because the house I lived in was quite a hostile environment, and every place after that I rented, I grew up without the feeling of home. I was puzzled by how to acquire it. Should homeownership do the trick?
the answer came swift and unexpected — I got a cat. Now, my home is where my cat is. Simple as that.

Did I ever tell you guys about that time I got a whole monitor for 1 Zar?

Probably but I shall again.

"twas the same auction at work where I got the R100 laptop. There was an LG Flatron W2243S listed with no reserve price. It had description "Faint line down middle of screen"

Figured what the hell, bid R1, mostly to see kif anyone else would. I won it. Literally just swapped out the vga cable and did a factory reset. All happy now. Only downside is that it's vga only but hey, what else are you gonna do with R1?

There’s a street near me called Flash Drive

Client said the images need to be responsive and go full width.

Told her that would make the images massive and we should have a limit in height a cropping enabled.

She told me it should look nice with full width images uncropped.

Fucking designers said the same fucking thing.

Client today: Hey images are huge. Make sure they look nice.

*sigh*

Story time...of how HR actually did its job of taking care of employees.

So, I started at this new gig on December, the boss was all sunshine and promise (big red flag now to think back). Then as time passed, he started seeming...off. To a point I considered quitting my boss just after 2 months of working for him.

Then one morning we had a project meeting. He started verbally abusing me, calling me incompetent, bashing my work (of which he knew ~nothing, his experience 30 years back). Earlier in the week he demanded me to make a presentation which he in this meeting told is complete bullshit without actually reading any of it. He told me 'I am your boss, you do exactly as I say' when I told him something is technologically impossible in the situation we're in. He *actually* told me to break the law with data protection...

This was like wtf dude. That's not how you manage people. So, I made an HR ticket about his behaviour. They were *shocked* and escalated the matter.

Long story short: he was a bully, he's getting fired, my team has a new manager. My workplace actually appreciates my expertise.

Bad thing in this is, now I actually need to continue doing my job. ;_;

In my case, the most unrealistic deadline was when I was put on a project for 30 person days in 2008. The project had been running for about 6 months at that point.

I spoke to the project manager about my tasks and she told me to finish the fat client. So I immersed myself in the sources. And I was horrified to realize that not only was it not even a POC, but the performance was lousy to say the least. It took about 70 (sic!) seconds to start the program, read in about 20 records from a database and display them as a hierarchical structure.

I asked the PM when I was supposed to have finished my work, and her response was, "Yesterday."
"Very funny," I replied.
"No, really," she said, "the deadline was yesterday."

It took me an afternoon to speed up the fat client startup to 6 seconds. And then it took us another two weeks or so to identify the processes in discussions with the technical project manager. Because that didn't exist yet either.

About 1.5 years after the deadline, the software system - consisting of the fat client, mainframe modules and purchased software - was stable enough to be rolled out.

Dear recruiters, if you prefer telephone calls, why not also learn how to leave a message on a voicebox, display a caller ID, and list your phone number on some legit page on the internet?

Otherwise you'll leave the impression of a desperate outbound call center agent paid not by leads and conversions but just by the quantity of calls made during the day. If I had such a job, I'd also call voiceboxes and busy developers all day and get money for listening to signals tones before hanging up.

I started writing a rant about my boss a while ago.

Never sent it.

Woke up to signal messages from her to our core team signal group that she’s been let go.

Starting to think maybe there is a god, because she was really pissing me off and micromanaging and making me want to quit my awesome job.

Also the new boss doesn’t want to bother making a job description for me but instead wants me to let him know what path I want to take, which certifications , etc.

Also got a maxed out m3 MacBook Pro today. The sleek black edition. My team is going to get our Dowding team logo etched into it.

Today was better than Christmas. Almost best day of my life.

Did I suffer through 2023? Hell yes! Fuck 2023! A LOT of doubt, anxiety, thinking that I live wrong somehow.

Yet, I’m completely satisfied with the results of 2023, with what I was able to accomplish. It means I do, in fact, live my life right. If I carry on doing what I do, I’ll be getting what I get. Here’s what happened to me in 2023:
- Cat!
- No more sugar
- No more smoking
- First time reading paper books in 15 years
- Made me a new website (miloi.am/engine) that, for the first time in my life, isn’t about me as a job candidate, but about me as a person.
- SENT MY DEVRANT LINK to my CEO! Dreaded this coming out for YEARS. Finally did it. He read my posts, told me I’m free to be who I am, told me he already knows me well, that he wasn’t surprised, and overall didn’t care much.
- New name, new pronouns
- Learned how to cook: soups, pancakes, falafel, other popular dishes. Most importantly, now when I go through the store, I’m not afraid of thinking about cooking. I look at something, and I know how to cook it, more or less.
- Found a good psychiatrist, got properly diagnosed, got properly prescribed
- Made a FIRE architecture at my work
- Conceived (and partly implemented) four monetizable side projects (that I can’t monetize yet because of my passport situation)
- Several VERY important insights that completely changed who I am. Several super crucial self-therapy skills.

Let’s see what happens in 2024 😛

Performance using docker sucks. Are they even trying?

With docker 134 seconds. Without docker 7 seconds.

Docker do better.

"I don't know where to put a class, must belong to the utils"

Said every -10x engineer.

The number of product people who want software to be built in an 'intuitive and simple manner' when they cannot even explain the problem domain in a intuitive and simple manner is quite incredible.

Not a deadline but I once worked for a company that regularly asked for “accurate estimates” which I found hilariously oxymoronic

More pooh memes

"And how are you?" I said.

Eeyore shook his head from side to side.

"Not very how," he said. "I don't seem to have felt at all how for a long time."

"Dear, dear," said Pooh, "I'm sorry about that. Let's have a look at your code..."

And then Eeyore looked at Pooh with terror in his face, before he vanish into the forest.

He never let me review his code again...

Well, for me the last two days have been some of the best since a long time!
So I just wanted to say a big thanks to all of you ☺ You are all some great people and I'm really happy to be a part of this great community.
I hope I made the day of some of you and made you smile 😊

So it's time for a face reveal, right? 😋
There you go, the moment you've all been waiting for!

Who you thought invented 3 way handshake?

@Root has a code review.

CR comment: “Why would you do it this way? It’s awful. Clean it up!”

Totally fair. I had copied the legendary dev’s code, and it was ick. Cleaning it was easy and enjoyable. I cleaned the source, too.

CR comment: “Why would you touch this? It’s outside the scope of the ticket. You could get it working without changing all this.”

Revert…

CR comment: “The interfaces don’t match. Now it’s confusing, and that makes it harder to maintain.”

🤦🏻‍♀️

Interviewer: So are you familiar with our company and what we do?

Dev: I looked at your website, looks like you build tools for managing restaurants.

Interviewer: No. That’s not even close.

Dev: ?

Interviewer: What we do is create an ecosystem of integrated data centres all orchestrated for immediate stakeholder utilization.

Dev: But the product itself…. it’s a user interface for tracking inventory. Of like…. burgers…. and bottles of wine.

Interviewer: It’s not a product! It’s a data……habitat!!

Dev: …

Dev: So does that make your users animals?

Interviewer: 😡. Unfortunately it looks like you do not see our vision and would not be a good fit for this role.

Dev: Agreed.

Someone wrote some error handling middleware for the whole application.
Then someone wrote some default classes for HTTP errors; BadRequest, Unauthorized and so on.

If I didn't know any better, I'd think throwing one of these default errors would give the proper status code, instead of default everything to 500.

But alas, I do know better.

Manager (via phone): You need to setup the CEO with access to the app IMMEDIATELY

Dev: Ok…What’s the occasion?

Manager: There is a big important meeting right now where we go over our achievements for the year and my plan was to have him log in and play around.

Dev: Likely would have been worth mentioning at this mornings standup.

Manager: Don’t be a smart ass. In fact, if you were actually smart you would have given him an account in the first place! So you’re just an ass then, what kind of idiot doesn’t give the CEO an account to an app like this?

Dev: Actually you specifically asked for him to be removed when I added him. “Unnecessary Optics” you said.

Manager: THAT’S BULLSHIT, I NEVER SAID THAT!!

Dev: It’s in our meeting minutes from 2 years ago.

Manager: STOP WRITING THE THINGS I SAY DOWN IT’S COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY.

Dev: I’ll make a note of that request

Manager: YOU ABSOL—ok looks like he’s waving me back in the room now the account must be working now bye. *click*.

Dev: Moron.

Dev: Why did you suddenly start adding random whitespace to the end of all of the files in your PRs?

Manager: IT’S NOT RANDOM!

Dev: ?

Manager: That’s a way I came up with for tracking my contributions. Every time I edit a file I add a line of whitespace at the bottom so it’s clear to everyone how much and how often I’ve contributed to the team. Although I haven’t been doing it this entire time so I had to make up for this by adding more to files that I *know* I’ve touched a bunch before. Just think! Especially with how big my PRs are compared to everyone else the tally of my contributions is going to get huge!

Dev: …

Imagine

websites didn't use unnecessary cookies,
JavaScript was only used when needed,
no trackers, no ads, no telemetry, no user
data saved when it doesn't benefit the user.

*Wakes up in cold sweat*

Scouting, beyond doubt

Scouting.
I've been a scout since I was 7 and been happy for it.

Ever got confused where to find settings for desktop app?

File -> Settings
Edit -> Preferences
Tools -> Options

Found in the source code of a site. Interesting.

Problems with redis... timeout everywhere...

30k READs per minute.

Me : Ok, How much ram are we actually using in redis ?

Metrics : Average : 30 MB

Me ; 30 MB, sure ? not 30 GB ?

Metrics : Nop, 30 MB

Me : fuck you redis then, hey memory cache, are you there ?

Memory cache : Yep, but only for one instance.

Me ok. So from now on you Memory cache is used, and you redis, you just publish messages when key should be delete. Works for you two ?

Memeory cache and redis : Yep, but nothing out of box exists

Me : Fine... I'll code it my selkf witj blackjack and hookers.

Redis : Why do I exist ?

I've been playing this really awesome game where you have to use code to manipulate the world around you to solve the puzzles.

It's awesome, colorful, and has been my obsession for the last couple of days.

The game is called "One Dreamer"
Summary: Manipulate the world around you by editing source code in an adventure game about a burnt out indie game developer's quest to fulfill a lifelong dream.

Honestly, even the summary doesn't do this game justice in what it's been able to give. It's so well done.

Also Steam link, if you're even remote interested. I figured the crowd here might enjoy it, even for it's novelty.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/...

Also demo if you don't want to spend money. A little less polished than the main game, but gets the point across well.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/...

I was looking around to do some stuff with wireshark and I stumbled across a forum question from a 2012 in which someone actually replied with the people from the future in mind.

God bless you shearn89 🫡
Youre a real one

And to those that reply "I found the solution thx" and don't post it: eat a dick