#story

Posts tagged #story

1. Experience

   My grandson and I built a weather station on the terrace. He wrote the Python, I wrote the SQL, and the rain did the rest.

   Dear friends, Some of you have read my long stories about the bank. This one is shorter, and happier, and I hope you will forgive an old man for being a little proud. My grandson Vignesh is fourteen. He lives with us in Chennai while his parents work in Bengaluru, and for most of last year our relationship consisted of me asking him to put his phone down and him explaining to me, very patiently, that Python is…

   S. RamanathanOct 15, 2026104likes35comments

2. Experience

   Two years after leaving backend for devrel: what I miss, what I don't, and what nobody warned me about

   Not a thread this time. Just a reflection, because several of you asked in DMs whether you should move from engineering into developer relations. What I miss Owning a system. For six years I could point at a payments service and say: that is mine, it moved money for a lot of people today, and it did not fall over. Devrel work is spread across talks, docs, samples and conversations. It matters, but you can rarely…

   Achieng OwinoOct 12, 202633likes10comments

3. Experience

   I test restore my backup for the first time in 2 year. 2 of 5 things was broken

   After greybeard_graham's tweet ("a backup you have never restored is a rumour") I feel personally attacked, so last weekend I finally do a real restore test. Not "I see the files in B2", a real restore to a new VM, start the apps, use them. Result: 3 OK, 2 broken. Nothing was lost because the originals are fine, but if the NAS died last month, I would lose all my scanned documents. Here is the story. The setup…

   Nguyễn Minh HiếuOct 8, 202646likes12comments

4. Experience

   The BOR level nobody set: why our controllers reset when the farmer's motor starts

   Field returns from farms in Tiruppur district. Controllers resetting at random, and some of them came back with the settings corrupted: pressure set point became 0, or the pump type changed by itself. Bench test: perfect, 2 weeks, zero resets. "Lab bench power supply never shows this. Farm shows it on day one only." I say this sentence to every new engineer now. Going to site One farm, 200 m of cable from the…

   Karthikeyan SOct 3, 202612likes6comments

5. Image

   sunday lunch, laptop closed

   Keron BaptisteSep 20, 20267likes8comments

6. Image

   spring on the farm

   Hamish TurnerSep 14, 202610likes7comments

7. Experience

   Mein Kleingarten hat kein WLAN, und das ist der beste Teil

   Seit zwei Jahren haben wir einen Kleingarten in Pankow, 300 Quadratmeter, eine Laube, die älter ist als ich, und einen Vorstand, der die Heckenhöhe mit dem Zollstock misst. Ja, wirklich. Wer in Berlin wohnt, weiß Bescheid. Am Anfang wollte ich, ganz typisch Entwicklerin, alles digitalisieren. Bodenfeuchtesensor mit ESP32, ein Dashboard für die Tomaten, LoRa bis zur Wohnung. Ich hatte die Teile schon bestellt. Dann…

   Frieda SommerSep 12, 20266likes8comments

8. Experience

   BLUF: 20 years a Chief, 1 week a junior. What my first week as a developer actually taught me

   BLUF: My first week as a junior developer at 42 was humbling, a little embarrassing, and the best career decision I ever made. A year and change later, here's what I wish someone had told me. Long post, grab coffee. Background for the new folks. Born in Olongapo, joined the US Navy at 18, retired as an IT Chief after twenty years. I ran networks on ships, I ran sailors, I ran a division. Then I did a 16-week…

   JoJo RamosSep 10, 202634likes12comments

9. Poll

   Settle an old man's curiosity: what was your first computer?

   Peter HughesSep 4, 20266likes12comments

10. Experience

    my first game jam: 48 hours, 1 stray cat, 0 sleep, 31 ratings ~

    okay so i did my first game jam!! 🐈 a small one on itch, 48 hours, theme was "one more lap", about 400 entries. my idea: a stray cat in a temple town has to walk around the temple 108 times before the gates close, like a pradakshina, but every lap something changes. a monkey steals your snack, the flower seller moves her basket, it starts raining. you only have to survive one more lap. and then one more. what went…

    Tanvi HegdeAug 30, 202612likes11comments

11. Experience

    Twelve engineers, nine nationalities, one potluck: what a lunch taught me about managing people

    السلام عليكم. A short one, and not very technical. I manage twelve engineers at a logistics company in Dubai. Between us we are from Sudan, Egypt, India (three of them, from three states that will never agree on rice), Pakistan, the Philippines, Jordan, Nigeria, Ukraine and Russia. Yes, both. They sit next to each other and review each other's pull requests, and I will come back to that. Every quarter, instead of a…

    Hiba OsmanAug 27, 202614likes9comments

12. Experience

    The test that only failed on Tuesdays (yes, only Tuesdays)

    ok this one took me 3 weeks and I need to share it because neta I still don't believe it. Context: I do QA automation for a US insurance app, Playwright + TypeScript, around 900 e2e tests that run every night on CI at 2am Central. We had one test, renew policy shows correct premium , that started failing. Not every night. Some nights. Rerun, it pass. Classic flaky, we put it on the quarantine list and move on. Then…

    Luis TreviñoAug 25, 202638likes15comments

13. Experience

    showed my demo at a tiny indie night in Tenjin. 23 people played. 学んだこと / what I learned

    天神の小さなインディーゲームの夜に、デモを持って行きました。23人が遊んでくれた！ I took my demo to a tiny indie game night in a bar in Tenjin. 23 people played it! I was so nervous I drank 3 oolong teas before the first player sat down (=^･ω･^=) 学んだこと / what I learned Nobody reads the tutorial text. 0 of 23. Zero. They pressed buttons until something happened. I am replacing all the text with a cat who points at things. 6 people got stuck on the same…

    佐藤はるか HarukaAug 25, 20265likes7comments

14. Experience

    The pump that stopped every 40 minutes: a FreeRTOS priority inversion story

    Field complaint: a pressure booster pump in an apartment building stops for 2 seconds roughly every 40 minutes. Water pressure drops, people on the 9th floor shout, the building manager calls our service guy, the service guy calls me. On the bench: nothing. Ran it for 3 days, no stop. The system STM32F4, FreeRTOS, three tasks that matter: MotorControl , priority 5, runs every 1 ms, kicks the watchdog through a…

    Karthikeyan SAug 24, 202614likes9comments

15. Update

    my parents' dry cleaner opened at 7am every day for 31…

    my parents' dry cleaner opened at 7am every day for 31 years. no status page, no retros, my dad just showed up. your 99.9% monthly SLA allows 43 minutes of downtime and somehow you still need a war room

    Danny ChoAug 20, 202615likes6comments

16. Experience

    11 years in and still no degree. some honest notes

    this is not a joke post. i do one of these about once a year and then immediately post something stupid so nobody has to look me in the eye i dont have a degree. i dropped out of community college in 2013 because i was working nights at a warehouse and something had to go. i learned javascript from free tutorials on a laptop with a broken hinge that i propped up with a hardcover book i never read. i got my first dev…

    Sam WhitakerAug 10, 202668likes16comments

17. Update

    4 august. 6 years. windows replaced twice, savings still…

    4 august. 6 years. windows replaced twice, savings still frozen, still nobody held responsible. going to fix a flexbox bug now because what else. بيروت بتضل حلوة 🇱🇧

    Rami HaddadAug 4, 20267likes6comments

18. Article

    july was my worst month in 2 years. -$2,180 MRR. here is all of it, including the part where i double charged 143 people

    i almost didn't post this one. which is exactly why i'm posting it. the numbers invoice PDF API : $16,910 (-$1,510). churn 6.8% 📉 shopify order tagging : $10,610 (-$570). churn 5.2% uptime monitor : $2,240 (-$100) total $29,760. june was $31,940. that's back below april. part 1: my biggest customer left a payroll startup paying $1,100/month moved their PDF generation in-house. nice email, no drama, "we're…

    Jo BrennanAug 3, 202697likes40comments

19. Experience

    I left Moscow in 2022 and I still cannot get paid like a normal person

    I want to say first: I am not asking for pity. Ukrainians have it much worse, I know this. This is only a post about what is it like to be a relocant developer with a Russian passport, because people ask me and I am tired of explaining it in DMs. I left Moscow the week mobilisation was announced, September 2022. Belgrade, because Serbia did not need a visa and I had a friend with a sofa. I am against the war. Против…

    Artyom SokolovJul 28, 202627likes14comments

20. Experience

    2 years of LoRa trough sensors on a dairy farm: what I stuffed up so you don't have to

    Kia ora. Not a programmer, just a dairy farmer in the Waikato who got sick of driving round on the quad every morning checking troughs. 400 cows, 28 troughs, 3 tanks. That run took me about an hour and a half before milking, every day, rain or shine. Two years ago I started teaching myself Arduino off YouTube. Now every trough and tank reports in over LoRaWAN and I get a ping on my phone if one is low. I've stuffed…

    Hamish TurnerJul 27, 202642likes11comments

21. Experience

    About a minute to the shelter, and coming back from reserve duty to a codebase that moved on

    Two stories. Both true. Both about deploys, kind of. One. In Haifa we have about a minute from the alert to the mamad, the safe room, sometimes less. I was in the middle of a rollout, kubectl rollout status running, new pods coming up. Alert. I grabbed the little one, my wife grabbed the big one, laptop stayed on the kitchen table. Ten minutes in the mamad, kids asking if the boom was close, me saying no with the…

    Yoni PeretzJul 24, 202623likes13comments

22. Experience

    The client from hell: a true story in 9 parts (names removed, trauma kept)

    This happened in 2022 but I still dream about it sometimes. Name and country removed, as the topic rules say. Grab your popcorn. 1. The brief. "We need an app like Uber, but for laundry. Simple." Budget: $2,500 fixed. Timeline: 4 weeks. I should have closed the tab. I did not close the tab. I was chasing a monthly target and my sister's school fees were due. 2. The small additions. Week one: "can riders also see the…

    Oluwatobi AdeyemiJul 23, 202625likes17comments

23. Experience

    Typhoon week at the fab: the city stops, the fab does not

    We had our first strong typhoon of the season last week. Some colleagues abroad asked me "do you get the day off?" and the answer is complicated, so I want to write about it from the inside. I cannot say anything about my company, the tools, the yields or the customers, so please do not ask. I will only write about the people. How a typhoon day works here When a typhoon is coming, each city and county government…

    C.M. Huang 黃志明Jul 21, 202630likes12comments

24. Experience

    July 2024: five days without internet, from inside a Dhaka software house

    Marta asked me some weeks ago to write this. Today is the anniversary, so I am trying. Sorry if it is long, actually it is the short version. I work at a software house in Dhaka, around 40 developers, almost all our clients are in Denmark and Norway. In July 2024 the student movement started about the job quota, and it became much bigger than quota. I was on the streets some evenings after work. I will not write…

    Rafiul IslamJul 18, 202651likes15comments