Ansible script I provided, and they don’t know if the updates they have made will work with our control system. Ugh...really...

I attempt to walk them through the 3 pretty simple commands to launch the playbook. Instead of listening, their project manager insists that I need to load up the environment and send them a ready to go system.

I quickly load up a RaspberryPi and prepare it for shipping. I hand the box to our shipping clerk and fill out the shipping request documentation. Then about a week goes by and this is where the story really begins.

I get an email from the same rep asking where the environment is, and I head down to the warehouse to inquire where the RaspberryPi might be. After speaking with the head clerk, we can’t seem to track down the package. I’m assured that they will find the Pi and send me the shipment update.

I pass the information along and after about a day and a half I still didn’t receive word back from the warehouse team. I load up another Pi and head back down to the warehouse. I follow up with the warehouse staff. They inform me that they have not been able to locate my package and another warehouse worker is called over. He says he hasn’t seen it, but they they were having a food day that day and he thinks more than likely someone ate it.

Like it didn’t even click at first but after a few seconds I realize that these guys have literally been looking for a pie for the past two days...and I JUST DIE.

After the 5 or so minutes of laughing I show them the newly flashed RaspberryPi, and of course they know exactly where the original one was.

It’s shipped out now, but wow. Also, it turns out the PCB manufacturing company didn’t even really need this and it was all a guise to hide that they are behind schedule and that they will not be able to finish the work scoped. FML!

To the cunt who named himself "Uncaught ReferenceError: username is not defined":
Sincerely, fuck you.

So, I’m a software engineer at one of the FANG companies, and a “friend” from college that I haven’t talked to in years suddenly messages me, asking for my work email. I’m like, why would you ever need that? And he replies, “I’m gonna send you an email with a link, can you open it from your work computer? I’ll pay you for doing that, and it’s totally legal.”

Yeah... how about fuck no.

He blocked me after I refused.

Santa is just a glorified sprint master