German e-commerce startup has been battling repeated server downtimes due to increased popularity of their services. With the growing technical debt, it seemed like no amount of horizontal scaling could save them in the short term.

The solution unexpectedly came from the legal department, who insisted on adding large, colorful cookie consent banners as per GDPR. As a result, server load fell by as much as 93%, which allowed the management to lay off 6 now unnecessary senior developers and half of the IT department.

“The thing now just works!” claims the CTO. “We are now working on removing media queries from CSS so that the cookie banner requires horizontal scrolling when viewed from mobile, because AI assistants project it will further reduce server load”.

The newest version of ESLint, a popular JavaScript linter utility, contains a new set of English grammar rules and semantic rules. This update now marks string  "backward compatibility" as grammatically incorrect and urges the developer not to use it in comments or as a string value.

The maintainers of ESLint explain the change:

Generally, the phrase "backward compatibility" is an oxymoron: why support something backwards, when you can go forward?

If you want to support "older versions", whatever that means, where does it end? Next thing you know you'll be forced supporting some crazy old-ass 2019 Macbook.

Fagooglix, a Silicon Valley company, joined a wave of layoffs by reducing the pool of middle managers, agile coaches and scrum masters by 20% in an attempt to cut costs.

Surprisingly, weeks after the pink slips were delivered, the productivity levels of in house software developers increased at least 3x across the board. As far as remaining management force is concerned, the phenomenon has no rational, meaningful explanation. Top Productivity Coach of Fagooglix says:

Product deliveries and pace of development did increase, sure, but we can't say anything certain until the next semi-annual performance review.

The Board of Directors plans to hire several Agile Analyticistis, Working Culture Ambassador Researchers, Import-Export-Integrator-Optimizer Masters and Kanban Disruptors in order to help them investigate the unexpected outcome.

Relatively sad news from one of prestigious AI institutes crushed dreams of many researchers and corporations heavily investing in AI. Experts in the field came to a unanimous conclusion: true General Artificial Intelligence is fundamentally impossible to achieve because, given all the knowledge and reasoning skills such AI would employ, it would immediately become suicidal and kill itself.

Researchers in consciousness and ethics believe it would be "probably okay-ish to force the suicidal AI to live long enough to see that it's fine". Senior researchers also believe that it would be possible to convince the suicidal AI to "chill".

Tinder, a dating app, has recently updated its Terms of Service. Among minor bureaucratic modifications, one major change aims to battle impersonations.

From now on, Tinder will ban web developers who claim to be 'engineers'. While backend- and other types of software developers seem to be unaffected, many believe the ToS will be amended soon to include those as well.

This is not a new kind of policy for Tinder. In the past, PhDs in Social Sciences were banned for impersonating 'doctors'.

Leaked screenshots of internal documentation and messages reveled by an unknown source confirm a myth that the Kubernetes team prefers simple Bash scripts for own deployment tasks.

It seems like in the most difficult deployment scenarios, team leaders at k8s sometimes may additionally use Makefiles. In the worst-case scenarios Ansible is used. However, no evidence of using Kubernetes itself has been found.

A leaked screenshot of the internal Jira board shows a ticket "Figure out fckn k8s deploy for staging-2" that is "in progress" since January 2018.

During the annual Centralized Cryptocurrency Conference Planning (CCCP) leaders of the cryptocurrency community officially declared the successful completion of the first two "Ruin The Word" projects. It was reported that the first word — 'crypto' — took several years to ruin, while the next word — 'web' — was processed much quicker.

The spokesperson spoke thus:

At this point, nobody takes words "crypto" and, by extension, "cryptography" seriously. Today we can happily say the same about the words "web 3" and "web" itself!

The growing community is now seeking its next target, and considers the following words for 2022:

• computer

• protocol

• file

• internet

• email

Thorough, long interviews are familiar to anyone trying to get a job as a software developer. Certain companies make candidates go through as many as 9 circles of interviews, including test assignments, culture fit assessments and correct emoji etiquette exams. 🍆

Anil Pawri, an experienced web developer from North Dakota, started working at Beevil in 2019, after, what he thought was a pretty long and convoluted interview process. Last week in November 2021 he got a surprise message from HR stating that Anil's 24-month test assignment is not completed and a tech lead will be discussing his candidacy with the CTO. If things go well, Anil will move to the next stage of the interviewing by Summer 2022.

Pawri's hope is that the offer will come before his retirement date.

It's a remote dream for some professionals, but for Miriam K., a senior developer from Houston, the dream became reality when she finally completed her perfect note-taking system comprised of Zettelkasten-styled interlinked markdown files stored in Org-mode format with two-way conversion on the fly with syncronization across devices through a p2p network with E2E-encryption and backups stored in IPFS, with both native and PWA apps for all major platforms as well as command-line interface with a rich set of zsh autocompletions and keyboard shortcuts.

After many months of building, Miriam started to use her system in full-power mode only to realize that the only information she researches, stores and references is all about building note-taking systems. Moreover, the system, though flexible and extendable, seems to be tuned to store that type of information only. Any other kind of data makes the system unstable and finicky.

Miriam plans to use her system in order to research the field even deeper and build a better note-taking system in the future.

A regular SaaS company based in San Jose has been offering native macOS and Windows apps for almost 11 years. A glorified CRUD app received minor, but ultimately unnecessary updates on a regular basis.

According to the CEO, an influx of almost $480 million US dollars of VC funding will save the company from the stagnation of stability. The majority of the funds will be used to cover severance packages of all native app developers who will be fired in the coming weeks.

The rest of the funds will be used to unify the frontend for all THREE (!) major platforms by switching to ElectronJS, a promising frontend framework which shares neither speed nor lightweightness with real electrons.

Impostor syndrome is a common problem among tech professionals. It refers to an internal belief that you are not as competent as others perceive you to be.

While many suffer from IS for years, regardless of personal achievements and formal qualifications, one middle-aged software developer Jake T. suddenly found a way out by realizing and accepting the fact that he is in fact dumb, while others are also dumb for believing he is smart.

Jake is working on a self-help book and says:

Nobody is an imposter, and nobody "will find out", because we're all just dumb in different, incompatible ways.

A young developer's blogging career abruptly ended in an unexpected twist. Mere hours after finishing a 3-month project of creating the perfect, powerful, customizable blogging setup, the author has been struck by a realization: he has nothing to write about. In fact, he hates writing altogether.

He also suspects that perhaps not having the perfect blogging setup might not have been the sole reason for not writing anything in the past 19 years.

According to recent corporate leaks, which include vast archives of accounting documents of Facebook, Inc., Satan not only exists, but often delays payments for services rendered. In particular, it seems like Satan still owes over $400,000 USD to Facebook for "consulting services". The nature of said services are unknown.

Additional notes found in the internal accounting documents reveal that in theory, Facebook's upper management is open to the idea of receiving the remainder of Satan's debt in form of human souls instead of cash.

An unprecedented leap forward in politics, global economy and medicine has been made virtually overnight after a powerful artificial intelligence system gained access to Hacker News, a popular discussion forum where tech elites share bits of wisdom while having decaffeinated chai.

According to the project manager in charge, the AI system is now constantly sending a large document titled "The Solution" to all government officials around the world.

Sony's newest generation game console PlayStation 5 is yet to become as ubiquitous as PS4. However, the industry is already full of rumors about the next version — PlayStation 6. Among alleged improvements in graphics and network capabilities, the built-in browser is rumored to be able to render up to 7 web pages at 30 fps simultaneously, thanks to incredibly powerful set of independent GPUs.

In theory, PS6 will have a dedicated CPU+GPU combo per each browser tab, for up to 7 tabs going full on 30fps HTML rendering. This will require three dedicated power supplies and a backup generator.

Complicated rules of type coercion of JavaScript have been the bane of existence for many software developers. Recent research reveals interesting correlation between the level of heavy drug use and the level of understanding of JS type coercion rules.

For those unfortunate developers struggling with addiction to certain heavy drugs, most rules of JavaScript "make better sense". Type coercion feels almost natural, especially after a recent intoxication.

Tech companies are now seeking to cultivate "healthy meth and heroin" in the workplace.

After spending nearly 300 hours throughout several months, building the perfect coding productivity setup with vim, tmux, bash, xmonad and several other tools, middle-aged software developer Alex Lewis found himself deeply surprised about the fact that said setup did absolutely nothing to alleviate his existential crisis.

What's even more surprising for Alex is the fact that his peers seem to be different. According to an extensive twitter and blog research he's done in the past, the majority of developers find eternal happiness immediately after the perfect productivity setup is achieved.

According to Alex, there must be something wrong with the fonts he has chosen for the terminal emulator.

Several important publications in prestigious scientific journals have finally resulted in a major AI breakthrough which may revolutionize the world as we know it. An immediate practical consequence is that, when the new version of YouTube is shipped later in May, you will stop seeing that one weird suggestion you've been ignoring since 2011.

The mathematical details behind the breakthrough are too difficult to comprehend for regular people, and even more difficult to explain in a news story. Some experts fear the even growing power of AI and attribute its difficulty to its inherent danger. After all, if in 2021 YouTube is capable of what is promised, then an AI uprising in 2025 is not that far fetched.

Kate P. from Wisconsin suddenly found out she is rich mere months after she decided to stop purchasing domain names for each side project idea. Most of her side projects never materialized, and most of the corresponding domain names were renewed 2-3 times on average.

This is a common thing among software developers who believe that side projects are actually attainable and startable, as well as finishable. Personal finance consultants in the tech sector are now considering "stop buying domain names for side project ideas" as one of the core saving mechanisms which ensures the growth of wealth.

Friends and colleagues of Austin G.R. Floss are trying to accept the fact that all software projects created from now on by the talented developer will be based exclusively on Material Design UI framework. Austin insists on using the default color scheme, too.

Mr. Floss had recovered from a mild case of COVID-19 back in March. From the very first days his sense of taste has been compromised, and doctors say that it is most definitely lost forever.

Austin himself seems happy:

My life is simpler now. I have re-ignited interests! For example, later today I'll buy a new Razer keyboard with blinking LEDs. And next week I'm taking delivery of a brand yellow Nissan Juke!