As a developer, sometimes you hammer away on some useless solo side project for a few weeks. Maybe a small game, a web interface for your home-built storage server, or an app to turn your living room lights on an off.

I often see these posts and graphs here about motivation, about a desire to conceive perfection. You want to create a self-hosted Spotify clone "but better", or you set out to make the best todo app for iOS ever written.

These rants and memes often highlight how you start with this incredible drive, how your code is perfectly clean when you begin. Then it all oscillates between states of panic and surprise, sweat, tears and euphoria, an end in a disillusioned stare at the tangled mess you created, to gather dust forever in some private repository.

Writing a physics engine from scratch was harder than you expected. You needed a lot of ugly code to get your admin panel working in Safari. Some other shiny idea came along, and you decided to bite, even though you feel a burning guilt about the ever growing pile of unfinished failures.

All I want to say is:

No time was lost.

This is how senior developers are born. You strengthen your brain, the calluses on your mind provide you with perseverance to solve problems. Even if (no, *especially* if) you gave up on your project.

Eventually, giving up is good, it's a sign of wisdom an flexibility to focus on the broader domain again.

One of the things I love about failures is how varied they tend to be, how they force you to start seeing overarching patterns.

You don't notice the things you take back from your failures, they slip back sticking to you, undetected.

You get intuitions for strengths and weaknesses in patterns. Whenever you're matching two sparse ordered indexed lists, there's this corner of your brain lighting up on how to do it efficiently. You realize it's not the ORMs which suck, it's the fundamental object-relational impedance mismatch existing in all languages which causes problems, and you feel your fingers tingling whenever you encounter its effects in the future, ready to dive in ever so slightly deeper.

You notice you can suddenly solve completely abstract data problems using the pathfinding logic from your failed game. You realize you can use vector calculations from your physics engine to compare similarities in psychological behavior. You never understood trigonometry in high school, but while building a a deficient robotic Arduino abomination it suddenly started making sense.

You're building intuitions, continuously. These intuitions are grooves which become deeper each time you encounter fundamental patterns. The more variation in environments and topics you expose yourself to, the more permanent these associations become.

Failure is inconsequential, failure even deserves respect, failure builds intuition about patterns. Every single epiphany about similarity in patterns is an incredible victory.

Please, for the love of code...

Start and fail as many projects as you can.

A story about how a busy programmer became responsible for training interns.

So I was put in charge of a team of interns and had to teach them to work with Linux, coding (Bash, Python and JS) and networking overall.
None of the interns had any technical experience, skills, knowledge or talent.
Furthermore the task came to me as a surprise and I didn't have any training plan nor the time.

Case 0:
Intern is asked to connect to a VM, see which interfaces there are and bring up the one that's down (eth1). He shuts eth0 down and is immediately disconnected from the machine, being unable to connect remotely.

Case 1:
Intern researches Bash scripting via a weird android app and after a hour or so creates and runs this function: test(){test|test&}
He fork-bombed the VM all other interns used.

Case 2:
All interns used the same VM despite the fact that I created one for each.
They saved the same ssh address in Putty while giving it different names.

Case 3:
After explicitly explaining and demonstrating to the interns how to connect to their own VMs they all connect to the same machine and attempt to create file systems, map them and etc. One intern keeps running "shutdown -r" in order to test the delay flag, which he never even included.

Case 4:
All of the interns still somehow connect to the same VM despite me manually configuring their Putty "favorites". Apparently they copy-paste a dns that one of them sent to the entire team via mail. He also learned about the wall command and keeps scaring his team members with fake warnings. A female intern actually asked me "how does the screen knows what I look like?!". This after she got a wall message telling her to eat less because she gained weight.

Case 5:
The most motivated intern ran "rm -rf" from his /etc directory.
P.S. All other interns got disconnected because they still keep using his VM.

Case 6:
While giving them a presentation about cryptography and explaining how SSH (that they've been using for the past two weeks) works an intern asked "So is this like Gmail?".
I gave him the benefit of the doubt and asked if he meant the authorization process. He replied with a stupid smile "No! I mean that it can send things!".

FML. I have a huge project to finish and have to babysit these art majors who decided to earn "ezy cash many" in hightech.

Adventures will be continued.

My "Coding Standards" for my dev team

1.) Every developer thinks or have thought their shit don't stink. If you think you have the best code, submit it to your peers for review. The results may surprise you.

2.) It doesn't matter if you've been working here for a day or ten years. Everyone's input is valuable. I don't care if you're the best damn programmer. If you ever pull rank or seniority on someone who is trying to help, even if it isn't necessarily valid or helpful, please have your resume ready to work elsewhere.

3.) Every language is great and every language sucks in their own ways. We don't have time for a measuring contest. The only time a language debate should arise is for the goal of finding the right one for the project at hand.

4.) Comment your code. We don't have time to investigate what the structure and purpose of your code is when we need to extend upon it.

5.) If you use someone else's work, give them the credit in your comments. Plagiarism will not be tolerated.

6.) If you use flash, you will be taken out back and shot. If you survive, you will be shot again.

7.) If you load jQuery for the sole purpose of writing a simple function, #6 applies.

8.) Unless it is an actual picture, there is little to no reason for not utilizing CSS. That's what it's there for.

9.) We don't support any version of Internet Explorer and Edge other than the latest versions, and only layout/alignment fixes will be bothered with.

10.) If you are struggling with a task, reach out. While you should be able to work independently, it doesn't make sense to waste your time and everyone else's to not seek assistance when needed.

11.) I'm serious about #6 and #7. Don't do it.

The programmer and the interns part 2.

We will discuss numerous events that happened over the past week or so.

Case 0:
We had our weekly engineering meeting. The interns were invited as well.
We hold meetings in the generic, big, corporate meeting rooms with a huge table in the middle.
There were more than enough chairs for everyone yet the most motivated and awkward intern (let's call him Simon) chose to stand, cause "it's cool man, I always stand". At this point we all know that he probably read about Agile stand up meetings and is confusing it with this one. Otherwise he's simply trying to stand out from the rest. (See what I did there?)
Anyway the meeting has started way later than planned (what a surprise) and took much longer than Simon expected. Everybody is sitting and listening to the CTO while occasionally glancing at the weird looking intern standing awkwardly and refusing to sit because it would make his original intentions pointless. He even tried to nod whith a serious face and his hands crossed when the CTO said something and looked at his general direction. The meeting was about a hour and a half long but with the delay it was at least 2.5 hours.
At the end Simon was so exhausted that he fell asleep on the office puff, was forgotten and locked inside. 3 hours later when I was home I received a call from him with his sleepy-trying-to-sound-awake voice telling the news. Lucky there's a 24/7 Noc team that could rescue him.

Case 1:
An intern who was late on his Linux test connected to every test VM (should I remind you that each one has a personal VM but they share passwords for their roots?) and tried to reset it with "sleep 10s; shutdown -h now".
He took down all 13 of those so I had to turn them on and switch passwords again.

Case 2:
One of the interns didn't do any of his training chores. Apparently he forgot what he was told to use, ignored all online documentation and used Windows CMD with Linux commands for almost a week already.

Case 3:
Simon uses Vim to write all text possible. Even mails, he then selects all and copies into the mail body. He spent half a day on a homework task I gave them. He wrote everything inside one text file using Vim. When he was done he saved the file and quit the editor. He then said "Oh shit! I've forgot to sign my name!". I explicitly told him that theres absolutely no need for that because I see which mail the file was sent from. He said "I don't even need a program for that!" and gave a couple of strokes on the keyboard.
Later I received an email from him with a .txt attachment. When I opened it the only text that was inside was "by Simon ;)".
I logged to his machine and checked the last command ran on the file:
echo "by Simon ;)" > linuxtasks.txt

Case 4:
The girl here uses a MacBook. She keeps getting confused with the terminal windows and rebooting her own machine instead of the remote VM.

Case 5:
Haven't checked yet how this happened but one of the interns deleted the gui from his local Centos.

Hello everyone, found this place recently, decided to bore you with one (or many) Navy story... tech Navy story. I'll start from the end.
Little backstory: I've deployed a simple domain setup on the ship I served, nothing fancy, a server, a switch, 10 computers, all Windows (details on that at another rant). I enter the ship Monday morning, and the XO tells me that he can't access his online folders.
OK, I say, I'll get to it. I fire up my laptop, try to RDP to the server (I know, I know, burn me at the stake later) no connection. WTF? Is the service down? I try pinging. No luck. I tried pinging the switch. OK. Looking at the switch admin panel, I see the server's port is dead. "OK, probably the cable." (we have old ethernet cables)
So, I drag my ass over to the server (same room with ship comms) with the cable tester to confirm that. What do I see?
The IMBECILES had pulled the plug from the server so that they could charge their mobile phones. I literally slammed my head against the door (calming exercise in case of spontaneous murder impulses - the things you learn at the Academy). My CO was nearby, and lucky for the guys, he heard me yell at them, while throwing mobiles and chargers around.
"But we thought it was OK, we just wanted to charge our-"
I kid you not, I reached for the firefighter's axe.
My CO grabbed me by the collar and dragged me to his room. I explained to him (between two cigarettes) that we MUST get a UPS and a server cabinet (budget constraints in the military are something that will give you people nightmares, trust me). I carefully explained to him that unless we got those, nothing would prevent the next moron from destroying confidential data and me from murdering him.
I plugged in and booted the server, after installing a multi socket extension. Two days after, surprise surprise, the server was off again. That was the first time I opened the door to the CO's room with a low kick. I must have looked like a psycho on drugs, he gave approval for the purchase in twenty seconds flat.
After that, I installed the UPS and the cabinet. Everything went inside, from the UPS to the very plugs. Just a locked box with cables coming out.
One of the guys came to my room, and asked if I could unlock the cabinet so that they could plug a "device" they needed.
I actually reached for my folding knife.
Disclaimer: The story above is TRUE. Even the almost violent parts.

There once approached me a client, with a request to be done. Here is a recap, with emphasis on time limits.

C: Ok, so we need this and this thing to be done that and that way...
*short talk about technical side of the project, unimportant to the rant*
C: Can it be done by 25th, this month? (It was 4th of the month)
M: No way, it'll take at least a week more, so realistically I'd say around 7th next month.
C (Had no option but to agree on the date)
*we arrange the price as well (was not a bad one at all)*

So I started working on the thing and one night, about a week or so in, I probably had a cup of tea too much, I suddenly have a breakthrough. I sat behind a computer from 22:00 till 17:00 next day, nonstop. I didn't even eat anything in the meantime. The project was far from done, but I did quite a lot of work. Anyhow, when I have completed the project, not only was I not over the deadline, it was 22nd of the month, so even before the wanted time! When I contacted the client and told him that I am done, he was ... let's just say very happy. The deployment went fine, but when I checked my bank account, for the payment, there was a surprise waiting for me. The number was 25% more than what we have arranged! Me, believing that it was a mistake, immediately messaged him about it and he responded:

No, this is just a small gift for you, because you finished that quickly.

(and not to forget, I have coded things for way less than those 25% and was completely fine with the price, so it was not a small amount)

Just because Facebook/Google/Apple are doing something, it doesn't mean it's the future of technology.

No, we're not going to throw out large parts our perfectly good tech stack just because you liked their latest blog post.

If you wanted to always play "follow the shiny thing", you should have become a jeweller. Please learn what independent thought is and how to apply it, the results might surprise you!

Why would a keyboard store 155 MB data?
Oh wait! It's Google's keyboard

My girlfriend sent me out to buy basil for soup... Had no choice so I went. At the mall entrance, 4 interactive digital signage panels. Used one to check for the supermarket's locations and saw that a display corner was flickering. The app was grabbing the full screen but had a bug with the windows' task bar. Messed with it a couple of minutes, stopped app and... Surprise! Windows 7, logged as administrator... I had to go to disk management... I really had to.

PS: gf said that I should be ashamed of what I did...

My last wk93 story, the time we discovered school faculty was spying on students and we uncovered student's deepest secrets.

I call it, kiddiegate.

So if you've read my past rants you've noticed I did some pretty childish and reckless stuff with my highschool's systems when I was younger, but nothing compares to this thing.

After resetting the sysadmin account pwd on some machines it occurred to me I could write a keylogger to capture teachers Moodle accounts and so on, I decided to try it out on a regular lab computer first.

Imagine my surprise when I found a hidden keylogger already installed! I couldn't believe it but then I thought, what if other PC's have it? So I recruited my mates and teached them the process to check if a PC had been infected...ALL PCs were, over 30 computers we checked had been logging for over 3 months! That damn sysadmin! >:[

We were shocked and angry, but then I thought "hey. . . My work has been done for me, better take advantage"

So we did, we extracted each log and then removed it from the PCs along with the keyloggers. There were hundreds of records and then one day we started snooping into the fb accounts of some students (we shouldn't have) we uncovered so many nasty, shocking secrets...

One of the school's lady's man had a drunk one nighter with one of our gay friends, the most secluded and shy guy was sexting like crazy with 15 chicks at the same time, things like that...we promised to never say a word and deleted the logs.

After that we didn't do much and continued highschool as every teenage minor should, getting drunk and avoiding responsibilities, though we could never see many of our classmates the same way. The sysadmin was fired shortly after I graduated, no reason was stablished.

I want to clear out we were minors and laws in my country weren't clearly stablished at the time plus no harm was ever done. I don't condone hacking or any kind of illegal activity, just thought I'd share.

I was at Leeds Central train station the other day, waiting for the platform to be announced on the screen in the main bit. I noticed a commotion to my right. There was a teenage girl screaming and writhing around on the floor, her mother was knelt on one knee trying to calm her. I walked over without thinking, I know nothing about Epilepsy or first aid, at a push I could probably figure out the recovery position from a faint diagram i have stored in the unused part if my brain...

(it’s where I keep the washing machine instructions, which incidentally were designed for maximum confusion, if Id designed a washing machine it would have 1 button labelled ‘wash’)...

Sorry, back to the story. So i walked over and just before I got there, with the mother looking directly at me, I realised, what the fuck am I doing, meanwhile the daughter was screaming still and writhing, a bit like a rapid angel print you would make in the snow as a kid (until your hand touched the dog shit).

I couldn’t help it, the words just came out, like a dumb fucker, i said ‘Has she got epilepsy?’ , i stood there waiting for the sarcastic comment or the murderous stare, even a fuck off would suffice, so that I could remove myself from the situation.

To my surprise, and shock, she looked at me, calmly and said “oh no, it’s not epilepsy or anything like that.... she’s lost her iPhone”.

Root encounters HR at her new job.

So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.

Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)

But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.

The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.

I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.

But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.

!!rant
!!ANGER

Micromanager: "Hey, Root!

Since you're back, and still not feeling well, we have an easy ticket for you: Rewrite the slack integration gem! Oh, you don't have to re-implement all of it, just make sure it all works the same way it does now. That bitch you worked with once over a year ago who kept throwing you under the bus to management and stealing credit for your work? Yeah, she wrote the original code like four years ago. It's perfect, so don't touch it. but she can fill you in on all the details you need and get you up to speed on how to test it.

But yep! It should be simple. and I just knew you would love this ticket, so I saved it just for you. Nice and quick, too, to get you an easy win.

You know, since you have to repair your reputation with product. and management. and the execs. and the rest of the team. and me. Yeah, product doesn't trust you so they don't want to give you any tickets. They just can't trust you to get them out and have them work. So you have a lot of hard work to do."

Spoiler: The bus-thrower wasn't much help. (Surprise.)
Spoiler: The ticket was already in my backlog -- one of a grand total of two tickets.
Spoiler: I don't find the ticket fun. Maybe if I was to write the entire implementation with a nice DSL? but no, "don't touch the perfect code." Fuck you.
Spoiler: It isn't going to be nice or quick. But, she (micromanager) is looking to lose me, so that really is an easy win. for her.

And. just. argh. fuck you. i've been exhausted and dying for well over a year, but you've kept ignoring that (and still are, despite me providing goddamn legal forms from fucking doctors stating it in plain fucking english, which you also fucking ignore), and you just keep piling on the work and demanding the ridiculous of me despite it. Yeah I can pull it off sometimes. No, I really shouldn't, and I'm surprised I can. (also, "Time off? What, and lower your productivity even more? ____ doesn't even take vacations. And how are you doing on that ticket?") And no, none of my tickets have ever had any fucking problems. Not even when there are upstream service outages. Not. a. single. fucking. one. Ever. And the only things I've ever missed were things that bloody product never put in the fucking ticket, so fuck you with your "repair your reputation" bullshit.

god, i fuckiNG HATE THESESTUPOID ANWETLJAF SAJEWTKW BITCHFACEDUCKFUCKERS

Why the FUCK am I still fucking working here?
Right, because I've been burned out and dying so much I can't pass a fucking interview so I can fucking leave.

jasdkl;fk

ugh. Anyway. If you ever find yourself starting work at a Cali fintech company whose internal mascot is a very fine duck? Just run. I absolutely guarantee you will be miserable.

I vehemently despise the popular image of developers as borderline autistic savants living on junk food and working 24 hour days!

You see, I bought into that vision and became that person. When I first started working as a developer, I would work crazy long hours, eating junk food while neglecting my health and personal life. This behavior was encouraged by my boss and co-workers, and became expected, with the sales people boasting about it to the clients, like is somehow proved I was a better developer.
It's no big surprise that this kind of life comes at a cost and can not be sustained. I burnt out, my life fell to pieces and my body fucked out on me.
It's taken me years to repair the damage and I am still doing so.
I now work at a company that understands the importance of a healthy work/life balance, and I take full advantage of that.
Perhaps if I had a wise mentor when I first started, I could have worked smarter instead of harder and respected the needs of my mind and body.
I am that mentor now.

Developers are smart people, we should stop glamorising a stupid lifestyle.

rant

The Java course at our Uni requires us to do an end semester project - A Java App with Swing for GUI and some Multithreading code in it.

They asked us to upload the code to drive. I was bored and was checking out my friends' projects.

The code below is what I saw in one of the projects. They have simply called a thread with an empty run method because the project required to use multithreading concepts, wtf.

But then, It is no surprise to me cause these are the people who memorize code and vomit code for marks.

I am worried that people are going to be awarded degrees and called software engineers.

God save the software industry!

The Absolutely True Story of a Real Programmer Who Never Learned C.

I have a young friend named Sam who is quite a programming prodigy. Sam does know C! I need to make this clear: he’s not the titular programmer.
But a couple years ago Sam told me a story about a different programmer who never learned C, and I liked it so much that right on the spot I asked his permission to repeat it. (I could never just steal such a tale.)
Sam wasn’t always a programmer—actually he started in his later teens, in part because he was more of a jock, and in part because he was related to programmers and wanted to do his own thing. But, like all great programmers, once he was bitten by the bug he immersed himself completely in it.
One day Sam happened to be talking programming with his uncle, who was also a programmer but from way, way back.
“Hey,” said Sam, “I’m learning this language called C. You must know a lot of languages, did you ever study C?”
“No,” said the uncle, to Sam’s surprise. “I am one of the very few programmers who never had to learn C.”
“Because I wrote it.”
Oh, Sam’s last name is Ritchie.
What I love about this story is the idea of Dennis waiting Sam’s entire life to deliver this zinger. Just imagine sitting on a line that good, watching your nephew grow up and waiting, waiting until the one day he finally starts learning to code. Did he work on the line in his head at night? Like, “Hmm, how should I word it so I can deliver the punch line perfectly? Should I say ‘I never took a class on C?’ Nah, too awkward…”
The great thing about geniuses is how much effort they put into everything.

Courtesy : Wil Shiply.

A room full of mostly old male stressed out engineers sat in chairs, and the presenter said:

"So who watched Judging Amy last night?"

The presenter went on to express her surprise that nobody in the room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.... and wasn't going to drop the topic.

The meeting, if it ever had any, now had no chance of going anywhere good.

By the end of the meeting someone would walk out and "retire" shortly there after, and it certainly wasn't going to be the presenter....

Backstory:

The company built on the IBM model of sell pricey custom hardware (granted it worked really well) and sell expensive support contracts wasn't doing as well as it had hoped. Granted it was still doing better than most of its neighboring companies, but it was clear that with the .com bust the days of catered lunches every day were over.

The company had grown fat and everyone knew that while the company had a good enough product(s) to survive, there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone to survive.

In the midst of this an HR department that took up nearly 20% of the office space at HQ felt it needed to justify its existence / expenses.

They decided to do this in the same way they always had, by taking funding from other departments, this time not by simply demanding more direct budgets for themselves.... they decided to impose mandatory 'training' on other departments ... that they would then bill for this training.

When HR got wind that there were some stressed out engineers the solution was, as it always is for HR.... to do more HR stuff:

They decided to take these time starved engineers away from their jobs, and put them in a room with HR for 4 days. Meanwhile the engineer's tasks, deadlines and etc remained the same.

Support got roped into it too, and that's how I ended up there.

It would be difficult to describe the chasm between HR and everyone else at that company. This was an HR department that when they didn't have enough cubes (because of constant remodeling in the HR area under the guise of privacy) sat their extra HR employees next to engineering and were 'upset' that the engineers 'weren't very friendly and all they did was work'.

At one point a meeting to discuss this point of contention was called off for some made up reason or another by someone with a clue.

So there we all sat, our deadlines kept ticking away and this HR team (3 people) stood at the front of the room and were perplexed that none of these mostly older males in this room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.

From there the presentation was chaos, because almost the entire thing was based on your knowledge of what happened to poor stressed out Amy ... or something like that.

We were peppered with HR tales of being stressed out and taking a long lunch and feeling better, and this magical thing where the poor HR person went and had a good cry with her boss and her boss magically took more off her plate (a brutal story where the poor HR person was almost moved to tears again).

The lack of apparent sympathy (really nobody said much at all) and lack of seeming understanding from the crowd of engineers that all they should do is take a long lunch, or tell their boss to solve their problems ... seemed to bother the HR folks. They were on edge.

So then they finally asked "What are your stressers?" And they picked the worst possible person they could to ask, Ted.

Ted was old, he prickly, he was the only one who understood the worst ass hell of assembly that had been left behind.

Ted made a mistake, he was honest with folks who couldn't possibly understand what he was saying. "This mandatory class is stressing me out. I have work to do and less time because of this class."

The exchange that followed was kinda horrible and I recall sitting behind Ted trying to be as small as possible as to not be called on. Exactly what everyone said almost doesn't matter.

A pedantic debate between Ted and the HR staff about "mandatory" and "required" followed. I will just sum it up that they were both in the wrong for how they behaved for a good 20 minutes...

Ted walked out, and would later 'retire' that week.

Ted had a history and was no saint. I suspect an email campaign by various folks who recounted the events that day spared ted the 'fired' status and he walked with what eventually would become the severance package status quo.

HR never again held another 'training', most of them would all finally face the axe a few months later after the CEO finally decided that 'customer facing, and product producing' headcount had been reduced enough ... and it was other internal staff's time for that.

The result of the meeting was one less engineer, and everyone else had 4 days less of work done...

I don't understand this. How is that Facebook is one of the biggest company in the world and have the worst fucking mobile apps ever created. I just use messenger to talk with my mom and it's utter rubbish.

When a call arrives, there's no way to silence that call apart from setting the phone to mute. All the other apps shut up when you either click power button or volume button. But this fucking messenger piece of Satan's anus won't respond to any fucking button when I have a call.

Not only that, once you have received the call, there's no way you can rotate the app without ending the call, turning on auto rotate and call again. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? how the fuck is it that you're so fucking big but you don't have this simple features in your fucking app?

And yeah, most of the time, when I receive a call in mobile, it doesn't appear on the desktop website. If it does and I receive the call from there, the mobile app still keeps shouting. AND GUESS WHAT, at that point, if I reject the call from the mobile, it will end the call that I accepted from the desktop. HAHA, WHAT A FUCKING SURPRISE.

Facebook, please stop being a piece of shite. Put your goddamn money to good use. If you can't make a good app, maybe outsource it to other companies. They will do a better job than you.

Story time:
Yesterday I wanted to go to the theater with my girlfriend. It was her idea because as a student you can get reduced tickets for the play, but only via the online store exactely two hours before the play starts. We had already tried two weeks before but with no success. So this time I said i want to be on my pc with a proper browser and not a mobile version like last time. So we are sitting at home me in front of their website on one screen and with a clock on the other screen. Two minutes realy i hit refresh and I get a selection for the reduced tickets, nice.

You would think.

After selecting the amount. ERROR: Can not get your tickets. I was like fuck they are already sold out because it's a popular play. But hey let's try again. I got one ticket but not the second one, okay strange lets try again, same ERROR again. WHAT the FUCK, no feedback what so ever. My girlfriend had then the idea that they maybe restricted the amount for reduced tickets to one (does not state this explicitly but hey lets give it a shot). Use second browser select one ticket. ERROR can not get you the amount of seats. Rage level near to a 1000 why did it work two minutes before but not anymore. Trying around for five more minutes finally got the second ticket.

Now the real fun begins.

Proceeding to checkout should not be that hard you would think, but you need to be registered for that. Okay so let's do that. The salutation is not required neither is the address for the tickets but you need to have a company name??!!!!! The fuck?? I am not self employed and neither are a most other people around here so why is this field mandatory? Beeing a little under stress I decided to found the "asdf" company with my girlfriend.

Now one would think checking out is easy. Not so fast.

After accepting the terms of service another ERROR, unable to accept your data. What data? I did not input anything new? Where does this come from? Ok never mind I am going to pay with credid card that must work!
ERROR: Internal paymentservice initialization failure! Sorry what? I thought maybe I was to long idle in this browser and they do not reserve the tickets for so long (which would be no surprise to me at this point). Let's try again. Nope same error.

Now my rage level was really over 9000 but we really wanted to go so I decided to call the customer SUPPORT. Or better to say I had a answering maching telling me for ten minutes how sorry they are that this takes so long, yeah you bet. Then and this is now really great: the support guy asks me: "What error do you see? Internal paymentservice initialization failure?" I was like, okay he knows this so they need to know how to handle it. FUCK NO. "Sorry I can't help you. This is our payment system maybe they (IT) are doing some maintenance I can't halp you. Call the theater directly good day." Sorry what just happened, you fuckers are the vendors for the tickets for nearly all big events around here and the theater explicitly states to call you for tickets but you can not help me? Like hell.

This process took 25 very frustrating minutes and I was really angry and wanted to quit, then I saw that there is also a paypal option which I had not tried. With very little hope i selected everything for the payment, registered with paypal and they told me I already had an account. So reactivated this five year old account payed with all the mobile passwords and tans to finally, after 30 fucking minutes, get a pdf file for a ticket. Repeated the last step for the second ticket and with some time left to get there we were off.

What's the difference between a wasp and single loose hair?
Apparently none till the wasp stings :/

Yesterday I thought I had a loose hair on my neck.. ok, I shrug it off.. later again the creepy feeling.. shrugs off..

I continue to work, sumberged in code, wanting to find the fucker (bug, not the wasp/hair).. lean in to the monitor... 10 cents away from the screen... Ok, maybe that's it! Feels the hair on my back, near shoulderblades again... shrugging again more violently to get it further down to fall out.. nothing.. ok, got the bug, threw myslef back in the chair with substential force & BAAAAM!!! Motherfucking hair bit me!! O.o

I scream in horror & on top of the lungs (it was late, after work hours so I didn't expect anyone else still at the office) PROKLETA PRASICA (roughly translated to goddamn female swine).. I previously saw some green bug flying around the office and I thought that nasty thing bit me (didn't know they bite soo, much more horror for me).. O.o

Anyhow, I jump up from the computer and see my coworker looking at me all baffled.. I proceed to franticly take of my headphones and hoodie..thinking about wtf should I do now, I cannot get undressed in front of him (not for my sake, bra is the same as top of the bathing suit for me, but still..I don't want anyone suing me for impropper behaviour of undreasing in front of coworkers..), how the fuck should I get to the toilet?! O.o

C: Are you ok?!
M: Um.. sth bit me..wtf?!
C: There was a wasp flying around somewhere some time ago.. are you alergic?!
M: um..not sure, I don't think so..we'll see soon..

I proceed to the WC, to take off tshirt & check/kill off the fucker.. on my way there (walking funny to not press the hair to my body again) I got another surprise, another coworker was working late..

C2: Are you ok?! O.o
M: yeah, sth bit me, probably a wasp..

Ok, finally on the loo..ok, do not lock self in in case it escapes and you need help.. don't even shut the door. Check.. standing between the doors I contemplate on how the fuck should I take my tshirt off without angering the fucker even more and getting bitten again.. O.O

I lifted the tshirt up my back to let it out.. nope, not there..the creepy felling of buzzing around between my shoulder blades continues.. crap.. what to do?!

I stood there & contemplated the task.. ok, roll up the tshirt to the shoulder blades, not against the body (duh) to prevent further stings..tighten the fabric, so it cannot escape, quickly remove the band from the body.. done..reversed the tshirt and straightened it.. bzzz... Fucker fell somewhere.. Dafaq?! Was it really just a wasp?! If yes, no problem...but what if coworker was wrong and I got bitten by that nasty green whateveritsname bug?! Eeeeewwww! Is it poisonous? Gotta find it & kill it for good.. waited a bit, than saw a goddamn wasp crawl from under the toilet.. wasp!! Yess!! Stopm stomp fucker!!

I get dressed & go back to my desk..

C: Did you terminate it?!
M: Yup, fucker went on a toilet paper trip down the drain!!

I sit down, starting to get my headphones back on and proceed to work.., but before I could, one last gem:

C: CTO would say, thank god it didn't sting you in your finger cuz you wouldn't be able to type anymore..

M: O.O so true hahhahahaaa

Disclaimer - I like animals, but I freakking hate wasps..especially if they get under my tshirt to sting.. :/

I am DONE with this woman CONTINUED!

I didn't think I'd have to put another rant about this stupidity at least not this soon but she just keeps on giving!

I have my noise canceling headphones on most of the time and when I want to hear the people around, I just put the right earcup of it to the side of my ear so the music pauses. Today we had a huge disrupt on our services because of a network switch error on the hub. I was also trying to focus on my coding as I didn't wanna do a stupid mistake on the last working day and be sorry about it in the next week.

So this woman sneaks up on me from behind calling my name - meaning she has a question, surprise! -, I say 'yes' moving my head to her side ever so slightly without getting my eyes off of my screen stating subtly that I'm also listening to her while trying to focus on my shit. She starts yelling at me 'look at me!' out of nowhere! I turn my head and ask what the problem is and she asks why I'm not looking at her face! Stupid moron, I might not be too good in understanding your way of communication but you are the one asking so you WILL wait if you'd like to hear answers.

I say I'm working on something and her answer is again 'Why aren't you looking at my face it's going to be quick bla bla did we do this like that?' and I answered I didn't remember because there's no way I'd ever remember without looking further and it was no lie.

This woman clearly has stability issues and everyone else seem to be tolerating it. It's now obvious as I'm not tolerating the nonsense I'll be the one that 'she only has ever had a problem with'.

I was quick to de escalate the situation but now I'm thinking maybe I should've responded in a way that she could understand. I wouldn't ever give a shit about it but this is getting ridiculous.

Got my first legit side-gig as a developer (like had to write an SOW and everything): my kids' pediatrician is amazing, but shes switching to a concierge practice, meaning she wont take any insurance, and shes going from about 1500 patients down to about 200. I already pay my mortgage-worth in insurance on a monthly basis, so we were prepared to say adios to her. At my daughter's last appointment, she pulled me aside and said "what can we do to keep you guys as patients?" and i somewhat jokingly suggested "I dunno, need any websites written?"

As a matter of fact, she did: she just fired her practice's web developer, who gave her a shitty wordpress site and fought like hell to avoid any further maintenance or updates for her. She hates the site's current layout (no surprise there) so she is basically giving me full control over a rewrite.

No user logins, no worries about compliance with PII or any of that. Literally just turning a brochure wordpress site into an angular app, hosting it on her own server and eventually building an admin page where she can change the banner text and upload new images.

And my kids will get free, top-notch health care.

How the fuck am I expected to salvage a fucking project that has been handed down to me with.
- No fucking clear architecture
- No fucking documentation
- Fucking shitty ass code base with no fucking coding standards
- The previous team was fucking learning a whole fucking new technology stack *Not fucking kidding* making fucking mistakes left and right
- No code reviews
- Mixing fucking local and cloud enviroment together
- No fucking testing
- Feature that were supposed to be implemented and are not working
- No configuration all the stuff are hard coded
- Full responsiblity for the whole stack
- Only one other guy with me
- And this fucking project has been delayed for a year
- MUCH FUCKING MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM

Like what the fuck am I expected to do? I took the job thinking that people knew what the fuck they were doing and surprise surprise that was a fucking bust.

the problem is also I am the junior and these fucking people have more experience than me, what the fuck happened to over seeing people's work, PM doesnt give a shit, developers dont give a shit nobody gives a shit.

But when I got this surprise surprise now everyone is interested in finishing the project

BULLSHIT

Fucking teammate who did not know how to read/write a simple class diagram.
We warned him that he have to study or we just kick his fucking ass out of the team.

He just did nothing. When we had meetings he just stayed at home pretending to have an heart issue needing surgery.
After just 2-3 days he was tagged on FB in a photo shooted a few days earlier where he was riding a bike for a competition.

He skipped another scheduled-a-fucking-week-before meeting saying that he was on a surprise trip, when I called him 5 minutes before meeting start.

In the end we just kick him out because he did nothing. He went to professor talking about some relationship problem in the team and asked him if he could continue the project by himself just forking the ours.

Professor said HELL NO SON OF A BITCH.

But our team learned a precious lesson : choose your team carefully.

Sometimes I have really loose the will to live and find myself face palming multiple times.

I added live chat software a web frontend for a client. Very easy job that consisted of pasting in some embed code. The actual software is very good and has native ios/andriod apps - something specifically requested.

I got a call from my client about an hour ago, saying there is a "serious issue with the live chat".

My client stated the live chat won't work when his staff go home. He asked me what my solution to this was.

Saying "wtf" many times to myself I directed him to a settings within the chat software i.e. an "away mode" where an email is sent when no chat agents are available.

This apparently wasn't good enough and said I hadn't followed his brief of "adding life chat software to the website", which I had.

After a lengthy discussion I found the root of his frustration. He'd signed a contract with a client of his own, stating there would be 24/7 support via live chat on the website.

Obviously there a huge difference between adding a chat widget to a website and committing to having it manned 24/7 :)

After a further 10 minutes of trying push the blame on myself, the client insisted of having the chat software "appear" as someone was always online, even when they are not (people need to sleep ya know!).

Bu design, the chat software requires at least one agent be logged in before the chat status changes to "online" - why wouldn't it.

After a little while I was seriously wondering why I'm involved in this conversation. I jokingly stated: "Well you could always install Andriod/iOS app on your phone, login and permanently leave it running in background. You'd get lots of notifications, but the site would say the live is always online".

The latter was something I said in jest. To my surprise the client said he'd do that on his own phone going forwards. He actually thanked me for my "resourcefulness", lol.

I'm looking at the same dashboard now and there are 407 pending chat requests - his phone must literally be blowing up notifications :)

Hey look, npm broke my project again. Surprise!

Code and dependencies on my local machine, all untouched for a couple of weeks, no longer works. I've no idea how it even managed that.

Oh, and `npm update` crashes.

eventually solved by upgrading npm and running `npm update --depth 500` because some arbitrary child dependencies changed without updating the parent packages, ofc. on my local machine. without me having run `npm update` for about a month.

because of course that makes sense.
Second time in two months, too.

isn't npm great?

I was getting a freelancer job to do some backend work for a company in India that is working for a huge company in Saudi Arabia.

The customer in india was my primary contact, I wasn't allowed to talk to the guys in Saudi Arabia. My contact, we'll call him Aman, asks if i can do frontend too. I decline. Now what follows were 4 weeks of backend work during which Aman called me 10-15 times per day via skype to ask me how I was progressing, and if "insert spec here" was already done. He even called me in the middle of the night, well aware of the different time zones.

But in the end all the work is done, Aman is happy. I request payment.

Aman: We can't pay you yet, you didn't do the frontend!
Me: I'm not doing frontend.
Aman: It's just a few simple changes and then we're done.
Me: Gnnn, fuck it, what do you need?
Aman: Our customer would like the frontend to look better.
Me: Ok, so what exactly should look better?
Aman: All of it.
Me: Do you have any specs?
Aman: No just make it look more modern.
Me: So you want me to rework the whole frontend? That's not just a few simple changes...
Aman: How long would you need?
Me: I actually don't do that kind of work.
Aman: We pay you double your hourly rate if you do this and finish it fast.

(This is were I should have just said no... but the greed...)

Me: Ok, but it will take me about 3 weeks to do that.
Aman: OK.
Me: Do you have any preferences as to how it should look?
Aman: No, just surprise us.

(After this sentence I really should have gotten the hell out of Dodge)

After working 3 weeks changing over 20.000 lines of CSS and most of the HTML I present Aman with the changes.

Aman: No our customer doesn't like the changes. Can you make a different version?
Me: What doesn't he like, any specifics, coloring, styling of lists or the buttons?
Aman: He doesn't like the whole thing. Please make us another version.
Me: Ok, you are the customer, but it would really help if you give me some pointers as to how it should look like.
Aman: Just do your best.
Me: ..., ok, that's helpful.

2 weeks later...

Aman: No our customer liked the version before better. But could you make it look more modern.
Me: *Bangs head against wall repeatedly*
Me: What do you mean by modern?
Aman: It should look more modern, as a whole.
Me: Ok, I get that, but could you give me an example?
Aman: Sends me a screenshot of the overview screen with all the elements encircled and modern written beside them.

1 week later...

Aman: The customer has decided, he likes the original version best. Can you undo all the changes?
Me: Sure but that'll take like 1 hour.
Aman: Oh by the way we were asked by accounting why the price for this project was so high?
Me: *hugh* *gnn* what?
Aman: Well at the beginning, you estimated the backend and frontend work to be done in 4 weeks.
Me: The frontend was never part of the original estimate.
Aman: Can you do anything concerning your hourly rate, so that we can get back to the original pricing.
Me: *make a mental note to never work with an intermediary company in india again and cancels the job requesting the due payment*

Luckily I got paid the full amount but not before having another 10 Skype call with Aman...

My sister is the one who got all the support, despite her now working as a cleaning lady, having 2 kids of her own, having already married and divorced, having been in financial trouble several times, oh and she's only 22 years old. She couldn't finish high school and even getting a driver's license wasn't without hoops. Now she's dating someone as old as our mother.

I've been putting my career front and center in everything. I want to make my own business and sell a network-oriented Linux distribution through it. My mother was impressed when her colleague whipped up a basic website for their company. You can imagine the surprise when I told her that that's only one component of my infrastructure. My family and I still aren't on very good terms, but yeah.. going from "don't stare at those "screens" all day long" to "wow, you've actually done something with these screens" (to her all technology is a screen) is at least some progress I guess.

No support whatsoever though, neither in my endeavors in programming, server administration and whatnot (but hey what can I expect) but what annoys me the most is that my sister did get all the help in the world for maintaining her general household. I didn't get any of that, first night when I moved into my apartment I slept on the floor because my bed wasn't completely built yet. Now that all of that is done, I don't consider my mother very welcome in my apartment actually...

Oh well, we've gotten where we are somehow at least. Just reading, reading and reading more manuals. That's all you need really.

!dev && rant

I just saw this video about car insurance and how they're essentially legal fraud. As I'm looking to get a driver's license and get myself a secondhand car, I looked what the costs actually are for mandatory car insurance that gets people so worked up...

€400 per fucking year?! And many companies that get well into the €1000?!!!! No surprise that people get so worked up about it! The budget of my entire fucking car would be only around €2000!!!!

Guess I'll be looking into building an electric bike then.. money grabbing corporate motherfuckers! And what for.. only because the average driver is a clueless operator of a killing machine?! FUCK THIS SHIT!!! 🤬

Back in college.
We had this course in which we gathered in teams and worked the whole semester for another teacher building a product. We had roles, like QA, devs, PM...all the works.
I was PM and during our first presentation of the product to our teacher and the client we showed the work of our first month of work. At the end, our teacher asked our QA, who have been silent the whole project and hadn't answered my mails asking for tests, if he had found any problems. "Oh, yes. The whole site is broken. I can easily break throught it"
The faces of the rest of the group showed a level of surprise that made the teacher ask if he had informed us: "No..."
Our client, another SE teacher, started to laugh and that was that.
It was awful

Old story, and yeah, it's all true, I shit you not!

So here I am at about age 11 (more or less). At the time, I had an almost brand new 333MHz beast, with 8 MB RAM, 2 (!!!) MB video card and (I think) about 300 MB of storage (yeah, I'm old :)) ).

Connected to this monster was sitting a 14" CRT monitor, mechanical keyboard and a 2 button, ball "powered" mouse.

There was no optical tracking tech at the time.

One evening, I notice my mouse starts lagging. Test it to see if Win95 is stuck. Nope, just mouse problems...

Fiddle with it a little, and at some point it stops working at all.

My room was dark now, so I got up to turn on the lights, sat down in front of the PC, and moved the mouse by instinct.

Surprise! It's working again!

My brother comes in and turnes off the lights. Mouse non responsive.

I tell him to turn them on again, mouse works again.

At this point, we were both scratching our heads at this mystery...

I decided to confirm it again using a desc light.

Conclusion: my 2 button, ball tracking, non light sensitive mouse was working only if light was shining directly oh it AND on my 14" crt monitor at the same time!!!

To this day I have no ideea why.

I kept them both for posterity, and they are still there in my parent's attic.

Fin.

Tech support for Friend...
Again...

Ok...
A friend ran down the hallway to my Appartement, I opened the door for him and asked him "What The Fuck... Is wrong with you?!" He was just coughing like...
My... Laptop.... Is... Slow...
When he then eventually came to the point where he could Breath normally again I asked him to login into his by then super with shitty software bloated PC... It was a mess... A Desktop full of Shit... only Shit... I
then opened Chrome and Task Manager...
and holy shit... EVERYTHING! Literally ANYTHING was under 100% Load... Yet his shitty Fans werent spinning up... Shutdown the Laptop and opened it... not to my surprise it was full of Dust... I cleaned it and booted it again... still 100% Load... I couldnt do shit without being bombarded with porn and Hentai Ads... So... I asked him "Did you make any backups to this machine?" He was like.. "*Really long explenation* No *Really long Explenation*"
Great... i thought to myself... Then I said to him his PC was so trash that i only could Reset it to 0... He was like DO ANYTHING YOU CAN LITERALLY ANYTHING!
I then explained him, Resetting this PC Means literally 0 A Fresh start, nothing of your data will be there literally nothing...
He again Was like DO IT!
So I did... When it was done i showed him the result... He FREAKED OUT LIKE THE WORLD WAS GOING TO FUCKING END, HE SCREAMED AT ME WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE? REVERSE IT! REVERSE IT NOW!
I Then said to him, I reset it to 0, I said this would happen...
He then took his now perfectly running Laptop and Ran away...

tl;dr
Tech support for friend, Reset PC to 0, Freaked out AF...

- Project for a 40+b$ company.
- No business analysis.
- Only some 64 pages tech paper dividing the project in 4 iterations (pretty well written).
- « Please estimate the first iteration ».
- Can we do it in 2 weeks? Only items in first iteration, I think we can but we need a BA before we accept the project.
- Confirmed by senior dev front. 10 days, says we need a BA before we accept.
- Confirmed by senior dev back. 12 days, says we need a BA before we accept.
- UX/UI senior designer says he can't estimate such a technical, says we defo need a BA before any estimations.

PM, who is actually the department manager, says OK we can do it. No BA and estimations are halved, UI/UX 2 days.

He fucking signs the contract.

SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER, WE NEED STUFF FROM FUTURE ITERATIONS IF WE DON'T WANT TO THROW AWAY ALL THE FIRST ITER WORK.

PROJECT BECOME A CLUSTERFUCK.
NOBODY UNDERSTANDS ANYTHING. THE CLIENT HAS NO CLUE EITHER.

The fucking dep. mgr assigns another PM and says he don't have time anymore.

NOBODY HAS A CLUE WHAT THE PROJECT IS AT THIS POINT.

We have 3 days left.

Whole team came to a conclusion: the only sane thing to do is to give our grouped resignation letters.

Thanks. It was fun while it lasted. Your dep. can go to hell.

I've been away, lurking at the shadows (aka too lazy to actually log in) but a post from a new member intrigued me; this is dedicated to @devAstated . It is erratic, and VERY boring.
When I resigned from the Navy, I got a flood of questions from EVERY direction, from the lower rank personnel and the higher ups (for some reason, the higher-ups were very interested on what the resignation procedure was...). A very common question was, of course, why I resigned. This requires a bit of explaining (I'll be quick, I promise):
In my country, being in the Navy (or any public sector) means you have a VERY stable job position; you can't be fired unless you do a colossal fuck-up. Reduced to non-existent productivity? No problem. This was one of the reasons for my resignation, actually.
However, this is also used as a deterrent to keep you in, this fear of lack of stability and certainty. And this is the reason why so many asked me why I left, and what was I going to do, how was I going to be sure about my job security.
I have a simple system. It can be abused, but if you are careful, it may do you and your sanity good.
It all begins with your worth, as an employee (I assume you want to go this way, for now). Your worth is determined by the supply of your produced work, versus the demand for it. I work as a network and security engineer. While network engineers are somewhat more common, security engineers are kind of a rarity, and the "network AND security engineer" thing combined those two paths. This makes the supply of my work (network and security work from the same employee) quite limited, but the demand, to my surprise, is actually high.
Of course, this is not something easy to achieve, to be in the superior bargaining position - usually it requires great effort and many, many sleepless nights. Anyway....
Finding a field that has more demand than there is supply is just one part of the equation. You must also keep up with everything (especially with the tech industry, that changes with every second). The same rules apply when deciding on how to develop your skills: develop skills that are in short supply, but high demand. Usually, such skills tend to be very difficult to learn and master, hence the short supply.
You probably got asleep by now.... WAKE UP THIS IS IMPORTANT!
Now, to job security: if you produce, say, 1000$ of work, then know this:
YOU WILL BE PAID LESS THAN THAT. That is how the company makes profit. However, to maximize YOUR profit, and to have a measure of job security, you have to make sure that the value of your produced work is high. This is done by:
- Producing more work by working harder (hard method)
- Producing more work by working smarter (smart method)
- Making your work more valuable by acquiring high demand - low supply skills (economics method)
The hard method is the simplest, but also the most precarious - I'd advise the other two. Now, if you manage to produce, say, 3000$ worth of work, you can demand for 2000$ (numbers are random).
And here is the thing: any serious company wants employees that produce much more than they cost. The company will strive to pay them with as low a salary as it can get away with - after all, a company seeks to maximize its profit. However, if you have high demand - low supply skills, which means that you are more expensive to be replaced than you are to be paid, then guess what? You have unlocked god mode: the company needs you more than you need the company. Don't get me wrong: this is not an excuse to be unprofessional or unreasonable. However, you can look your boss in the eye. Believe me, most people out there can't.
Even if your company fails, an employee with valuable skills that brings profit tends to be snatched very quickly. If a company fires profitable employees, unless it hires more profitable employees to replace them, it has entered the spiral of death and will go bankrupt with mathematical certainty. Also, said fired employees tend to be absorbed quickly; after all, they bring profit, and companies are all about making the most profit.
It was a long post, and somewhat incoherent - the coffee buzz is almost gone, and the coffee crash is almost upon me. I'd like to hear the insight of the veterans; I estimate that it will be beneficial for the people that start out in this industry.

!dev
!!politics (kinda)

Here’s a gem from our recent harassment and diversity training at work:

Speaker: “All of these things are protected from discrimination in California! Wow! It’s a huge list, isn’t it? Now let me ask you a question: is a single white male under 40 protected?”

Everyone: *crickets*

Fucking really?
After immediately jumping on all of the other speaker’s questions, you can’t answer this one?

And later, here’s another gem:

Speaker: “If you witness an employee harassing another employee outside of work and work hours, completely unrelated to work, should you report it? What if you ask the person being harassed and she says no?”

Speaker: “Always report it! While it’s not *technically* required by law, you must report it! Why? Because you have the same protections she would! And maybe it’s easier for you to say something than for her.” (Surprise gendering was her own addition)

Fair on that last point, but against the person’s wishes? Totally not cool. Maybe it wasn’t harassment, or you don’t know the situation. Heads up: you probably don’t. Or maybe it wasn’t a big deal at all, but you think it’s earth-shattering. But all that reporting it against someone’s wishes does is create drama and possibly legal trouble. And if it wasn’t harassment or the case goes poorly, you just created enemies for yourself, or for one or both of them if you’re reporting it anonymously, and possibly even ruined one or both of their jobs/careers by doing so. Good fucking job, asshole.

Snitches get stitches.

!!oracle

I'm trying to install a minecraft modpack to play with a friend, and I'm super psyced about it. According to the modpack instructions, the first step is to download the java8 jre. Not sure if I actually need it or not, but it can download while I'm doing everything else, so I dutifully go to the download page and find the appropriate version. The download link does point to the file, but redirects to a login page instead. Apparently I need an oracle account to download anything on their site. stupid.

So I make an account. It requires my life story, or at least full name and address and phone number. stupid. So my name is now "fuck off" and I live in Hell, Michigan. My email is also "gofuckyourself" because I'm feeling spiteful. Also, for some reason every character takes about 3/4ths of a second to type, so it's very slow going. Passwords also cannot contain spaces, which makes me think they're doing some stupid "security" shenanigans like custom reversible encryption with some 5th grade math. or they're just stupid. Whatever, I make the stupid account.

Afterwards, I try to log in, but apparently my browser-saved credentials are wrong? I try a few more times, try enabling all of the javascripts, etc. No beans. Okay, maybe I can't use it until I verify the email? That actually makes some sense. Fine, I go check the throwaway inbox. No verification email. It's been like five minutes, but it's oracle so they probably just failed at it like everything else, so I try to have them resend the email. I find the resend link, and try it. Every time I enter my email address, though, it either gives me a validation error or a server error. I try a few mores times, and give up. I try to log in again; no dice. Giving up, I go do something else for awhile.

On a whim later, I check for the verification email again. Apparently it just takes bloody forever, but it did show up. Except instead of the first name "Fuck" I entered, I'm now "Andrew", apparently. okay.... whatever. I click the verify button anyway, and to my surprise it actually works, and says that I'm now allowed to use my account. Yay!

So, I go back to the login page (from the download link) and enter my credentials. A new error appears! I cannot use redirects, apparently, and "must type in the page address I want to visit manually." huh? okay, i go to the page directly, and see the same bloody error because of course i do because oracle fucking sucks. So I close the page, go back to the download list, click the link, wait for the login page redirect (which is so totally not allowed, apparently, except it works and manual navigation does not. yay backwards!), and try to log in.

Instead of being presented with an error because of the redirect, it lets me (try to) log in. But despite using prefilled creds (and also copy/pasting), it tells me they're invalid. I open a new tab container, clear the cache (just to be thorough), and repeat the above steps. This time it redirects me to a single signon server page (their concept of oauth), and presents me with a system error telling me to contact "the Administrator." -.- Any second attempts, refreshes, etc. just display the same error.

Further attempts to log in from the download page fail with the same invalid credentials error as before.

Fucking oracle and their reverse Midas touch.

I'm investigating PRs for a super legacy codebase. Someone else already approved the PRs -- somebody who has never even run the code or had the project set up before.

The codebase hasn't been touched in two years, and it hasn't been updated in four. It's using CoffeeScript, Node v0, Electron v0.30, and Angular 1.x. I obviously don't have a dev environment anymore, either, and my previous dev env was on Windows, so I'll have to translate my custom build utilities from batch to bash (or much more likely: node).

To make matters worse: the PRs break both the initial project setup and the project itself (NPM can no longer find some installed packages, among other problems). And. someone already merged them into master. So: fuck.

I'm going to yell at the author and tell him to fix his shit. Why? Because when I check out my last commit prior to his PRs, everything works perfectly. Surprise!

I was so done with this project two and a half years ago. I'm still so done with it. I just don't want to maintain this anymore, or honestly even look at it. I would happily rebuild the project from scratch, but updating it from the days of IE8? No way.

I am from Nepal, developing country, most of the people here have no idea about linux and free software, finding ubuntu on bus media server was a total surprise for me.

I was fresh out of college, love Java and looking for a job.

Well, after exact 1 month I sucked the reality. I found an Ad for a designer and got selected. Point is I mention my qualification in high school because I was feeling bad to disclose my higher degree for such a job.

I worked for 6 months there and every day was like working as the covert operative. I always knew I can write an automated script for all that daily shit. But for the sake of the landlord rent, I kept quiet. (I literally care for his children, I was the only source of income)

Then, my friend that day 16-Sep-2012 I wrote a program to do all the repetitive thing I used to do.
My boss found out and I expose my self as Spiderman do to Jen, Sir! I am a Programmer.

Sadly it was, no surprise to him. He said, on your first day I found out that you are not high school. Because with such accuracy only a graduate can do such level of the job.

He praised me and motivated me, my first non-technical master.

Please disregard. I just need to vent.

Being a manager is so fucking shit. This is not even about devs or tech specific only. Never become a manager.
Why? Because it’s about handling people and all the dumb shit they do. It’s all about knowing what people suck at and preventing that weakness from leaking into other areas. The amount of fucked up people on this earth means that you have to work with at least some of them, and that means putting up with their stupid ass list of super special requirements, that if they do not fulfill, will make them a shit worker. It’s not even an issue of technical skills.

You have the guys that are often late, because “they have depression”, but will complain that “companies don’t treat employees like adults”. Being on time for work is apparently very difficult. Which doesn’t generally matter in general for dev work, but it ends up affecting other things.

You have the completely socially inept idiots that make half the team hate them and try to avoid working with them, increasing problems and work for other people. Just because they’re socially stupid, have low or no empathy, or are incapable of not being insufferable to others.

You have the people that are so bad at estimating that they keep making up numbers instead of waiting to think for a few minutes and say “ not sure, I need to research and estimate that”.

You have the surprise absentee for dumb as fuck reasons like “my phone died lol sorry”. They never do anything to actually improve, it is just “sorry guys! Btw I will do jackshit about this”.

Or the ones whining about virtually everything, all the time. Wtf why do I have to be on scrum at 12 tomorrow?! Wtf why do I have to record the result of that customer call? Wtf why should I talk with XYZ?

And if you leave them alone, everything burns. They actually need someone to tell them “hey mate you need to improve that, shall we plan something to do so?”. I think managers are useless and unneeded when you have adults working, but it seems like most of the population is composed of children. It’s basically another form of daycare.

And you have to prepare shit around all of these constraints.

Then you have the one guy that reads the requirements, has common sense, and is inoffensive and can work like a normal adult human that needs no baby sitting. A ray of light on this shitshow.

I just want to go back to pure dev.

Finished my project early today. I assumed it would take another day or two since it's primarily research and I had no idea how to progress, but I caught a break and finished it early. I also finished another surprise ticket! yay! I had the rest of the day to myself!

... had!

But then I noticed I had been working on the wrong branch. Fuck. Moving my work over was tedious, as was the cleanup. I kicked myself for good measure. Also, every time I switch branches, I need to run a bloody slow script that runs all the migrations, data tasks, backfills, etc. for the branch. It takes 12-18 minutes. There's a faster version, but it usually breaks things.

Turns out the branch I was supposed to be working on wasn't up to date with master. So I merged that in, leading to....

merge conflicts. Because of course there are conflicts. To make matters worse, I had (and have) no idea which changes were correct because idfk what those 248 new commits are doing. So I guessed at them, ran the script, and (after more waiting) ran a few related specs. Yet more waiting. Sense a pattern here? Eventually they finished, and all the specs passed. H'ray. So I committed the changes, and told Jenkins to kick off a full spec suite, which takes 45+ minutes.

La de da, I go back to cleaning up the previous ticket, pushing reversion commits, etc. Later, I notice the ticket number, look at the branch number I've been working on.... and. Fuuuck. I realize I had put everything on the wrong freaking branch AGAIN. I'm such an idiot. Cue more cleanup, more reversions, running the bloody script again and again. More wasted time, more kicking. ugh.

All of this took well over three hours. So instead of finishing at a leisurely 5:00 like a normal person, I finally stopped around 9pm. and I won't know the Jenkins spec results until morning.

A nice early day?
I should know better.

I know this isn’t dev related at all but...

Nor is it a question, as my fat finger set it to...

Eminem just dropped a surprise album at midnight last night. No promotion, no bullshit. Just straight hip hop.

And the album cover is a throw back to the beastie boys!

If you can’t tell already, I am super pumped about this!!!

Story time on my job hunt: Currently interviewing with Google during my notice period.

I always had a love hate relationship with Google. Unlike my hate towards Meta or Amazon, where I had a reason to hate them for how ill intended they are, I never had a valid reason to dislike or hate Google apart from the fact that they steal my data.

That's it. That's my only reason why I hate Google. But I fell in love with their products during my trip to Istanbul and how throughout my journey, Google products were there for me to solve all my needs.

As y'all know, I was treated badly during my Meta interview, last October. With Google, the experience is on another level.

People are fucking smart and ingenious, but at the same time very polite, humble, and respectful.

During my 3 interviews so far (2 more remaining), each one of them made me so comfortable that I was more anxious before the interview than during or after.

They supported me during each question they asked. They made me felt heard and focused on my strength, instead of the weaknesses (or trying to break me down unnecessarily).

The interview syllabus is so fucking vast, and recruiters know so much that they helped me not only with preparation material, but also guided me personally. Haven't seen such knowledgeable recruiters.

The questions were dynamic in nature and thankfully because of my preparation, I was able to answer them most.

Overall, the culture at Google seems brilliant and an environment where one can flourish. No wonder companies are trying to copy every aspect of how Google operates and no surprise that Google is doing well at scale.

I feel so high on emotions (positively), after these interviews that I wonder how would it be to work at Google with such phenomenal people and exceptional environment.

It was a Monday morning, and I did what most people do - I got up late. When I came to senses, I realized I have an important client meeting today.
I ran towards my closet and grabbed my favorite shirt, but it was a mess, badly wrinkled.

But no problem, I decided to put this task on my old but trusty laptop, I waked up my laptop (Which has just celebrated its 12th birthday yesterday), it literally coughed 100 times as i opened 3-4 chrome tabs and android studio on it. Within a minute , my newly found laptop-iron become as hot as the surface of sun, i gently placed my shirt under it and in 5 seconds my shirt was looking brand new !!! I quickly got dressed up , while my laptop was cursing me at the back.

Luckily my meeting went well and we secured a new project, on my way home I was happy and satisfied that my oldy has found a new purpose of life as a makeshift iron.

I returned home, and to my surprise my laptop was'nt turning on....!!! I though maybe its tired from todays work so i let him rest..........

I haven't ranted for today, but I figured that I'd post a summary.
A public diary of sorts.. devRant is amazing, it even allows me to post the stuff that I'd otherwise put on a piece of paper and probably discard over time. And with keyboard support at that <3

Today has been a productive day for me. Laptop got restored with a "pacman -Syu" over a Bluetooth mobile data tethering from my phone, said phone got upgraded to an unofficial Android 9 (Pie) thanks to a comment from @undef, etc.

I've also made myself a reliable USB extension cord to be able to extend the 20-30cm USB-A male to USB-C male cord that Huawei delivered with my Nexus 6P. The USB-C to USB-C cord that allows for fast charging is unreliable.. ordered some USB-C plugs for that, in order to make some high power wire with that when they arrive.

So that plug I've made.. USB-A male to USB-A female, in which my short USB-C to USB-A wire can plug in. It's a 1M wire, with 18AWG wire for its power lines and 28AWG wires for its data lines. The 18AWG power lines can carry up to 10A of current, while the 28AWG lines can carry up to 1A. All wires were made into 1M pieces. These resulted in a very low impedance path for all of them, my multimeter measured no more than 200 milliohms across them, though I'll have to verify and finetune that on my oscilloscope with 4-wire measurement.

So the wire was good. Easy too, I just had to look up the pinout and replicate that on the male part.

That's where the rant part comes in.. in fact I've got quite uncomfortable with sentences that don't include at least one swear word at this point. All hail to devRant for allowing me to put them out there without guilt.. it changed my very mind <3

Microshaft WanBLowS.

I've tried to plug my DIY extension cord into it, and plugged my phone and some USB stick into it of which I've completely forgot the filesystem. Windows certainly doesn't support it.. turns out that it was LUKS. More about that later.

Windows returned that it didn't support either of them, due to "malfunctioning at the USB device". So I went ahead and plugged in my phone directly.. works without a problem. Then I went ahead and troubleshooted the wire I've just made with a multimeter, to check for shorts.. none at all.

At that point I suspected that WanBLowS was the issue, so I booted up my (at the time) problematic Arch laptop and did the exact same thing there, testing that USB stick and my phone there by plugging it through the extension wire. Shit just worked like that. The USB stick was a LUKS medium and apparently a clone of my SanDisk rootfs that I'm storing my Arch Linux on my laptop at at the time.. an unfinished migration project (SanDisk is unstable, my other DM sticks are quite stable). The USB stick consumed about 20mA so no big deal for any USB controller. The phone consumed about 500mA (which is standard USB 2.0 so no surprise) and worked fine as well.. although the HP laptop dropped the voltage to ~4.8V like that, unlike 5.1V which is nominal for USB. Still worked without a problem.

So clearly Windows is the problem here, and this provides me one more reason to hate that piece of shit OS. Windows lovers may say that it's an issue with my particular hardware, which maybe it is. I've done the Windows plugging solely through a USB 3.0 hub, which was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the host. Now USB 3.0 is supposed to be able to carry up to 1A rather than 500mA, so I expect all the components in there to be beefier. I've also tested the hub as part of a review, and it can carry about 1A no problem, although it seems like its supply lines aren't shorted to VCC on the host, like a sensible hub would. Instead I suspect that it's going through the hub's controller.

Regardless, this is clearly a bad design. One of the USB data lines is biased to ~3.3V if memory serves me right, while the other is biased to 300mV. The latter could impose a problem.. but again, the current path was of a very low impedance of 200milliohms at most. Meanwhile the direct connection that omits the ~200ohm extension wire worked just fine. Even 300mV wouldn't degrade significantly over such a resistance. So this is most likely a Windows problem.

That aside, the extension cord works fine in Linux. So I've used that as a charging connection while upgrading my Arch laptop (which as you may know has internet issues at the time) over Bluetooth, through a shared BNEP connection (Bluetooth tethering) from my phone. Mobile data since I didn't set up my WiFi in this new Pie ROM yet. Worked fine, fixed my WiFi. Currently it's back in my network as my fully-fledged development host. So that way I'll be able to work again on @Floydian's LinkHub repository. My laptop's the only one who currently holds the private key for signing commits for git$(rm -rf ~/*)@nixmagic.com, hence why my development has been impeded. My tablet doesn't have them. Guess I'll commit somewhere tomorrow.

(looks like my rant is too long, continue in comments)

"how did you make that app?"
"nice website, how'd you make it?"
"I thought only geniuses could make x? how'd you make x?"

maybe because I put in half a fucking ounce of effort into making it. please kindly shut the fuck up and realize that I don't care enough to tell you how I did it, because it would take more fucking effort to tell you than to walk away (surprise?). no I will not take your idea in consideration. why? because it's not worth fucking considering. go fuck yourself. and don't ask me the same thing tomorrow you cunt.

New job surprise: I will inherit a 900k lines of php code from a contractor dev shop. It is the company erp web app.
It has no version control, tests, architecture or configuration management of any kind.
There are just 1800 bug ridden files with almost no comments in a directory with lots of code duplication.
Also just learned that the contractor was paid a lot monthly for over 2 years for this monster.

I will need a raise quickly. At least management understands that I will need a couple of months to get a semblance of order in this madness.

And to you contractor I have your address and i'll try to restraint myself from vandalizing your house but I can't make any promises.

And fellow developers send help or beers or come and join me to teach this bastard a lesson.

This is the craziest shit... MY FUCKING SERVER JUST SET ON FIRE!!!

Like seriously its hot news (can't resist the puns), it's actually really bad news and I'm just in shock (it's not everyday you find out your running the hottest stack in the country :-P)... I thought it slow as fuck this morning but the office internet was also on the fritz so I carried on with my life until EVERYTHING went down (completely down - poof gone) and within 2 minutes I had a technician from the data centre telling me that something to do with fans had failed and they caught fire, melted and have become one with the hardware. WTF? The last time I went to the data centre it was so cold I pissed sitting down for 2 days because my dick vanished.

I'm just so fucking torn right now because initially I was absolutely fucking ecstatic - 1 week ago after a year of doomsday bitching about having a single point of failure and me not being a sysadmin only to have them look at me like I'm some kind of techie flat earther I finally got approval to spend around 5x more per month and migrate all our software to containerized micro services.

I'll admit this is a bit worse than I expected but thanks to last week at least I have recent off site images of the drives - because big surprise I have to set this monolithic beast back up (No small feat - its gonna be a long night) on a fresh VPS, I also have to do it on premises or the data will only finish uploading sometime next week.

Pro Tip: If your also pleading for more resources/better production environment only to be stone walled the second you mention there's a cost attached be like me - I gave them an ultimatum, either I deploy the software on a stack that's manageable or they man the fuck up and pay a sys admin (This idea got them really amped up until they checked how much decent sys admins cost).

Now I have very flexible pockets because even if I go rambo the max server costs would only be 15-20% of a sys admins paycheck even though that is 13 x more than our current costs.

My old job was great. I was writing automation software for one of the world's biggest storage deployments, and there was always a new challenge. But over time, I was asked to lend a hand with the tedious task of corresponding with procurement vendors and on-site technicians. At first it was one site, then it was two, and then it was an entire region of the US, spread across two time zones I'm not in.

I hated that work, and I found that I didn't have time anymore for software development, because of the time commitment the logistics work was. I was never hired to do logistics work, I was never trained, never qualified, and as I said, I hated it. I agreed to it to temporarily help out a weakness due to a shortage in staffing. But it never got taken off my plate, except for a short stint toward the end, just before I was placed on a PIP, because surprise surprise-- I'm bad at logistics.

About halfway through the PIP, I told my boss I wasn't doing it anymore. I said he could either put me back on software development or let me go, if ticket-monkeying and phone calls is the direction the wind is blowing for our team. I told him I had no intention of resigning, as you are not eligible for unemployment or severance if you resign, so their choice was to let me go. I'm told by people who are still there that everybody on the team is a ticket-jockey button-pusher now. Bleh.

My wife and I sold our old condo in Kansas City earlier in the summer, so we had about a year's worth of cushion, which was why I was willing to be let go. I was profoundly unhappy in my work, and it was bleeding through to my relationship with my wife and kids. So I took advantage of the time between jobs by spending more time with my family and just generally becoming a happier person again.

Meanwhile, I was in no desperate hurry to find a new job, so I got on linkedin, and had no more than two irons in the fire at a time. After just over two months I got an offer for a better job than before, which I accepted. There wasn't anything remarkable about that process though-- it's just something I've gone through recently.

Our company is restructuring and our CTO offered me the lead architect role. I'm currently the dev manager for about 40 guys and girls. I was delighted.

So, because I believe people make shit up in the absence of information, I called my seniors in to explain the possible restructure. To my surprise (and shock), they dropped the following pearl on me...

If they had to report to anyone else, they're going to leave the company.

I tried to convince them that one of them can apply for my role, also no.

Don't get me wrong, I love my team and do feel flattered about their response. But I also feel a bit trapped/confused now. I've spent the last 6 years building and protecting the team from 5 guys. And frankly, I'm tired and just get back to focusing on coding.

Any sage advice?

I think there is such a thing as "getting too comfortable with the people you work with".

My boss came over and wanted to show me how to do a new process. We start going through the steps and a question arises. I then IM my team lead, because he's the one who would know the answer, and all I get back from him is sarcastic comments and profanity (he doesn't know my boss is sitting at my comp with me). So I keep trying to get him to be serious, and he just keeps his mouth (well, fingers) going. (He is remote - not in our bldg). I want so badly to shut him up because what if he says something about my boss while she is sitting there? Not that he does that, but at the pace he's going, it no longer would surprise me.

There should be some sort of code to hint to your team to STFU and give a fucking answer when one is needed. Sort of like what kids do to hint that a parent is in the room, but for work?

The Cloud Of Bullshit

Every day I wake, and I think of my one true mission in life. To mock and ridicule paint huffing idiots. Something recently that drew my ire, like the hemorrhoids on my ass is this idea of 'the cloud', THE CLOUD and the buzzword lingo-bingo bullshit that providers use to hype and sell it.

For example, airtable is an amazing service. I love that I can insert just about anything into a row, create any of my own row datatypes, that it's flexible as all hell.

I love it.

And I hate that I'm essentially locked in to the cloud.
I fucking hate how if my internet goes down (thanks you pie eating inbred dipshits at comcast) I have no access.
If the company is bought, they'll shut down like all the rest , to be "relaunched at a later time" (or never).
I hate that if the company doesn't make enough money, or it's investors change their mind, woopsie, service is shut down.
I hate that the cloud is synonymous with massive data leaks and IOT-levels of stupidity in security practices.

Every time someone says "but its in the cloud! Isn't it amazing!"

I always think 1. YEAH IF IM AN INVESTOR I GET TO MILK LOW BROW FINGER PAINTING FUCKWITS EVERY MONTH like Adobe sucking the blood from infants who are still in college.

2. Why? So I can get locked into their platform, have them segment off previously free features (fucking youtube and the 'subscribe so you can continue playing audio with your screen off' bullshit), and then have fees increase month over month?

3. Why, so every four years during the presidential selection, if I piss off some fuckstick braindead lemming literally sucking his girlfriends BFs cock, they can potentially shut me out from my own data completely?

The Cloud is built on shit-colored hype sold to knob gobbling idiots, controlling idiots, profiting at the expense of idiots, and later fucking them for buyout payola. The Cloud is a Cloud of Bullshit shat out by huckster messiahs straight into the lapping mouths of fanatics worshiping slavishly like toilet drinking scum at the porcelain alter of a neon god, invisible, untouchable, and like a spigot, easily shut off without anyone noticing. And when it happens, I'll be there, shouting "WHERE IS YOUR CLOUD NOW?"

Native any day. 100% native or I don't fucking want it
None of this node.js-gone-native bullshit either with notetaking apps taking up hundreds of megabytes of ram, where everything is bootstrap or react, in a browser, in a window container, because people are so fucking incompetent we have to hold their hand WHILE they give themselves a reach around.

Native or nothing.

For my favorite notetaking app, I use Microsoft OneNote. "OH god, a heathen, quick, stick his body up on a stake!"

But hear me out. I'll be the first one in a crowd to kick bill gates in the nuts (not because I particularly hate microsoft, just because I think hes kind of a cunt).

So when I say onenote is good, I really fucking mean it. Sure they did some cunty things like 'dumbed down' the interface, and cut out some options. But you know what they can't do?
Shut down the damn service (short of a system update completely removing the whole app, which, frankly, wouldn't surprise me).

It's so god damn good it waxed my balls, cured my cancer, fixed my relationship with my father, found my long lost brother, and replaced ALL my irl notebooks.

It's so good that if it was cocaine I'd be hospitalized for overusing it.

So god damn good it didn't just replace all my notebooks, it even replaced and sped up my mockup process three to five times. Want layers?

Built in. Just drag an image on to the notebook to import instantly.

Want to rearrange layers? Right click select "send forward/back/bring to front/send to back".

Everything snaps to grid by default and is easily resizeable.

I had all the elements for a UI sliced and diced. Wanted to try a bunch of layouts. Was gonna take me two damn days.

Did it in three hours with the notebook features of onenote.

After I started using onenote, me and my bodypillow finally conceived even.

Sweet marries mammaries I just fucking jizzed. Thank you onenote.

P.s. It really did speed up my UI design, allows annotated images, highlighted text. Shit, it can even do kanban.

And all I can think is "good job microsoft making an awesome product for free, being dumb as fuck for not charging for it, and then not marketing it at ALL."

It was sheer fucking luck that I discovered it while was I was looking for vendor STD bloatware to blast off my new install.

OneNote: Worth a try even for the kick-gates-in-the-nuts fan club.

The cloud can suck my balls.

Four years ago while still a newbey in Android Dev and still using the eclipse IDE which was hell to configure by adding Android plugins,my girlfriend had a birthday.
With my new found love of coding thought of developing a b-day app for her.With so little android knowledge I had a great idea the main activity would have her photo as the background and button which when clicked would show a toast saying happy b-day love.
After spending few minutes in Tutorial point and learning how to display a toast and setting click listeners on buttons I was good to go and compiled the app.

Later that evening I head to her room where her b-day was to be held with some of her lady friends .When presenting gifts I presented her gift said had one more surprise for her and asked for her phone and using bluetooth sent the apk to her phone.
Installing the app I was scared to death on seeing how my grey buttons were displaying on her 2.7 screen size since had no idea on designing for multiple screens.
Giving her back the phone she loved the app and felt like her superman in the room though not for long.Her lady friends had gone ahead took her phone and were critising the app:
Why can't I take a selfie
Why can't the app play a b-day song for her and this went on them not knowing how hurting that was.
Bumped on the lady who lead the onslaught on me and had to go down memory lane.Life is a journey.

Was wondering when the stickers would come in when low and behold, my wife and I were packing up for a move and the stickers were just there in my sock/underwear drawer...

Confused as all hell I ask my wife, "Did you put these here?"

Turns out the letter arrived ages ago and she wanted to surprise me by opening it up and hide the stickers!

I mostly wear sandals so I had no need for socks and never moved them around to find the stickers underneath...

So here they are and thank you @dfox and @trogus for making this awesome community!!!

This is going to take a second to get dev related, please bear with me.

So, I'm from a pretty small (and poor) town. Like most small towns, not many give a damn about computer science/IT (that shows by the fact I'm the only CS major. And there's one IT major).

Now, my high school offers a few "career prep" classes. There's (no exaggeration) almost 5 or 6 classes for medical majors to prepare themselves; like 4 different agriculture based classes; 2 business major classes; and surprise surprise...not a damn Computer Science or IT class.

Yes, we have a computer class. But can you even call a "How to Use Microscoft Products" class an computer class? Finally by my senior year, I got pissed off by this.

I had/have relatives that have worked/are working in the school system, so it wasn't hard to get a meeting with the superintendent and the assistant superintendent to discuss my thoughts. They were both open to and even supported my ideas. But due to funding, it wasn't a feasible idea at the time. (Especially since not many care about CS or IT.)

This is where I get really really pissed off. Being that the town is small, the people with money/a name tend to control things. So, a former principal retired with the expectations to work in another county. However, this job fail through. But there was a "magical" opening for a job that didn't exist before this job fail through.

This pisses me off. We can create a job for someone and afford a full time salary for them, but we cant get an actual CS class. (And this isn't the first time a job was created for someone.)

I started my internship at the end of the year..
Fuck my ass!!! This code I have to work with is a huge pile of shit.
The code base I need to work with is around 40k LOC. It is a mixture of C++, C, Java, Python, Bash and I think I saw some lonely js files around.

A list of awesome parts:
- Paths are hard coded.
- Redundant code everywhere
- No documentation or inline comments available

Most of the comments in the code are just old code that is not used anymore. But the cherry on the turd is the class that should provide all kind of useful functions in my daily routine. About ninety percent of the functions have the same description or nothing. Sometimes a function name says "readSomethingFromSomewhere" but instead it writes something to a file. It is really confusing and I need to check everything twice instead of rely on what the function name promises.
I have also learned why copy paste isn't that good. The brief descriptions of every method in a files are always the same.

getName() - Description: Fork child process
getIp() - Description: Fork child process
getIpv6() - Description: Fork child process.

Surprise: None of these functions forks a child process. :D

Another awesome feature is the thing that they store up to five different versions of libraries. Everyone with slight modifications but no hint which one you need to use. Sometimes it is the newest, sometimes the oldest which is running in production. Another case of try and error.
Oh and my dev machine is a potato with a power supply and a fan. I started with NetBeans and every time I compiled the code it sounds like the machine wants to lift off and leave for a better place. (At this point I switched to Emacs and everything runs smoothly now)

At first I thought that I'm just not that good at coding and understanding a big project from scratch but some colleagues have the same problem. The whole system is very inflexible and it is all about "std::cout"-debugging to check if your changes do what you want them to do.

Currently I'm just trying to fix this mess to make the life for the next student or employee easier. The first month was just frustrating as hell. I need to ask so many questions and most of the time the answer was "I don't know, haven't touched this code in years". Needless to say that my progress isn't that awesome but at least I get a nice payment for 20 hours of work a week.

First Rant here.

So I was working on some integration test issues when I found this by accident made by a professional level SW engineer:

@Test
public void testMethod() throws ApiException {
Response res = null;
try {
res = serviceToTest.callMethod();
} catch(Exception e) {
assertNull(res);
}
}

Was wondering why tests were being green after some code changes I've made cuz tests could have not been green afterwards.

Together with a senior (I'm also professional only) I've tried to explain him for a good 1-2hrs why this code is useless and he still did it. Good thing there are no errors in the real implementation from him after fixing the tests as it's code freeze here and we are having go live in a few days 🙃

Also luckily he isn't working on our code anymore and has only been doing so for a few weeks.

Wasted a day with it and gonna check all of his code now before I run in the next surprise.

So in Germany we have something like 'cooperative study'. You are employed in a company and study 'normal' at a university. This is in 3 month phases, i.e. 3 months working, 3 months studying.

At the moment I'm working and there is a colleauge, that seems to have no high confidence in my programming skills.
Today I saw parts of his NodeJS code and I thought I'm going crazy.
No comments, no real usage of callbacks or at least promises and I dont want to talk about naming of the variables.
I caught myself arguing with this guy too often and always thought I'm the stupid one, that doesn't understand him.
But I'm starting to think, He is the one that is hard to understand.

How ever, I stay confident and also keep a nice tone (also help as much as I can) and sometimes we also have the same thoughts in some topicd. It's not that bad, but sometimes I feel underestimated.

But hey, so it's a bigger surprise if I'm presenting my results and show them what I'm able to do 👍🏻

Just recently I found myself in the position I never thought I would. I was at work and my boss said, "Hey could you pickup *Item* from *sister location*? So I went to *sister location* I knew what I was looking for but I couldn't remember what they were called. So I asked one of my coworkers," Hey, I'm supposed to pick up something here." She didn't know what I was talking about. I told her I could remember what they were called.

Her response: "If you don't know what the were called, why do you EVEN come over here?" The rudeness in her voice was unmistakable.

In retrospect I could have been rude right back but there where people nearby and I had already decided I didn't like her. She is the kind of girl that you assume spends her paycheck on outfits. (or maybe she just dresses well I can never be sure, but I digress) Eventually I found what I was supposed to do. By the time I had to go to back for the second batch of *items*, I get sent back to my boss's office. To my surprise, my boss had overheard what happened.

Apparently one of the people nearby thought SHE was being rude and REPORTED HER.

It was incredible; someone was offended FOR ME?!!!

I have no idea how you even go about doing that where I work. I went back to work and I saw her walk though the door to the boss's office. I actually felt a bit sorry for her.

I just got the book "The C Programming Language, 2nd Edition" from Amazon.

I've had my wars with Amazon in the past for not protecting packages properly, and now it happened again. For the third time in 6 months.

The cover of the book is damaged, pages are bend a bit and it looks like someone took a key and tried to draw something on the front cover.

I contacted customer support to get a replacement, which was no problem, but still fucking annoying that I have to spend time on this shit.
Anyway, what pisses me off is the amount of work I have to do in order to send this shit back to them. Holy fuck!

First of all, I haven't met a single competent employee at a "post office" here in Denmark, as all of the offices are now a part of a either hyper markets or grocery stores. This means, that it's the stores employees handling this.

In this process from Amazon I have to actually clear it for customs with a form they need to take care of.
I have to print 4 labels, 2 which I need to sign and 2 I need to do something else with...

But I'm so freaking scared that they'll fuck this up and I'll get billed for 2 books. It wouldn't fucking surprise me, considering how fucking shit our postal service is in Denmark and how I've been screwed over by Amazon in the past

I recently accepted my first "real" Dev position. This has been a huge hurdle for me.

So my degree is in graphic design and it's pretty much what I spent the first 2-3 years after university doing. In fact, when I started at the place I am now (I am still working my notice) I was hired as a creative artworker.

I had always had a website I put together with some basic frontend skills, but always assumed the backend stuff was "beyond me". But, given the option here, I asked to be sent on a PHP course. Holy shit I took to it like a duck to water. Over the next few months I got my feet wet building a new website for the company, building out a little intranet, all that good stuff. I went from procedural spaghetti monstrosities to nice, OOP, documented code. It was beautiful. And no one here really have a fuck.

About 6 months ago, I started trying to leave. This was hard. I actually had several interviews for design positions, but always got turned down for some variation of "you're very technical and we think you'd get bored here" and thank god really, because they're right. I could never get a look in for Dev jobs though, because on paper I had no experience, hell my job title was still "Digital Designer" despite over a year of developing here.

But it finally happened. Through someone I used to know I got my foot in the door for a developer position. In the interview they even told me if it was a junior position they'd hire me on the spot - but sadly it wasn't. I had a good time though, a good laugh, and had a lot of fun finally, for the first time in my life, "working" and talking with other developers.

Over the next couple of weeks the agent kept telling me I had done really well and they were just dragging their feet getting things sorted, but I gave up hope a little. So imagine my surprise when I found out they turned the role into a junior one for me!

And so now, I get to go to a job where my job title includes the word "Developer". To some of you that might not mean much, but to me it's a fucking medal I wish I could mount on a plaque on my wall.

Stupid ass nimble fucker of an old friend talks to me for a whole week after a reunion saying stuff like "I'm glad we got to spent time together bro and stuff", the soul eater of poop being sets up a conversation over a week talking like he was a true friend. He only had to manage it for a week more, hell he had to resist his urge for a puny ass week and I would've considered that maybe good people existed. Well the universe along with this Pseudo-panty fuck decided it was time, they pitch me an "idea". Well after demonstrating kindly that I could technically pull (n) such ideas from my virtual butthole. The guy finally believes his idea was stupid and moves away. A minute later. SURPRISE MOTHER FUCKER! he says, telling me that he got an amazing idea along and if I could help him with some stuff. Well.. What? I jumped at this amazing opportunity. Not because of the dangling-dickina of an idea, because this was my way out of this misery fucks life. Alright should buy me some time right? He would go watch some tutorials, make a logo and call me when there's a problem. We'll in the milli fucking time that even a big bang couldn't have recurred, the bitch calls and says.. Bro, sorry for disturbing you, I need some help... [What did your mother from another son tell you she only gave birth to half of you?]
APPARENTLY, THE GUY JOINED FORCES WITH SOME INTELLIGENT MINDS AND SETUP A LEAGUE OF LIKE MINDED NECROPHILES AND I COULD HELP THIS DREAM TEAM with a name and a logo.
It started, I could sense it. I wasn't THE CHOSEN ONE. Tired, I said I'll see what I can do while attempting to block his number. A few hours later, he calls from another number with no shame and asks BRO? DID YOU. Did me what you bloody dick lubricator. Yeah I watched your mom a couple times, then I got bored when I found out it was an ad.

Unfortunately no I did not tell that, instead I used the kindest words I could pull out of my frustrated ass to tell him I won't do it cause I have better things to do.

The guy comes back a few hours later with an emotional back-story of how this is his way out of his sad ass life and saying stuff like sorry to disturb you bro, I never meant to.

Oh my gawd! Give this douche manufacturer an Oscar. Actually give him two!!

————

After this traumatic experience I often feel for such people. They have around 90 years to live. They have a free fucking brain. They have money. They have less problems.

Why can't they come up with a worthy idea with all these factors to compound the ideation process.

And why on the earth can't they make the Idea on their own. I'm completely self taught so I don't see it being a problem. I could well say that I'm more knowledgeable than a few grads out of my stupid college but I don't wanna compare myself to those stupid beings.

If you have an idea? Make it. Die for it. But never approach another being, either he eats you or you eat him.

(first post/rant on here)
So I recently started at a new company. I was kinda aware that the project I'm working on would be rather old school (to put it in a nice way :-)).

Part of my job is to 'industrialize' and update/clean up the existing code so there is less time spent on fixing bugs due to bad design.

One of the first things I had to do was to write a new interface to integrate with external software.

I already noticed some rather nasty habits, like prefixing every variable with m (don't know why), private fields for every property (all simple properties) and a whole lot of other stuff that either is obsolete or just bad practice.

Started writing clean code (simple classes with properties only, no m prefixing, making sure everything is single responsibility, unit tests, ...).

So I check in the code, don't hear much from it again besides the original dev/architect that started the project using my code to further work on that integration.

Now recently I started converting everything from TFVC to Git (which is the company standard but wasn't used by our team yet). And I quickly skimmed through my code to check if everything was there before pushing it to the remote repo.

To my surprise, all the code I had written was replaced by m prefixed private variables used in simple properties. BL classes were thrown in together, creating giant monstrosities that did everything. And last but not least, all unit tests were commented out.

Not sure what I got myself into ... but the facepalming has commenced.

Ahh boy, uni sure is fun...
I missed my comp-sci class last week when we got a project assigned. No big deal, right? We have an online student portal where teachers can post assignments for everyone to see. I'm sure it's in there.

It's not.

Okay. How about the syllabus? Professors are supposed to create a weekly schedule for students to follow, it's probably in there, right?

Nope. Nothing.

Alright... I guess I'll email him. At this point about two classes have passed and I haven't heard anything in class, so I fire off a quick email to the professor asking for the details to be posted to the web portal so I at least have some idea of what I'm doing.
Surprise surprise, I get a response in about an hour.

"I'm not posting anything online. You should have been in class. Talk to a classmate."

*sigh*

So, from what I can gather from my classmates, we have to design a game using python. It might be a quiz, maybe. We have a week.

Are you fucking kidding me? Is it really that hard to take 20 minutes to type up a few requirements so your students at least know what you're grading for? I barely have any idea of what you even want, and from the three people I talked to it wasn't very clear even when he explained it in class. Post your assignments online, asshole!

Story Time.

I was hanging around at a friend's place when she informed me that her roommate is throwing a really lavish party 50kms away from the city. I got invited by said roommate and I agreed to go.

When we arrived at the venue, there were like 100+ people at this place, all smoking weed drinking and dancing in loud music. I was also stoned at that point.

So at one point, my friend abandoned me and I found myself talking to 10 complete strangers. I realized that I was on my own and thought about seeing how much rizz I got.

Mind you that everyone was drunk and there was loud music everywhere so there was no way anyone else knew that I was getting shot down lol.

After couple rejections, I straight up went to a girl and said "You want to smoke weed and make out in the bathroom?" And to my surprise, she said yes. So, we both already high and drunk slipped into the bathroom and made out for like 10 mins and I smoked all my weed with her.

Then, at some other point, my friend showed up and we went home. The one thing I missed, was asking for her number, which I kicked myself later for. I guess stoners don't realize they have phones.

Regus sent me to collections.

Jist: if you ever think about renting an office from Regus, for the love of your bank account and your credit, just don't. Go into the kitchen and pan-fry your face instead. it'll be better.

Moral: get it in writing. What is "it"? Fucking everything.

------

I needed someplace quiet away from my children to work, so I rented an office from Regus. They said they had a minimum 6-month contract, which is fine, but at the time I was pretty sure I would be moving within three to five. They said they understood and offered the quivalent of a month-to-month plan: I could cancel my contract whenever I wanted, given a few weeks' notice, and that would be that. It wasn't in writing, but both the accounts person and the regional manager were there offering it to me, and they seemed cool. Awesome! I agreed, signed the contract, and paid a hefty damage deposit.

Long story short, I ended up hating the office, and chose to bear the distractions at home instead. Seeing how much I disliked it, the accounts person I talked to originally called me and offered to cancel my contract. I agreed, and she walked me through the steps to cancel it and request my deposit back. Done. I aske her if that was it; no more payments, no more contract. "No more," she said. "You're done." I liked the sound of that. Done and done.

The next day, I check my bank account; no deposit.
Two weeks later, still no deposit.
A month later, still no deposit.

They did say it could take up to three fucking months or something, so whatever. I waited.

Another month later, and instead of my refunded deposit, I get an overdue invoice notice? Seriously?

Apparently they never cancelled my contract, don't remember offering me the month-to-month agreement, nor does the very chick I talked to remember telling me over the phone that everything was paid up and done. Apparently my contract wasn't even for six months like they originally promised, but indefinite? despite all of this? and despite the two of us fucking cancelling it? together?

But no, the legal agreement is binding and explicitly states that they are fucking assholes and due their pound of cash.

So fuck that and fuck them.
And in response, they sent me to collections.
Huge fucking surprise.

and now collections is calling me saying I owe $1900, which works out to a lot more than the couple months it's been since I cancelled that crap, AND.

AND IT'S LESS THAN THE FUCKING DEPOSIT REGUS NEVER RETURNED!

SO NOT ONLY DID THEY NEVER CANCEL MY CONTRACT, THEY CHANGED ITS TERMS (or lied up-front) AND DECIDED TO POCKET THE DEPOSIT INSTEAD OF APPLY IT TO MY FUCKING IMAGINARY BALANCE!

FUCK YOU SHADY MOTHERFUCKERS!

Fucking piece of shit, i want to make a fairly thin app with some native functionality and

Flutter - no documentation whatsoever, what a surprise
React native - i need 3 extra modules just to do what i want
Cordova - fuck no
Litho - seems fine but i dont wanna use native, i dont even have adb on my laptop

♫ Your API is a HALL OF SHAME! ♫

Ow surprise surprise, ofcourse i don’t get any kind of salary increase at this fucking shit company im working at. Because nobody see’s the work i actually do and everyone is just guessing im eating out of my nose all day.
Seriously, i had to work 1.5 jobs because a colleage left but there is no credit for anything i do here. Friday im going to contact recruiters. Fk this shit!

Haven't been here for a long time, kinda amazed I still had an account to be honest. There used to be a bunch of people I chatted with regularly on here, but my mentally ill self decided at some point to self sabotage (surprise surprise) and cut contact with almost everyone.

That said I've gone through quite a bit of therapy, which has definitely improved my outlook on life and allowed me to do some much needed self reflection. Has that made life better? Hard to say, but I like to think I've got a grasp on my mental health now, with the occasional relapse, because shit's a 🌈process🌈.

I'd like to apologize for the hurt I've caused some people here, you know who you are. My behaviour at times has been inexcusable. There's no sugarcoating it.

The past years have been a rollercoaster to say the least. Switched jobs multiple times. Went from doing frontend exclusively, to fullstack, then backend, and now engineering lead responsible for all architecture and infrastructure, learning a lot about myself and people around me along the way. Somehow I managed to get into a somewhat stable relationship, which is still a big WTF from time to time. The company I currently work for has had a metric fuckton of layoffs, just like the company I worked for before that. I can tell the lack of stability in work still affects my mental health a lot, but seeing how I've been growing a lot personally while the market seemingly has gone to shit gives me some level of confidence. I'll be alright.

This is mostly a sign of life to whom it may concern. I'm alive, existence is dreadful but manageable, shit's hard, but it's all gonna be okay in the end. I may or may not post a rant from time to time, as management loves unrealistic deadlines, and the PM can't say no to the CEO for some reason so her work ends up on my plate most of the time as well. Oh and of course the primary product of the company had a codebase which made me want to gorge my eyes out. So yeah, plenty to rant about.

I want to explain to people like ostream (aka aviophille) why JS is a crap language. Because they apparently don't know (lol).

First I want to say that JS is fine for small things like gluing some parts togeter. Like, you know, the exact thing it was intended for when it was invented: scripting.

So why is it bad as a programming language for whole apps or projects?

No type checks (dynamic typing). This is typical for scripting languages and not neccesarily bad for such a language but it's certainly bad for a programming language.

"truthy" everything. It's bad for readability and it's dangerous because you can accidentaly make unwanted behavior.

The existence of == and ===. The rule for many real life JS projects is to always use === to be more safe.
In general: The correct thing should be the default thing. JS violates that.

Automatic semicolon insertion can cause funny surprises.
If semicolons aren't truly optional, then they should not be allowed to be omitted.

No enums. Do I need to say more?

No generics (of course, lol).

Fucked up implicit type conversions that violate the principle of least surprise (you know those from all the memes).

No integer data types (only floating point). BigInt obviously doesn't count.

No value types and no real concept for immutability. "Const" doesn't count because it only makes the reference immutale (see lack of value types). "Freeze" doesn't count since it's a runtime enforcement and therefore pretty useless.

No algebraic types. That one can be forgiven though, because it's only common in the most modern languages.

The need for null AND undefined.

No concept of non-nullability (values that can not be null).

JS embraces the "fail silently" approach, which means that many bugs remain unnoticed and will be a PITA to find and debug.

Some of the problems can and have been adressed with TypeScript, but most of them are unfixable because it would break backward compatibility.
So JS is truly rotten at the core and can not be fixed in principle.

That doesn't mean that I also hate JS devs. I pity your poor souls for having to deal with this abomination of a language.

It's likely that I fogot to mention many other problems with JS, so feel free to extend the list in the comments :)

Marry Christmas!

!Dev

In Malaysia for some reason Chinese and Indians are considered as outsider. Some Malays are considering themselves are native (actually the Orang Asli are the native). Many politicians attempt to even startled a racial fight against the non- Malays. My country is operated by a closed system. Most Dutch , US companies are leaving Malaysia due to the unfairness.

Before this I worked in a Dutch company in Malaysia , where lately the company declare bankruptcy as my respectable boss told me what happened. Later I learnt, in order for a foreigner to start a company in Malaysia , a transaction of transfering have of the company assets and name under an assigned Malay man by the government.

The racism here is real and crazy. It is no surprise most Malaysian migrating to Taiwan, China Singapore , Thailand and some western countries.

I hate racism. Recently I heard news about western countries still have the hatred against Asians which I abort the idea of migrating there. But in my country Asians are hating other kind of Asians before for being different Asian.

May be I should just get my arse back to Mongolia (where my ancestors will be )

i love to actually understand how the code works! like you're writing some text and surprise - it does magic? no. it goes deeper than that. and when you understand those concepts, coding becomes more serious/fun and interesting

Ok, so many people rant about windows update. It can fuck up things, starts unexpectedly (after 100 warnings and messages letting you choose when but ok) and it takes too long to update.

I use Windows daily so I update regularly and never takes more than 5 mins. 20 when its a major update twice a year. So let's talk about Linux.

Yesterday I wanted to try out .net core on Linux so I booted my antergos vm to do it. TLDR: Didn't do shut because, surprise, Linux updates.

So apparently I downloaded the wrong version of visual studio code. Uninstall and install the right one then. Nope, can't do that. Some dependency must be updated. That dependency is on the highest version on the AUR, I have to get a different one. Ok, no problem. But I can install the other because uninstalling the original breaks more dependencies. Well fuck then.

So I decided I'd do a full system update with pacman, shouldn't take long. 1.6gb worth of update. I have 200mb download so it should be fast right? Well, I had to wait a couple of hours.

So I couldn't do anything on my afternoon because of Linux updates. That's an original rant isn't it?

And before the comments get here, yeah I know it's arch, it's difficult and all that. This isn't about being hard to do. It's just annoying and making me lose time.

I’ve been a solo frontend developer for a couple of weeks now with critical enormous features and some bugs to get out the door by the end of next week.

On top of that, I got a backend bug to fix which is fine since I know the stack. The SQL that’s causing a bug is an obvious fix but as a FE dev I have no damn idea about DB structure.

I decide to setup local DB to see it for myself. So as a reasonable developer I look for docs to set it up since it sounds like quite a process after confirming with colleagues.

ANNNND... SURPRISE, the docs ARE NON EXISTENT unless you wanna call an outdated diagram a sufficient doc. Just so you understand the pain, we have 9 micro services, a weird db structure and only 5% is documented.

I requested help from my colleagues, but their answers were similar to docs with a follow up of “maybe you can document it after you set this up”. Barely stopped myself from asking “do I look like I have time for this crap? Why don’t you document it SINCE YOUR SETUP IS READY TO GO?”

So I’ve been at it for a couple of hours and I gave up. Will go back to frontend development since still a ton of shit to do anyway. Tomorrow I will attempt this again.

Trigger warning:
Emotional !dev love life rant

I think this is not the right place to pour my heart out, but despite its more recent infights I still consider devRant to be a special community to me. And I guess if devRant is my goto place for support that's an issue. But maybe I just need to shout into a void because this is not about you solving this for me.

I have been in this relationship for ~6 years. My first great love. In the beginning, everything was perfect - a love story like from a cheesy movie. We've been through a lot to be together: Long distance, moving countries, a ton of bureaucracy (as she's from another country). So many memories.

It came as a surprise to me when she ended things. It really shouldn't have been. We've talked a lot about the reasons and I now see how much I've taken her for granted and neglected our relationship. I see now how I've been avoiding my problems and how I didn't work on my (mental and physical) health issues as good as I need to - not just for any relationship, but for myself. The regret/shame/guilt of not giving it 100% and of neglecting her weights heavily on me (besides the loss) and I am not sure what is worse.

Besides our relationship withering because of neglecting emotional needs, she also questioned our compability. We certainly have differences and different interests and we're both somewhat uncertain whether we really fit, if we ignore our history/emotions. It is actually a question that popped up in my head before sometimes, but I was too afraid to look into it for fear the answer is no. But here we are and ignoring that didn't help.

For now, we both need time to think about what we really want and whether this includes the other. We agreed that we need some distance to process the feelings. We still live in the same flat but for now she's staying with a friend most of the time and I'll also have a friend's place available soon. If in some time we both feel like we want to be together, we can date again - however she was also clear that she doesn't want to give any false hope and her current vision doesn't include me. If not, well have to hire a divorce lawyer. (Why you need a lawyer for that if both agree is beyond me.)

I am shattered. When it became clear to me that the relationship is over (and I ruined it), I got nauseous to the point that I threw up constantly for 6 hours. For the following 2 days I only cried and haven't eaten. Third day I started cleaning up the flat (long overdue!) - mostly for her tbh but I know it's good for myself, so better do the right thing with wrong motivation than sob all day -
talked to my psychiatrist and she brought some lunch which I could eat. Today (fourth day) she came over and we cooked lunch. I am still feeling terrible but the first days have been the worst I've ever felt and I've been trough quite a bit of (physical & chronic) pain - emotional pain hits different.

Let's see how this works out. In any case I now know very clear that I can't continue like before and need to work on my issues (for my own sake). I want be my best self, even if right now I don't have a lot of energy and am very depressed. I got an appointment with a therapist tomorrow - something I should have done years ago but I was overwhelmed with anxiety and analysis paralysis. I hope the future will be brighter and while I still wish to wake up from this nightmare and realize my faults without this breakup, I also know that I have to face reality.

PS: I do feel better now after writing this out. Thanks for listening, I guess.

In today's episode of kidding on SystemD, we have a surprise guest star appearance - Apache Foundation HTTPD server, or as we in the Debian ecosystem call it, the Apache webserver!

So, imagine a situation like this - Its friday afternoon, you have just migrated a bunch of web domains under a new, up to date, system. Everything works just fine, until... You try to generate SSL certificates from Lets Encrypt.

Such a mundane task, done more than a thousand times already... Yet... No matter what you do, nothing works. Apache just returns a HTTP status code 403 - Forbidden.

Of course, what many folk would think of first when it came to a 403 error is - Ooooh, a permission issue somewhere in the directory structure!

So you check it... And re-check it to make sure... And even switch over to the user the webserver runs under, yet... You can access the challenge just fine, what the hell!

So you go deeper... And enable the most verbose level of logging apache is capable of - Trace8. That tells you... Not a whole lot more... Apparently, the webserver was unable to find file specified? But... Its right there, you can see it!

So you go another step deeper and start tracing the process' system calls to see exactly where it calls stat/lstat on the file, and you see that it... Calls lstat and... It... Returns -1? What the hell#2!

So, you compile a custom binary that calls lstat on the first argument given and prints out everything it returns... And... It works fine!

Until now, I chose to omit one important detail that might have given away the issue to the more knowledgeable right away. Our webservers have the URL /.well-known/acme-challenge/, used for ACME challenges, aliased somewhere else on the filesystem - To /tmp/challenges.

See the issue already?

Some *bleep* over at the Debian Package Maintainer group decided that Apache could save very sensitive data into /tmp, so, it would be for the best if they changed something that worked for decades, and enabled a SystemD service unit option "PrivateTmp" for the webserver, by default.

What it does is that, anytime a process started with this option enabled writes to /tmp/*, the call gets hijacked or something, and actually makes the write to a private /tmp/something/tmp/ directory, where something... Appeared as a completely random name, with the "apache2.service" glued at the end.

That was also the only reason why I managed fix this issue - On the umpteenth time of checking the directory structure, I noticed a "systemd-private-foobarbas-apache2.service-cookie42" directory there... That contained nothing but a "tmp" directory with 777 as its permission, owned by the process' user and group.

Overriding that unit file option finally fixed the issue completely.

I have just one question - Why? Why change something that worked for decades? I understand that, in case you save something into /tmp, it may be read by 3rd parties or programs, but I am of the opinion that, if you did that, its only and only your fault if you wrote sensitive data into the temporary directory.

And as far as I am aware, by default, Apache does not actually write anything even remotely sensitive into /tmp, so...

Why. WHY!
I wasted 4 hours of my life debugging this! Only to find out its just another SystemD-enabled "feature" now!

And as much as I love kidding on SystemD, this time, I see it more as a fault of the package maintainers, because... I found no default apache2/httpd service file in the apache repo mirror... So...

Company has a severe lack of fresh blood.

"let's recruit everyone who has an IQ over room temperature and barely passes the mark".

Me protesting bloody murder cause I know that the idea is not just profoundly dumb, but frustration from high staff turnover takes a toll on *everyone*.

"nah can't be that bad".

Then the discussion started who could do monitoring and mentoring, so we can sort out the bad apples *quickly*.

Me reminding again that this is exactly what leads to a high staff turnover, as this is nothing else than "hire, hire - quickly fire".

Guess who won the award of being the mentor / monitor ....

*drum roll*

Come on, I know you would NEVER expect this.

Let me surprise you: M E.

Yeah. They chose the person that was absolutely against this idea...

Because that person is "most qualified for the task at hand and has the necessary qualifications".

Today was the first 4 h workshop with a new recruit.

The Lord has had zero mercy on me.

I started to mute myself after 30 minutes in regular intervals to just scream and curse the world.

How profound dumb a person can be amazes me.

Person has had a "very expensive 6 month boot camp course".

I was close asking if the boot camp course was in watching porn and wanking their brain cells out....

Git... Yeah he knew what he was doing...

Except that he messed up every commit by either not sticking to the companies format or - what I found funny the first 2 times, then not so much anymore - just writing a git commit message like a 15 year old teenage girl would write to their diary.

Programming. Oh yeah. He should be a programmer.

He had much Bootcamp.

Bootcamp expensive. Bootcamp good.

If someone is unable to iterate over an iterator... And instead starts creating an integer based array of a map's key name to then fetch the map value in an for loop based on the created key array.

Yeah. Bootcamp much good.

Creating DTOs...

It took an hour to write a DTO with him... Cause constructors are hard and it's even harder when you have to explain primitive datatypes in Java, null safety, constructors, NPEs, final, ...

Like really no experience at all.

The next week's will be amazing.

Either I get a valium drop or I'm gonna blow my head off, cause mentoring will drain the last bit of hope I had left in me.

Note that I do not blame the recruit (yeah he's dumb. But he has ZERO work experience, so it's not unexpected), I'm just too fed up with getting the poo crown despite being against the whole process.

I think the recruit could make it..........

But that I got the shittiest job ever is really haunting me.

I dunno how I survive the next weeks.

And this is just the first recruit... There will be more.

Always thought writing free code is devaluing yourself. So, the stories coming out how the most popular used libraries' dev/maintainer having no income, complaining afterwards doesn't surprise me.

Why do people devalue themselves? I have no idea.

What idiot uses 0 for a success response!!! Integrating with a 3rd party I found a bug in our code that uses the default value for an int when the external server can't be reached.

As it happens 0 is the default integer in most languages so no surprise when our system accepted the 3rd party as a success when it blew up 😒

Ugggh. Has anyone else on here worked with MFC?

I've been updating some legacy software and it's been like wading through a swap that was caused by a malfunctioning trailer park septic system: no map, and mostly shit with the occasional nasty surprise.

Over the summer I was recruited to be a supplement instructor for a data structures course. As a result of that I was asked (separately by the professor) to be a grader for the course. Because of pay limitations I've mostly been grading homework project assignments. In any case, it's a great job to get my foot into the department and get recognized.

Over the course of the semester I've had this one person, OSX, named after their operating system of choice, who has been giving me awkward submissions. On the first assignment they asked the professor for extra time for some reason or the other, and that's perfectly fine.

So I finally receive OSX's submission, and it's a .py file as per course of the course. So I pop up a terminal in the working directory and type "python OSX_hw1.py". Get some error spit out about the file not being the right encoding. I know that I can tell python to read it in a different encoding, so I open it up in a text editor. To my surprise it's totally not a text file, but rather a .zip file!

I've seen weirder things done before, so no big deal. I rename the file extension, and open it up to extract the files when I see that there's no python files. "Okay, what's goin on here OSX..." I think to myself.

Poking around in the files it appears to be some sort of meta-data. To what, I had no clue, but what I did find was picture files containing what appeared to be some auto-generated screenshots of incomplete code. Since I'm one to give people the benefit of doubt even when they've long exhausted other peoples', I thought that it must be some fluke, and emailed OSX along with the professor detailing my issue.

I got back a rather standard reply, one of which was so un-notable I could not remember it if my life depended on it. However, that also meant I didn't have to worry about that anymore. Which when you're juggling 50 bazillion things is quite a relief. Tragically, this relief was short lived with the introduction of assignment 2.

Assignment 2 comes around, and I get the same type of submission from OSX. At this time I also notice that all their submissions are *very* close to the due time of 11:59pm (which I don't care about as long as it's in before people start waking up the next morning). I email OSX and the professor again, and receive a similar response. I also get an email from OSX worried about points being deducted. I reply, "No issue. You know what's wrong. Go and submit the right file on $CentralGradingCenter. Just submit over your old assignment".

To my frustration OSX claimed to not know how to do this. I write up a quick response explaining the process, and email it. In response OSX then asks if I can show them if they comes to my supplemental lesson. I tell OSX that if they are the only person, sure, otherwise no because it would not be a fair use of time to the other students.

OSX ends up showing up before anyone else, so I guide them through the process. It's pretty easy, so I'm surprised that they were having issues. Another person then shows up, so I go through relevant material and ask them if they have any questions about recent material in class. That said, afterwards OSX was being somewhat awkward and pushy trying to shake my hand a lot to the point of making me uncomfortable and telling them that there's no reason to be so formal.

Despite that chat, I still did not see a resubmission of either of those two assignments, and assignment 3 began to show it's head. Obviously, this time, as one might expect after all those conversations, I get another broken submission in the same format. Finally pissed off, I document exactly how everything looks on my end, how the file fails to run, how it's actually a zip file, etc, all with screenshots. That then gets emailed to the professor and OSX.

In response, I get an email from OSX panicking asking me how to submit it right, etc, etc. However, they also removed the professor from the CC field. In response I state that I do not know how to use whatever editor they are using, and that they should refer to the documentation in order to get a proper runnable file. I also re-CC the professor, making sure OSX's email to me is included in my reply.

OSX then shows up for one of my lessons, and since no one had shown up yet, I reiterate through what I had sent in the email. OSX's response was astonished that they could ever screw up that bad, but also admits that they had yet to install python(!!!). Obviously, the next thing that comes from my mouth is asking OSX how they write their code. Their response was that they use a website that lets them run python code.

At this point I'm honestly baffled and explain that a lot of websites like those can have limitations which might make code run differently then it should (maybe it's a simple interpreter written on JavaScript, or maybe it is real python, but how are you supposed to do file I/O?) .

After that I finally get a submission for assignment 1!

First rant guys!

I'm a .net and PHP developer and love visual studio. I also hate windows 10 and it's stupid surprise reboots. Twice I switched to Linux mint but returned to windows because of the IDE. Been on VS (with PHP tools) for too long and nothing on Linux comes close to VS not to mention the lack of .net 4.6 (no mono) on Linux. M$ make Visual Studio 2015 cross platform!

i was hired to join a team of old devs (40+) in an unnamed European country "yay goodbye 3rd world it's time to enjoy the quality of life" assist with enhancing already existing software and creating new solutions.
prior to my arrival most things were slow and super buggy, looking at the code base it shouldn't be a surprise, amateur hour everyone, logic implemented that is not needed, comment driven development, last time code review was done back in 1996. lots of anti patterns.
i swear there is a for loop that does nothing but it loops through a 100+ elements list, trunk based development with tfs since git is "not really needed"
test projects are not there.
>enter me an educated fool, with genuine passion for the craft and somehow a decent amount of knowledge.
>spent the last year fixing stuff educating people on principles and qualities.
> countless hours of training and explaining. team is showing cooperation, a new requirement comes in to develop with react.
> tear my ass creating reusable shit and self explanatory code with proper naming etc using git with feature branching, monday is first deployment day.
> today a colleague was working on an item submit a pull request and self approve it
> look at the code..... WTF the dumb fuck copied and pasted the whole code from different kendo components but somehow managed to refractor the name to test component, commented out all the code that he didn't use did the api call directly from the component, has 2 useeffects that depends on the a fucking text box changes for no reason, no redux implementation, the acceptance criteria is not achieved, and it doesn't work it just look right.
> first world country shit cannot scold, cannot complain, lead by example.
>asked him why you did this, the response was yeah probably i shouldn't have done that, i really didn't understand anything in the training but didn't want to waste time!!!!
> rest of the team created a different styled disaster with different flavors they don't even name their shit the same way.

fellow developers I'm stuck in a spaceship with a bunch of imposters, seriously i never cried in my entire life now I'm teary and on the verge of a break down.
talk with management "improving needs time" and offers me to join a yoga session to release the stress as if reaching nirvana would deliver shit on monday.
i really don't know what do is this a rant, is this a cry for help, I'm not sure, any advice is welcomed.

Ok so I have done some work with crypto currency mining pools and recently a client requested for me to make a splash page that showed data from multiple instances of these pools APIs. I went to find some documentation for this open source api and to my surprise there is none. I thought of querying the public API from the clients side and it worked, however it's so slow that the data shows up roughly 20 seconds after the page loads.

Easy fix right? Make a PHP server get the data every 5 seconds, cache it and serve the data with the page and use a websocket for live updates! Until I found out that there is no practical way in this garbage framework to get the damn API data without making an HTTP request or mutilating the original source code. I'm so done with this garbage framework. It literally loads pages based on a page and action parameter on the index.php. I quit.

So the last 2 devs who I really looked up to and respected at my company peaced out within the last 2 months. So I began seriously chasing offers while the market was hot. The new bigwigs that were brought in at the company knew I was one of the biggest flight risks, so they threw more money at me without me asking for it.

I just got an offer from a company that I really like that matched the salary that I was bumped to - to them it exceeds my expectations because they did not know about this preemptive bump.

Best part is, I applied to this company on my own, the old fashioned way. No recruiter as my hype person or negotiator. I made a good impression on them myself.

No, wait, the real best part - they offered me a senior level role after seeing my code in a day-long working interview (virtual of course). I mean I had to do some shit with RabbitMQ, which I had heard about and seen in passing, but never worked with before, which to my own surprise, I got working in a matter of a few hours. Blows my mind that someone outside of my old company actually thinks I'm good.

No, wait, the REAL real best part: I've spent the last 4 years - a large majority of my professional career - at my current company. I experienced a lot of growth, but they shoehorned me into a development manager role, which bummed me out as i found myself getting farther and farther away from the code. I'm so excited to get a fresh start and go back to spotify + code for 10 hours a day.

Well well well.
Story time.

Since we are working from home for the past 4 months, I finally decided to install a Microsoft SQL server on my home server. (Mostly was using Azure)

My server is running Windows Server 2012 R2.
Tried installing SQL 2019 : fail, 2016 : Fail, 2012 : Fail. Some obscure message about some DLLs not being at right version. (And a warning that it is no recommended to install SQL server on domain controller, but I know, it is my home setup, not roduction)

“Ok fine, I’ll install it on my PC instead”. Windows 10 PC. NOPE. “Cannot install on a compressed drive”. Welp, wtf ? (Of course you cannot select destination install folder, I could’ve put it on another drive).

So here I am. Working 100% on Windows, installed Ubuntu server 20 LTS in Hyper-V, Installed Microsoft SQL server on it (BTW, install is very easy compared to windows). And that shit is working. And new “Terminal” app does support SSH out of box, no need to add Putty !

So as a Windows user, I needed Linux to make Microsoft SQL techno work.

Nothing will ever surprise me anymore. (BTW it’s fucking fast. I like SQL server on Linux)

(Part 2/2?)

THE RAT-RACE ARC:

I get a mail 2 months into this fiasco telling me to register on their website and take up another test. I was already over with my emergency and was working my full-time default. (Fortunately I found another internship during this time which was one of the best initiatives I've worked with).

It asks me to register as a new user, take up the test and "share" my results. Not pushing it on insta/fb but legitimately share my test results link to my friends manually like a referral code. The more shares the more marks I'll get in the test. Why the test you ask. Of course to sign you up for the same Whatsapp trickery bullshit.

Luckily these nutcases didn't know they could be bypassed. I simply opened the link in incognito and logged in with my own account and that counted as a point. So I automated that shit.

Surprise surprise. The same fucking "Hello everyone" message into my mail. To my surprise I was relatively lucky to get ghosted after my attempt. This story is quite depressing in general cases. You're supposed to do this assignment shit for 2 months and then they ask for 2000 INR for a training period, past which you are paid between 1000/- and 7000/-. Though I didn't get the chance but I'm willing to bet you get 1000/- per month in a 2-MONTH INTERNSHIP. WTF.

You also have the other option of ranking first in their 3 consecutive competition that they hold. The theme is again to create chunks of their actual outsourced work.

WHY NOW:

The reason why this rant sparked is because I recently received an email with my results of the aptitude exam that I first took before the Whatsapp fiasco. I imagine they just pushed out a new update to their test thingy and forgot to set it's limit.

THE CORRECTION ARC:

I pushed this message to Internshala. They were kind enough to remove them from their website. I also shot down their Angel and Indeed listings. I sent a strongly worded email counting their con-artist operations and how I've alerted authorities (obviously a bluff but I was enjoying it). They most probably are not affected by this though. They might still be continuing their operations on their website.

I'm sharing the story here with the moral of:

Don't do jackshit if they're not compensating you for it

Always check for reviews before you start working at a place.

Be cautious of bulk messages (and the infamous HEY GUYS!! opening)

Don't do anything outside your work specification at least while doing an assignment.

You're free to question and inquire respectfully about the proceedings.

If you're good at your job you'll get good working place. No need to crush yourself with an oppressive job due to external restrictions.

And if you manage a company, please don't take advantage of helplessness.

There's no good ending to this tale as I have not received a follow-up. Though I want to see scumbags of their calibre shot down without remorse.

Good bye and thank you for listening.

I decided to upgrade my intellij ultimate from 2019.3 to 2020.2 and I saw there is update button.
I clicked on it.
As I expected it didn’t work and it was 30 minutes waiting looking at progress bar going back and forth couple of times before I decided just to download latest version and drag and drop it to applications folder ( took me 5 minutes) - I use mac so it replaces all crap ( I think ).

I cleared the old cache that growed to 2 gigabytes leaving some configuration files.
Next as always crash on startup cause of incompatible plugins with long java stacktrace - at least I could click the close button or popup closed itself I can’t remember ( one version I remember this button couldn’t be clicked cause it was off the screen and you need to do some cheating to launch ide )
The font has changed and I see that it at least work a little faster - that is nice. Indexing is finally fixed after all those years - probably thanks to visual studio code intellisense pushing those lazy bastards to deal with this.
But the preloader on first logo disappears so I think they decided to remove it cause it’s so fast - no it loads the same time or maybe little longer when I launch it on my old macbook.

After that as always I looked at plugins to see if there’s something interesting, so to find ability to scroll over whole plugins I needed to click couple of times. I think they assume I remember all the nice plugins in their marketplace and I only type search.
Maybe I should be type of user who reads best 2020 plugins for your best ide crap articles filled with advertising or even waste more time to watch all of this great videos about ide ( are there any kind of this stuff ? )

After a few operations I unfortunately clicked apply instead of restart ide and it hanged up on uninstalling some plugin I’m no longer interested in for 5 minutes so I decided to use always working ‘kill -9’ from command line.

Launched again and this time success.
Fortunately indexing finished for this workspace and I can work.

I’m intellij ultimate subscriber for 7+ years and I see those craps are not changing from like forever.
What’s the point of automate something that you can’t regression test ?
I started thinking that now when most people are facebook wall scrolling zombies companies assume that when new software comes out everyone is installing it right away and if not they’re probably not our customers cause they’re dead.
What a surprise they have when I pay for another year I can only imagine ( to be fair probably they even don’t know who I am ).
Yeah for sure I am subscribed to newsletters and I have jetbrains as a start page cause I shit myself with money and have nothing better to do then be grupie ( is there corporate grupies already a big community? )

Well I am a guy who likes to spend some time when installing anything and especially software that is responsible for my main source of income and productivity speed up.

Anyway I decided to upgrade cause editing es7 and typescript got to be pain in the ass and I see it’s working fine now. I don’t know if I like the font but at least the editor it’s working the same or maybe faster then the original that is huge improvement as developers lose most of their time between keyboard and screen communication protocol.

I don’t write it to discourage intellij as it’s great independent ide that I love and support for such a long time but they should focus on code editor and developers efficiency not on things that doesn’t make sense.

Congratulations if you reached this point of this meaningless post.

Now I started thinking that maybe it’s working faster cause I removed 2 gigs of crap from it.

Well we’ll see.

I left my previous job to concentrate on finishing up University. I've been working full-time at another company and doing freelance on the side since then.

Not too long ago I saw my old boss and he told me i shoud apply back at the company and get back working Front-end.

I went to check the job posting. To my surprise, the qualifications they were asking were completely different than what I was doing at the time.

I'm no longer qualified for my old job despite being more experienced and still learning.

Dependency hell is the largest problem in Linux.

On Windows, I just download an executeable (.exe) file, and it just works like a charm! But Linux sometimes needs me to install dependencies.

At one point, I nearly broke my operating system while trying to solve dependencies. I noticed that some existing applications refused to start due to some GLIBC error gore. I thought to myself "that thing ain't gonna boot the next time", so I had to restore the /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ folder from a backup.

And then there is a new level of lunacy called "conflicting dependencies". I never had such an error on Windows. But when I wanted to try out both vsftpd and proFTPd on Linux, I get this error, whereas on Windows, I simply download an .exe file and it WORKS! Even on Android OS, I simply install an APK file of Amaze File Manager or Primitive FTPd or both and it WORKS! Both in under a minute. But on Linux, I get this crap. Sure, Linux has many benefits, but if one can't simply install a program without encountering cryptic errors that take half a day to troubleshoot and could cause new whack-a-mole-style errors, Linux's poor market share is no surprise.

Someone asked "Why not create portable applications" on Unix/Linux StackExchange. Portable applications can not just be copied on flash drives and to other computers, but allow easily installing multiple versions on a system. A web developer might do so to test compatibility with older browsers. Here is an answer to that question:

> The major argument [for shared libraries] is security, that if there is a vulnerability in a commonly-used library, then only that library has to be updated […] you don't have to have 4 different versions of a library installed

I just want my software to work! Period. I don't mind having multiple versions of libraries, I simply want it to WORK! To hell with "good reasons" for why it doesn't, and then being surprised why Linux has a poor market share. Want to boost Linux market share? SOLVE THIS DAMN ISSUE!.

Understand that the average computer user wants stuff to work out of the box, like it does in Windows.

Had a deal with a client that i’ll make a website for him in a month because I have other jobs that i need to finish first. I called him 2 days ago i said that i’ll upload the website for confirmation of the design in a few days, he says ok. I get around to it, developed the frontend on localhost, put it on my server for him to approve and sent him the link. He said something about a specific photo not being grayscale or whatever - I don’t even have any info for the site that he sent, got confused, ok.. I go to his old website to get some information onto the new one, surprise surprise a new website that I don’t have anything to do with appeared. Wtf, check the ftp - was uploaded 5 days ago. Fml just wasted a day and got no sleep. 99.9% that i wont get paid. Bamboozled. Cant sleep, wtf

Shame on Apple to use AngularJS on their iTunes Connect developer portal.... and probably other sites.
Today I discover that while inspecting the source code in search of an element that might have been hidden or missing and to my surprise I saw angular code in it !! WHATTT? !! shame on Apple... the links of the iTuneConnect still mention WebObjects (a Java based web-building framework that was never adopted by the mass) but the client code has Angular on it. How is it possible that they did not try to come up with their own framework for web applications ? They started the entire web-widget html/Javascript adventure, promoting modular web component and what not to then adopt a Google made framework ?! . No wonder they are syncing again. :D ... of course I am just runting... I love you Apple.

You had two additional weeks to improve your project.

You could research different marketing strategies to increase revenue. You could add some new features to attract more users and ensure your existing users are satisfied. Finally, you could optimize performance to make your UI quicker.

But you’ve chosen to write some unit tests. Now that two weeks are gone, you got no new features, no performance improvements and no new marketing strategies while your competitors got them all.

Tests caught obvious bugs that can even be caught by static typing, but you by definition couldn’t write tests that’ll catch unpredictable bugs, so they are still present.

After six months you realize you have to rewrite a major part of your project because your project (surprise-surprise) has to chase market needs to stay relevant. Your tests are thrown into trash along with your old code.

“Having trouble with code quality? Write a lot of tests. And I mean a *lot*. Test every file in isolation. Mock as many imports as possible.

When you're done, your code will still be bad, but now your tests will make sure it's impossible to improve anything in any meaningful way.”

Last few months have been quite calm. Nothing to really rant about. The egocentric asshole PM (see my past rants) left the company, so things have been better at work. I thought that there would be so much chaos because of all the roles that he had (project manager, engineering manager, lead developer, dev ops) but we managed to keep things running smoothly, which shouldn't have been a surprise for me, but I was a bit scared at first. Relieved, because well... the egocentric asshole left, but a bit scared either way. Anyway, everything has been fine. I'm pretty much the lead frontend developer now, even tho there's no official structure or hierarchy, everyone just keeps looking up to me for help and guidance. I've received a good pay raise. Work has been interesting and challenging. All's well.

This all coincided with me deciding to take a little break from devrant, and the lack of ranting material kept me from coming back. I just dropped by to say hello and check how devrant is going. I hope you are all doing well :)

!rant, need advice

I have no idea where to start with freelancing.

My girlfriend's been wanting to get some stuff but due to some issues hasn't been able to and has been extremely hesitant about bringing the topic up.

So to surprise her, I decided it'd be nice if I could freelance on the side and rake up some money so she can get the things she wants and I can spoil her (she's been through things and honestly deserves it).

So if you guys have any suggestions on where to start freelancing, that'd be great. I can do graphics and web design and just set up an anonymous Fiverr account but never had any luck with it.

So this happened at a government organised 24 hour Hackathon. We had to store documents uploaded from the front end. Now we’ve been trying for a very log time but everything failed (yeah we had a crappy front end guy). Then all hell broke loose when the our team leader in hi sleep deprived state deleted our git repository while I wondered why my pushes were throwing a 404. When hell felt near we came up with the solution to encode the documents in base64 and store it in the database since we only had to show a demo😂.
Sadly enough, WE LOST. Although in retrospect it comes as no surprise.

I feel like writing or telling people about the time I jumped from Windows 7 Ultimate and jumping to Windows 10. (I'm not against 10, but I'm never updating after what had happened to me)
It all starts when none of my games will play due to a possible issue with my graphics card. I look up "3D source game bug" and not many results pop up. I go on Microsoft's Qna areas and ask this question but to my surprise nothing they say would make sense. "Clean the pins of your graphics card, make sure you verify the games on Steam". I verified the games and they checked out as perfectly fine. I don't have access to my graphics card because this is a laptop, sadly not a tower.
Two months pass and my computer is already showing signs of stress, like it didn't want to live in a sense. It was three times slower than when I was on Windows 7 and it was unallocating areas of my main hard drive where I could make virtual hard drives.
Instantly I start looking up Linux distros and find Linux Mint. 17.3 was the current version at the time. I downloaded it and burned it onto a DVD-rom and rebooted my computer. I loaded into the disc and to my surprise it seemed almost like Windows 7 apart from the Linux part. I grab my external hard drive and partition it to hold the Linux distro and leave it plugged in incase Windows 10 does actually fail.
On December 19, a few months after Windows 10 had released. I start my laptop to try and continue my studies in video game development. But to my surprise, Windows 10 had finally crashed permanently. The screen flickered blue and black, and an error box saying Loginui.exe failed to start. I look at it for a solid minute as my computer had just committed suicide in a sense.
I reboot thinking it would fix the error but it didn't. I couldn't log in anymore.
I force shutdown the laptop and turn it back on putting it into safe mode.
To my surprise loginui.exe works and I sign in. I look at my desktop, the space wallpaper I always admired, the sound files, screen shots I had saved.
I go into file explorer and grab everything out of my default hard drive Windows was installed on. Nothing but 400gb got left behind and that was mainly garbage prototypes I had made and Windows itself. I formatted my external hard drive and placed everything on it. Escaping Windows 10 with around 100GB of useful data I looked at the final shutdown button I would look at.
I click it and try to boot into normal Windows 10. But it doesn't work. It flickers and the error pops up once more.
I force it to shutdown and insert the previous Linux Mint disc I made and format the default hard drive through Linux. I was done. 10 gave me a lot of shit. Java wouldn't work, my games has a functional UI but no screen popped up except a black abyss and it wouldn't even let me try to update my graphics card, apparently my AMD Radeon 5450 was up to date at the AMD Radeon 5000's.
I installed Linux Mint and thinking the games would actually play I open steam and Launch Half-Life 2 to check if Linux would be nicer to me than Windows 10 had been.
To my surprise the game ran. The scene from Highway 17 popped on screen and the UI was fully functional. But it was playing at 10-15fps rather than the usual 60-70fps. Keep look at my drivers and see my graphics card isn't in use. I do some research and it turns out I have a Hybrid Laptop.
Intel HD Graphics and an AMD Radeon 5450 and it was using the Intel and not the AMD. Months of testing and attempts of getting the games to work at high frame rates pass and the Damn thing still functions at a low terrible fps. Finally I give up. I ask my mom for a Windows 7 disc and she says we can't afford it. A few months pass and I finally get a Windows 7 installation disc through money I've saved up. Proudly I put it into my optical disc drive and install it to my main hard drive deleting Linux completely. I announced to all my friends my computer was back in working order and I install everything I needed, Steam, Skype, Blender, and Unity as well as all my games. I test Half-Life 2 and it's running exceptionally smoothly, I test Minecraft at max settings and it's working beautifully. The computer was functioning properly once again and my life as a developer started as I modeled things and blender, learned beginners C# and learned a lot of Batch. Today the computer still runs at a great speed and I warn others of what happened to me after I installed Windows 10 to my machine if they are thinking of switching from 7 or 8 on an older machine.
Truly the damage to my data cannot be undone. But the memory of the maintenance, work, tests, all are a memory of how Windows 10 ruined me and every night before the one year anniversary of Windows 10's release, I took out the battery of my laptop and unplugged it from the a.c. power, just so Windows 10 doesn't show it's DLLs, batch scripts, vbs scripts, anything on my computer. But now, after this has happened and I have recovered, I now only have a story to tell

I spent 4 months in a programming mentorship offered by my workplace to get back to programming after 4 years I graduated with a CS degree.

Back in 2014, what I studied in my first programming class was not easy to digest. I would just try enough to pass the courses because I was more interested in the theory. It followed until I graduated because I never actually wrote code for myself for example I wrote a lot of code for my vision class but never took a personal initiative. I did however have a very strong grip on advanced computer science concepts in areas such as computer architecture, systems programming and computer vision. I have an excellent understanding of machine learning and deep learning. I also spent time working with embedded systems and volunteering at a makerspace, teaching Arduino and RPi stuff. I used to teach people older than me.

My first job as a programmer sucked big time. It was a bootstrapped startup whose founder was making big claims to secure funding. I had no direction, mentorship and leadership to validate my programming practices. I burnt out in just 2 months. It was horrible. I experienced the worst physical and emotional pain to date. Additionally, I was gaslighted and told that it is me who is bad at my job not the people working with me. I thought I was a big failure and that I wasn't cut out for software engineering.

I spent the next 6 months recovering from the burn out. I had a condition where the stress and anxiety would cause my neck to deform and some vertebrae were damaged. Nobody could figure out why this was happening. I did find a neurophyscian who helped me out of the mental hell hole I was in and I started making recovery. I had to take a mild anti anxiety for the next 3 years until I went to my current doctor.

I worked as an implementation engineer at a local startup run by a very old engineer. He taught me how to work and carry myself professionally while I learnt very little technically. A year into my job, seeing no growth technically, I decided to make a switch to my favourite local software consultancy. I got the job 4 months prior to my father's death. I joined the company as an implementation analyst and needed some technical experience. It was right up my alley. My parents who saw me at my lowest, struggling with genetic depression and anxiety for the last 6 years, were finally relieved. It was hard for them as I am the only son.

After my father passed away, I was told by his colleagues that he was very happy with me and my sisters. He died a day before I became permanent and landed a huge client. The only regret I have is not driving fast enough to the hospital the night he passed away. Last year, I started seeing a new doctor in hopes of getting rid of the one medicine that I was taking. To my surprise, he saw major problems and prescribed me new medication.

I finally got a diagnosis for my condition after 8 years of struggle. The new doctor told me a few months back that I have Recurrent Depressive Disorder. The most likely cause is my genetics from my father's side as my father recovered from Schizophrenia when I was little. And, now it's been 5 months on the new medication. I can finally relax knowing my condition and work on it with professional help.

After working at my current role for 1 and a half years, my teamlead and HR offered me a 2 month mentorship opportunity to learn programming from scratch in Python and Scrapy from a personal mentor specially assigned to me. I am still in my management focused role but will be spending 4 hours daily of for the mentorship. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity. It felt unworldly when I pushed my code to a PR for the very first time and got feedback on it. It is incomparable to anything.

So we had Eid holidays a few months back and because I am not that social, I began going through cs61a from Berkeley and logged into HackerRank after 5 years. The medicines help but I constantly feel this feeling that I am not enough or that I am an imposter even though I was and am always considered a brilliant and intellectual mind by my professors and people around me. I just can't shake the feeling.

Anyway, so now, I have successfully completed 2 months worth of backend training in Django with another awesome mentor at work. I am in absolute love with Django and Python. And, I constantly feel like discussing and sharing about my progress with people. So, if you are still reading, thank you for staying with me.

TLDR: Smart enough for high level computer science concepts in college, did well in theory but never really wrote code without help. Struggled with clinical depression for the past 8 years. Father passed away one day before being permanent at my dream software consultancy and being assigned one of the biggest consultancy. Getting back to programming after 4 years with the help of change in medicine, a formal diagnosis and a technical mentorship.

Technically not andev rant but fuck it. This pusses me off no no end.

PC gaming as I used to love it, is ending.

E3 for pc gamers was a death march. With the exception of hitman and just cuz 4, which are both more of the same. Don't get me wrong, I'll play them both because they're good fun, but look at the PS4 lne up. Control, Anthem, Detroit and more, all NEW IPs.

Meanwhile over in PC world we get the 50th billionth Battle Royal and (surprise) another JC.

I couldn't even being myself to finish Origin (WHICH WANT EVEN A GOD DAMN ORIGIN STORY)
sigh

I'll have to get a PS4. I just LOATHE playing FPS with a controller.

Oh, yeah, and a new fallout. With one mode. Which is great because it means I get to be fragged and tea bagged by 9 year old Asian kids..

I’d been working event based and freelance jobs in the security and entertainment fields for years, with odd stints as a bartender sprinkled in. My pay was mostly decent, but I had no job security, and I was more on the road than at home. A few years before this job search experience I had already realised I can’t continue on this path for ever, especially if I ever want a serious relationship (e.g. 16 weeks straight touring Europe with on avg. 16h work days pretty much every day isn’t ideal in that regard, and also really though on both body and mind). So I decided to study. As I applied in autumn, not every line of study accepted students. The closest to my interest I found was BBA in Business IT.

Fast forward 1,5 years. After moving away from my previous base due to then-gfs studies, I had also been able to accept less work. Well, there were really two reasons: I didn’t want to go on weeks long big tours anymore, and I’d had to price up on my freelance job due to reasons. I still managed to keep our household going, but not knowing when the next paycheck would be available was becoming a little too stressful. I wanted job security. So a few weeks after my wedding I scoured the internetz for positions I could apply to, and applied to a dozen or so places. They were a variety of positions I had a vague understanding of from what I’d learned at UAS: from sales to data analytics to dev… I was aware pretty much all of the applications were a long shot by best, so I expected to be ghosted…

Two of the organizations I applied to wanted to go forward with me. Both dev jobs. I can’t even remember the specifics of the other one anymore, but I do remember the interview: I got in to their office (which was ridiculously open), and got marched into a tiny conference room. The interviewer was passive-aggressive and really bombarded me with questions, not really leaving a socially awkward introvert with any time to answer. I started to get really anxious and twitchy, sweating like a pig. Just wanted out. But nooo, they wanted me to do a coding test live. So they sat me on a computer with Eclipse open, gave me an assignment and told me not to use the internet. What’s even worse is that I could literally feel the interviewer breathing down my neck when I tried to do the test. Well, didn’t happen cause I was under so much pressure that I couldn’t think at all… yeah, that was horrible.

Anyhow, the other position I really applied to because it was in my hometown and I recognised the company name from legendary commercials from the 90s - everyone in this country who watched TV in mid-to-late 90s remembers those. Anyway, to my surprise, my present day manager contacted me and wanted me to do a coding test. At the time he asked I was having a bout of fevers after fevers, not really able to get healthy. I told him that I’d do it as soon as I’m healthy. A month went by, maybe more. He asked again. Again I replied that as soon as I get healthy, but promised to do it next week the latest. I didn’t deliver on that, but the next week after that, even if I was the most feverish I had been, I did the tests. I could only finish half of them, cause I couldn’t look at a screen for long at a time and had to visit the loo every 10min or so, but apparently that was enough. Next week I was already going to the interview… oh I also googled what is PHP on the way there, since it was mentioned as a requirement and I had no idea what it was. Imagine that…

The interview itself couldn’t have been more different from the other one. We were sitting in a nice conference room with my manager and the product’s lead dev, drinking coffee, our feet on the table and talking smack. Oh, and we did play a game of NHL<insertNumber> on PS4 during the interview… it was relaxed. Of course the more serious chat was there, too, but I can only really remember how relaxed it was. When I left the interview, I had been promised the position and that I would be sent the contract to be signed as soon as the CEO had reviewed and approved it. Next day, I had signed it and some time later I started at my current job (I gave a date when I was available to start, since there was a tour still agreed upon between the interview and the start).

Oh, and the job’s pretty much like the interview. Relaxed. It’s a good place to be in, even though the pay could be better (I regularly get offers for junior positions with more pay, and mid level positions with double the pay). I do value a pleasant working environment and the absence of stress more than big munny, what can I say?

So I've been back to work for 2 weeks after going on a holiday. Getting back into the flow of things was easy, but seeing the status of the project that I am a part of, and seeing the kind of implementation work that my co-workers has done, it's kind of a no surprise.

So the past 2 weeks I've been completing features that I left my co-workers to finish, but didn't. And rewriting other features that they worked on, but does not meet the specifications.

Will I ever be able to work with reliable/competent developers?

Client be like:
Pls, could you give the new Postgres user the same perms as this one other user?

Me:
Uh... Sure.

Then I find out that, for whatever reason, all of their user accounts have disabled inheritance... So, wtf.

Postgres doesn't really allow you to *copy* perms of a role A to role B. You can only grant role A to role B, but for the perms of A to carry over, B has to have inheritance allowed... Which... It doesn't.

So... After a bit of manual GRANT bla ON DATABASE foo TO user, I ping back that it is done and breath a sigh of relief.

Oooooonly... They ping back like -- Could you also copy the perms of A on all the existing objects in the schema to B???

Ugh. More work. Lets see... List all permissions in a schema and... Holy shit! That's thousands of tables and sequences, how tf am I ever gonna copy over all that???

Maybe I could... Disable the pager of psql, and pipe the list into a file, parse it by the magic of regex... And somehow generate a fuckload of GRANT statements? Uuuugh, but that'd kill so much time. Not to mention I'd need to find out what the individual permission letters in the output mean... And... Ugh, ye, no, too much work. Lets see if SO knows a solution!

And, surprise surprise, it did! The easiest, simplest to understand way, was to make a schema-only dump of the database, grep it for user A, substitute their name with B, and then input it back.

What I didn't expect is for the resulting filtered and altered grant list to be over 6800 LINES LONG. WHAT THE FUCK.

...And, shortly after I apply the insane number of grants... I get another ping. Turns out the customer's already figured out a way to grant all the necessary perms themselves, and I... No longer have to do anything :|

Joy. Utter, indescribable joy.

Is there any actual security reason for disabling inheritance in Postgres? (14.x) I'd think that if an account got compromised, it doesn't matter if it has the perms inherited or not, cuz you can just SET ROLE yourself to the granted role with the actual perms and go ham...

!rant

So got into a small debate (actually a civil one, surprise surprise) about the final project for a class. Basically the final project involves a team of 3-4 coders making a website for an actual client that either they find or provided by the professor.
The exact point of conflict was that the work is pro bono. The student argued that the work should be paid since after all, real work, real client. My argument is that because the clients don’t exactly choose the designers (or have little to no knowledge of most of their work) there will be high variance in quality and contract work would cause more conflict if done in class.

So just wondering, what do people think about this? Logistical issues aside (earning money for technically school property/ownership and money for learning essentially)

Fun story, I keep discovering new ways of being shameless.
I had been once caught of basically giving my assignment (not one of my brightest moments)for a course to a friend and surprise surprise the instructor did take disciplinary action but he was a bit pissed so infact, he called out for a viva for all the assignments.
The Vivas went fine but immediately after I was done I was like "sir so I'm having a bit of trouble in this next assignment I was wondering if you could help me out" 😂 I have no clue what I was thinking nor was I proud of that.
Kudos to the instructor tho who calmly responded and actually helped me out with it.
Also due to some policy the action could not go ahead so yea guess things turned out fine. Im now hoping to see if he can keep me as an RA. Again, yes why am I like this. Good instructor tho.

I just got the dna test.
I am the father. My daughter is now 3 weeks old.

No surprise there. I expected to be the father. I had no reason to distrust my wife. But, after all, I know my IT security.

The relationship I had with my daughter was transitive. I trusted my wife and my wife had my daughter, ergo I had a connection with my daughter. Or in clearer terms: from a => b and b => c follows a => c.

The problem I was thinking about: What if I will stop trusting my wife in the future. At some point in the future... Something might happen. And I would stand there and wonder how long it went on. Maybe a month? Or before my daughter's birth? Maybe more than 9 month before my daughter. Would I be able to hide it from my daughter or would she notice...

If anything ever happens now, I know it has nothing to do with my daughter...

That's the same reason why we use end2end encryption. Sure, we have to trust that the application provided is not manipulated. But we only have to trust today. If it lands on their severs, we have to trust until the end of eternity.

I don't need any trust right now. And I am fucking happy about it.

I normally have my Windows desktop and my Kubuntu laptop, but I’m on “holiday”, and I only brought my laptop. “I can write a simple research proposal on it, right?”, I thought. Ahahahaha, no. Turns out Libre Office and Mendeley are fucking useless on Linux. I had to give up and use my mum’s prehistoric Windows 7 laptop... Also Snap is “great” in theory (basically a Linux setup.exe, rendering packages pointless), but nothing I’ve tried worked so far. Docker can’t figure its permissions out, Chromium cursors break, and Mendeley doesn’t even detect Libre Office as installed. What a fucking shit show. I love Linux for dev, but no fucking surprise that no sane human being uses it for everyday tasks.

Hey guys. I am in a situation where I need to decide wether to take on a new project or not. And if not, how to turn down that client so that I would not burn any bridges. So I need your opinions on this matter in order to make the final decision.

To make things clear heres some background info. 10 months ago I quitted my fulltime position in another EU country and went back to my own home country. 10 months forward till today and I have my own ltd company which currently has 5 projects. Its doing pretty well money wise. All projects combined, I already earn more then I ever did and I need to work max 10 hours a week since all projects are remote projects so I dont waste time on useless meetings and etc. However I dont feel fulfilled or challenged anymore because surprise surprise doing well paid projects doesnt guarante your sense of fulfillment.

So I noticed that I have lots of spare time which I spend diving into rabbitholes with hobby projects. I decided that its time to scale my company and take on more projects and maybe even hire more people.

So I started searching for other projects I could work on (prefferibly remote projects or flexible ones where I could come in 2-3 days a week in office and work remotely rest of the week). Reason being that I am already out of sync with fulltime position lifestyle and I am totally result oriented, not punch in my hours and go home oriented.

For exampleIf i get my weekly tasks I prefer to do them in 1-2 days (even if it requires doing double shifts which rarely but happens) but then I want to have rest of the week off. Thats how my brain works and thats how Im wired. I cant stand fulltime positions especially in enterprise bigger companies where I come in and do maybe 2 hours of actual work everyday because of all useless meetings and blockers from backend/etc. Its soul crushing to me.

So I posted linkedin ads and started searching for new clients/projects. One month ago I went to an interview for an android project in a startup.

The project looked interesting enough. Main task was to rewrite their android app from java to kotlin. Apparently their current current app was built by a backend developer who wants to focus solely on backend.

So during the interview they showed me their app which was quite simple frontend wise but not so simple backend wise from what I was able to figure out.

Their project lead (also a backed guy) asked me my estimation of price and completion of task. I told them maybe 2-3 months to do everything properly.

Project lead was basically shocked because all other candidates told him they can rewrite the app from java to kotlin in 2-3 weeks. I told him that everything is possible but his app quality will suffer and for a better estimation he would we would need to sign an NDA so I could evaluate the costs. So we ended the interview.

After that we kept in touch for one month (it took them one month to google a generic NDA and sign it digitally with me).

So heres the redflags I noticed:

1. They dont respect my time. Wasted 1 month of my time and after signing NDA gave me 2days to estimate their project and go to a meeting and give them detailed info about what I can offer. I thats not a brain rape then I dont know what it is

2. They are changing initial conditions we talked about. We agreed on rewriting the codebase and be done with it. Now they prefer a fulltime worker who would be responsible for android app as his own product. So basically project lead was not able to find a fulltime dev so now hes trying to convert me (a company owner) to his fulltime worker.

3. Lack of respect. During the interview he started speaking in his own native language to me with some expression (he seemed pissed off at that moment when he switched languages).

4. Bad culture fit. As I said Im used to relaxed clients and projects where I dont need to be chained to a desk a monitored and be micromanaged. I mean lets sign a contract give me access to your codebase and tell me what to do, I will produce results and lets be done with it.

5. Project lead is a backend guy who doesnt understand how complicated android apps can be. No architecture and no unit tests are in his frontend app. He doesnt care about writing proper app since he ships it in his own device so he doesnt need to worry about supporting custom devices or different api levels of android and etc. But not having any architecture? Cmon.

So basically I am confused. Project lead needs a fulltime dev but hes in contact with me in hopes that I would sign a fulltime contract. But how I can work fulltime if all what I can see are redflags?

Basicaly I thinkthis was a misundersanding. Im searching for fulltime remote projects and hes offering fulltime inhouse projects. Project lead never outsourced so hes confused as well.

As you can see decision is already basically made to turn him down, I just need to know how to tell him to fck off in the most polite manner and thats it.

Soo I've written some python code to test things for my soon starting bachelor thesis. I work with a little robot car I share with other people and use 2 cameras on it. Today I make the extra effort to go to the lab to test my things as there were too many people busy with the available cars yesterday.
Set it all up with ROS and my project as per usual just to see whether python fucks me over again ... nothing, ok what a surprise.
Good part: my python code seems to work flawlessly
Bad part: cameras don't work, although they don't throw any errors. Quick check with rqt_image_view ... everything seems fucked up, but not broken. Cameras not accessible as they should be, only 1 view available instead of the normal million modes and a blank grey camera stream on the screen. But no errors, nothing.🙄😪

I also wanted to capture some footage to test at home, well that's gone to shit. Now I had to simulate that using my phone camera ... while crouching.
Fuck ... me.

Yesterday while learning some basic php stuff, prof was telling us about text fields and how php auto converts HTML and JavaScript.

He said to test it out before class, he wrote a lil JS script and submitted it to a text field using IE and then again using Chrome.

IE let the script run no problems (big surprise) but chrome blocked the script from running.

He doesn’t use Firefox, but I just recently switched from chrome to FF so I tested it out in class on FF.

I was surprised to see FF ran the script no problem. Surprised because I made the switch because of security reasons, my partner helped me secure all my shit and we both switched to FF cause every resource suggested it.

This is just one small case that I feel isn’t a huge deal, my prof said any decent dev will strip tags or whatever, but made me think: are there any other security concerns with FF? Am I right to consider it a more secure and therefore “better” browser?

Im currently working on a game, response and feedback is much appreciated.
-- idea--
I'm looking at creatures that will grow when someone that has bad thoughts or intentions.
-- story 1--
This boy grows up in a village that to his surprise, there no other kids in his village. The kids were mutilated. No one knows what happened. The ones with bad thoughts or intention will always be able to see that monster. As the boy grows up, he commits sin that are rather grave and when he grew up to 40 yrs old, he was dangerous person due to his character. His parents only saw his bright side of him and is rather unaware of it.
One day while talking to his mother, he felt rather uneasy, and went to the toilet, as he came out, she was no longer there. Thinking that she must be busy with house chores, he decide to head to the kitchen. Only to be greeted by his mother back facing him. She turned around and gave a big grin on her face that were as long as from one ear to the other. She then grew into a monster. The end
--
The story lacks a lot parts which I need such as gameplay, dialogues, and story itself.
Should I end it as the guy gets murdered? Or let the player think? Or leave as it is?
It's a 2d game though.
Ideas, suggestion or freedback is great!

It's been 3 days since I started my dev job and it's been pretty stressful. I could have posted at least 3, maybe 4 rants each day. Mainly about trivial bullshit that I let get to me.

Lets just say it came to a head today and that's when one of my bosses, who doesn't even really need to know who I am, decided to help me out. No reason why, just being kind.

I get home to find my other half had been making my lunch for me for tomorrow and had made dinner for me as a surprise. Didn't ask her to do it, she just did it out of the kindness of her heart.

It just made me realise that I'm actually surrounded by great people who I value a lot and appreciate more and more each day.

I recently started a new job where I’m working with someone who is vegan. This is great and I have no problems with it at all. My diet also leans heavily towards vegan and I understand and sympathize with the reasons that can lead to this choice.

However, I seem to keep ending up in inadvertent conflict with my colleague in ways that surprise and baffle me. For example:

* After buying and showing him a vegan product I had just purchased (and commenting that I had done so in the hope of avoiding a more animal-product based health solution), I found myself harangued at length about how healthy non-vegan foods weren’t actually healthy, and “Would you eat a human? Have they done trials on the benefits of eating humans? No? Exactly!”

* I sent an all-office IM asking if anyone wanted a cheese sandwich I had accidentally bought (accidentally in that I thought I had bought a different filling). I received an email back from him demanding that I don’t include him on any further “offensive” emails. This was followed up by an office update telling all staff to use work communications appropriately.

I enjoy my job and I did enjoy working with this person, but now I feel quite thrown and unsure of how to react to him. I’m pretty annoyed at being accused of being offensive for my use of the words “cheese sandwich” and don’t want to bring it up as I can’t see a way of that conversation going well (I’m not planning to apologize; I don’t think I need to?!). I realize the obvious solution is just to never ever mention food (or nutrition or words that aren’t vegan) again, but I need help with how to get back to a place where I feel like I am comfortable in my work environment rather than slightly on edge in case he kicks off at me again for some insane reason.

Need some advice here.

So hello everyone! I recently moved abroad for work, for the sake of the experience and the excitement of learning how developers in Latin America tackle specific problems. To my surprise, the dev team is actually composed solely of Europeans and Americans.

I work for a relatively new startup with an ambitious goal. I love the drive everyone has, but my major gripe is with my team lead. He's adverse to any change, and any and all proposals made to improve quality of throughput are shot down in flames. Our stack is a horrendous mess patched together with band-aids, nothing is documented, there are NO unit tests for our backend and the same goes for our frontend. The team has been working on a database/application migration for about a month now, which I find ridiculous because the entire situation could have been avoided by following very rudimentary DevOps practices (which I'm shunned for mentioning). I should also add that for whatever reason containerization and microservices are also taboo, which I find hillarious because of our currently convoluted setup with elastic beanstalk and the the constant complaints between our development environment and production environments differing too much.

I've been tasked with managing a Wordpress site for the past 3 weeks, hardly what I would consider exciting. I've written 6 pages in the past two weeks so our marketing team can move off of squarespace to save some money and allow us more control. Due to the shit show that is our "custom theme" I had to write these pages in a manner that completely disregard existing style rules by disabling them entirely on these pages. Now, ironically they would like to change the blog's base theme but this would invertedly cause other pages created before I arrived to simply not work, which means I would have to rewrite them.

Before I took the role of writing an entire theme from scratch and updating these existing pages to work adequately, I proposed moving to a headless wordpress setup. In which case we could share assets in a much more streamline manner between our application and wordpress site and unify our styles. I was shot down almost immediately. Due to a grave misunderstanding of how wordpress works, no one else on the team seems to understand just how easy it is to fetch data from wordpress's api.

In any event, I also had a tech meeting today with developers from partner companies and realized no one knew what the fuck they were talking about. The greater majority of these self proclaimed senior developers are actually considered junior developers in the United States. I actually recoiled at the thought that I may have made a great mistake leaving the United States to look a great tech gig.

I mean no disrespect to Latin America, or any European countries, I've met some really incredible developers from Russia, the Ukraine, Italy, etc. in the past and I'm certainly not trying to make any blanket statements. I just want to know what everyone thinks, if I should maybe move back to the states and header over to the bay/NY. I'm from the greater Boston area, where some really great stuff is going on but I guess I also wanted a change of scenery.

So until now the default env var User directory paths for Windows were all located under %userProfile%. To my surprise:

cd %userProfile%\Desktop

no longer works. Indeed, when you are even just signed in to OneDrive (which is the default, even if you disabled backups!), these retards decided it was a good idea to move all the standard library folders one level up to %userProfile%\OneDrive\ instead.

And the worst is that the locations continue to be swapped when you enable/ disable OneDrive.. WTF Microsoft

Inb4: I swear I am not an asshole.
Ok, I did a year of business, judge me all you want. Now I'm in CE. So we were learning VBA basically for those managment files that you preprogram to do your enterprise finances...or your grocery store list. Anyway, I was not paying attention to the classe, we were learning "For", so I was on Facebook and doing nothing along with my friend. The teacher caught us and decided the whole class would take a surprise quiz right that moment, because "some people think they know it all". So, all the class got bad grades because he was pissed at two students out of 56. Dick move!

PS:I got an A, so I am just stating that he was a dick to the others guys for no reason

First time linux user feedback

Linux lovers are probably gonna eat me alive but I don't give a flying fuck
Maybe its a little lenghty or boring, tell me what you think

Backstory:
I work for game extension company. We work with WinAPI and such. I've been using Windows since forever and I'm happy with it. But I thought to myself "hey, if I wanna be a good dev, I should give Linux and OS X a try, too"

I downloaded Linux Mint couple of months ago to start with. I was unable to boot it from live CD no matter what I tried, even in recovery mode. Apparently, Mint 18.3 was based on Ubuntu 16.04 which doesnt support UEFI
Wait, what the fuck, all modern PCs have UEFI so what, do all Mint users have 10 y/o laptops and PCs???

Anyway, when I heard about Mint 19 being released I thought to give it another try and I did. What a surprise, it booted successfully from Live CD. I saw the Linux desktop for the first time in my life, yay! I then installed it, GRUB appeared, my Windows was still there and wasn't broken so I was happy SOMETHING was working. I configured timeshift and applied dvorak layout system-wide. Realised dvorak layout is fucked up big time and applied normal layout for just desktop environment. Everything was really nice until couple reboots later Cinnamon stopped launching (kept returning to login screen). Okay, lets use timeshift

First big what-the-fuck was when I found out system restore can only be done using GUI??? This is absolutely retarded and I couldn't believe it is true. Login screen has a reachable console but I can't login there since I can't type the password. Fuck, fuck, fucking drovak layout was there.

Recovery mode - I've spent 20 minutes trying to type "timeshift --restore" having to press all keyboard buttons just to progress with one button. I've had another what-the-fuck when I saw "error: can't restore timeshift - partition already mounted"
Okay, this is too much. Why the fuck would you bundle a recovery mode if you can't restore a snapshot from there.

I have spent 3 hours now googling and trying to remove this fucking keyboard layout. No dice. I am making another copy of the live CD now. I'm gonna reinstall the whole shit now. I have the desire to create a custom Mint version without this abomination of a keyboard layout.

It's okay. Windows has taught me to be patient.

Fuck Dvorak, I dont know who the guy is but his keyboard layout can eat my dick

Maxi-Rant, rest in the first comment!

Yay, I've caught up with my "watch later" list on YouTube! Next thing: Just quickly go through my subscribed channels and add old videos that I haven't seen yet to the watch later list so that I have more stuff to watch the next months. The easiest way to do that is to go to the "all uploads" playlist of the channel (that is luckily always linked now, it used to be hidden sometimes) and use "add all to" to get them on my playlist. Then sort out the stuff that I've already seen and turn on automatic sorting by date, easy. Yeah...
Firstly, in the new design there's no "add all to", I have to go to the old design. For my own playlists, there's a handy "edit" button to do that, but on other pages I have to do it manually. Luckily I have set Ctrl+Shift+1 as a shortcut for "&disable_polymer=true" long ago.
Next surprise: On "all uploads" playlists, there is no "add all to" button. It's on every single other playlist on YouTube, including "liked", "watch later", "favourites" and so on, just not there.
Fine, I'll just abuse my subscription playlist script that I already have by making a copy of it, putting the channel IDs in it and setting the last execution date to 1.1.2001. Little problem with that: Google apps scripts can run for at most 5 minutes and the YouTube API restricts it to add one video per second. So it doesn't work for more than 300 videos. I could now try to split it up by dates, but I didn't write the script myself and I don't know how it sorts the videos to add, so I'll just google for another solution instead.
Found one: Go to the video overview of the channel in the old layout, Ctrl+Shift+I, paste this little Javascript thing and it automatically clicks all the little clocks that add the video to the watch later list. Yay, that works! Ok, i'm restricted to 5000 videos, because that's the maximum size of a YouTube playlist, so I can't immediately add all 8000+, but whatever, that's a minor problem and I'll sort out later anyway. Still another little problem: For some reason I can't automatically sort the watch later list. Because that would be too easy.
But whatever, I'll just use "add all to" from there to add it to my creatively named "WL" list. If that thing is restricted by the same rate limit of 1 video per second, it should be done in about 1½ hours. A bit long, but hey, I'm dealing with 5000 videos. Waiting 2 hours... Waiting 3 hours... Nothing happens. It would be nice if it at least added them one by one, but no, it waits an eternity and then adds all at once. At least in theory, right now it does absolutely nothing.
Shortly considered running it for more hours or even days on my Raspberry Pi, but that thing already struggles when using Chromium normally, I shouldn't bother it with anything that has to do with 5000 videos.
Ok, what else can I do then? Googling, trying out different things, mainly external services that have their own concept of "playlists" and can then add them to an arbitrary playlist later...
Even tried writing my own Java program with the YouTube API, but after about an hour not even the example program in the YouTube API tutorial worked (50 errors and even more open questions, woohoo), so I discarded that idea.
Then I discovered "DiskYT". Everything looked like it would work and I'm still convinced that I can do it with that little pile of shit. Why is it a pile of shit? Well, for example the site reloads itself after a while, so it can at most add 700 videos to a playlist. Also I can't just paste the channel link (even though it recognises those links, but just to show an error message that it can't copy from channels). I can't enter/paste URLs, I have to drag them. The site saves absolutely nothing (should in theory work, but in practise it doesn't), so I have to re-drag everything on every try. In one network, the "authorise YouTube" button (that I have to press again on every computer) does absolutely nothing ("inspect" reveals that there isn't even any action bound to the button), in another network the page mostly doesn't work at all or the button to copy from playlists is suddenly gone or other weird stuff. Luckily I have the WiFi at home, there it works in theory. But just on my desktop PC, no other device, wow. I tried to run it on my new laptop, but it's so new that it still has the preinstalled OS and there I can't deactivate going to standby when closing the laptop, so while I expected it to add 5000 videos, it instead added 4 and went to standby. But doesn't matter, because it would have failed at about 700 anyway. Every time I try to use this website, I get new problems, but it seems to still be the best option, because everything else just doesn't do anything. This page at least got to 700 before.

Continuing in first comment!

can't take this sh1t anymore, will start updating my CV today.

I have to steer wheels on this shitty php-related task with testing suites with latest guides written in 2014, code base of that suite got a shitton of changes.

When referring to original documentation and example that is not working and gives me loads of errors, community pricks just saying something like: don't use 6 year old tutorials!!! well, that is the latest I could find, so yeah -> basically go fuck yourself situation!

went alive from 1st part as I managed to make some hacky clusterfuck that works. now i had to switch library that has no documentation at all, has shitton of options and lattest update is like from 3 years ago, library that is connected had some breaking changes lately so to no surprise I can't get this shit to work!

Is whole php ecosystem just made of folks who simply doesn't give a fuck and latest knowledge update they had is like 4 years ago?

ofc I am excluding laravel community in this!

!rant

Well not really a CS teacher but it did happen to me during my uni days.

I had joined a marketing class as an elective since my Information Systems degree did have some business related stuff thrown in there.

One day the lecturer strutted in all smug and told us to take out a sheet of paper and we were gonna have a surprise test.

He has the test on a pen drive , apparently it was just 2 open ended type questions he was gonna plug into the class pc and send it to the projector screen.

To this day i have no clue what the hell he did, but that smug bastard managed to delete the test permanently 😂

He popped it in and we saw a few files there he selected them and was about to either drag to desktop or open them , the cursor changed to the wait hourglass , he right clicked and refreshed as if it would
Do anything but .... PooF.... Bye test 👋

He took the pen drive out and plugged it in again, but couldn't find the test file

He scowled then checked the desktop and recycle bin, nope 👎

He took his pen drive and silently walked out....

The other IT students and I were in stitches 😂

TLDR, need suggestions for a small team, ALM, or at least Requirements, Issue and test case tracking.

Okay my team needs some advice.

Soo the powers at be a year ago or so decided to move our requirement tracking process, test case and issue tracking from word, excel and Visio. To an ALM.. they choice Siemens Polarion for whatever reason assuming because of team center some divisions use it..

Ohhh and by the way we’ve been all engineering shit perfectly fine with the process we had with word, excel and Visio.. it wasn’t any extra work, because we needed to make those documents regardless, and it’s far easier to write the shit in the raw format than fuck around with the Mouse and all the config fields on some web app.

ANYWAY before anyone asks or suggests a process to match the tool, here’s some back ground info. We are a team of about 10-15. Split between mech, elec, and software with more on mech or elec side.
But regardless, for each project there is only 1 engineer of each concentration working on the project. So one mech, one elec and one software per project/product. Which doesn’t seem like a lot but it works out perfectly actually. (Although that might be a surprise for the most of you)..
ANYWAY... it’s kinda self managed, we have a manger that that directs the project and what features when, during development and pre release.

The issue is we hired a guy for requirements/ Polarion secretary (DevOps) claims to be the expert.. Polarion is taking too long too slow and too much config....

We want to switch, but don’t know what to. We don’t wanna create more work for us. We do peer reviews across the entire team. I think we are Sudo agile /scrum but not structured.

I like jira but it’s not great for true requirements... we get PDFs from oems and converting to word for any ALM sucks.. we use helix QAC for Misra compliance so part of me wants to use helix ALM... Polarion does not support us unless we pay thousands for “support package” I just don’t see the value added. Especially when our “DevOps” secretary is sub par.. plus I don’t believe in DevOps.. no value added for someone who can’t engineer only sudo direct. Hell we almost wanna use our interns for requirements tracking/ record keeping. We as the engineers know what todo and have been doing shit the old way for decades without issues...

Need suggestions for small team per project.. 1softwar 1elec 1mech... but large team over all across many projects.

Sorry for the long rant.. at the bar .. kinda drunk ranting tbh but do need opinions...

Looking at jest errors and loads of GitHub and StackOverflow issues, it's no surprise that people claim they don't like testing.

Maybe they would if we got our tooling right.

import { foo } from 'bar';

Nah, that's an unexpected token, jest does not like this syntax.

Using require, like in jest's getting started tutorial isn't compatible with my existing JS libraries exports.

Adding type: "module" in package.json just makes another error message appear instead.

Fucking developer experience!

Why bother with unit tests at all?

How come PHP is 10 years superior to JS when it comes to code quality, unit tests, and static code analysis?

I don't even care about "ES modules". I don't want to "mock" anything either. All I want to do is import a handful of JavaScript functions into another file.

Overengineered web dev stack sucks!

oh god, wake up snappy as a lubed tomato, ready for battle. Gotta take my adhd stimulant, namely Vyvanse or else it'd be cokedbenz-like, annoying the f*ck out of everyone cuz me wouldn't even manage to keep still.

So I take those 70mg punch and
my brain takes it like a sissy! It slows to a crawl, surprise, surprise motherf*cker, it's bed time, AGAIN!

Can't keep my peepers open. Why god, why that med gets me into hibernation mode??

No trouble, no trouble, son, pop some Ritalin and you'll be ready to go!

Alright, alrighty! Take a couple of those and it's like a coffin's final nail, Thanatos roundhouse kick to Dreamland! Wtf 😒

If I hadn't gone thru the "I don't need it", "better off without it" phase so many, many! times before, I'd consider not taking those, but I know, I know that even tho those first few days would be great, by week's end I'd find me self rampaging life and crashing like thunder, with a big bang

My fucking lazy-ass coworkers haven’t made meaningful progress on anything for months. I’m brought in as the tech lead and these stupid fucks didn’t work on any meaningful shit for literal months. Their manager was asleep at the wheel and their old tech leads apparently need months to make a couple of minor database changes.

So I’m brought in to fix it, and… surprise! They’re still lazy pedantic assholes. And they’re shocked - shocked - that people expect them to start completing a project or two per quarter. Like these dense motherfuckers thought that they could be the most annoying pedants this world has ever seen, and also do no work.

I could have done their whole 5 month project myself in a month. No joke. It’s incredibly simple. But somehow the overhead of coordinating people who A. don’t work very hard and B. assume that every ticket needs special attention and 6 hours of ponderous thought has eaten into the time we have.

I don’t respect them in the slightest. They’re such shitty developers. Whoever signed off on their hire was fucking high.

#Suphle Rant 9: a tsunami on authenticators

I was approaching the finish line, slowly but surely. I had a rare ecstatic day after finding a long forgotten netlify app where I'd linked docs deployment to the repository. I didn't realise it was weighing down on me, the thought of how to do that. I just corrected some deprecated settings and saw the 93% finished work online. Everything suddenly made me happier that day

With half an appendix chapter to go, I decided to review an important class I stole from my old company for clues when I need to illustrate something involved using a semblance of a real world example (in the appendix, not abstract foo-bar passable for the docs)

It turns out, I hadn't implemented a functionality for restricting access to resources to only verified accounts. It just hasn't been required in the scheme of things. No matter, should be a piece of cake. I create a new middleware and it's done before I get to 50 lines. Then I try to update the documentation but to my surprise, user verification status turns out to be a subset of authentication locking. Instead of duplicating bindings for both authentication and verification, dev might as well use one middleware that checks for both and throws exceptions where appropriate.

BUT!

These aspects of the framework aren't middleware, at all. Call it poor design but I didn't envisage a situation where the indicators (authentication, path based authorisation and a 3rd one I don't recall), would perform behaviour deviating from the default. They were directly connected to their handlers and executed after within the final middleware. So there's no way to replace that default authentication scheme with one that additionally checks for verification status.

Whew

You aren't going to believe this. It may seem like I'm not serious and will never finish. I shut my system down for that day, even unsure how those indicators now have to refactored to work as middleware, their binding and detachment, considering route collections are composed down a trie

I'm mysteriously stronger the following day, draw up designs, draft a bunch of notes, roll my sleeves, and the tsunami began. Was surprisingly able to get most of previous middleware tests passing again before bed, with the exception of reshuffled classes. So I guess we can be optimistic that those other indicators won't cause more suffering or take us additional days off course

I hate surprises.
I join office after a short leave and the other guy is out with a completely new product I have no clue of. (surprise 1)
Next, he's on leave and now I'm asked to fix bugs.(surprise 2)

Just for the curious, I ended up successfully fixing them and adding 2 features.

Self-isolation takes its toll on people's lives and, naturally, on interviews for our platform . So, a technical interview with a DevOps engineer at Zoom. The candidate started to surprise us already in the first minutes of the meeting. To begin with he apparently decided that the formality was enough at the first stage of the interview and decided to talk to the technical experts in a T-shirt and lying on the couch. That would have been fine, but in the middle of the interview his caring wife came in and insisted that the husband should eat his sandwiches and drink his tea. The candidate tried to remain unperturbed and undistracted, but his short "no", "don't want to", "come on!" didn't take effect. At one point, the applicant's wife escalated the tone of the conversation and threw a sandwich at him, promising to do the same with the tea. The supervisor and I became worried about the candidate and already in the voice of his wife began to persuade him to take a break for an afternoon snack. And such stressful interviews happen, and not at the company's initiative.

what the f....

So I'm making some changes to my setup. I'm relieving my current router from its duties and retiring it as a mini PC for my desktop setup. And I got my hands on a Dell Optiplex that will become my new router.

Now, firstly, the Optiplex came w/o a wifi antenna. I booted it up into a LinuxMint install USB for the first time and didn't expect much from it, but to my surprise, I got a popup: "There are wifi networks available". At that spot there was also my Fenvi PCI wifi card's antenna of my current (soon-to-be-previous) PC and it was barely seeing any wifi, and there came Optiplex with NO antenna attached to it and it managed to maintain stronger and more stable signal. wtf....

Alright, it's Fenvi, it's chinese -- there's probably not much I should expect from it.

Then I hooked it up right next to my current router with an external USB wifi adapter having 4x6dBi antennas on it, serving as my current wifi AP. Trying out hostapd configs, searching for the right channels,... should I test it? Naah, it still doesn't have an antenna - it won't reach my laptop. Meeh, for shits and giggles! `hostapd -d /etc/hostapd/hostapd_custom.conf`, on my lappy `nmcli d wifi rescan; sleep 5; nmcli d wifi` and... wtf... To my surprise, the AP was there! A thick wall away, no antenna whatsoever, and I still could connect to that Optiplex AP and post this rant!

What magic is this??? I'm now a bit concerned about ordering an antenna for it - I'm worried it could either worsen the signal or make it so strong that it'll fry my brains overnight.

Fucking hate to explain basic shit to computer illiterate. Usually I don't mind, but right know I working on the project, want to automate one thing I need to do every morning, put two numbers to web page(I will explain details maybe in next rant). So I am only one who fix, buys computers, printer(for some problems I call for other repair man.). Generally speaking working as IT guy. Firm has like 50 computers, some of them has SCADA software. Some computers have Win 7, some win 8 and others win 10, can't upgrade those computers, not enough money(I can deal with this problem). And yes, computer buying is not the fastest, easiest thing too. Because is public firm, I need to do public buying(I don't know how to translate to english), and most of the time wins the lowest price, I am ok with that. But I can't on item specification write I want that model pc or it components. Example: I can't write I want intel processor, however I can write number of cores, frequency. But it's not that bad, usually i have template for all things I buy. One of the worst thing is this, our firm bought new bookkeeping software version, old version was using visual foxpro framework. Good thing I didn't initiate the purchase, because right know I would be jobless, not because I would be fired, but because our senior accountant would drive me crazy. In fact accountants drive me crazy, but I can handle it for now. As I wrote before our form has about 120 workers, major part of workers are old, like my parents age. (I am 28 btw. Mom is 55.). As you all know what happens if you say you work with computers. So our accountants are like 60 years old, got new program, don't know how to work with it, and they ask me how to do certain things. if I don't know how to I ask program's support, every question is like 90 Eur. So in short accountants expect I should know their work and how program works. If I try say something they don't like, they try to make my day hard. Next thing is our billing program. Man that worked before me done some payments import. And when I came everyone expect me to do that. Ok I did that because that people working with billing program would probably fuck it up. And I semi automated that, so I don't mind that much. Sometimes that program fucks up, like it happened yesterday, it send email invoices attachment without filename. Example: people got this attachment ".pdf"(no filename, only extension), And if you save it you need do OPEN WITH command and then select pdf reader or rename file (I don't know what easier). And surprise surprise our firm, customer support redirects all phone calls, emails to me. But I did explain to customer support what to say to people. Still they redirect it to me.
PS: This is my first job after school. I work as part time.
TL;DR Thinking my life, carrier choices. accountants are not the nicest people.

I hate coming to work and not seeing my team. I’m contractor & expected to be there amongst the other SysAdmins. This **** make ya quit. I’m discouraged rn. I have interview for automated warehouse on Thurs. My contract almost up at current & have heard no talk of in-house hire. Not sure if I’m supposed to negotiate again or what but I have had no training and came out of nowhere as they struggle to keep and find talent and I kill it. I have completed projects, organized assets, closed mid-high ticket count weekly, etc. I like showing up. Imma go. Anyone got wisdoms or words for meh? Maybe it’s a surprise!!!🎉 Like a birthday or sumn.

I think its a bit of a cliche. But when I saw "The social network" I knew this is what I was gonna do. I always loved maths, physics and logic, though. So, I guess its no surprise I ended up being a dev.

Long time no rant.

Spent the last two days trying to figure out why a legacy app that I adopted (was a surprise considering I'm a database developer not c#).

Long story short horrendous view causing issues retrieving data in an app that is slow enough as it is.

I may have suggested starting a proper product roadmap and using sprint's etc for managing development of said app. And the boss agreed, currently the process is someone asks for a feature and we drop everything and develop it so things get forgotten/pushed to the back of the queue.

So to cut to the chase, can anyone suggest any places I can read up about managing this properly?

task: building classes for "yes, everything done and tested, okay"-API-Request1
result: the undocumented shit is broken, what a surprise.
alt.task: classes for request2
result: there is no controller named "ABC"
-.-***

Recently joined new Android app (product) based project & got source code of existing prod app version.

Product source code must be easy to understand so that it could be supported for long term. In contrast to that, existing source structure is much difficult to understand.

Package structure is flat only 3 packages ui, service, utils. No module based grouped classes.

No memory release is done. So on each screen launch new memory leaks keep going on & on.

Too much duplication of code. Some lazy developer in the past had not even made wrappers to avoid direct usage of core classes like Shared Preference etc. So at each place same 4-5 lines were written.

Too much if-else ladders (4-5 blocks) & unnecessary repetitions of outer if condition in inner if condition. It looks like the owner of this nested if block implementation has trust issues, like that person thought computer 'forgets' about outer if when inside inner if.

Too much misuse of broadcast receiver to track activities' state in the era of activity, apપ life cycle related Android library.

Sometimes I think why people waste soooo... much efforts in the wrong direction & why can't just use library?!!

These things are found without even deep diving into the code, I don't know how much horrific things may come out of the closet.

This same app is being used by many companies in many different fields like banking, finance, insurance, govt. agencies etc.

Sometimes I surprise how this source passed review & reached the production.

Okay..

So, what do I have here?
A cross platform mobile app with NO unit tests.
😕
I have to write a big new feature from scratch. (Things can't go wrong, right?)
Started working on it, pointed out problems with the UI/UX designs. The design changed multiple times, still I thought I could finish it by the expected date. And, so I did.
The feature went through testing, and they found bugs. (Surprise...?)
It's already kinda scary to touch someone's code that has no unit tests and no comments. And I think, it's all the more difficult to not introduce bugs.
Also, had to work on the weekend to fix the bugs.
I had some good learnings here, but I'm not sure how I can prevent bugs without unit tests and proper feedback cycle. :/

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I haven't been able to access ChatGPT since Friday. I thought it might help to delete all cookies so I did, and managed to access their login page. However, when clicking on "Log in", nothing happens, which shouldn't come as a surprise as there is no event listener on the button element, nor on any of its ancestors or descendants (see attached screenshot).

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