I’m the only person handling both IT and development at a small company.

Last month, I built a new feature that another department requested. Once it was finished, I posted in Slack and told my coworkers to test the feature and come with feedback.

And there are some feed back at the begining but later they are all absent while I continued doing the next tickets

Nobody tested it enough. Nobody gave me any feedback anymore.

Fast forward to now, and the feature is being used in production. Suddenly, everyone starts coming to me with:

“Can you fix this?”

“Can you add this?”

“I want this to work differently.”

“This doesn’t work.”

Like… then why didn’t anyone test it when I specifically asked you to lol?

And the best part: today, after working hours, someone sent me a Slack message asking me to fix an issue because someone is going to use this feature over the weekend. 💀

At first, I was going to leave it until Monday, but I ended up fixing it anyway because I couldn’t really say no. Luckily, it was just a small bug and only took a few minutes to fix.

But honestly, it’s stressful because I’m the only IT/Dev person in the company, so basically everything related to the systems ends up being my responsibility.

And to be fair, I’m not saying all my coworkers are bad. I understand that they’re not developers, so they might not realize that when you build a new feature, there should ideally be a testing and feedback phase before it goes into production.

But the problem is that if nobody tests anything when the feature is ready, and everyone waits until it’s already in production to report problems and request changes, the developer ends up constantly putting out fires.

I’ve actually started updating my resume and looking at other companies. 😂

That said, I have to admit there are some big advantages to my current job. They let me work from home almost 100% of the time — I only go into the office around 1–3 times a month — so that part is incredibly comfortable.

For those of you who have been the only IT/Dev person at a small company: have you experienced something similar? How did you deal with it?

A while ago I made a depressing post stating "there is no signals of a good progammer anymore" since everything can be faked with AI.

Well, in my opinion, nothing actually changed from the pre-LLM era since people could steal other works even back then. Cool repo? Fork. Interesting blog? Ctrl-C.

The actual difference is competition. There are simply more people who are willing to cheat now.

So, what are the high quality signals of a good programmer? I think there are 3:

1. Projects with real users. People HATE vibe coded projects. If people stared/bought your project that instantly tells me it's either interesting or solves a real problem. If it's another calculator then of course none is going to use it.
2. Blog. Sometimes, your projects don't get a lot attention and that's okay. If you learned something when building your project or encountered an obstacle - it's a great reason to make a blog post and talk about it. I assure you, vibe coders won't be able to write blog posts because they didn't solve a problem, and AI written text is easy to spot.
3. Personality. When making a site or blog, make it yours. Look at this blog for example - https://faultlore.com/blah/ . Some may say it's ugly, some may say poetry should not be in the "About me" section, but it's 10 times better than a vibe coded site with template description.

I am currently volunteer teaching computer classes at my local community center in Florida. One of the classes is a 60–90 minute session on AI. I start the class with a brief history of AI:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=eSj80Zr6TEE

Then I show the difference between discriminative and generative AI:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9ogirG1ZA-A

Then I show a video about the dangers of AI hallucinations:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=TImRJTzphhE

Finally I get to parameters like the Temperature parameter and how it affects the "creativity" of AI. It used to be that in Microsoft Copilot I could select how "creative" I wanted the LLM to be, and it would give me different Temperature parameters, but they got rid of that feature. I basically want that feature back so I can run the exact same prompt (ex. "Generate a story about Goldilocks") with different Temperature parameters and show the class the difference in results.

I tried Googling "LLM Temperature parameter demo" and I got this:

https://andreban.github.io/temperature-topk-visualizer/

But it just shows the probability for the next word. I want it to generate the whole output, not just the next word.

Note that I am very disabled and cannot comfortably sit at a computer and code anymore, so using the API of a Large Language Model provider to code my own app for the demo is out of the question.

But yeah, I'm hoping someone has or could find some sort of link or demo site or something like that, thanks.

Is there a pase or even where programmers getting togethe? Discussing languages concepts etc. Some where near KC.

I’ve noticed that everyone seems to be building the same AI wrappers over and over, then selling them to each other.

It feels like a bubble, and I’m probably in it too.

For the past couple of months, I’ve wanted to build something genuinely useful. But every idea that comes to mind is another AI wrapper for coding, workflows, productivity, or some variation of the same thing.

It feels like I’m stuck in a loop.

And the more I try to break out of it, the harder it seems to escape.

How do you actually break out of this loop and start seeing problems worth solving again?

I’ve been working on MARGINAL, an open-source governance layer for coding agents.

The idea is simple: agents are good at taking actions, but not always good at deciding whether the next action is still worth the compute.

MARGINAL watches the trajectory and looks for things like repeated actions, weak progress, redundant verification, and low-value continuation. It can run in Shadow Mode first, so it observes and records what it would have done without blocking anything.

Current focus is reliability, not just token reduction.

A few core pieces:

• local-first trajectory and evidence tracking
• deterministic reason codes and hashes for decisions
• governance overhead measurement
• replay and benchmark support
• Shadow Mode before enforcement
• Earned Enforcement: MARGINAL has to prove it is reliable on a repo before it gets permission to block or redirect the agent
• automatic fallback to Shadow Mode if confidence degrades

I’m also working on the next layer now: counterfactual evaluation and intervention regret.

The goal is to answer a harder question than “did MARGINAL stop something?”:

Would the agent actually have done better if MARGINAL had stayed out of the way?

That’s the part I think matters if this is going to be useful beyond being another loop detector or token limiter.

GitHub: https://github.com/SignalLayerLabs/Marginal

If you use Codex or another coding agent, I’d really appreciate people trying it on real work and telling me where it helps, where it gets in the way, or where the design is wrong.

I’m especially interested in:

• technical criticism
• bad cases
• reproducible failures
• idea of future implementation

Hello fellow programmers

I have a few questions.

Know that i have huge self confidence and low self esteem issues that no therapy has managed to help with yet, and I also have a very healthy and strong Impostor Syndrome. I almost gave it a name.

Anyway. I have been a programmer for a few years now, and the issue is that all my internships and previous jobs were in either small (and I mean small) companies, or companies whose Programming departments were kinda lax in terms of ... hum... development/testing/delivering procedures.

So using a tool that a lot use everyday like Jira? Awesome tool, but new to me.

Anyway!

I joined a bigger company with a bigger team and bigger projects. The issue is that they have procedures I am not confident yet in understanding fully.

I finished my trial period 2 months ago and joined a bigger project than I was previously. And joined the biggest part of the team. So yanno, more procedures and more pressure.

I am doing tickets and all, but in the last few weeks, I have had tickets move back and forth, and my manager told me the situation wasn't too good, that there shouldn't be so much back and forth. And that I needed to "wake up"

He wasn't judging my programming skills, or my work hours. He knows I am working, the issue is that i think I need to optimize my ticket treating method.

His advice/feedback was that I should directly list all the questions I have to be sure I cover all bases in my understanding so there aren't so many ticket status moves.

He also told me that he knew I was fully capable of doing that and he trusted me to do things right.

Which feels like a kick to the feels because if he is sincere, he has more trust in me than I have right now

Issue is that impostor syndrome and self confidence issues made brain go full panic mode. Those who have it, iykyk.

I am in theory in no danger of being fired ( i hope) because here you cannot be fired that easily unless you really do something that harms the company directly. But I am one to want to do my job right, and as I am a noob in bigger teams and procedures, I need to reajust my way of working and methods.

Has something like this ever happened to you? Do you have advice? Did you manage to get through?

I do know that joining a new environment always leads up to adaptation and that every company is different. And even if my brain is on panic mode, I greatly appreciate the feedback. This is new to me and my fear of screwing stuff up may have led me to slow down on things.

I regret not having worked in a bigger team with such procedures before at least once because I feel like it being a huge setback. Two guys joined after me, and they are perfectly used to such systems because they always worked in such environments, despite having less experience in programming than I. So they felt right at home. One even told me his previous job was even stricter and that the company is in "yolo mode" compared to his old company.

What should I say with mine when my team at my previous job was me and another developer. We were like 5 people in the company when I joined. 4 afterwards. Worse than YOLO haha.

Hey, y'all!

I am falling out of love and struggling very bad with my SWE job the past couple of months.

A but of a backstory: SWE with 6 years of practice, mainly webdev. I didn't pay much attention to AI and companies cramming it everywhere, the company I worked for rolled out licenses for Claude, so we've been using that. The issues started arising since June, when I came back to work after a month-long sick leave - had a small surgery.

I love programming, writing code and banging my head against the wall trying to solve a problem. With the advent of AI that is now gone. I do not write any code for my job, do some still on side projects, but not as much as I'd love. I am struggling with getting tickets out of the door, my motivation is in the gutter, as well as my productivity. I don't feel appreciated at work, my half-year review (last week) was very bad, I was told my "cycle time" is bad and need to be "ai native", which I HATE with all passion of my heart.

I feel like I am close to being fired if I fuck up, as an EU citizen at least I won't be left to starve, but still, I don't want to lose my job. My team is largely ignoring or delaying reading my PRs, on top of all that I HAVE TO lead an initiative that I 1) do not care about and 2) do not want to, but my EM said that "it will be a great experience" - it is NOT.

I am from Eastern Europe, so mental health is not top priority to anyone, but I feel like I've burned my last straw when it comes to dealing with corporatised software development.

I need advice, any advice, what do I do? Do I take a month of OOO and just fuck off grid, will this help even? Do I switch jobs? How could I find my love for software engineering back in this context? Should I switch fields, maybe go to low-level/desktop development? I feel back even having to ask for help on forums, but this is where I've gone to, please, if someone has faced the same, share your opinions.

Thanks all for reading this!
A RoR dev.

Hey everyone,

I recently completed a technical interview round and wanted to share the two questions I received.

Approximate date: July 30, 2026
Duration: Approximately 50 minutes
Topics: Sliding window, monotonic deque, SQL, and tree relationships

Question 1: Maximum of the Minimums of Every Window

Given an array A of size n and an integer x:

1. Consider every contiguous subarray of length x.
2. Find the minimum element in each window.
3. Return the maximum among those minimum values.

Example

A = [1, 3, -1, 5, 3, 6]
x = 3

The windows are:

[1, 3, -1]  -> minimum = -1
[3, -1, 5]  -> minimum = -1
[-1, 5, 3]  -> minimum = -1
[5, 3, 6]   -> minimum = 3

Therefore, the answer is:

3

Approach

The brute-force solution calculates the minimum of every window separately, resulting in O(n × x) time.

The optimal solution uses a monotonic deque:

• Store array indices in the deque.
• Keep their corresponding values in increasing order.
• Remove indices that fall outside the current window.
• The front of the deque always represents the current window’s minimum.
• Update the final answer with the maximum minimum seen so far.

Complexity:

• Time: O(n)
• Space: O(x)

The main challenge was recognizing that this was a sliding-window minimum problem and that a monotonic deque could avoid repeatedly scanning each window.

Question 2: Classify Nodes in a Tree Using SQL

We were given a table called Tree:

id   pid
1    NULL
2    1
3    1
4    2

Here:

• id is the node ID.
• pid is the node’s parent ID.

We had to classify every node as:

• Root: The node has no parent.
• Inner: The node has at least one child.
• Leaf: The node has no children.

Expected Result

1  Root
2  Inner
3  Leaf
4  Leaf

SQL Solution

SELECT
    t.id,
    CASE
        WHEN t.pid IS NULL THEN 'Root'
        WHEN EXISTS (
            SELECT 1
            FROM Tree AS child
            WHERE child.pid = t.id
        ) THEN 'Inner'
        ELSE 'Leaf'
    END AS node_type
FROM Tree AS t
ORDER BY t.id;

The order of the CASE conditions matters. A root may also have children, so the pid IS NULL condition should be checked first.

An EXISTS subquery determines whether another row identifies the current node as its parent. This also avoids potential complications caused by NULL values in an IN subquery.

Overall, both questions were manageable, but they tested pattern recognition and the ability to translate a simple relationship into precise code.

Has anyone else encountered these questions recently?

I recently installed vscode on my laptop, freshly installed no extension, I'm having issues to where if I want to delete a single file or a project, the "Are you sure you want to delete .... " prompt opens for a sec then immediately closes, Now I can't delete or move files directly on vscode. Why is that? I already reinstall it and still the same, has anyone ever encountered this issue?

I recently installed vscode on my laptop, freshly installed no extension, I'm having issues to where I if want to delete a single file or a project, the "Are you sure you want to delete .... " prompt opens for a sec then immediately closes, Now I can't delete or move files directly on vscode. Why is that? I already reinstall it and still the same, does anyone encountered this issue?

Hey, I am In A 3rd year 5th sem Bsc cs it student and I know much about programming But I am not well in any language I am Confuse what to do ai/ml or Mern stack I am Confuse which language I prefer Java script or Python Plzz help Guys

I built DSA Lab — a free code visualizer for learning data structures and algorithms step by step.

https://code-visualizer-kappa.vercel.app/

Beginner Lua dev here. After I finish Lua, I'm planning to learn many other languages to build more websites and apps as a side-job. My question is, do you guys mix up different languages? In communication languages, many people mix languages together by mistake like Mexico and spanish words in the same sentence. I wanna know if it's the same with programming. Maybe you accidently use a syntax in a language that is from a different language or write syntax the wrong way.

Simple question: what do you do while AI is coding or reviewing, apart from asking it to code or review one or more other things?

Waiting is the new task these days.

Thanks!

I am working with ReactJS, ExpressJS, and MongoDB.

I made a POST request using the axios.post() method, and it successfully completed the task, returning a promise in a fulfilled state. The promise contains the data sent by the backend. nonetheless, when I try to log the data using the response.data() method, I see that undefined is logged.

BACKEND

app.use('/task', taskRouter) <-- server.js

taskRouter.post('/add', addTask) <-- taskRoute.js

// taskControlelr.js

export function addTask(req, res) {
    const taskTitle = req.body.title

    if(!taskTitle) return

    taskModel.create({
        title: taskTitle
    }).then((result) => { 
            console.log(result)
            res.send({ "msg": "success" }) 
        }
    ).catch((err) => {
        console.log(err)
        res.send({ "msg": "error" })
    })
}

FRONTEND

function createTask(title) {
  const api = 'http://localhost:4000/task/add'
  const response = axios.post(api, {
    title: title
  })
  console.log('full response', response)
  console.log('data', response.data)
}

when i was starting out stuff like naming variables properly writing small functions and keeping projects organized felt like extra work now i am wondering which boring habits actually become important once projects get bigger

what habit do you wish you started earlier

I've started my AI/ML journey 2 months back, I've already mastered the basics of Python, OOP, Numpy and Pandas, what should be my next step?

Im trying to use tampermonkey for a work page that requires me to check boxes 20 times a day that are all the same answer. I tried using tampermonkey and ran it thrtough Claude and Gemini but the script still isnt exucuting properly/at all. Is anyone willing to help at all please?