Client be like 😅

So true

I had the most depressing realization last night after I spent a good chunk of the day answering questions on Stack Overflow.

I can usually understand their code, I often understand their questions, and I know how to help and when to recommend that they completely change direction. I'm effectively trying to mentor total strangers using a few code samples and paragraphs. I'm happy to do that, and I'm good at it.

Then I realized - these people all have programming challenges of their own to solve. I work for a so-called "consulting" agency where I sit around for weeks because they have nowhere to put me. When they do find me a client it's some company that has no idea how to develop software and no interest in how I can help. They just want to add another developer into the giant mess they've created to keep doing what they're already doing. I'm still using any of the skills I put to work all day long helping people on Stack Overflow.

In other words, the people who need my help figuring out how to write code actually have the jobs writing code, and I don't. Clearly I'm doing something wrong.

Ironically, when I go to one of these companies with a lead developer who doesn't know how to write a unit test or put together three lines of coherent code, that person tells me to just follow what everyone else is doing without making any improvements. Then he goes on Stack Overflow to figure out how to do his job, and chances are I'm the one answering his questions.

As my wife always reminds me, I work in air conditioning so I shouldn't complain. It's a stable company with nice people and it pays the bills. But I sure would like to develop some software in my software development job instead of treating it like a personal hobby.

My phone just froze. But this one time, instead of being mad at it for stopping I had the thought that it's probably working harder than when things are going smoothly. So I watched with compassion as my phone tried to resolve its internal struggle, it being so overwhelmed that it could no longer communicate with me. It was like watching someone having an anxiety attack. There, there. Take all the time you need, little friend. You're safe in my hands ♥️

I'M BACK TO MY WEBDEV ADVENTURES GUYS! IT TOOK ME LIKE 4 MONTHS TO STOP BEING SO FUCKING DEPRESSED SO I CAN ACTUALLY STAND TO WORK ON IT AGAIN

I learned that the linear gradient looks cool as FUCK. Honestly not too fond of the colors I have right now, but I just wanted to have something there cause I can change it later. The page has evolved a bunch from my original concept.

My original concept was the bar in the middle just being a URL bar and having links on the sides. If I had kept that, it would have taken me a few hours to get done. But as time went on when I was working on it, my idea kept changing. Added the weather (had a forecast for a while but the code was gross and I never looked at the next days anyways, so I got rid of it and kept the current data). I wanted to attempt an RSS reader, but yesterday I was about to start writing the JavaScript to parse the feeds, then decided "nah", ended up making the space into a todo list.

The URL bar changed into a full command bar (writing the functions for the commands now, also used to config smaller things, such as the user@hostname part, maybe colors, weather data for city and API key, etc)....also it can open URLs and subreddits (that part works flawlessly). The bar uses a regex to detect if it's a legit URL (even added shit so I don't need http:// or https://), and if it's not, just search using duckduckgo (maybe I'll add a config option there too for search engines).

At this very moment it doesn't even take a second to fully load. It fetches weather data from openweathermap, parses it, and displays it, then displays the "user" name grabbing a localstorage value.

I'm considering adding a sidebar with links (configurable obviously, I want everything to be dynamic, so someone else could use my page if they wanted), but I'm not too sure about it.

It's not on git yet because I was waiting until I get some shit finished today before I commit. From the picture, I want to know if anyone has any suggestions for it. Also note that I am NOT a designer. I can't design for shit.

I visit my mom once a year, and usually perform preventative maintenance on her computer. Scrubbing it for viruses, applying updates for drivers, etc. On one such occasion in the early days, she complained that the PC was slow, and would quit. I opened it up, and there was a 1/4 inch layer of dust everywhere, and any and all vents were completely blocked, to the point that fans weren't turning. I blew that crap out, and from that point on became her IT guy.

I'm a lead engineer, I design, I code, I debug, I test, I struggle, I deliver, I'm just a basic building block in my company, hardly involve in product roadmap planning. This is pretty clear in my LinkedIn profile. Jp Morgan recruiter called me for Vice president role. VP? Seriously? me skipping 4-5 levels, just with an interview process? Are you kidding me?
I asked her two times "...are you sure?", I lost my words, somehow gathered courage and asked, "what's the portfolio looks like, how many people will report to me?" Then she, calmly revealed that it's just an ic dev role and they name it that ways in their company.

What the actual ducking-duck-duckkk!

P.s. not sure about jpmc rest of the world but that's how it is in jp Morgan india.

This next one is dedicated to a couple of special people at my workplace:

- The person who uploaded internal-use-only code to a personal repository on GitHub

- The network team that has blocked any and all access to GitHub

- The obscured mass of management bureaucracy that makes it pretty much impossible for anyone at my level to make any sort of appeal

This one's for you:

*ahem*

WHY?!

Now seriously, WHAT THE FUCK???
Every single time I have to work with people from a particular country [you have one guess. Yepp, that's the one], I see A-FUCKING-LOOOOOOT of manual work?!?

"can you reboot the server?"
-"sure, let me help you, sir" <20 minutes later> "done"

"can you unlock my account?"
-"yes, just a moment sir" <20 minutes later> "please check now"

"can you restart this environment w/ 200 instances?"
-"yes sir, let me check" <6 hours later> "please check now"
"you've missed 18 containers"
-"oh okay sir, will restart them now" <2hours later> "please check now"
[I am already OoO]

why is it that every time I have to work with you guys I am the one who is automating shit. How come you never think of/do any automata? You are fucking technitians, you should know how. WHY DO YOU ENJOY CLICKING ALL-DAY-LONG????

I'm serious. Why??? I'm struggling to understand...

Fellow developers,
For all people asking u to be partners of their "billionaire" idea, and to be paid from revenue ONLY when the plateform goes live or shit like this, BEWARE.
For all of them i had the same answer: "ok, ill share with you the project, but until it goes live, i am the only one who is giving sacrifice, and since we are partners, i want us both to do same level of sacrifices in order to deserve later the share of revenue... That being said, u have to pay the hours of devlopment, all of them, and when it goes live, from the revenue ill get, ill pay you back what you paid on dev cost"

It is the only way to be really even...
And if he refuse, ask them again "why? I taought u where 100% sure that your idea will work and become a billionaire why u think it is risky tp pay few thousands????"
... Now he is having second thaughts

Yesssssssssssssssssssssssssssss, finally!

After months of searching for a damn bug I've finally found it in a 5h session. People increasingly started to worry whether this bug has been introduced because of a recent update of the programming language, but I finally found the bug in a dependency. Nobody thought it would be the dependency, because it wasn't updated in 9 months, but it seems like the update improved the networking a tiny bit, whiche caused a buffer to load a second mesage sooner than expected.

I can finally work on my side project again!
Fucking finally!

Colleague: Hey mister IHateForALiving, I've seen you made two files for a single form
Me: I did that because these two forms have nothing in common. You can have either one or the other and do totally different things, and I splitted them because they are fairly complex, and you may want to add more of this kind in the future.
Colleague: That's not how you should handle the matter, you should have put everything in a single file and handle everything via if else if else

Yeah Helen lucky you for thinking a single file of thousands of lines handled via switch-case is a good idea, must be great living life with the IQ of a rock, please give me a call if you ever decide to stick your head out of your ass just the tiny bit it takes for some oxigen to reach your brain

New position at work. Lots of power in regards to tech stacks of my choice.

I feel like Neo.

First project was finished in a week using Clojure. A basic application that would automate the process of adding our students into a particular active directory system in which many other things happen at the same time including updates to pins and other shit as well as networking and wifi permissions. Works fast as fuuuuuuuuuck, the alternative existed(somewhat) in php and while there was nothing wrong other than speed I wanted to show the head of my department what i could do.

It was anticlimactic as fuck. I thought it was gonna take me longer. It fucking didn't and i am glad as shit. It is now working like an absolute powerhouse in its own environment and being monitored by the sys admins, they loved how easy it was to deploy and how well behaved it is.

The head of the department is impressed as fuck and the board of directors got a hold of it. Reason being that I am being displayed as some sort of wizard that used ancient alien tech in the 21st century.

Fuck yes, major win.

I also get to add Clojure to my resumee. Hod even said that if needed be they will rethink my salary to add the fact that i get to use this tech where no one else can.

Today my current company fuck itself.

We were in negotiations about the end of my contract/mission, I want to quit to create a company around AI.

And the actual chairman said to me "You think too highly of yourself. I could find a tenth of people to replace you so shut up and take what we offer".

30 minutes later they received my resignation. 1h after that, the 15 dev under me resigned (after two year working with us they are clearly under paid). At the end of the day, the Head of product and the two good PO resigned.

This morning I get an email, talking about suing me as I made everyone resigned and asking for a meeting.
So I went to the meeting with a lawyer, they weren't expecting it. Boring legal stuff came after that.

And the funny fact: at the end of the meeting the CIO, chief ops and the SRE resigned as well.... As they didn't want to have the run it without all the team...

Funny day :)

Last month the main product, 90% of the company use it, was launched. And in three months 80% if the IT profiles will be out...

A list of Stux's !dev pet peeves.

1) Slow walking (elderly or visibly injured dont count most of the time) people in busy grocery stores. Like please move. I've got shit to do.
2) Thot bots on Instagram.
3) people who leave 2 or 3 car links between them and the car in front of them at a stoplight. I'm not saying you need to be touching their vehicle, but move closer damn.
4) People that say shit like "if you believe x, then unfollow me." Grow up and get over yourself. People are allowed opinions you asshat.

My name is Stuxnet and thank you for attending my TED talk.

A year ago I posted on here that I had been working on a game using xamarin for 2 years as a hobby project. Back then you guys encouraged me to publish it.
A year later, I have done just that. I put it on play store for free. No ads. No monetization. Feel free to check it out:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/...
Feedback is always welcome.
It isn't a graphics heavy game. More of a strategy clicker.
Also, still some bugs I need to iron out.

A Developer is desperate: his java application servers are unresponsive, thousand of dead zombie threads are sucking all cpus, memory is leaking everywhere, garbage collector has gone crazy, the cluster sessions are fucked....

The Developer goes to the closest bridge, ties a stone to his neck and gets ready to jump.

Suddenly a bearded old man with a fiery look runs toward him, yelling:
- stop stop!!!! Your application is not scaling and misconfigured, your servers are melting, cpu usage is not sustainable anymore, but don't despair

The Developer, puzzled, looks at him:
-I've never seen you...how do you know...
- Hey, man, I'm the Devil. I know everything. All your problems are solved. I'll give you magic functions. They are called Lambda.
You'll never have to worry about your servers, scalability, security, configuration and shit.

The Developer seems astonished but relieved:
- Ok, sounds great! let's try it - suddenly suspicion creeps in - hmmmm but you are the Devil....so...you want something back, don't you?
(the Devil nods lightly with a diabolic smile)
- ...and...you want my soul, I guess...
- your soul??? come on!!! - the Devil burst in a laugh - we are in 2019. I don't care about your soul. I want your ass.
- What!???!!!?
- yes, I want to fuck your ass

The Developer, evaluates quickly the situation.
Few moments of pain or slight discomfort (?) in exchange for magic lambda. It could be worth. He accepts.

After a while of rough anal fucking, the devil asks
- Hey, how old are you anyway?
- 45, why?
- Oh jeeez...45!!!??? and you still believe in the devil?

Boss: Hey man, can you do an extra couple of hours today to finish [...] up? I just talked to [person he knows is driving me home that day] and he said he would do them! Can I count on you?
...
Me: Hey, [person driving me home]. Are you really doing the extra hours the boss is asking for? I thought you didn't wanna stay longer today...
[person driving me home]: F*ck no! He hasn't asked me yet.

I have colleagues that enjoy only drinking, nothing wrong so far but those guys are ordering a lot of crates monthly on the company budget.

You can see it as part of the fun or making the workplace enjoyable, what's wrong with having some relaxed atmosphere?

The funny fact that each developer has an education budget and guess what? you can't even claim it, the manager said no to conferences, if you want to get a book or training he will come up with 1000 excuses.

So when the company priority is spending thousands on drinks and ignore education and growth don't expect the motivated developers to stick longer.

>be me
>drop out of uni studying civil engineering
>"self-taught" "web programmer"
>start freelancing in 2010
>Make money, feels good man
>clients keep me busy, feel important
>Code just for the fun of it
>be 2019. Married, code to make ends meet
>lose all interest
>mere sight of the ide makes me want to bash the screen
>have zero motivation
>never get any projects done
>become broke af
>look at old friends on fb. They are "Something".
>look at real software engineers and programmers with education
>realize I am an imposter
>start dropping all projects and studying theory
>become more broke
>start taking "motivation pills" to just start working again
>lose all motivation and pissed at all the real programmers and engineers for their success
>be me on May 20, 2019 at 2:56 AM
Yep, this is the end.

Team quarterly capacity planning:

- Confluence document created with a big table (+100 rows) by product / business. Each row is something that needs to be worked on for the coming quarter.

- Row 1 could be an Epic with 15 tickets attached. Row 2 could be adding a single log to our analytics. No consistency.

- For each row, we create a separate confluence document with the "technical details". 75% of the time these remain blank. 1% of the time there is something useful, the rest its a slightly longer version of the description from the bigger document.

- Each row gets a high level estimate by the leads. 50% of the time without sufficient background info to actually do get it accurate.

- These are then copied into the teams excel spreadsheet, where it will calculate if we are over/under capacity.

- We will go backwards and forwards between confluence and excel until we are "close enough" to under capacity without being too much.

- Once done, we then need to copy them into the org/division's excel spreadsheet. This document is huge, has every team on it and massive 50pt text saying "Do not put a filter on this document".

- Jira tickets + Epics will now be created for each one, with all the data be copied over by hand, bit by bit, by product. Often missing something.

- Last week, at the end of this process for Q2 (2 weeks late), 6 of the leads were asked to attend a 30 minute meeting to discuss how to group the line items together because we had too many for the bigger excel spreadsheet.

- This morning I was told business weren't happy with one of our decisions to delay one line item. Although they were all top priority (P0), one of them was actually higher than that again (P-1?) and we need to work it back in.

... so back to step 1

- Mid way through Q2, a new document will be created for Q3. Work items that didn't make the cut will be manually copied from one to the other. 50/50 whether anything that didn't get done on time in Q2 will make its way to the Q3 doc.

- "Tech excellence" / "Tech debt" items (unit/UI tests, documentation, logging, performance, stability etc) will never be copied over. Because product doesn't understand them and assumes therefore that they are unimportant.

==================

PS: I'd like to say this was a rare event for Q2, but no. Q4 and Q1 were so bad, we were made assurances from the director of engineering that he would fix this process for Q2. This is the new and improved process (I shit you not) that has resulted in nothing tangible.

I've installed Ubuntu for her something like 2 years ago, because her Windows installation was fucked up. After that 2 years she aksed me to install her new computer and copy the personal documents from her old computer.

So I backed up all her personal stuff like photo's and so on and asked her if she would like me to install Ubuntu again. Then she said that she would love to get Ubuntu again, because it was much cleaner and easier than Windows 😁.

So, from now on, my mom is using Ubuntu instead of Windows. That makes me really proud of her.

Just the other day I got back from getting an extra monitor.. and just when I came back home, some older lady that also lives in this residence came to me, all panicked because her left car lights wouldn't turn off. So she asked me whether I could fix it, because I'm a man and therefore technical... Yeah.

Told her I don't know anything about cars (I don't even have a driver's license), and she should ask someone else.. but she kept clinging on to me and eventually I figured.. screw it, how hard can it be?

Got to her car, yada yada yada.. lady opens the door, and it's full of fucking buttons everywhere! No fucking way that I'm gonna dabble with those. So, do the easiest thing first.

"Ma'm, could you please turn on the car?"
*Turns car on, all lights light up*
🤔 Fair enough...
"Hmm.. and what happens if you turn it off now?"
*Turns car off, all lights go off*

Lady: "I've got no idea how you've done it but thank you so much, you're an angel!! 😊"
Me: "Well.. 😅 let's just say that turning it on, off and back on again works at least 90% of the time..."

F*** all this motivational/inspirational shit going on nowadays. We don't need cold showers, wake up 4:30 AM, or sacrifice time with loved ones just because our ego wants to be successful.

What if I don't want it, what if I just want to BBQ some chickens, drink Red Bull, and watch some Netflix shows until I die.

I don't want to own a Lamborghini, big apartment, live in a warm place with a nice view over the blue ocean, etc. This is just an illusional life-style story that every single person in the world wants, and the reason is so media and commercial companies can trick people to buy whatever they want.

I don't give a shit, we'll all die someday, I don't need these things in my life to make me feel happy or complete. I've seen people with everything, yet they commit suicide because the inner self is broken.

Just be happy with whatever you have, and stop going after things that won't really make you happy. The fact you have eyes to see, ears to hear, and hands to feel is worth billions in itself.

Wake up.

Got a LinkedIn message from a recruiter looking to know if I’m interested in a full stack developer role, to only work on front end. The requirement is that I know one of:

“go, node.js, rails, python, C# .NET, RoR etc”.

I wonder who it is that doesn’t have a clue, company or recruiter (or both?).

I’m actually going to reply to this one for fun to try figure out this mess (yes I’m that bored)

Dear Android:

I know I'm not on wifi. I get it. Sometimes data coverage isn't amazing or the network is congested. It's cool. You can just flash "no service" and I just won't try. or even "3G" and I'll have some patience. I rember how slow 3G was. It's okay, I'll wait.

But fucking stop showing 4G LTE if you can't make a fucking GET request for a 2kb text file in less than 5 minutes! Fucking really? Don't fucking lie to me with your false hope bullshit, just tell me the truth and I'll probably sigh and say shit and put my phone away.

But fuck you and your progress bar externally stuck in the middle. As if to say you're making progress! Wasting my time!

If you can't download a kilobyte in a 5min period, why even say I have data at all? What good does that do me?

I found a healthCheck function while troubleshooting an old application for a large auto manufacturer today. The healthCheck function was running several times a day on a timer. The function tries to insert a record into the database and returns whether or not it was successful. It was written in 1999 and has to date inserted over 2.5 million records into the database! 1/3rd of the data for this application was the same record.

How the hell did nobody notice this for 20 years!!!

Recruiter: Hi, i'm recruiting for xyz, your profile looks like a great fit. Would you be interested in discussing further?

Me: Hi, your company website says you only have an office location in Berlin. I've marked my profile as not interested in relocation, only interested in jobs in my country and said the same in my description. Are you expanding to my country?

Recruiter: You are correct, this role is based in AMAZING Berlin. Are you interested in relocating?

Me:

*On a programming support forum*

Guy: My compiler keeps throwing null pointer exception at line 128.
Me: Ok. Can you post your code real quick so I could figure out what is null at line 128?
Guy: No I'm not going to show my code to someone on the internet. What if you want to steal my code?
My mind: "Dude wtf why would I steal someone's code on a support forum?"
Me: *Use the next 15 minutes explaining that showing the code is necessary so that others can actually help him, and that no one on a support forum is going to steal his code.*
Guy: "You know what I'm more convinced that you want to copy my code. I might as well just try to fix this on my own."

What?

Rejected for the job . Out in technical round, though i gave all the correct answers.
Me: seating outside with a down face.🦁
HR: what happened? you seems to bit low .
Me: sir ,got rejected in technical round.🐷
HR: work on mistakes.
Me: yeah sir🦊
Inner me: tell me the mistakes fucker...
Why ? Why? Why?
Dealing with rejection for no reason 🐀