Advent of code is a bit crap this year. These early problems aren't hard per-se, they're just annoyingly time consuming for early day problems.

Pissed off. Planning on imposing a company wide hook that prevents you checking in code with a @Generated annotation. Seriously, never even heard about it being used outside of auto generated code until some bozos here seem to have started using it to silently drop complicated classes from test coverage metrics. Is this a thing with new coders these days, or are my lot just cowboys?!

No more, anyway. Sometimes it's convenient to be able to pull rank.

"Hey, just scheduling in some time for a catch-up today, looks like you've just got focus time so I've scheduled it then"

"Wait, why did you decline my invite?!"

Because I actually need time to focus and do my job, and spending an hour talking to your sorry arse about something irrelevant doesn't trump time I need to focus? Bleh. People.

Dah, I wish I was better at painting. The easiest kind too - painting a room, not a picture. It's fine until I get to the edges. Then I mask off the area I don't want to paint, pull of the tape but no - turns out it's wonkier than a drunk student trying to walk in a straight line.

Go to touch it up, miss, get paint on the other bit I was trying to avoid. Great. Try taping it again - straighter this time - and it works, but then rips off chunks of paint when I take the tape off. Go to touch those bits up, then in my haste splatter it on the floor.

Seriously, how anyone can be this bad at this is beyond me.

CEO: This project is of critical importance to us - anything you need at all to help make it happen swiftly, let us know and my team will be on it.

Hey, could you give us IntelliJ ultimate licences?

THAT IS A RIDICULOUS REQUEST DON'T YOU KNOW EVERY PENNY COUNTS HERE

New business opportunity. Hire the worst, cheapest devs on the planet and get them to build a HR system.

Judging by past popular HR systems, it'd become a best seller instantly.

Wait, is he.... gone?!

Yaknow, *that* guy.

There's nothing that screams "junior" more than a graduate dev dressed up in a suit awkwardly posing for a LinkedIn photo.

Seriously, stop it, and stop listening to whoever tells you to don a suit so you're taken seriously. Maybe in marketing, HR or finance - but that's not how devs think, or hire people.

It's harder to grab hold of underperforming colleagues and give them a shake up, and harder to catch contractors working more than one job at once and doing poorly at both.

I'd still take it over a long commute and office work any day, though.

What is it with networking guys refusing to do any kind of fault finding? Pretty much everywhere I've worked they seem to be overpaid address hogs who occasionally want everyone to be proud of them for installing a new switch.

Currently seeing a production issue that's clearly due to spikes in packet loss on a certain part of the network - but oh no, it's always "our tests are fine", "we can establish a route no problem", "this is an application level issue", etc.

No you morons, when a dozen unrelated applications hosted on different cloud services fail because none of them can contact anything in your particular subnet in your data center at the same time, it's a damn networking issue. Sort it out.

Running them, and having to ask dumb HR related questions that no-one gives a crap about.

I don't want someone that's sold their soul to XCorp and can rave about how it's the best place in the world to everyone they meet. I want a down to earth, decent dev.

As a moron, I write all tasks in this format even though it makes no sense to do so, so I won't have to put up with business colleagues moaning.

PSA: If you need to make dummy commits to trigger a pipeline for test purposes, please just use --allow-empty and make an empty one. Don't just add random newlines back and forth in stupid places.

Is it just me, or are the media / journalists once again putting a stupidly unfair pessimistic spin on that SpaceX launch?

"SpaceX rocket launches but explodes shortly into flight"
"Musk's SpaceX big rocket explodes on test flight"
"SpaceX rocket explosion: None injured or killed"

They've said time and time again, it's the first test of a massively complex rocket that's bigger than anything that's ever gone before it, and success is just defined as "getting off the launch pad" and collecting data. They did that and then some.

But instead of spreading excitement about the data, the fact it launched, that it's a world first, etc. - it's all doom and gloom, implying that the whole thing was a failure and people could have died 🙄

And people wonder why I have a low opinion of journalists.

"Hey, quick call?"

No.

!dev

Am I the only one fed up with all these self-obsessed "oohhh loook at me I pretended to be a beginner in (x) and hired a tutor to teach me in (x) and hahahaa actually I'm a pro in (x) look at their face!" videos?

Congratulations, you pretended to be a beginner in something you're not a beginner in. Really don't see the skill in that. It was mildly entertaining the first time someone did it, but is now *beyond* overdone and dull.

"Did you not see (x important announcement) guys?! It was posted very clearly in the group teams channel and everyone was tagged!"

"No, we turned off notifications for that teams channel so didn't see it."

"What?! Why on earth would you turn notifications off, everything posted there is incredibly important! You must turn them back on now!"

Channel history:
- @everyone "HEY GUYS IT'S FRIDAY! Let's celebrate by everyone posting their favourite gif! Go go go!"
- @everyone "Choo choo guys it's the training train! How about we all share our best training experience for a bit of positivity?"
- @everyone "Hi I lost my laptop can anyone help find it"

Yeah... I wonder why...

Almond: "This isn't right, we need to use <blah> instead"
Phil: <Marks as resolved>
Almond: "This still doesn't look to be resolved"
Phil: "IT IS RESOLVED IT WILL BE PUBLISHED AS PART OF MY NEXT COMMIT WHICH I WILL PUSH ON SCHEDULE LATER TODAY"

🙄
...yeah, that makes sense...

Few things hack me off more than devs who can't be bothered to do a task properly, so just submit some random crap as a PR that looks half correct at some surface level in the vague hope it gets approved.

This team is about creating decent, tested, reliable, resilient backend infrastructure, and we need to trust devs in order to do that. If you want to pull the half-arsed, do as little as possible and get paid as much as possible approach then sod off to higher management somewhere.

I find a decent place to work, with interesting problems to solve, decent fellow devs, and a decent salary.

If one of those lapses, I start thinking about moving. Life's too short to be working on boring stuff, working with idiots, or working for pittance.

On the further subject of "new trends" that piss me off, being in an important meeting, asking someone an important question about work they haven't completed, and getting back:

"Oh sorry I was *multitasking* then, could you repeat that?"

No you cloth-eared dufus, you weren't multitasking, you were focusing on only one thing - and it wasn't the meeting that you called and the meeting you're meant to be listening to. Arse.

I know I'm out of the loop since I barely use these sites, but...

What is it with this seemingly ridiculous new trend on LinkedIn of replacing your meaningless job title with, somehow, an even more meaningless fake description of what you're doing? I'm seeing it all over.

Back in the day it'd just be "Python developer". Then the trend seemed to be a "Senior / lead / principle software engineer / Python specialist" (who cares if you're actually a senior eh, this is LinkedIn.) And if that wasn't ridiculous enough, now it's "Helping to transform the globe towards a greener future by implementing beautiful, robust code in Python 3.10" or similar. Who the hell wants to see this crap?!

What is it with shipping websites sending you an email saying "hey, here's your tracking number and tracking URL!" and then that *very same link* saying "this tracking number doesn't exist, it can take a few days to show up sometimes, try again!" I'd understand if this was one knock-off weird company, but it seems to be *all of them*.

Seriously, how hard is it to just initialise a tracking number at the point you send that email so it at least shows a "parcel not yet picked up" or similar message? I know it doesn't make much material difference to tracking but it just reeks of bad UX and lazy / incompetent devs.

Come on guys, use those JSON schemas properly. The number of times I see people going "err, few strings here, any other properties ok, no properties required, job done." Dahhh, that's pointless. Lock that bloody thing down as much as you possibly can.

I mean, the damn things can be used to fail fast whenever you misspell properties, miss required properties, format dates wrong - heck, even when you want to validate the set format of an array - and then libraries will throw back an error to your client (or logs if you're just on backend) and tell you *exactly what's wrong.* It's immensely powerful, and all you have to do is craft a decent schema to get it for free.

If I see one more person trying to validate their JSON manually in 500 lines of buggy code and throwing ambiguous error messages when it could have been trivially handled by a schema, I'm going to scream.

I'm convinced that playing the piano has allowed me to type faster and commit keyboard shortcuts to muscle memory faster too. While coding isn't about typing quickly, there's a whole bunch of times when I've had an idea, and had to get that down into code as quickly as possible before I forget it - and that's when I really find fast keyboard work comes into its own.

Don't you dare screw it up.

If you do `log.error("blah: " + e.getMessage())` rather than `log.error("blah: ", e)` then I will personally hunt you down, come to your house, and give you a bloody good talking to as to why stack traces are free, useful debugging tools, and you've just wasted my time by omitting it.

Things story points are great for:
- Helping the team estimate their workload for a sprint
- Discussing the relative complexity of a task / story

Things I will slap you for, hard:
- Arguing that all the easy stories you plan to pick are actually infinite story points to make you look better
- Going "yeahhhh look at me I did 5 more story points this sprint than Bob, I'm amazinggggg"
- Trying to subtly change the story point assignment after you pick a task so you can do the above while doing sod all work
- "Hmm your team only did x story points this sprint, but team poopoo over there did x+10, what's going on?!"

I feel a bit bad when I reject most people after interviews - they'll do alright, just don't have the knowledge we're looking for.

Other people who fail interviews just piss me off.

If you're applying for a *senior* position, yet you tell me a race hazard is "what happens when concurrent applications are working efficiently", a GET request is "only ever used in a REST API", a POST request is "when you use TCP directly" and you can't write a single line of code in a new project because "in the real world we always just modify what's there already", then please sod right off. There comes a point when you clearly know bugger all, have extensively lied on your CV, and you're just trying to con your way into a position while hoping no-one notices.

Argh.

Probably when I heard about (as it was then) this new fangled "internet" thing going around.

Suddenly computers weren't isolated individuals, or networks, but had the power to talk to *other* computers as well, and exchange information with each other, and then take decisions and action based on that information - even talking to other computers in turn!

The potential for what this could do blew my mind a bit as a kid - and I'm not sure anyone, myself included, even then understood anywhere close to what the full impact would be in a few decades time.