Le me.

Tasked with eval’ing SPA frameworks.

Gets down to business with Vue.

Fuck this shit.

It’s lovely when it works, but heaven help you if *anything* is slightly off.

What the fuck is Webpack?! Fucking ugly-ass, hydra-looking fuckery is what it is.

Cypress? Hah! Does it want to work? No it fucking does not.

Does anything tell me what’s wrong? Nope.

I love OSS, but so much of it a complete clusterfuck of duct tape and prayers.

How do you deal with massively poorly-performing and unknowledgeable teams?

For background, I've been in my current position for ~7 months now.

A new manager joined recently and he's just floored at the reality of the team.

I mean, a large portion of my interview (and his) was the existing manager explicitly warning about how much of a dumpster fire everything is.

But still, nothing prepares you for it.

We're talking things like:
- Sequential integer user ids that are passable as query string args to anonymous endpoints, thus enabling you to view the data read by that view *for any* user.
- God-like lookup tables that all manner of pieces of data are shoved into as a catch-all
- A continued focus on unnecessary stored procedures despite us being a Linq shop
- Complete lack of awareness of SOLID principles
- Actual FUD around the simplest of things like interfaces, inversion of control, dependency injection (and the list goes on).

I've been elevated into this sort of quasi-senior position (in all but title - and salary), and I find myself having to navigate a daily struggle of trying to not have an absolute shit fit every time I have to dive into the depths of some of the code.

Compounded onto that is the knowledge that most of the team are on comparable salaries (within a couple thousand) of mine, purely owing to length of service.

We're talking salaries for mid-senior level devs, for people that at market rates would command no more (if even close) than a junior rate.

The problem is that I'm aware of how bad things are, but then somehow I'm constantly surprised and confronted with ever more insane levels of shitfuckery, and... I'm getting tired.

It's been 7 months, I love the job, I'm working in the charity sector and I love the fact that the things I'm working on are directly improving people's lives, rather than lining some fintech fatcat's pockets.

I guess this was more a rant than a question, and also long time no see...

So my question is this:

- How do you deal with this?
- How do you go on without just dying inside every single day?

When you’re way more experienced and new to a team and are met with “but this is how we’ve done it for ages, and it’s done fine for us” but the sprint performance shows they’ve not completed one in 2 years.

So... I’ve recently started a new role, and luckily I’ve established myself as someone that knows his shit (more or less) TM.

I’m leading the charge on tech debt, and raising issues about it, first on my radar is the monstrosity of their approach to app config.

It’s a web app, and they store config in a key-value table in the database.

Get this. The key is the {type}.{property} path and this is fetched from the database and injected *at construction* via reflection.

Some of these objects get instantiated dozens of times per-request. Eurgh.

Not at all.

I’m a dropout. 🤷‍♂️

My dropping out was due to mental health from a bad relationship and also the realisation that I was failing the math-based portions of the course.

I’ve no doubt had I been better with maths and finished, the course would have been useful, but not the degree itself.

Not having it has never been a real barrier to my finding work, though it did raise eyebrows and require explanation to begin with... now my CV kinda speaks for itself in a way a degree simply doesn’t.

Throw in the fact that most grads can’t code (https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-c...) and employers are starting to wake up to the pointlessness of the degrees.

Real world learning, experience and intuition are *far* more valuable.

I will counterbalance this with the caveat that, if you’re doing things on the very bleeding edge, then a compsci degree beyond undergrad is likely the course you want to forge, I assume there’s no decent substitute for access to the knowledge of experts and the tech / equipment they bring to bear.... just avoid becoming an ivory tower type and you’ll be fine.

Probably going to catch a lot of heat for this, but the casual misogyny, racism and homophobia in this community is just so, so sad.

I’m not left-leaning. I’m not a liberal. I’m not a feminist (third wave).

What I am however is someone that has experienced the toxicity directed toward myself for a part of my identity I have no control over.

Do you not realise that your heel-digging, joke-making, feminazi-labelling, gatekeeping douchebaggery is *exactly* what has led to the insanity we’re seeing these days? If you keep ratcheting it up, they’re going to as well.

Just take a step back, and try to envision what your life would be like if you weren’t a straight white male (TM), and how the conversations and behaviours you participate in or are witness to in the workplace might affect people that are not in that wonderful club.

By virtue of being straight, white and male you have the inherent privilege of walking into a workplace and not immediately thinking these things:

“Are my clothes too revealing?”
“Is that guy starting at my thighs?”
“Shit. I’m the only black one here”
“Fuck. Did I sound gay just then?”
“Does my makeup make me look like a whore?”

These questions aren’t the fault of straight white males, they’re an inherent part of the minority experience, what *is* the fault of straight white males however is the negligent attitude towards these very real issues.

It’s not cool to judge a colleague’s attitude differently because they’re a woman.

It’s not cool to tell a female colleague to smile.

It’s not cool to make gay jokes like “no homo” in the workplace.

It’s not cool to joke about how hot a female colleague is.

It’s not cool to ask the ethnic colleagues where they’re from, because your implicit motivation is that they’re surely not born and raised.

Accept that behaviours like these are pernicious and dangerous, and be willing to look inwards and realise you may be part of the problem.

Don’t label it as an attack on the heterosexual, the male or the white. It isn’t. It’s a cry to equalise things and make people aware that their privileged experience of life (relatively speaking) is not universal.

!rant

I've had a personal project (commercial idea) I've been meaning to get started on for a while, and today I started...

Kudos to the team at Microsoft, they've really gotten .net core and asp.net core to a fantastic place.

And the team at JetBrains have done an amazing job on Rider.

I've been able to get a docker container running SQL Server on linux, as well as Web API projects for an API and an identity server all running with local HTTPS and communicating quite happily, with barely an issue in sight.

Bodes well for the future I hope.

Now I just have to commit to the project and actually finish it 😂

After being a miserly bastard and settling on VirtualBox for my VM needs on OSX, I downloaded a Parallels trial a couple weeks back, and today, I'm happy to announce I bought a license!

VirtualBox can go do one.

I've ditched Studio for Rider, and now Parallels, what has the world come to when a dev actually buys software?!

The end is nigh I say, nigh.

I ❤️ F#, this function is both beautiful and was an utter nightmare to create 😂

So... after a vision test on a whim, it turned out I needed glasses.

Turns out sitting in front of a screen all day did actually mess my eyes up 😂

Luckily I only need them for using the computer for extended periods of time, so managed to run them through my company as an expense.

So I’m a huge fan of visual studio, but it let me down today.

“Find all references” just straight up fails to find all references of a member in this big F# solution I’m documenting.

I need to be able to reliably find what I’m looking for.

Reshaper for visual studio appears to not be that maintained for F#. FML.

Download Rider evaluation on the off chance, it works flawlessly.

One begrudging commercial license purchase later (despite being the only employee) and I now have software that actually fucking works.

What a wonderful time when Microsoft’s official IDE fails in analysis of its own language.

Those feels when you're tasked with producing a detailed breakdown of the structure of the client's application, and you're high-key having to avoid being too negative about the shit-show.

Late to the party. But renovation complete.

Presenting my new home office / bedroom setup.

👌

Strap in...

- Previous employer
- 3rd party partner firm
- integration link between both over SOAP
- Both sides riddled with poor code and messed up political structures (partner firm CEO is an investor in my employer)
- Doing a deployment to update to https (I know)
- Keep http endpoint live
- Other side starts shitting itself
- Diagnose
- Not us
- feelsgoodman.tiff
- Get angry email
- Explain not us
- Back and forth
- Tell client it’s “irrelevant” on https issue, it’s their side that’s gone wrong
- Get angry reply with boss cc’d about how nothing is “irrelevant” for the client
- We all had to have a make up meeting and meal
- Client was calm and reasonable, all agreed we just snapped and it wouldn’t happen again
- 2 weeks later
- Their system shits itself again and suddenly we’re on the hook
- BA on my team (smarmy little bastard) constantly fucking me off
- Get so close to actually screaming and hitting him

So yeah. I don’t tend to hold that a job is more important to me than my dignity.

I have and will never hold my tongue for the sake of a job, I’m not gonna put up with people shouting / belittling / backstabbing etc.

!dev

Just got done watching Netflix’s new 10 part series ‘Maniac’.

It’s by far the weirdest, most emotionally charged thing I’ve perhaps ever watched.

I spent a solid 5 minutes just crying my eyes out at the end of the final episode.

I can’t recommend it enough.

Late update to the party, but I’m temporarily occupying the newly decorated living room while my room / office is being prepared for a swish new look.

Obligatory code included.

Wanna know what I love being able to do now?

Reply to bullshit recruiter emails and basically follow the script:

- Here's my skills
- Here's my availability
- Here's my rate
- Here's my CV

Oh, and BTW, I trade through my own limited company, so stick that up your various orifices you ratchet-fucking moron emailing me about roles that are literally nowhere near related to my publicly available info...

It’s that time again. I should be sleeping and instead I’m on here delirious with toothache and the dread of the dentist later.

So have a face reveal thread.

Needs tidying and I’m not exactly using it for work at the moment... but this is my home office / bedroom setup.

There’s an Alienware Alpha hiding behind the MacBook, but it hasn’t actually been on more than once since the MacBook came home... 😂

Contracting:

Con - It can be hella stressful and last minute, especially when contracts and agencies are a real pain.

Con - finding out you’re probably gonna need to go to site at like 11PM the day before, and train tickets are a fucking scam

Pro - Sitting in first class with a complimentary croissant and orange juice isn’t so bad.

Pro - Being able to finally travel to an Apple Store to get that MacBook you’ve been eying for a while because now you actually have to travel. 👀

Any U.K. / EEA devs with substantial Angular experience?

Asking for a client, it’d be remote work with visits to the office every so often.

Contract work too, so ideal for freelancers.

TIL: American’s are having a super freak out over the singular use of “they” rather than “he” or “she”.

I’m British, and this is utterly baffling to me.

Singular they is super common here, and has actually been in considerable use for hundreds of years, and used by people like Shakespeare.

I had absolutely no idea that the American derivation of English had such crazy little grammar quirks like this.

What’s everyone’s take on this? Why have such a problem over a word that rather elegantly avoids any conflict over gendered usage of pronouns?

It avoids mislabelling when you’re not sure, it allows you to make statements that are inclusive, and it’s just cleaner.

(And no, I’m not at a ‘Zir’ level of madness)

!rant

Today I got access to the code for the new contract I’m working on.

It all built first time from source.

I’ve never wept such joyful tears.

Story time.

Previous role.
Have a BA working and overseeing the team.
Development is an absolute shit show at the company.
Basically constantly focussed on putting out fires and reeling from the 100 WTF’s a minute thanks to the batshit code the yes-men offshore Indian devs had created.

I’m quite outspoken, and don’t just roll over when people are cunts to me.

I ended up in so many meetings about communication and tone, merely because I wasn’t putting up with the BA’s two-faced cuntery where he tried to be my friend but at the same time be an utter fucking jobsworth.

Genuinely, I really got so close to decking him a few times.

Pic related.

Had a job advert where they legit said a requirement was following the waterfall methodology.

Nope. Nope nope nope nope.

Fresh out of dropping out of uni with a real heaping of newly diagnosed depression.

Get job in the industry.

Absolute joke of a company, spiral even further.

Thus begins the saga of boom / bust and the universe / myself fucking me over just as things get good that has been the last 8 years of my life.

Maybe one day I’ll write properly about my experience of mental health, in industry, in welfare and in my family too.

Suffice it to say, anything that leads you to take a whole year out, as well as makes you question whether what you thought was your dream job is actually right for you - is, ultimately, the definition of burnout.

tl;dr - the last 8 years have been a fucking burnout episode.

!rant

Just landed my second client, and it’s an exciting one!

*dance*

!rant

That remote contractor life is waiting for work, feeling super unproductive.

Solution? Shorts and shirt in the glorious weather with a spliff.

~rant

I started working for myself in January, and work has been few and far between.

I’ve always wanted to work for myself, and now I’m working on a product I’m actually going to sell *gulp*

It’s not ready yet, but I’ll definitely be posting here about it when it’s ready to go :D

It’s going to be a super simple (Windows to start) screenshotting tool (and relevant cloud services) primarily focussed on devs / IT professionals and their needs.

Sound off for feature requests 👍

Anyone else really struggle with motivation?

Time was back when I was a fresh dev that I couldn’t stop coding, it’s all I ever wanted to do.

I think doing it for a job has sucked the fun out of it, and unless I’m getting paid (and even then), I find actually getting down to it is really difficult.

I’ll start looking into making something, perhaps get as far as opening the IDE and then just nope’ing and bingeing YouTube / gaming / Netflix instead.