I turned a 20 hour per month task into a 150ms database query.

I feel like a fucking super hero.

FYI my super hero name is ThreadPool (see past rant)

So, to anyone defending IBM at this point, a member of a client's offshore team used their paystub as test data. Aaaaand I was horrified by what I saw.

Their pay is less than $2/hr ($3973/yr, 300k INR).

I can't even. Not only that someone would pay so little to a supposedly degreed professional (I question the validity of that claim based on performance, that's a story for another time), but that companies feel comfortable giving full production system access to people I would not blame for taking bribes.

Fuck.

boss: please look into tools that do X.

fullstackchris: Ah, here's a solution we can use!

boss: I don't want to use it because it is too complicated.

fullstackchris: ok, that's fine with me...

[one week later] boss: oh I found this nice site that does X, can we do X?

fullstackchris: YES, THAT'S EXACTLY THE SOLUTION I ALREADY FOUND, *AFTER* YOU ASKED ME TO LOOK FOR A SOLUTION, AND IN THE END YOU DIDN'T WANT TO DO IT. OH HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND?!?!

F*@#! *%*#

That’s it I’m done with writing documents like Software Product Specifications and Software Requirements Documents and Software Architecture Documents, manuals, data sheets and more in MS word..

I’m doing it all form this point forward in LaTeX... I can stay in my editor, it works beautifully with version control because it’s just text... I can split it amung multiple files.. it looks damn sexy. I can focus on the content rather than being distracted by formatting and spelling issues and the rest of that shit.. ALSO.. it doesn’t crash or get corrupted.. well at-least I’ve never had a text editor crash or corrupt my files.

Idk why I didn’t learn latex sooner and do the switch.

I Loved that serie!

What is the state of DevRant?

I've been away for quite some time.

I've been working exclusively from home for over 2 years now. I've been seeing several posts from people talking about adjusting to working from home, so I figured I would compile a list of tips I've learned over the years to help make the adjustment easier for some people.

1) Limit as many distractions as possible. WFH makes it much easier to get distracted. If you have roommates/family members at home, ask them politely to leave you alone while you're working. Make sure the TV is turned off, put your phone on silent, etc.

2) Take regular breaks. I find it easier to accidentally go hours without taking a real break from work. Try working in half hour intervals, and then taking 5-10 minute breaks. Read an article, watch a youtube video, grab some coffee/tea, etc.

3) When you eat lunch, eat it away from your computer. I often find myself eating lunch trying to wrap up fixing a bug, which makes it feel like I never really "took a lunch." Lately I've been trying to step away and do something else completely unrelated to work.

4) Get ready for work like you normally would. It's very easy to wake up, throw on your favorite pair of sweats and sit at the computer with messy hair half awake "ready" to start the day. Instead try doing your normal morning routine before sitting at your computer. It will help your mind and body go into "it's time to work" mode.

5) Keep your work area clean. I find it very difficult to work when my workspace is cluttered. Studies have shown working in a messy place tend to make us less efficient.

6) Keep your work area work related. Try to only have the things you need for work in your workspace. If you're working from your personal computer this can be difficult. I always end up with camera/music equipment left over from the previous night's photo editing/jam sessions. So try to clean off your desk when you're done for the night so it's ready for work in the morning.

7) Prepare for meetings. I have alarms set 10 minutes in advance so I can go from programming mode to meeting mode. During this time I'll go to the bathroom, grab a snack, water, mute all my email notifications, close any non essential programs, get my code ready if I need to present it.

Stuff is hard & stressful right now, but hopefully these tips will make it a bit easier. If anyone else has any good tips please share them.

I hate this work from home shit with your family around. "You're always in front of the computer, go workout, go socialize, its family time"

What part of "work from home" you don't understand. SMH!

TFW your client's git policies are so draconian that the dev teams use "develop" as trunk, and completely ignore the release process.

I wrote up 50 pages of git standards, documentation and procedure for a client. Bad indian director 9000 decides the admin (also Indian) who specializes in Clearcase and has no git or development experience is more qualified to decide and let's him set the policy.

FF to today:

- documentation, mostly contradictory, is copy pasted from the atlassian wiki
- source tree is the standard
- no force pushing of any branches, including work branches
- no ff-merge
- no rebasing allowed
- no ssh, because he couldn't figure it out...errr it's "insecure"
- all repos have random abbreviated names that are unintelligible
- gitflow, but with pull requests and no trust
- only project managers can delete a branch
- long lived feature branches
- only projects managers can conduct code reviews
- hotfixes must be based off develop
- hotfixes must go in the normal release cycle
- releases involve creating a ticket to have an admin create a release branch from your branch, creating a second ticket to stage the PR, a third ticket to review the PR (because only admins can approve release PRs), and a fourth ticket to merge it in
- rollbacks require director signoff
- at the end of each project the repo must be handed to the admin on a burned CD for "archiving"

And so no one actually uses the official release process, and just does releases out of dev. If you're wondering if IBM sucks, the answer is more than you can possibly imagine.

Me: "do you know about .exe files?"
Girlfriend: "yeah, like '.exe stopped working'"

*Windows exe immediately associated with bugs by common user*

Oh no, JetBrains! <facepalm>

Finished my setup!!

Debuggers are a good invention 🙂

All the young kids get to work on new projects with the shiny tech....

I feel left out :( I'm only 30 and pretty sure skill-wise I can still kick everyone else's asses on my team...

But I guess I'll remain in the "nanny" role yelling at them whenever something fucks up....

Don't send me a confirmation email that I successfully unsubscribed from your list you shit nugget.

Editor of choice would have to be VSCodium. All the benefits of vscode + added privacy.

!dev

I can't stand any more YouTube ads, it's gotten up to a point where it's just abusive. Some videos have two consecutive ads before starting, other videos have 5+ ads in less than 15min. Watching a video is just frustrating nowadays. I'm done, I'm installing adblock and only allowing certain channels to have ads.

All my unit tests work, all my component tests work, why the FUCK does it give me a 'Verification Failed' error?

1 hour later:
Oh wait this is the wrong public key

Really? Fucking really?
"This role starts out with a one-week, unpaid trial to gauge work speed and compatibility"

https://www.python.org/jobs/4433/

For different reasons, this outbreak of coronavirus lead me to learn how to use git efficiently (never had to before, as I work mostly alone). In two days I learned to fork, branch, pull, push, ... I feel like I really accomplished something for myself.

Oh and I also started to collaborate to a shiny app in R. Any way is good to keep my mind off the fact of being in lockdown in a foreign country.

Stay positive people! :)

For the last time, git is not GitHub.

I'm so happy to have an electric car in times like these, not only it saves me a whole lot on gas, I can keep using it without the need to visit public places to fill it.

That feel when you’re asked to share work you’re proud of and you’re not proud of anything.

Or rather, you are... but they’re programs written in C/C++ and you’re interviewing for a mostly frontend gig in React.

I just got sent an email after registering an account at a webshop which contained my username and password.. *sigh*

Everyone’s a remote worker at our company by default. Literally no HQ or central physical office to report to. As it should be for most people who are knowledge workers or coders. Why commute and pollute and all that nonsense? It doesn’t make sense anymore for a lot of people like us.

i love redis so fucking much

Damn, sometimes I want to rant about something rather badly, but feel I can't as I'd inevitably mention something way to specific which would identify me way too easily 🕵️‍♂️

I'll just say talking to our offshore dev team really does feel like talking to a brick wall 😒

Created an md5 hash for the admin user's pw on a personal project and the hash starts with "bad666...".
Is md5 telling me something?
Hmm...

The bloke that I share my office with is asleep on the job. Ffs, can I get any support around here?

This working remotely from home thing, just isn’t panning out

He put just a zip in the new branch. I thought it was going to be the actual fucking project like I asked him to. Nope just a damn zip for me to extract and push to github correctly

Fucking hell