Whenever I feel bad about my engineering skills, I take a look at what people build who work in enterprise or the public sector, and I feel like a fucking 1337 pro.

Isn't it awesome when someone's "bugfix" causes new bugs which prompt "bugfixes" for the bugfixes in the same merge request?

Caching is a cruel mistress.

I've probably said that before, but I can't remember whether I've said it before or not, because caching is a cruel mistress.

10 Things I Wish I Knew as a Junior Developer

After a few years in tech, I’ve realized that most growth doesn’t come from new frameworks — it comes from mindset shifts. If you’re just starting out, here’s some advice I wish someone had drilled into me early:

You’re not competing with anyone but your past self.
Forget comparing your code to that genius on your team who breathes JavaScript. You’ll get there — and faster if you focus on consistent growth over ego.

Google is your best mentor.
Asking questions is fine, but make them good questions. Try solving things first. Seniors love helping, but they respect those who’ve clearly done their homework.

Readable > Clever.
Fancy one-liners might make you feel smart, but clear variable names and simple logic make you a great teammate. Code is for humans first, machines second.

Reviews aren’t attacks.
A pull request comment isn’t criticism — it’s collaboration. Listen, learn, and keep the good discussions going both ways.

Never fake knowing something.
“I’ll check and get back to you” will earn you way more respect than pretending you know the answer. Engineering thrives on honesty.

Think before you type.
Rushing code just to “finish it fast” often leads to rework. Taking time to plan saves you more time later than you’d imagine.

Document like someone will use it tomorrow.
Because someone will — maybe you. Nothing feels worse than debugging your own undocumented code months later.

Soft skills aren’t optional.
People remember how you made them feel, not how you formatted your code. Be kind, patient, and reliable. Those qualities get you rehired.

Run toward the scary stuff.
That weird legacy code? The new API nobody wants to touch? Take it on. Growth hides in discomfort.

Keep learning, even when your job doesn’t require it.
Your company won’t future-proof you — you have to do that yourself. Read, build side projects, and stay curious.

At the end of the day, being a great developer isn’t about knowing everything — it’s about always being willing to learn.

We are already in the Windows 11 era but they still didn't fix that thing about choosing "update and shut down" and it restarts instead.

What’s the worst company you’ve ever worked for that had zero understanding of technology I mean like, the kind where you wonder how their systems are still online and survive?

Fuck, its 2025 and we still cant shake away the "you work with technology, you must know how to fix my microwave" stereotype.
Seriously, I have fewer apps in my phone and access fewer websites and even spend less time on my devices than the HR old hags, and yet im the one who has to come and "explain to them how to print a PDF".
Holly fucking crap. I haven't used a printer in MONTHS. With the cost of the time I will take to figure out how to communicate with those mummies that is 'just click the print button', they could hire ChatGPT to do it for a decade.
Fuuuuuck, that is the reason those stupid AI chat bots exist! To endlessly toil at the repetitive and predictable task of saying 'hi there! Have you clicked "print"?'
Imma gonna leave work early and get pissed. Luckily, I've already done a couple hours of OT for the day, so it won't seem so out of the ordinary.

One of our internal web apps stops loading the content when you switch to another tab.

How do you even implement horse shit like that?

I think you‘d have trouble to implement it even if it was a requirement. Fucking how?

Anyway, if you want to spend the long ass loading time by doing something else in another tab, then no!

Tough luck motherfucker!
You‘ll be watching that loading spinner like the rest of the thousands of users daily!
It‘s doing hard work loading all that crap for the convoluted clusterfuck of a web app!
You better appreciate that and watch it loading!
🤡

I recently joined a bank as an IT Quality Analyst, and it's been an overwhelming experience. I feel like I've been working like a donkey for a fraction of what I deserve. My responsibilities include testing all types of software, including some that, frankly, seem poorly shity written by vendors.
The project managers are not helping matter....they push projects through UAT and expect me to sign off on everything as if it’s ready for production. They seem indifferent to how compromised the testing can be. They want me to say all tests passed even when there are unresolved issues. If I do find any failed tests, they expect me to chase after developers for fixes.

As a developer myself, I took on this QA role to explore a new area of IT, but it's clear that this environment is not what I hoped for. The stress is mounting every day, and I find myself wanting to avoid the PMs entirely. It's disheartening to see them receive compensation that feels entirely unwarranted given the pressure they put on the testing process without regard for quality or thoroughness. I need to voice these frustrations because it's becoming hard to stay motivated in a role that feels so misaligned with my values and professional ethics.

hoop: – "masterkey" is not okay. Please replace all instances of "master" immediately #WeValueInclusivity

cprn: – Just to clarify, "master" in this context is standard (as in "master key" in databases). It's not intended to be offensive. Replacing could affect functionality. Call to talk more?

hoop: – STOP overthinking, just change it. I DON’T CARE, JUST DO WHAT I SAY. #DoItForTheCulture

cprn: – Got it. You want me to replace every instance of "master" in the codebase, including comments and variable names. Just confirming?

hoop: – YES. NO EXCEPTIONS. #MoveForward

PR Update: Replacing all instances of "master" as requested. Please, verify before accepting.

hoop: – Perfect. Now we’re on the right track. 👏

After 2 failed attempts at explaining, I blindly replaced all instances of "master" with "boss", and hand-delivered my letter of resignation. I left them with "complied with your request, have fun figuring it out". It was 2 years ago, and I was the last coder who knew that system after a big merger.

Do you have a master's degree and 14+ years' relevant experience in IT, or a Bachelor's + 18 years of experience in IT?

Is this a fucking joke?

We have a no AI use policy at the company.

I had a contract developer added onto my team. I start to see AI generated comments in his code all the time. Point out that the code being contributed is def AI nonsense. I brought it up with my boss which reports to the CTO. Response: “As long as he doesn’t get caught I guess.”

He did get caught. This is me catching him and telling you.

It's amazing just how bad Visual Studio/.NET is .. and the way this shop does stuff.

I was just copying existing projects and renaming/modifying everything for new tasks, but this time I tried to create a new project from scratch. No matter what I get:

Could not load type 'System.Runtime.CompilerServices.RequiredMemberAttribute' from assembly 'NJsonSchema, Version=11.3.2.0, Culture=neutral

Everything has the right .NET framework. Dependencies look mostly identical to other projects. No one in the work chat has seen it before. I'm about to move this project to a tmp dir, copy and existing project, search and replace all the name, empty it out and copy my source into it. What you want to bet it will "just work."

I hate everything about Windows/.NET .. I'm glad I have a job again, but .NET is just so fucking painful. How has Visual Studio remained this bad for this many decades? I swear VS 2022 is just like VS6 with a fucking dark theme.

bug with no steps to reproduce

logs show null pointer exception but doesn't have a stack trace to point a bad line of code

fuck jersey and jettycounts

I got a new job a few months ago and carried over my PTO from previous job. I still have 16 days of PTO to be taken by the end of the year. The projects deadline is also the end of the year. With the current development progress, I don't see it anywhere being close to possible. There is also no agreed expectations what the project should do.

And yet, the deadline cannot be pushed back and there is no one else at this company that can do my job at this point. We have 2 people who can learn how to do it but they have no experience in this programming language.

So......... there's this company who HATE to return data in json, yml or xml. Their "RESTFul api" returns .ini file as string and all requests are 200 ! even though it is failed , still return 200.

And the structure are inconsistent af.

The PIC literally solve every issue by store data in .ini file locally

LocalStorage? .ini
SharedPreferences? .ini
Api response type ? .ini
Caching? .ini
UI key=value handling? .ini

hotel? trivago.

I'M FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

(I got a new job)

7up decided to sponsor me. The randomness of a soft drink company wanting to sponsor a tech YouTube channel is making me laugh.

!rant

Okay, so last Monday I get a message from the fertility clinic that I’ve tested positive for one or more genetic carrier conditions and that I should schedule a consult with a genetic counselor. I go to check my labs to find out what condition(s) I’m a carrier for only to find that the labs are marked as upcoming and aren’t available until late Tuesday night. So I spend Monday through Wednesday morning worrying about what horrific shit I might pass onto kids if we have them.

Finally read the labs Wednesday morning.

Albinism. The horror is albinism. (Oculocutaneous albinism type 2)

Husband looks at me and is like “Are they SURE you’re just a carrier? You being a carrier for albinism explains SO MUCH. I thought you were just British, but *gestures at me vaguely*”

(I have poor vision, light brown hair, green eyes, pale skin, and have never tanned)

Apparently for SIXTEEN YEARS this man has thought I *could* tan but was paranoid about sun exposure and so never did.

This man who has seen me burn on a NUMBER of occasions.

And who has seen me get burned by having the temerity to sit too close to a bay window on a sunny day.

Story Time:

In the late 90s , early 2000, I remember we had our first landline (phones where a luxury on our part of the world) , with that our first 56k internet connection.

I remember vividly waiting for 14:00 (02PM) so I could connect to the internet paying only a single "pulse".

Back in my tiny remote rural village in brazil, most houses where build by brick layers people hired directly and I lots of owners worked with them to speed up the process, run plumbling and
eletricity, paint and do the floors etc, mylate father included.

Being quite handy, he also did all the wiring for the landline and the for modem.

While he was handy, he was by no means an electrician, so one bizarro side effect for the amateur wiring was that whenever someone turned on the Shower, the internet connection would go down.

And for some bizarre reason, it was only the internet connection, while the shower was turned on, the phone would work fine... some years later broadband internet got widespread and it was unnaffected by the shower.

devRant is fast enough to use again? Excellent.

!rant Lovely quote:

“There are two ways of constructing a software design: One
way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no
deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated
that there are no obvious deficiencies.”
—C.A.R. Hoare, 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture

*me reviewing a resume*

"Optimized backend APIs and increased speed by 40%"

*resume straight to dustbin*

why tf do people write like this

I'm rewriting this horrendous piece of software that's like, real ugly, I mean, seriously ugly. A non stop mess of global variables and aliases and logical tantrums and fuck I know what else...

That's until today.

Today, after a ton of time spent clenching 2k LOC of ASS into readable 1.2k LOC, all tests passing, and passing faster if I may...

Then came a horrifying realization...

It downed on me, harder than a naked superman for a young Louis Lane

Tha maybe, just maybe, if them codes 's só shitty then probably so is them tests

So I tried deleting a obviously important conditional and to my dismay... oh boy, tests kept passing

...

Stolen:

Me - "What are you doing?"
Microsoft - "Leaving you alone?"
Me - "Then why are you here?"
Microsoft - "We have to watch you to know how to leave you alone."
Me - "Who is we?"
Microsoft - "Microsoft and our affiliates."
Me - "Who are your affiliates?"
Microsoft - "We can't tell you that."
Me - "Why?"
Microsoft - "They asked to be left alone."

Diary of an obsessed company.

So at our company, the interview loop includes Sudoku.

Why?
Because if you can’t solve a puzzle with numbers, how are you going to survive when product throws 47 Jira tickets at you with conflicting priorities?

We know you will want to ask:
“Uh… what does Sudoku have to do with shipping features?”

Our response to you is:
“Well… if you put a 3 where a 7 should be, the whole board collapses.
Same thing happens if you deploy on Friday at 4:59pm.”

Next:
We interviewed a candidate
He solved the puzzle.
We hired him.
He still deploys on Friday and can't close tickets. 😔😔😔

🔥 Fire him!!!!! 😆 🤣 😂 😹

Oh no, I've been asked to fix a printer. And I said yes. 🤦

Just checked the source code of our backend project with that tight deadline. So far, the backend consists of an in-memory database, 2 records and no API. 🙃

There is also no documentation on how it should look like 🤡

I used to think code review was about protecting engineers from themselves. It was always my goal to help keep them from making the same mistakes I made coming up.

But you can't, and it's exhausting. Give them the tools, give them resources, and automate as much as you can. Listen when they have questions, and give thoughtful answers and direction.

That's all you can do, and they'll learn through making mistakes the same way you did. The value is actually being a mentor for when hard problems come and they don't have the experience they need yet.

> These "AI doomers," as they've become known, > represent a growing faction within the artificial intelligence community convinced that humanity is running out of time to implement safeguards against potentially catastrophic AI systems.

Also rock music will be the death of civilization and turn our kids into satan-worshiping pedophile. A friend of mine killed himself because of dungeon and dragon and I lost my mummy to candycrush

I swear, people can't recognize a social panick when they see one.