Journey from being Homeless to a Software Developer back to Homelessness

mithereal
mithereal
Sep 7, 2018 · 4 min read

I was happy to have a new job, and happy to be employed and off the street as i had previously been homeless for a few years due to a injury leaving me only 15% use of my left hand and maybe 30% of my right.

I did everything i could do to get out of the situation of living in a tunnel, including developing 50 pieces of software and publishing it on github in hopes someone would throw me a lifesaver.
I thought i had made my mark, but i was wrong.
So onto the job.

I interviewed and landed the job a few days later at 55k per year, i was overjoyed as the wealth i had accumiliated over the past decade wasnt even that much ( i had about 100 bux in my bank account due to months of panhandeling).
During the interview process i explained that i was a backend developer skilled in php and erlang and that fancy css and the like would require a ui/ux expert, they were ok with that.
I was employed by one of the largest companies in their industry in phoenix.I finally made it life was once again worth living.
I was tasked with building an uber clone. The CTO had made is sound simple build a quoting app that reports to your cell via text message, “kind of like uber”.

I start doing r&d with the technologies given to me by the CTO, First the CTO said just do it in laravel, well after ab testing the app was limited to only a few processes, laravel is klunky, slow and a memory hog.
Next was use js, we can do this in js, up and running in meteor, but rebooting the server every 24 hours due to memory leaks and orphined processes, reinstaiting state became burdensome with technical debit, i spent more time keeping the app running than programming features.
so after much research i decide to create this in elixir.
elixir is a breeze and makes the hard parts fun and the easy parts trivial. well notsomuch.

In retrospect id say the hardest part of the job was keeping my sanity while trying to meet project deadlines in order to keep my job as the cto was not doing his, and refused to hire additional developers.
I finally caved to the pressure and started cowboy coding following the cto like a lost retarded puppy.

I build this app using the awesome drab framework in elixir, but that wasn't good nuff, it was “experimental”, well can we use reason.js , nope “no other developer can follow what you've done and if we lose you all our efforts are lost”, in reality the CTO new nothing about functional programming, he would do code reviews commenting things like its only 3 lines of code why are you reinventing the db, the db will NEVER lock you will never have 100 connections, genservers were out of the question.
So i go to the investors and say i have an api written, we need a ui/ux expert. Next week the CTO brings in a 3 page html site hacked together from the bootstrap themes 1st page filled with jquery spagetti.
api goes into bin 13.rewrite, like its 1996.

It works but is ugly as hell and from a ui standpoint is klunky and not friendly,
skip ahead to 4 weeks and im implementing a cart to store the items and quoted amount the client should pay for, all in jquery, only to find out once youve added an element to the page it doesnt delete the stale referneces and uses too much memory to work, crashy, unexplained behaviours etc.
works but is a fire pit. next came stripe integration, easy peasy, add more wood to the fire.

user can pay and checkout his cart get the quote etc. but how was this all going to work like uber. how do we pay our employees etc.
herin lies the problem an actual engineering problem not some gay ass css which i wasnt hired for. the cto says your on your own i trust you.
given that i had thrown away my api and was instructed “api is not how we do it in 2017 do not use it” i had to figure out a way to make this work.
6 weeks later i have a working project again, ugly but working. the amount of defensive coding exceptions are in the hundreds and i hate life now.
I sustain a massive head injury, yet have to come in and work or may lose my job. i sit there for a week holding my head in my hands typeing is excruiating.
this attempt of working lasts for a month and im let go, i can only imagine how i fucked up my code i was working on, im seeing dots that arent there and stuff.

i get a call from the owner of the company “were going another direction”.
6 months later im still unemployed hopefully someone will see this, have a need for a skilled engineer and throw me a lifesaver.

lesson learned software development is hard cloning Uber is harder, following a CTO that knows dick about development insane.

now i only receive calls from recruiters with questions do you know html, how bout drupal or wordpress, never offering me anything but wasting my time and selling broken dreams.