I did get into the Information Systems - DevOps Master's program at the uni I wanted (which is the only one that does exactly that). I am trying my best at it now...

Boss: How long will it take to finish the project?

Me: (Gives date for finishing dev and deployment.)

Boss: great, sound reasonable.

Me: ...

Boss: wait. Aren't you on vacation the two weeks after that.

Me: jup.

Boss: yeah we are not doing that again. Client can wait another two weeks.

Before someone says no Boss/PM is like that, he was/is a developer too so discussing deadlines and efforts is usually pretty relaxed since he knows our codebase and how long it takes to do things.

Do you ever spend any day in a week/month without working for even a bit?

Two mobile devs were talking for 10 minutes in this zoom meeting whether "the component on the bottom should be hidden, or made sticky".

I just could not contain my laughter any longer when they showed an animated mockup comparison, and the product manager yelled excitedly: "Oh yeah, I love the one where it's very visible and sticky! But could you make it bigger for me?"

Sorry HR. I will never become a grown up boy.

The project where I realized I wanted to go from chemist to pro dev.

I built a flow-chemistry spectrometer with monitoring backend in Haskell.

Spectroscopy is where you add a reagent to a glass tube, it changes color, and by measuring the exact color it tells you how much of something (for example, a toxin) is present in the sample.

I had to do that a lot on factory samples, writing down measurements using pen & paper.

I'm lazy so I decided to do the logical thing: Automate it. I bought a second hand spectrometer, stripped the casing, did a shitload of glassblowing and hooked up tubes to the production pipelines, so I could get samples, mixing them in the correct ratio with reagents in continuous flows using valves.

I ended up using 2 home-crafted arduino-like boards (etching PCBs is fun!).

One to calibrate the mixture against known samples and control solenoid valves to continuously cycle through various reagents and deionized flushing water, the other to record the measurements and send them to a server running a Haskell/Yesod API.

The server collected the information into InfluxDB (A time series database), displaying all data on a graphite dashboard.

Eventually I wrote Haskell plugins for most of the chemistry processes, from pH & temperature measurements to polymer property and pigment tests (they made a lot of printer ink).

Then I was fired because they didn't need chemists anymore, and the code "could be maintained by the intern" (poor guy)...

But I did find out that I loved functional programming, chemistry automation projects, and crafting my own electronics during that time.

One advantage of being reasonably proficient with Haskell is being able to very quickly create maintainable programs, often without needing to write extensive documentation.

One disadvantage of having Haskell as a favourite programming language is sometimes looking like a pretentious ass.
But just read the type definition and think for once, idiot. How could "Monad m => (a1 -> a2 -> a3 -> a4 -> r) -> m a1 -> m a2 -> m a3 -> m a4 -> m r" confuse even a beginner to computer programming, nonetheless Haskell?

I haven't. Yet.

I started taking programming seriously when I got to 9th grade. 3 years isn't enough time. Probably enough to be able to put out okay-ish code in a scripting language, but not good code.

When you are able to switch jobs easily and clear interviews in good companies without sweating much.

Anders Hjelsberg, creator of Turbo Pascal,C# and Typescript, three of my favorite languages.

Grace Hopper, fighting complacency and standing up for her self.

Dan Abramov

He more or less invented React? Or at least he's made a lot of improvements to its state management functionality. He offers to have lunch with random people on Twitter. He probably knows a lot and reads a lot. He seems like a cool down-to-earth dude.

This was during the first day of my first real dev job, straight out of college. I didn’t have have much experience with version control since I did mostly solo projects in college, and I wasn’t exposed to SVN or Git in school at all.

One of the senior devs was going to give me and another new guy a brief overview of the codebase. He sets us up with the GitHub repo for the codebase and tells us to clone the codebase locally. I didn’t really know what this meant but I felt kind of embarrassed to ask, so I just clicked “download as zip” on The GitHub repo.

After a minute he saw what I had done and was like “yeah, that’s not what you want to do” and showed me how to clone it. I was kind of embarrassed but I learned Git pretty quickly after that.

I don’t really have a moral to this story except that “no question is a stupid one” is much easier said than done for many people, and it can be embarrassing to ask certain questions sometimes.

Me: Can you make me some meatballs?

Engineer: No, what are you talking about?

Me: I thought you were a chef.

Engineer: I'm not a chef, what made you think that?

Me: I was looking at your code and I haven't seen that much spaghetti since Olive Garden ran the endless pasta special. I was just wanting some meatballs to go with it.

"Why don't you look for a new job?"

I have a monthly coffee meetup with an ex colleague, where we rant about each others frustrations at work. Since she used to be part of my team she knows everybody and can relate to my stories and updates. In short: she was the kick in the boot I needed to start looking, and after the summer break I'll start a new job making 45% more.

Oh, SMBC.
So, how many of you are actually plants?

(Taken from: https://smbc-comics.com/comic/...)

Good morning, can you imagine why my mailserver can't deliver mails to some email-addresses? For example I can't sent mails to Hotmail, Freenet, Yahoo, Outlook and see more...

It’s funny being on the other side of interviews. People say how complicated it is to get a job, and it is. But then they show up to a third round Senior Software Engineer technical interview and is unable to write a function on the white board in any language or even pseudo code to reverse a string. That isn’t complicated stuff...

Argh, very frustrating.

Linux users, lets share our daily terminal view)
Here is mine

Spot the one month vacation aka burnout recovery time.

Today was my last day of work, tomorrow i have officially left that place. It's a weird feeling because i'm not certain about the future.
The job was certainly not bad, and after all i read on devrant i'm beginning to believe it was one of the better ones. A nice boss, always something to eat/drink nearby, a relaxed atmosphere, a tolerance for my occasionally odd behaviour and the chance to suggest frameworks. Why i would leave that place, you ask? Because of the thing not on the list, the code, that is the thing i work with all the time.

Most of the time i only had to make things work, testing/refactoring/etc. was cut because we had other things to do. You could argue that we had more time if we did refactor, and i suggested that, but the decision to do so was delayed because we didn't have enough time.

The first project i had to work on had around 100 files with nearly the same code, everything copy-pasted and changed slightly. Half of the files used format a and the other half used the newer format b. B used a function that concatenated strings to produce html. I made some suggestions on how to change this, but they got denied because they would take up too much time. Aat that point i started to understand the position my boss was in and how i had to word things in order to get my point across. This project never got changed and holds hundreds of sql- and xss-injection-vulnerabilities and misses access control up to today. But at least the new project is better, it's tomcat and hibernate on the backend and react in the frontend, communicating via rest. It took a few years to get there, but we made it.
To get back to code quality, it's not there. Some projects had 1000 LOC files that were only touched to add features, we wrote horrible hacks to work with the reactabular-module and duplicate code everywhere. I already ranted about my boss' use of ctrl-c&v and i think it is the biggest threat to code quality. That and the juniors who worked on a real project for the first time. And the fact that i was the only one who really knew git. At some point i had enough of working on those projects and quit.

I don't have much experience, but i'm certain my next job has a better workflow and i hope i don't have to fix that much bugs anymore.
In the end my experience was mostly positive though. I had nice coworkers, was often free to do things my way, got really into linux, all in all a good workplace if there wasn't work.

Now they dont have their js-expert anymore, with that i'm excited to see how the new project evolves. It's still a weird thing to know you won't go back to a place you've been for several years. But i still have my backdoor, but maybe not. :P

"New JavaScript framework"

-No one ever

Since one of my colleagues had a difficult time saying/spelling the word SpamAssassin, it's now officially (in our office):

Spam Ass Ass In

😏

Cannabis.

I wanted to post a note on devRant community etiquette and rule-breaking behavior we’ve been seeing lately to make clear it will not be tolerated. This is pretty much a rehash of this rant, https://devrant.com/rants/609739/... and also our official rules which I highly encourage people to read: https://devrant.com/rules

I’ve noticed an influx of a select group of members, mostly older users, expressing a distain towards other users or declaring content they dislike “shouldn’t be posted”, “please stop”, etc. If you find yourself about to post that, as per our rules, please don’t. It blatantly violates our rules and we are going to start cracking down on it much more. Whether you have 30k+ points or 10, we will apply the rules fairly to everyone and not give breaks to specific people, which admittedly I’ve done in the past.

If we see this behavior in rants/comments first we will give a warning (and the rant/comment will be deleted) and the next offense is a ban.

A valid question (even though I’ve answered it before) might be why does this need to be a rule? Simply put, it’s a rule for a number of reasons: posts like described try to inflict one’s will upon the entire community (even though we have a Democrat voting process...), they create confusion (almost every time they try to sound official, ex. “Stop doing this”), and beyond those two main reasons, they literally accomplish nothing because they offer no constructive methods of achieving what’s being requested, and only a fraction of the community will actually see it.

Here’s an example of what’s not allowed and what is allowed:

- Allowed: posting an issue on our GitHub issue tracker saying “I really dislike seeing this type of rant in my algo feed, here’s some ideas I have to improve the algo and add more personalization so I can see what I want.”

- Allowed: posting on GitHub issue tracker: “I found this awesome image similarly algo that I think can improve the ‘repost check feature’ - you guys should check it out and see if it might be good”

- Not allowed: “Omg stop shitposting windows update rants and Linux rants I hate them. Go post this type of rant because that’s what everyone really wants to see.”

One is constructive an the other is merely an opinion expressed as an enforcement of a self-made rule on the community and tries to tell other people how they should use devRant.

I cringe when people tell others how to use devRant because without fail when I see those posts, I go through that person’s rant/comment history and I nearly always see them using devRant in some kind of way I disagree with or isn’t exactly what I like to see. But that’s OK. I understand I’m not going to enjoy everything posted and I’m also not going to agree with everything posted. But I think it’s fair for those same people to then lecture on what isn’t appropriate to post on devRant, and it’s even more silly when their posts are sometimes irrelevant to development and the posts they are complaining about are relevant.

In the end, based on the large majority of feedback we get, we want to make devRant a place where everyone feels comfortable expressing themselves and doesn’t have to think about possibly getting ridiculed every time they post and that don’t have people trying to dictate what kind of ideas they are allowed to post. We also realize there’s types of content people don’t enjoy, but telling others not to post it is not the solution. We will soon be launching post type filters that will make filtering rants by post type possible.

Please let me know if you have any questions and thanks for reading.

I ranted about this guy before who thought he was a security expert while hardly knowing what the word is probably. Today I met him again at a party.

Holy fucking shit, this guy.

"we use the best servers of the netherlands"
"we use a separate server for each website and finetune them"
"we always put clusters under servers, that way we have a fallback mechanism"
"companies mostly use bv ssl certificates"
"you're on call for a week? I'm full-time on call. Why I'm drinking alcohol then? Because fuck the clients hahaha"

😥🔫

Seen as most devs listen to music while programming, I'm curious what music you listen to? Playlist are welcome too!

I've noticed that, wherever I am, people tend to come to me for help and guidance. It happened at my previous job and is now happening at my current job too.

These past few months I've spent most of my day helping my coworkers instead of actually writing code. I'm not complaining, I like helping, but I feel like I'm not being productive.

Is there a name for this role? Should I embrace it?

My first script in Python.

It's amazing how it is simple manipulate spreadsheet data.

I'm a PHP developer and the same task would require ton of line codes.

Got a Yubikey today. Seems like a really cool bit of kit. Time to nerd out and 2FA all the things.

So a friend of mine asked me today "got any proposals?"
Me: "yeah, in fact I got two of them"
Friend: "... Nice!"
Me: "yeah. Both were from my client"
Friend bursts out laughing.

Issue 0 of devRant Comics! Based on the epic rant by @cdrice (https://devrant.com/rants/451202/) Let me know what you think!