Neighbor: So what do you do for work?

Me: I'm a software engineer.

Neighbor: Oh I don't even know what that means. What exactly do you do?

Me: I write code for Fortune 500 companies while sitting on my couch in my underwear.

“Your email address has been blacklisted and you can no longer send emails to this domain. If you feel that this has been done by mistake, I can assure you that I was not.”

It feels like half of what I do is just tell people that their code sucks and it needs to be replaced, then I drag them through the 5 stages of grieving the loss of an application that has them trapped in an abusive relationship.

1. Denial:
The unique and complicated needs of our business lead to this unique and complicated architecture. This is all here for a reason, and it's all needed.

2. Anger:
What do you mean it's going to take 6 months to rebuild this? We made MVP in 3 months!

3. Bargaining:
Surely we don't need to throw it all away! There must be something worth salvaging!

4. Depression:
Stake holders and going to think we're not getting anything done! This is a nightmare 😭

Six months later...

6. Acceptance:
Holy shit thank god we got away from that glass tower before it shattered and cut us all to pieces! Side note: development velocity is on fleek. #profit

Snitches get stitches.

When your digital signage program crashes in production

I've been training a client for a few months now to not use Slack for sharing passwords and other secure materials.

I really thought I had made great progress. I even had him using a password manager. Then out of nowhere he sends the wildcard SSL key pair to me and a handful of other devs in a Slack thread.

At least we aren't storing important information like medical records. Oh wait, that's exactly what we're doing.

So we have this administration page in the clients app that has tables of data.

The user can click on a row to edit or click "Add' to create a new one, doing so pops up a modal with a form full of inputs and a save button at the bottom.

The other day our client told me he was concerned that users would not understand how to edit data and that I should add some text below the first input field of each modal that says "Type in a new value and click 'SAVE' to change the [field name]"

As I implimented this crap, I took a few minutes to come up with a nice way of saying that his idea made no sense, added unnecessary clutter to the UI, and proposed some alternatives.

He essentially said, "Thanks for your much better ideas, for now let's just stick with what we've got and we can revisit this later."

Everytime I open that UI, I physically feel pain and get a little sick.

My fiancée is helping her dad setup an iTunes account and it's just painful to listen too. I can't take much more of this.

I work for a company that is 100% remote. Slack just went down. We're doomed, on Halloween of all days.

Well, shit.

Few things are more frustrating than fixing a bug only to have CI break because the fucking test runner that has always worked, and is working locally, just won't run on fucking CI, preventing you from deploying said fix.

A colleague of mine was wearing his Funcunit t-shirt on a plane yesterday. The flight attendant asked him about his "Fun Cunt" t-shirt.

I had a dream where I got a job at SpaceX. Long story short, rockets fell from the sky, people died, and Musk got really angry. I don't think I'll be applying at SpaceX anytime soon.

Coitus.

I stayed at a hotel called "Crowne Royal Plaza" for a work event in Denver. The TV in the room was a nice new '50 Samsung. Much to my dismay I discovered they had disabled the ability to change the input to HDMI. I called the front desk to compain and the pesent who answered the phone had the nerve to tell me that feature had been disabled because it was "illegal". I laughed histarically and explained the reason was actually to try and force customers to buy shitty pay-per-view content, to which he replied, "Probably".

We must put an end to such blantant disregard for hardware and software freedom. This is beyond uneccaptable. I am completely and utterly disgusted by such slimy business practices.

To the management of the Crowne Royal Plaza, from the bottom of my heart, fuck you and burn in the deapest, darkest part of hell, you scum sucking dick fucks!

I'm watching TV and I just heard something along the lines of "The files have been wiped from the server and there was no sign of a DDOS attack. Whoever erased those files had a backdoor.".

Today I was working on an issue related to adding icons to external links. I'm no CSS ninja, I never claimed to be. Somehow I wrote some really nice CSS that works well cross-browser. Now I'm scared they're gonna think I'm good at CSS.

So last night my Fiancée's mother asked me to hack into the website of a potential employer and somehow increase her chances of getting hired.

P.S. happy Easter!

My fiancée was complaining about how one of her classes at the University requires using a PC to run some obscure program so she would have to study in the library as she has a Mac. I asked if she wanted me to spin up a Windows VM. After explaining what that means she freaked out saying "You can do that?!". Yes. Because I am part God.

Fuck Uber!

I requested an Uber to take me Chicago Midway Airport.

They driver takes me to a different airport over an hour away! I nearly missed my flight because he didn't follow directions. To add insult to a shitty situation he charged me an extra $40 for his mistake.

This morning I requested a refund and noted the driver took a long route. They had the nerve to reply and blame it on me! Claiming the drop-off location was not the location original specified. Mother fuckers I have a screen shot!

I am astounded that they would stoop to such low levels as to shift the blame to me. I suppose they were betting I didn't have a screen shot.

Well, time to try lift!

You know the world is fucked up when you can post a picture of your dinner on Facebook and it gets fifty likes, but when you post about something important, like software and hardware freedom is gets one like.

Your fucking single page whatever the fuck app doesn't need React! Stop overcomplicating everything and getting distracted by shinny new frameworks, just focus on solving the problem!

My fiancée's grandfather calls his cellphone a "jukebox". I can't handle this.

Had a fun little conversation with a potential employer...

Him: We use git for version control. To work with our team you'll be expected to do the same and be proficient at it.

Me: Not a problem. I am well versed with all things git! May I ask, what does your work flow look like?

Him: All of our source lives in a single repo and everyone commits straight to master.

Me: 😐...

Him: Conflicts will not be tolerated.

Web advertising has really gotten out of hand.

Most news sites dedicate more real estate to ads than actual content. Even worse, sites like Bloomberg scroll like a janky piece of shit because of all the gaddamn ads constantly loading resources, and phoning home to help the fucks spy on me.

Marketers ruin everything.

Was reading a recipe when suddenly some wild JavaScript appeared.

I know what I'm dressing up as this year.

In case you want to scroll through time instead of space: https://github.com/mathieudutour/...

I got my nieces Github t-shirts. My sister just sent me this.

My department was tasked with building browser extentions for Shopify to add functionality to their admin panel.

We warned the bosses about how unstable these extentions could become as there is no warning of changes to Shopify's code. If they make a small change it could break everything.

Instead of listening to us, what did they do? They doubled down and had us build this massive plug-in that adds dozens of complicated UIs and features to run the core of their business. I actually left the company over this and several other questionable decisions.

Last week I was catching up with their last remaining dev. Appearently a few weeks ago most of it fell apart and some of its not fixable unless Shopify makes some changes.