My life is basically a loop of:
1) “I’m in a slump and terribly depressed because of my lack of productivity.”
2) “I know! I’ll try using the strategies that proved to make me very productive”.
3) “I’m very productive right now, that’s because I’m so smart and talented, it’s just part of me”
4) Back to step 1

Im an unaccomplished idiot with a big ego. Why do I have an ego if I don’t have any real accomplishments????
Dear god, I will become a fucking egotistical moron the day I actually do something worthwhile.

I’m a goddamn fucking piece of shit.

Studying is my drug.

But thank god I say no to drugs.

The way 90% of the population wears their face masks really explains a lot about their approach to using software, apps & websites as well.

I feel like giving up.

I am not a developer for the salary, or just to solve analytical puzzles. Those are motivators, but my main drive is to make the world more comfortable and enjoyable, better optimized, build ethical services which bring happiness into people's lives. I want to improve society, even if it's just a tiny bit.

But if users invest absolutely zero percent of their limited brain capacity into understanding a product that already has a super-clean design and responds with helpful validation messages...

...why the fuck bother.

I used to think of the gap between technology and tech-incompetent people as an optimization problem.

As something which could be fixed by spending a fortune on UX research. Write tests, hire QA employees, decrease tech debt, create a bold but unified & simple design.

But the technologically incompetent just get more entitled with every small thing you simplify.

It's never fucking fool-proof enough.

Why can't I upload a 220MB PDF as profile picture? Why doesn't the app install on my 9 year old Android Froyo phone? Why can't I sign up if my phone number contains a  U+FFFC? Why does this page load so slowly from my rural concrete bunker in East Ukraine? WHY DO I HAVE PNEUMONIA, HOW DID I GET INFECTED EVEN THOUGH I WAS WEARING A MOUTH MASK ON MY FOREHEAD?

This is why I ran away from Frontend, to Backend, to DBA.

If I could remove myself further from the end user, I would.

At least I still have a full glass of tawny port and a huge database which needs to be normalized & migrated.

Fuck humans, I'm going to hug a server.

How do I know if my work computer is being monitored? :/ I'm using MacBook.

During the majority of my career, I've been the stereotypical pissed off guy with earphones in mashing away at his keyboard.

During lunch hours, I absolutely love listening to other pissed off devs. Their tales of buggy Microsoft products, oblivious project managers, dangerously unqualified directors, and severely disabled bosses are often the only thing that put a smile on my face in a workday, and here in Tokyo a workday is often your whole day. I don't feel there's anything wrong with it - the targets of their abuse often really are leeching tons of money while contributing little to nothing, so I feel like they deserve the abuse.

However, I don't like it when devs trash-talk other devs. I sympathize with those guys, even if they wrote bad code. I know writing good code is really, really hard, and I know that they were trying to do it under extremely difficult circumstances (in an office). If they're junior I sympathize even more because they're often better than I was when I had the same amount of experience.

So in conclusion, don't hate your fellow dev. Don't let hatred control you and poison your well-being. Direct your hatred where it belongs, at project managers.

Another oldie - apologies if it has been done before.
So there were these two developers in a light aircraft looking to land, but they were completely fog bound and had no clue where they were (I said it was an oldie - no GPS).
So they flew around for a while, getting lower and lower hoping to see a landmark, when they flew past this office building.
As they went by, they saw a single light on in one of the windows, so they flew around again and attracted the guy's attention.
On the next loop around, the pilot shouted "WHERE ARE WE?"
Then on the next loop around, the guy in the office shouted back "YOU'RE IN AN AIRPLANE".
They looped around again, and the pilot shouted "THANKS!" and set course south west for 15 miles and made a perfect touchdown at Seattle airport.
Hi passenger looked at him and said "How did you do that??"
He said "Quite simple really. I asked that guy a perfectly reasonable question, and got an answer that was 100% correct, but totally useless, so I deduced that must be Microsoft, and I knew that the airport is 15 miles to the south west"