Next step on my job hunt... Automated coding interview... All the surveillance bullshit. Share your whole screen, camera and mic, we will record every word. Don't look anything up, no AI.

Fine.. Can do, you surveillance state arseholes... So I get to coding. Coding challenge stuff. Easy enough. Took me ten minutes to get into the groove. Then I made it in optimal big O. Some smaller stupid mistakes. Not incorrect.

But I have a toddler. Anyway, turns out I sing to myself when I am focusing. So, when they open. The video, they will find the applicant solve their test while singing:

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I want to know what you are,
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky...

Guess next time I also should try not to look like a psychopath... Let's see I'd someone will bring it up.

Don't you find it annoying when the dev team gives you the worst or less than absolute minimum of time to test a new release?

It's like... that itches with me so hard. Come on.. we're testing a build here. You want me to brush over this? The amount of bugs that might pop up...(oh yeah we just bill the client for those later lolololol)! Especially when no one wrote tests, or just minimal, I... sigh.

lol

I am job hunting atm.

I fucking hate it. Just sent half of my life to them with lied niceties. Got dammit... Data farming was never simpler.

All I need to do is set up a fake company website, put out a few job ads and let people send me their certificates, cv, telephone numbers. Guess those could be sold.

Hey kids, be careful what you're telling on the internet, except if you want a job, then run around naked.

Oh, yea.. shameless plug.. If anyone needs a web developer, full stack, anywhere in Europe where there is a beach and a warm climate, who pays >90k €. You'll get a great developer, who is perpetually in a bad mood, has a never ending headache, is blunt and does freelance work on the side.

So, anyone? No one? Yea, didn't expect so.. Back to lying to get a job. Indeed, here I come.

Wow, apparently when you're authorizing a Github App with your account there's always a "[This app can] Act on your Behalf" permission that you have to agree too

Bro what??? I just want to add https://utteranc.es/ as a comment system on my blog ;_;

Fortunately it doesn't actually mean what it says. It just means that the app can do all the *other* listed permissions *in your name*. I think?

This wording has been criticized by multiple people but apparently GitHub will not fix it for some fucking reason. Great way to scare off literally every single person who want to comment on some random blog. Because there's so many of those in the first place..........

Shortly after joining the $company, I found this issue where if you connect a certain peripheral to the console, you can use it to do weird stuff that isn't really a thing on consoles. I documented my finding by creating a bug report.
...the bug report had been closed by the test lead w/ a message stating 'The game doesn't support the peripheral. Won't Fix'.
Fucking moron. Well... personally I don't give a fuck whether the issue is fixed. For one, though, it's !that tester's call - it's the devs' call. Seconds thing about this is - if the peripheral is !supported, then how about fucking disabling it, instead of letting the game intercept input from it, which can /* && does, as it turns out */ lead to unintended behavior?
I kind of wish the game had an SQL injection vulnerability, so I could create a report of it just to see whether the retard closes that one too w/ 'The game doesn't support code injection. Won't Fix'.
FFS.

I got hired in as a senior engineer and, after getting adjusted to the new job, I suggested some pretty big process changes for a big year long project we're working on.

I convinced the manager and team to not continue our practice of dozens of independent project repos where we repeat a lot of the same .NET code, and instead have all our services in one big monolithic repo specific to this domain. I build out the docker compose infrastructure so we could build everything using local Kafka and Mongo (previously devs always relied on the cloud dev environments for both).

It's streamlined, and still a bit clunky because I didn't want to change too much, but I think it will be a significant gain with a project that's this big.

We're already seeing a lot of issues that could have been swept under with the old process of tons of independent services.

Still, I struggle to care. We had layoffs in November, the logistics industry is still struggling, my manager is still using LLMs for stories and coding .. and although he did fix a bug in our Kakfa libraries pretty quickly using copilot, elsewhere it just seems like we're getting big messes of stuff. Even I'm auto-generating all the unit tests and not bothering to even look at them anymore.

I've been here six months. I bet I'll see this go into production. I hope it's not a disaster. I'm struggling to care.

Looks like devrant paid for their certs and https is back on the table (so I am back).

Update: I signed an offer two days ago. I battled myself for a while because I am self conscious when it comes to money, but talking to the new team for 3+ hours and chatting with some close peers helped me realize that I have enough money, it's still good money I'd be making, and my work life balance would be great even for a startup.

Saying the job market is rough would be an understatement. It's really a battle of perseverance and a numbers game.

devRant is the ultimate backend to test my proxy server with since it's random responses. When your proxy server can handle devRant scenario's, it's robust. Making a proxy server that is actually robust and don't let it flaws itself with slow connections / servers is quite a challenge. Depends also what you're writing it with. In python was way simpler than in C. In Python some things magically just worked. If you think that python sockets are native, you're wrong kiddo, they did al sort of shits under the hood. Had to do a whole rewrite of my original proxy server to allow pipelining. Pipelining is req>req>req>resp>resp>resp instead of the traditional req>resp>req>resp>req>resp. It's keep-alive on steroids. Most server don't support it out of self preservation but I just want to. Caddy is a huge pipeliner. What most servers do is, they close the connection the moment the second request is sent / marking the second request invalid. Clients support that behavior and will do the second call under the hood.

My new proxy server has exactly the same dashboard as the previous one but the many statistics that it has have zero performance impact. It persists every second a quick snapshot to database, every 60 seconds a big one. The statistics are persistent for when the server reboots.

What an adventure.

How do you cope with genuinely hating your employer? I’ve been fully remote since 2023, and at this point I can’t ignore how badly it’s wrecking my mental health.

What makes it even worse is the company itself. It’s a 5,000+ employee mess built around ancient, proprietary, closed-source “high-security” appliances. Every single day, working in this environment drains whatever motivation I have left. It’s a constant barrage of bureaucracy, cargo-cult security policies, and security-by-obscurity nonsense held together by duct tape and ego.

They love preaching about “security” while running a brittle, opaque infrastructure that actively fights anyone who tries to do things properly. Every meeting, every ticket, every decision just reinforces how little they understand modern software or trust their own engineers.

At this point, even logging in feels exhausting. The disconnect between what they claim to value and what they actually build is demoralizing, and the longer I stay, the harder it gets to care at all.

Hello there!

From my 5 min lurking procedure, good to see this place didn't die.

So. I guess AI took my job... But not in the way people preach.

I survived the first layoff wave, but not the second. Cutting off on game driver development. Everything goes towards AI now.

Well, I get nice severance, and I already have another job, and I learned good shit, and can always pull the old FAANG style "worked at V".

Life goes on.

When I applied for the AWS re:Invent 2025 All Builders Welcome Grant, I honestly didn’t expect to get selected.

But a single email changed everything.

In this video, I share my real journey of getting selected for the AWS re:Invent All Builders Welcome Grant 2025, including how I discovered the opportunity, what AWS actually looks for in the application, and why community involvement and networking matter more than most people realize.

https://youtube.com/watch/...

Just doing some math about AI financials and its pretty crazy:

A one-gigawatt data center allegedly costs $50 billion to build.
Lets say its written off totally over 5 years. The building, cooling and power infra won't be,
but the GPUs and CPUs -- which are really expensive -- will be much quicker than 5 years,
so I think this is a fair assumption, not to mention personell and power costs

$50 billion over 5 years is $833 million per month, divided by $20 is 41 million

OpenAI needs 41 MILLION (!!) customers that pay $20 a month just to pay for
this ONE data center, and obviously they require a lot more than that

~2020
Us: "We should switch from user-defined table types to JSON for stored procedure parameters. Its too much hassle to make database changes when we need to add or remove fields."
DBAs: "JSON is just a varchar and not structured. We can just keep adding number suffixes to the type name. See, Invoice15 works just fine."

~2022
Us: "Specifications changed, here are the fields we'll need to update .."
<4 hours later>
DBAs: "You developers need to make up your mind on what fields you need updated. My team doesn't have time to keep creating new user-defined table types and updating all the corresponding stored procedures."
Us: "Why not use JSON? That way the schema binding really falls on us to keep everything in sync. New fields or removing them would be easier, faster, and safer on a case-by-case basis."
DBAs: "NO! JSON is just a varchar and too slow for mass updates!"
Us: "We haven't needed mass updating since moving the data notification pushes to Service Bus almost 10 years ago."
DBAs: "JSON in SQL Server is still too slow, unsecure, and hard-coding field names in string is not best practice!"

~2024
DBAs: "We're only using JSON for this one stored procedure. Its going to be up to you guys to keep the your schemas up to date and be prepared to constantly make changes. We may not support JSON if this doesn't work."

2026: <more than 80% of the stored procs use JSON to pass in parameters>
Us: "Specifications changed, here are the fields we'll need to update .."
<30 seconds later>
DBAs: "Done. Fields ready to go in the JSON schema. If you need to add or remove fields, just let us know. Dealing with JSON is sooo much easier now."

JoyRant build 50.

I don’t know who else is still using JoyRant but according to TestFlight there are currently 73 users (wtf?!).

The new version doesn’t ignore the cert anymore because it’s been fixed.

And the new highlight is: auto-retry!
If a Slim Shady Error occurs, the app will retry up to 5 times until giving up and showing the error.

It’s really smooth again now. What a difference!

The retry feature is implemented on the SwiftDevRant SDK and is currently set to 5 by default.

@retoor if you want to use it, just update to the latest version 2.3.0
It’s better than just hiding the error because as a user you don’t need to manually repeat the request.

Have fun!

Have I ever told you how I found this hilarious && stupid debug feature in one of my old $company's released games?

It was during the Android 4.3 Jelly Bean era. I had very little to do w/ the actual $project_0, but was tasked to test it, briefly, so I was aware of its existence.

Later on, when I was testing $project_1, I would test the chat _a lot_. So much, in fact, that I purchased a keyboard that I would connect to the Android devices to help w/ the whole testing.

Just for fun, I downloaded the $project_0 from the Google Play Store && started messing w/ it using the newly purchased keyboard.

...turned out that a debug feature had been unintentionally left in the game. During the tutorial, you could press '0' on the keyboard to skip it...

Nothing major, to be sure, but still, fucking hilarious. Given how the $project_0 had already been left to die a slow death && was no longer in development, I mentioned the issue to the PM as a curiosity.

Too bad the original programmer was no longer working for the $company.

I'm sure he'd have a 'WTF?' moment.

Next display server protocol proposal that would succeed Wayland has been just announced:

Every GUI elements require 3D graphics API and live ray tracing because it looks "cool" and "awesome".
Screen buffer won't get pushed to the display unless it's been perfectly ray traced, not missing every spot.

Users are required to enter their password everytime an application calls the drawing API to prevent unauthorized memory modification.

The mouse cursor is delayed about 10 seconds because the floaty feeling is the "future". It will also follow your hand movement with a 500ms interpolation curve to enhance elegantness.

How did we end up with such a bad convention for font weights?

Is thin thinner than light? Is regular thinner than medium? Is medium or regular the default? Is semibold thicker than medium? Is heavy thicker than bold? What about black? Why is it even named like a color? What the fuck is going on? Just use freaking numbers!

0 should be the default.
Negative numbers should mean thinner and positive numbers should mean thicker.

Why I still don't fully believe in vibe coding: Even the frontier models are constantly wrong!

Claude says c# structs with LayoutKind.Auto can have differing layout for each usage or JIT compilation. ChatGPT says they can't (and that's what I assume is true)

Claude says to "Multiply by a large prime", 0x9e3779b97f4a7c15
...That's NOT a prime!

AI generated code looks really convincing but they always make these little mistakes. And even if you inspect the AI code yourself (which let's be honest, we're all too lazy for that :P), will you be able to spot these? I really doubt it

week 4 of meditating now

emotional control is nice but turns out you get so good at being sensitive to yourself and noticing things in your own nervous system that you get phantom itches everywhere that you cannot scratch and they drive you crazy, both while meditating and outside meditating... AI says it's some kind of error-predicting neuroplasticity going on in the somatosensory cortex, misfiring "for now"... sigh. release me from this hell. apparently this is gonna get worse before it gets better at my stage, too

I just wanna be a jedi, come on now...

I am livid and humans are just vile and disgusting beings

you know how much we say cortisol is stress and bad for you

it isn't. cortisol literally makes you unable to feel fear, it literally heals you. it STRICTLY does this. it is NOT the "stress" response

if peoples level of cortisol is high that's GOOD, not bad. they literally have more self control and their blood sugar levels are better and their brain is protected from the ACTUAL stress chemicals. your body releases cortisol to RECOVER from stress and to ensure you can remain sane and functional during high stress, like a well-trained combat soldier and shit

I just can't. humans are so disgusting. the cult of science is just vile. they just parrot each other and perform fucking rituals blindly, calling themselves high status and pretending they have the answers to everything when they're literally backwards. never do they analyze anything they say. they ignore all exceptions to their dogma. worse than any religion in the history of mankind