Interviewer: Where do you see yourself in five years?

Candidate: Well, I checked your LinkedIn... and most employees leave in two years.

Interviewer: Uh... welcome to the team?" 😂

Fuckers stole my ground. Can't have shit in South Africa

There was this one time when a coworker needed to update the Xcode.

IIRC because his Mac mini was low on storage space, the update failed && the Xcode became corrupted.

He found that out when he tried to open the Xcode, at which time he was presented w/ an error akin to:
'Xcode was found to be corrupted && was moved to the Recycle Bin'.

C: 'Good, it belongs there!'.

Did anyone here work with WebAssembly? .-. Like for real-life scenarios and not just a hobby
I thought it'd be a bigger deal by now specially for SPAs and corporate web-based dashboards

but i havent seen much of it irl

The perfect LLM doesn't exis...

Old employer sends you a message on WhatsApp 4 weeks after you left asking for your help because they cannot figure out a NEW issue with one of the application servers.

What do you reply? Do you even reply?

(I’m now freelance and charge £70/hr)

I doubt.

I accidently uninstalled a browser in my android phone. Lots of bookmarks lost :-( No Google sync or anything. How to recover?

It occurs to me that the only people left on devrant are shills, bots, racists, and insane people, and I've yet to decide whether to leave or count myself into that last category.

The evolution of website navigation.

I hate tech.

Trying to find a solution to problem in tech:
- 5 to 10 minutes searching for the correct terminology for the problem you are having.
- 5 to 10 minutes trying to find a solution.
- 5 to 10 minutes trying to find the correct terminology because the first terminology was wrong.
- 5 to 10 minutes finding the correct solution for your platform version.
- all the while dodging sketchy AI results
- Either you find a solution or you find it can't be fixed on your platform because X vendor is a POS.

So, this is not quite what happened today, but it pisses me off. I cannot imagine not being non-technical trying to use any platform this day and age.

I am trying to access data off of a backup. The data I want is in a user directory on a windows backup. I cannot get to user content because the user for the machine the backup came from is not known. I try with explorer and it says I need to elevate priv. So I do. It sits there and just spins icon doing nothing forever. The volume for viewing the backup is read only (actually a good idea, but annoying, can't change permissions).

So I remember that explorer artificially enforces permissions on folders. So I get Q-Dir which has worked in the past. So I get it installed and it fails to elevate privs. WTF! Everywhere I search I see no solution and shitty AI results. Then from the back of my mind I remember. Run Q-Dir as admin (which doesn't work on explorer due to artificial enforcement). So I do. It can access anything from the backup regardless of location.

WHY THE FUCK DO THESE BULLSHIT BARRIERS EXIST? It only causes frustration from users and locks people out of their data.

I hate technology.

my luck is terrible

woke up this morning to a blizzard. I love snow though. had to walk middle of the road because the sidewalks had a meter of snow. so fun. tons of people shoveling their cars, interrupts to their day and awkward problem solving (love it!), even saw some people traversing the city in snowshoes... never seen Canadians not magically clear snow instantly!

got my stuff, came home, showered, put coffee on to make, decided I was gonna do a lot of laundry and clean the place. was listening to podcasts, ate cake and coffee, went nuts cleaning the apartment. even did some impromptu gardening because my plants needed some TLC. my muscles were exhausted and it was awesome

... got a new blanket on Valentine's day from the boyfriend. well turns out it's flammable or something. messed up my drying machine. ended up messing up the laundry load and just putting up clothes to dry hanging... lame. tried to fix the blanket best I can wtf.

... but while sweeping and trying to make sure the drying machine was adequately vented out... my phone slipped out of my hoodie pocket and dropped on my toe... and cracked in half

I am in despair now, irrationally

I also feel irrational fear on the matter

the phone works perfectly fine... there's just a crack across. sensors all good, visuals all fine. but noticing the air bubble in the screen protector, the tiny crack in the correct lighting, just makes me feel like such crap

feel so cursed and like everything I touch breaks. my laptop is also broken... a screw fell off the corner. I just feel so cursed. grrrr. and I don't get the irrational fear. now the reminder on my phone screen... this phone slips out of everything, I've had it fall often, but I guess because this time it landed on my toe and not flat on the screen the weight distribution made it crack. probably next time it slips somewhere it will break entirely 😔

just irrationally in fear, grief, whyyy 😭

I am so naive about LLMs. I wanted to know if I can just make one trained on text I produce. I don't even know what that means. But I read that it can take a huge effort to train one.

The more I read about this subject the less I understand. I assume some are available commercially:
https://github.com/eugeneyan/...

But I don't even know what that means. If I wanted to make an LLM to handle text interactions with NPCs what are we talking about here? Is it a multi-gigabyte file? Do I have to worry about what it was trained on? I don't want one that has infinite knowledge. I don't want it to have any frankly. I want to provide its reality as the sole creator.

The problem is I don't even know what the question is to ask it properly. I assume I need something that teaches it english, but then what comes after that?

WHO TF STILL USES SVN!!!!!

The current client I am working for has an insufferable CTO who doesn't want to use git, because of some github new privacy terms... We have tried to explain git is not github and that we can host our own git server... He is a knows it all and doesn't want to use git in 2025... although I understand there's different preferences out there... No one in the development team wants to use SVN! ... The CTO doesn't even write code.

AI is dumb and is not going to rob your work as a programmer.
Expanding on this:
https://devrant.com/rants/12459112/...

Don't know about the others, but programming and IT is mostly safe unless you're a secretary answering to mails pressing 1 keystroke at time with index finger.

Bullshit.

I’ve tried EVERYTHING. As a developer, I know exactly what instructions to give and how to explain them. I tried this stuff for years.

I abandoned the idea to give Ai a full blown workspace to vscode with copilot, even with experimental LLMS (Claude 3.5, Gpt4o, o1, as per my linked post, copilot is dumb as a rock), because it fucks up every fucking time so bad.

I tried getting an AI to build a simple project, something that has plenty of samples of code around, something that I was sure it could have been in its training dataset. A copy of Arkanoid, in HTML/CSS/JS, even reformulating the prompts over and over with different LLMs that claim to have reasoning abilities. I provided detailed feedback step by step, pointed out the errors, improvements, and problems in-depth to: o3, o1, 4o, deepseekv3+R1, and Qwen 2.5 Ultra. I even activated web search and suggested scanning GitHub repos when necessary. I gave examples of code after several failed attempts.

And guess what? Nothing. A total mess. Half the time, the game didn’t even run, and when it did, everything was wrong—bricks overlapping, barely anything working the way I asked. Even though the internet is full of similar code, and I gave it part of the solution myself when it couldn’t figure it out.

Don’t worry, AI isn’t going to steal your job—it’s just a broken toy. Fine for repetitive, simple tasks, but nothing more.

It's years that they make hyped up bold statements that the next model will revolutionize everything and it's years that I get delusional results.

It's just good at replacing some junior bovine work like mapping some classes or writing some loops with not too much variables and logics involved.

Sigh. My error was getting too comfortable using it and trusting/hoping that this ramp up in AI developement would have brought an easier life to dev.

Silly mistake.

do you have an innate instinct to respect authority or those with status?

where does it come from? how does it feel? how do you experience it?

I'm a sick to fucking death of reading 'documentation' by developers who assume you know everything they did at the time of writing and so leave out 90% of the context that would make the documentation make any sense.

Listen to me. If you are writing instructions on how to do something you have 2 options.

1. Write steps that are so detailed a person who has never touched the system could do them
2. Give enough information for a person who has never touched the system to work it out for themselves.

NOT. LET ME REPEAT MYSELF. NOT: 3. Give some half assed info that assumes you had already been working on the system and practically knew everything anyway.

If I had already been working in this area I WOULDNT NEED THE FUCKING DOCUMENTATION TO BEGIN WITH.

So the people who gave root access to clowdstrike and broke half of the world's computers are gonna operate the three miles island nuclear plant?

What could go wrong, right?

https://bbc.com/news/articles/...

LinkedIn is mostly cringe but not always...

It's 2025.
We still have MSSQL with compatibility level set to 100 (matches the version from 2008).
We still have random downtime or issues with timeouts thanks to parameter sniffing.

Update? No that's expensive and doesn't provide more cashflow (ecommerce-ish).
'I just have to make better code'.

Have you ever started a new job and they have a bunch of legacy and technical debt so much that it doesn’t even makes sense trying to fix anything

Okay, maybe I'm unlucky, but I find macOS to be extremely buggy and inconsistent across the board compared to Windows.
The "it just works" slogan hasn't been true in my case.
Like, there's always some dumb issue hindering me.
For example, I can't seem to resize a window by its edge on my second screen in macOS. It just doesn't work.
Of course, Windows isn't perfect, but it works without a hitch in my case.
Finally, the memory swapping issues that lead to lag.
On a typical day, I have two instances of IntelliJ running, Android Studio or XCode, and two Edge + Mozilla, and Docker. 32GB should be able to handle this smoothly. This works fine on my 32GB Windows workstation.
On my 32GB M2 MacBook Pro however, I have to constantly close some programs because of lag.
Not to mention, memory fills up really quickly. I essentially turn on the MacBook and 18 GB are in use. WTF!

Got a bit distracted today. Instead of doing what I've wanted, I created the most comfortable way to make a site ever. I'm serious. It beats all those static site generators.

Hmm, could even make a static site generator of this one. Won't do, no benefit.

It's by using markdown and it has support for syntax highlighting of many languages. A website could be literary:

# My blog

## some code

```c
printf("This is my C code");
```.

And you already have something decent. See the 'Get started' section. You have a site running in no time. See also the Python database example at the bottom, it shows you how to use the internal sqlite3 database in your 'static' site and how to create a visitor counter!

Sky's the limit.

I came up with the idea by teaching my next door neighbor HTML and that was succesfull. She is able to navigate trough files and folders and edit a file like most people. Then I realized, if it was markdown, it would be really user friendly for anyone to use. To create a decent site, you only need to make a stylesheet for someone. By using # ## ### #### headings, it will always be in your designed style.

People won't fuck your site up like they do with WYSIWYG normally.

The concept is so simple, I only see advantages and it could be used for small and big content sites. It doesn't do caching on purpose, overkill and it's more comfortable this way.

Here is project link: https://molodetz.nl/retoor/dreamii

At my work we still deploy web files the old-fashioned way, copying newer versions over from dev to test and test to prod. For comparing and copying changed files we use WinMerge. Although our workflow sucks, WinMerge itself is actually a nifty little tool for comparing any sort of text files. But today it pissed me off in a way it never has before. I copied a diff from left to right and then meant to save it with Ctrl + S, but accidentally pressed Ctrl + D. Guess what happened? To my horror, both sides went completely blank! It looked as if the file contents had been deleted, and undo had no effect. To my relief, the files were intact when opening them in VS Code. Thinking this was a glitch in WinMerge, I restarted it but still, all files were blank. No contents displayed! Then I thought, perhaps pressing Ctrl + D again would bring the file contents back into view. And it did! So the bottom line is: Pressing Ctrl + D makes the compared files appear as empty. Now, who would want that to happen? What a nice feature, you've got here WinMerge! (I'm being sarcastic in case you missed that)

I cannot express how much I don't want businesses who have my phone number to randomly pick an instant messaging account registered with that phone number for their correspondence. I can pick an SMS app, I own my messages as data and so I am fundamentally free to backup, sync, and view them as and when I want. The same is not true for Viber which I only registered because my mom's tenants literally don't use anything else.

When you have 2+ separately scaling services (not HTTP) that need to communicate which each other, what do you do?

I'm leaning on putting Redis in the middle since it's mostly seeding data once per login, but I'm curious about opinions/alternative solutions (one creates a session the other reads the info)

Yearly angular rant.
I am doing since 2023
https://devrant.com/rants/10263715/...

and yep, angular is still shit in 2025

And still maintaining a high level, business critical, giant angular set of web portals, and some more projects with an angular UI that has to do with AI projects.
Of course not my choice, I'm forced to use this pile of steaming shit.

Year by year they keep releasing a new version and I always hope they get their shit togheter.
Every year is worse.
Instead of fixing this half-baked, ill-fated, broken clot of hacks rigged togheter, they keep adding cosmetic shit and useless no-one-asked ever features.
They added signals when there are not 1, but 2 mature, battle-tested frameworks (rxjs, ngrx) that already do it better.
They added @if @else etc etc. syntax after 10 years people were telling them that using that shit *ngIf and ng-container and templates was a shitty hot mess.
The whole change detection system is still the worst, clunky designed, cake of shit, requiring for real world applications to juggle with change detection services, change detection policies and control value accessors, which basically forces you to reinvent the most complicated wheel ever for what a ton of other frameworks already do out of the box without getting you bald from hair-pulling late-night hours.

Even AI can't fathom it. Give it to Copilot, GPT, Claude or whatever, and as soon as you get something more complicated than a form that sends a class to the backend or some mapping classes they will flip up, get all worked up and write completely utter shit that doesn't work.

I won't get into the projects details but I had to build some complicated UI and it has baffled me what fucking triple backflips I had to write to make some UI elements work smooth.

Jesus, why the fuck people keeps unleashing this pile of shit on me?
Why is it even used? There are a TON of healtier alternatives.

As of 2025, my christmas wish is still to have an 1v1 with angular devs in an octagon to shove my fist in their skull to check out what kind of twisted donkey shit is in there.

Seriously some improductive dumbass framework here, and if you like it, you're a shit programmer.

Why the fuck is the elastic search docker image 900Mb. Why the fuck does it include a complete logging system and why the fuck doesn't it have an up-to-date alpine image?

The arrogance of some systems these days. You're part of someone's software, not the software itself. You don't have the right to claim x resources. It's not about you.
Same for Sentry, a logging application that literally requires 8Gb of ram? I removed the limits and did try it anyway and stuff just crashed. Congrats, a logging system that REALLY requires 8Gb ram. The best my VPS does is 4Gb and therefrom you're only allowed to use 512Mb max imho.

I care about image sizes since my laptop only has 114Gb drive and my internet is a 4g hotspot with 50Gb/day limit (trust me, you can't find better for 40 euro's). 114Gb is maybe a bit outdated but be realistic, I only use vim, vscode, some sdks and source files. Why would my harddisk ever be full? Because of bloated docker setups. That's why. The other option is screwing over your system with everyone's configuration.

Alpine all the things!

Years ago, I joined a company making games for handheld consoles.

Because a game's audio needs to be tested, too, I connected earphones to the console so that:
0. I wouldn't bother others w/ the sounds coming out of the console.
/* !Everyone wants to hear that crap. */
1. I could hear the sounds better.

PM: * Enters the room. *
Me: * Focused on testing the game. *
PM: * Walks up to me from the side, starts talking. *
Me: * Focused on testing the game. *
PM: * After approx. 30 seconds of complete lack of response from me, kind of irritated, knocks on my desk to get my attention. *
Me: * Take out the earphones. *
Oh, hi, how can I help you?
PM: Haven't you heard a word I said?
Me: Well, no. I am testing the game, including the audio.
PM: You need to pay attention to what's going on around you.
Me: Testing audio is one of my responsibilities. I am using earphones because of the reasons [0-1].
PM: Even still, you just need to pay attention to what's going on around you.
PM: * Finally explains the reason for him bothering me, then goes back to his lair. *

Moral of the story: Fuck being good at what you do && knowing your responsibilities.
When PM wants something from you, you better give him the attention he wants.

/* The expectation being I grow an extra pair of eyes && ears, so that I see the guy coming && am prepared to listen to him whenever he wants something _while_ doing the best job I possibly can. */

I was curious about the geographical distribution of Top Tech Jobs (i.e. how many FAANG jobs are in Europe, where they are mostly focused, etc)... So I came up with a draft (prototype) of the Tech Jobs Radar:

https://jobs-radar.com/

I'm sharing it here just in case someone else is curious about analyzing such data