!rant

After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:

1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.

2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)

3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.

4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.

5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.

6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.

7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.

8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.

9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)

10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...

These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!

😎 = me, 💩 = client

💩: "I must emphasize that I'm on a tight schedule. I need this done in 2 weeks."
😎: I cut some features and take the job.
As agreed, I send a progress report at the end of the week to get feedback.
💩: *nothing*
😎: He must be busy... I'll call him if he doesn't reply in a few days.
💩: *doesn't answer call*
😎: Time running out, still no feedback, I assume everything is fine and finish it a day before the deadline. Suddenly:
💩: "Hi, how's the project going?"
😎: "...good... WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN???"
💩: "Oh, I went on a quick vacation"
😎: *wants to die a quick and painless death*
"There's only like a day left..."
💩: "Right... Soo, here's the feedback you asked for"
*dumps 4 paragraphs of stupid nitpicking on me (rants following)*
😎: *wants client to die a slow and painful death*

My boss is technically restricted shall we say.

As the cto I have also been designated office IT guy. Which means apparently fixing the printer. Which is ok I guess. I mean it's bullsh*t but hey.

Anyway, about 6 months ago he said he needed a new laptop. He lives his life in excel and outlook, and even though the whole company uses google docs for everything he still exports everything to excel, makes a copy, then saves it back to drive so everything gets out of sync.

It's a fun problem that I have banned everyone from doing obviously but he continues.

Anyway, anyway, he wanted a new windows laptop naturally. I said to spend about £700 on a decent machine rather than buying something cheap that will frustrate and not last long.

He doesn't listen and gets some old windows 7 machine for £300. It's an alright spec for 2009; he must not have got the memo about it being 2017.

4 months go by and he says he needs a new laptop because this one is too slow (not least because he opens 400 chrome tabs and never reboots his machine). Anyway, I fix the problem of uninstalling all his bloatware and it runs quicker but he has his heart set on a new machine.

He insists.

I suggest he spend the money this time so he literally doesn't buy a new one in 4 months. I suggest the surface book that's £1200. A little overpriced but he will love the touch screen, it's powerful enough and it's windows. Ticks all the boxes for him.

He suddenly decides he wants a Mac.

I tell him it will be a nightmare for everyone if he does that.

He insists.

I suggest the Mac book pro as I've had mine for 6 years now and it's still going strong. It's a little more expensive than the surface but it will last.

He then says he wants the air.

I say they haven't updated them in ages and they aren't actually that powerful.

He insists.

That night he just buys an air from the Apple Store.

WHY THE FU*k ARE YOU ASKING ME FOR ADVICE IF YOURE NOT GOING TO LISTEN YOU MOTHERFUC*er. WASTING MY TIME AND YOURS.

Was very close to rage quitting when he wanted me to back up his old machine but didn't bring in his hard drive and didn't want to put it in the cloud. #whatDoYouWantMeToDoWithYourOldPornCollection

To top it all off I ran some benchmarks and my 6 year old Mac book pro is more powerful than his "brand new" air.

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

*sitcom audience cheers*

Thank you, thank you. Ok so far we've had a developer from hell and a CEO who shot to fame for being the first rectum to receive a passport and be given a job.

2 pretty strong entrants if you ask me. But its time to slow it down and make sure everyone gets a fair chance. Its not all just about the psychopaths and assholes, what about the general weirdo's and the stoners who just made life awkward?

So here we go, Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 3, "A".

"A" was a bit of an unusual developer, despite having a few years experience in his home country, he applied for an unpaid internship to come work with us ... probably should have rang alarm bells but hey we were all young and dumb back then.

I had to say I felt very bad for A, as he suffered from 2 very serious, and job crippling personal conditions / problems

- Email induced panic attacks
- Extreme multifaceted attachment disorder (also known in layman terms as "get the fuck away from me, and do your job" syndrome)

While he never openly discussed these conditions, it was clear from working with him, that he had gone undiagnosed for years. Every time an email would come in no matter how simple ... even the services team asking to confirm his staff ID, would send him into a panic causing him to drop everything he was doing and like a homing missile find me anywhere in the building and ask me what to do.

Actually "A" also suffered from a debilitating literacy issue too, leaving him completely unable to read our internal wiki's himself. Every week we had to follow a set of steps to upgrade something and every week to mask his issue, he'd ask me what to do instead ... no matter how many times I sat with him previously ... must have been truly embarrassing for him.

But "A"'s finest moment in the company, by far, was the day where out of the blue, at the top of his voice (as if wearing headphones ... without wearing headphones) he asked

"DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO SELLS POT?"

... why no, manager of the entire department standing behind you, I do not

... why no, tech lead talking to manager, I do not

... why hello 50% of my team staring at me ... no "A", I do not!

Needless to say all our team meetings were a little awkward for the next few weeks after that but hey who doesn't like being thought of as a stoner / drug dealer by their team mates huh?

Will A make it to the top of the list of most incompetent? Well he has some truly logic defining competition yet to be announced.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

string excuses[]={
"it's not a bug it's a feature",
"it worked on my machine",
"i tested it and it worked",
"its production ready",
"your browser must be caching the old content",
"that error means it was successful",
"the client fucked it up",
"the systems crashed and the code got lost" ,
"this code wont go into the final version",
"It's a compiler issue",
"it's only a minor issue",
"this will take two weeks max",
"my code is flawless must be someone else's mistake",
"it worked a minute ago",
"that was not in the original specification",
"i will fix this",
"I was told to stop working on that when something important came up",
"You must have the wrong version",
"that's way beyond my pay grade",
"that's just an unlucky coincidence",
"i saw the new guy screw around with the systems",
"our servers must've been hacked",
"i wasn't given enough time",
"its the designers fault",
"it probably won't happen again",
"your expectations were unrealistic",
"everything's great on my end",
"that's not my code",
"it's a hardware problem",
"it's a firewall issue",
"it's a character encoding issue",
"a third party API isn't responding",
"that was only supposed to be a placeholder",
"The third party documentation is wrong",
"that was just a temporary fix.",
"We outsourced that months ago.","
"that value is only wrong half of the time.",
"the person responsible for that does not work here anymore",
"That was literally a one in a million error",
"our servers couldn't handle the traffic the app was receiving",
"your machines processors must be too slow",
"your pc is too outdated",
"that is a known issue with the programming language",
"it would take too much time and resources to rebuild from scratch",
"this is historically grown",
"users will hardly notice that",
"i will fix it" };

I hate when I go on stack overflow to find an answer, and all the comments for the correct answer say, "awesome thanks!", "Works perfectly now, thanks!". While I sit staring at my screen feeling like a complete idiot because I don't understand the given answer at all!

This is my river baby, a laptop that was broken by its previous owner. It came to me with many dents (I covered those with stickers) and in a not booting state for about $300 after the guy dropped it in a river in South America.

- There is river sediment inside the screen, as well as the motherboard.
- If I put two sticks of RAM in it, the display artifacts all over the place and the computer crashes randomly. One slot must be empty.
- The ODD was filled with literal garbage. There is now a hard drive in its place.
- Running Windows through a VM would cause the WiFi to fail in a confusing manner. No one had ever seen that type of error before. I had to reseat the AirPort card.
- At one point, the power button stopped working, so I removed the keyboard and would start the computer by shorting two pads on the motherboard with a screwdriver.
- I’ve had all sorts of strange issues with it because of the water damage.
- I colored the keyboard with cellophane... 😅

After taking it apart for the 100th time, it’s now completely stable. I’ve had it for about 4 years, but it’s getting slow. I’m not sure what will come after the beloved river baby...

We have a customer that runs an extremely strict security program, which disallows any type of outside connection to their servers.
In order to even correspond with them via email you must undergo background checks and be validated. Then you sign an NDA and another "secrecy level" contract.

Today they had a problem, I was the one assigned to fix it. I asked for a screenshot.
We already use an encrypted mail service, which runs via a special VPN that has enough layers of protection to slow down a photon to the speed of a snail.
The customer's sysadmin encrypted the screenshot and sent it to me.

I open the screenshot and....
He runs Windows 10, uses Google Chrome and has Facebook's WhatsApp desktop app flashing orange in the tray.

😐😣😫😖

Rich CEO's are so out of touch with reality.

We outsourced part of our software development to a third world country. During hiring process I had pushed for us to hire the more expensive, more experienced devs in a second-world country, but nooo we must save up those bucks. The pay is so low you wouldn't be able to afford rent in *city where CEO lives*.

As @GiddyNaya has ranted about, third world countries face impossibly slow internet and frequent blackouts. I also ranted about it in my last post. The "last straw" for the CEO was when our dev's computer started malfunctioning.

boss: When is that computer from?

dev: 2017

boss: 2017?! That's a dinosaur! Of course you're having battery problems!

me, trying to come up with an affordable solution for our dev: Well, you can have the battery switched.

boss: But 2017 is too old! Your computer should be *at most* 5 years old. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have your work-related tools working. (last sentence is ad verbatim)

The boss, of course, recommended a Mac. Mind you, the closest Apple store to our dev is 500km away! And a month of their salary will not come close to paying a Macbook.

Providing them with the equipment? No! We're already paying them a "competitive" salary!

Like seriously, how out of touch with reality can you be? Does greed blind you that much?

(The dev seems to have fixed the computer problems on his own tho)

!!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.

Post Anger Rant (Beware, Long rant ahead)

So there is this project we have been working for months, most of the devs involved are jr students so I was leading them in the architecture and what to do and they were doing it, the progress was slow but safe and fun.

On the team there was this guy, someone I trusted and in who I had special interest for his skills, so I let him own the github repo.

So the day of the first demo I pull the backend changes ( I had been working on front end ) and I realize that the code was different, so I started using my super awesome forensic skills to find what happened,and when I say different I mean a totally different architecture different database connections, different service pirts, basically other project, so during my criminal investigation I found out this guy I trusted had never really worked with us, from the beginning he went solo working on his own project and changing everything because of some tutorial he found on the internet, so I decided to reset to the previous version just to find out that he had already deployed the code and that a lot of fixes that we should have were only on his version.

So I went and confront him telling him that he did wrong and he had to learn team work and that I was trying to teach them good practices and he waits and asks me "so, my code was wrong?" Seriously what da hell dude? I'm talking about team work and all you can think about is your code.

Finally he admitted his mistake and repented (I think), but seriously how arrogant must you be to ignore a whole team, specially when on your first real project.

First rant. 3 years in my first job as a developer. It's been great. I've learned a ton. But the past 6 months have been awful. Our client is forcing us to remote into a cloud pc, which we then use to remote into Ubuntu. All development must be done this way. Everything is extremely slow. To the point that you can type faster than the screen can update. I want to jump out of the window. I'd basically have to move to get a new job, which Im not really into. Just bought a house a year ago, family is here, blah blah. Just hoping if I ride it out, client will wise up and let us use our own computer again.

devCraft {
Closing the minecraft server for a little while!
I'll be adding mods, writing up a perms file, and hosting the pack on git! I'll post a rant with the repo link.
One of our lovely ranters offered a VM to host the server on, so the ip is probably gonna change as well! (i also gotta make an arch bootable USB, and running the server would slow that down lol)
i'll notify you all once it's donevia a rant, like i said. until then, formulate plans, and suggest some developer-related mods for me to add in! (must be 1.7.10)
Currently planned mods are:
- ComputerCraft
- Applied Energistics
- Buildcraft
- Project Red
and a few from whatever you guys suggest. see you then!
}

We have to use this tool in work for classifying new and existing projects for GDPR. Long story short you have to fill out a REALLY long questionnaire, then it gets reviewed by someone in legal. The tool will also assign you tasks and suggest actions to common issues (e.g. suggesting a banner to explain cookie policy if you tick a certain box).

I have spent about an hour trying to re-assign the assessment I started, as i'm due to leave the company in a few days, to the guy taking over from me.

1. There is a “generate shareable URL” button, with the ability to click a button that says “replace me with the logged in user who opens this”. All it does is duplicate the name and description fields and send a new copy to that person, with no access to any of my other content or answers.

2. I did find a re-assign button eventually, again all it does it create a duplicate, and throws and error saying names must be unique when I try to save it.

3. While I couldn’t find a way to do that, I did find another button to at least assign the reviewer. It told me i’m forbidden to change the reviewer on assessments i’ve created.

This is THE WORST piece of nonsensical shit on earth. The entire application is absolute garbage and sssssssooooooo slow.

When you first create an assessment it brings you to a page that has all the questions, makes sense right? Wrong. All the questions are in read-only mode, and they are simply there as a "this is what you can expect to see later on", telling you whether or not they will be freeform, multiple choice etc.

The way to actually answer the questions is to click the "start survey" button hidden in the "status" dropdown.

I don't have much advice to anyone around GDPR, but please stay the hell away from TrustArc.

Buffer usage for simple file operation in python.

What the code "should" do, was using I think open or write a stream with a specific buffer size.

Buffer size should be specific, as it was a stream of a multiple gigabyte file over a direct interlink network connection.

Which should have speed things up tremendously, due to fewer syscalls and the machine having beefy resources for a large buffer.

So far the theory.

In practical, the devs made one very very very very very very very very stupid error.

They used dicts for configurations... With extremely bad naming.

configuration = {}
buffer_size = configuration.get("buffering", int(DEFAULT_BUFFERING))

You might immediately guess what has happened here.

DEFAULT_BUFFERING was set to true, evaluating to 1.

Yeah. Writing in 1 byte size chunks results in enormous speed deficiency, as the system is basically bombing itself with syscalls per nanoseconds.

Kinda obvious when you look at it in the raw pure form.

But I guess you can imagine how configuration actually looked....

Wild. Pretty wild. It was the main dict, hard coded, I think 200 entries plus and of course it looked like my toilet after having an spicy food evening and eating too much....

What's even worse is that none made the connection to the buffer size.

This simple and trivial thing entertained us for 2-3 weeks because *drumrolls please* none of the devs tested with large files.

So as usual there was the deployment and then "the sudden miraculous it works totally slow, must be admin / it fault" game.

At some time it landed then on my desk as pretty much everyone who had to deal with it was confused and angry, for understandable reasons (blame game).

It took me and the admin / devs then a few days to track it down, as we really started at the entirely wrong end of the problem, the network...

So much joy for such a stupid thing.

Customer complains that the deployed desktop app is slow at site x.
I check it out with users at site x, and indeed, it does have a delay when trying to connect to a share on a server.
Checks with users at site y and z, no issues.
After a bit of digging, the resolve of a DNS record is most likely the culprit.
Send the ticket to the customer network team to investigate.
Get it back after an hour.

"We have pinged the DNS name, and it responds fine, there must be a bug in the application".

Oh and also, I wrote this rant at work, in my head, with a lot more cursewords involed.

Long long time ago when recharge coupons we a thing, I used to try out more codes in the series and waste my time. After failing a lot over this, I started trying out different USSD codes to see what other stuff is out there. This got me to stumble upon facebook and twitter on USSD. I'm not sure now but, twitter was probably *515# from my carrier.

Facebook. I remember chatting for quite a long period using this. Very slow and limited yet, fun. The USSD message expires within ~60secs. so you have to type the chat message before that or you lose everything you typed. The phone was no smartphone that would allow me to copy the text from the USSD input. On top of that panic, was a character limit to these messages. I remember hitting send while being midway through a message just so I don't lose what I typed, on a T-9 keyboard. Still miss those!

The person on the other side would receive a half message due to this, and would start replying without any patience, to which I panicked as now there's a new thing to respond to, and a half message which I'm waiting to complete.

Later over the weekend when I was allowed to visit the cyber cafe for an hour or two with 15-30 INR, reading the chat threads, being able to use the five sticker packs:) and thus continuing on a computer was fun. But, as the time at the cafe expires, I had to immediately shut off my session or I'd be charged more. Thus, I was left in the middle of a conversation again, and had to continue over USSD.

Using social media without any internet like this was quite fun in a weird way. If I get a new message, I'd get a USSD alert, and then an sms if I didn't reply in some 10-15mins!

This had all the features like like and comment. Friend requests too. For the posts in a "timeline" which was new and fancy in those days, all you see is the caption of a post which also gets truncated quite a bit as USSD also has to show it's options like:
1. Like
2. Comment
3. Next Post
4. Main Menu

This was around '13 or '14 I guess. After which I later got my first computer- a laptop. Anyways, the tactile feel of pressing the buttons on a T-9 keypad is nostalgic to me. 😅 And if you were a pro at texting, u must hv used shrtcts lyk dis too w/ emojis lyk :-) <3

Dev: Sends weekly update email on Friday, as drudgingly required by management, outlining that stress level is high recently in the past two weeks and constant polling for feedback and updates is stressing him out, needs to slow down the pace

Management: (ON A FUCKING SATURDAY): "Received your email @fullStackChris"

WOW! THANKS FOR THAT INSIGHTFUL UPDATE! I BET YOU DID! I HAVE NO DOUBT GOOGLE'S SMTP SERVERS ARE RUNNING PROPERLY. AND AFTER READING IT, YOU HAVE THE AUDACITY TO @ ME IN A WHATSAPP MESSAGE. ON A FUCKING SATURDAY. I DON'T WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU, I DON'T WANT TO THINK ABOUT THE COMPANY OR ITS TASKS UNTIL MONDAY. PLEASE STOP.

I mean they must be fucking with me at this point, right guys? Maybe I should start writing stuff like "I need more tasks and more messages throughout the day" then I would probably receive less, I mean wtf is actually going on.

FUCK reddit

Seriously fuck reddit. I just wanted to post a fucking Question but noooo you must have Karma to post it. Your account has to be old af. Which dickhead designed the god damn karma system???? I'll never try to use that fuckin platform again, the user experience is horrible and their official app is absolute trash. It's slow and buggy, even a fucking 12 year old can code a better client.

Argghhhh I am angry

My ideal dev job, would be a job I can show compassion towards. A team I can be proud of and learn from. And a vibrant workspace with likeminded individuals who just want to improve themselves even if they feel their at their pinnacle.

My current office tries to make use of new technologies, we've embedded docker, vagrant, a few ci systems on an in need basis per team, and a lot of other tools.

My only real qualms are they feel indifferent towards new languages and eco systems ( Node.js, GoLang, etc ). Our web team is still using angular.js 1.x, bower, refuses to look into webpack or a new framework for our front end which is currently being bogged down by angulars dirty checking.

Our automated quality assurance team is forced to use Python for end to end testing, I've written an extensive package to make their lives easier including an entire JavaScript interface for dispatching events and properly interacting with custom DOMs outside of the scope of the official selenium bindings.

Our RESTful services are all using flask and Python, which become increasingly slow with our increase in services. I've pushed for the use of Node or GoLang with a GraphQL interface but I'm shot down consistently by our principle engineers who believe everything and anything must be written in Python.

I could go on, but tldr; I'm 21 and I have a ton of aspirations for web development. I'd like to believe I'm well rounded for my age, especially without any formal education. I'd love to be surrounded by individuals who want the same, to learn and architect the greatest platforms and services possible.

The website load time is so fucking slow!!
FIX IT!!

And i saw the images they uploaded was a jupiter-sized images.

It's the devs fault for not making validation.

But me, as a designer must help them resize those fucking already uploaded images to be web-friendly.

I hate the elasticsearch backup api.

From beginning to end it's an painful experience.

I try to explain it, but I don't think I will be able to cover it all.

The core concept is:
- repository (storage for snapshots)
- snapshots (actual backup)

The first design flaw is that every backup in an repository is incremental. ES creates an incremental filesystem tree.

Some reasons why this is a bad idea:
- deletion of (older) backups is slow, as newer backups need to be checked for integrity
- you simply have to trust ES that it does the right thing (given the bugs it has... It seems like a very bad idea TM)
- you have no possibility of verification of snapshots

Workaround... Create many repositories as each new repository forces an full backup.........

The second thing: ES scales. Many nodes / es instances form a cluster.

Usually backup APIs incorporate these in their design. ES does not.

If an index spans 12 nodes and u use an network storage, yes: a maximum of 12 nodes will open an eg NFS connection and start backuping.

It might sound not so bad with 12 nodes and one index...

But it get's pretty bad with 100s of indexes and several dozen nodes...

And there is no real limiting in ES. You can plug a few holes, but all in all, when you don't plan carefully your backups, you'll get a pretty f*cked up network congestion.

So traffic shaping must be manually added. Yay...

The last thing is the API itself.

It's a... very fragile thing.

Especially in older ES releases, the documentation is like handing you a flex instead of toilet paper for a wipe.

Documentation != API != Reality.

Especially the fault handling left me more than once speechless...

Eg:
/_snapshot/storage/backup
gives you a state PARTIAL
/_snapshot/storage/backup/_status
gives you a state SUCCESS

Why? The first one is blocking and refers to the backup status itself. The second one shouldn't be blocking and refers to the backup operation.

And yes. The backup operation state is SUCCESS, while the backup state might be PARTIAL (hence no full backup was made, there were errors).

So we have now an additional API that we query that then wraps the API of elasticsearch. With all these shiny scary workarounds like polling, since some APIs are blocking which might lead to a gateway timeout...

Gateway timeout? Yes. Since some operations can run a LONG (multiple hours) time and you don't want to have a ton of open connections hogging resources... You let the loadbalancer kill it. Most operations simply run in ES in the background, while the connection was killed.

So much joy and fun, isn't it?

Now add the latest SMR scandal and a few faulty (as in SMR instead of CMD) hdds in a hundred terabyte ZFS pool and you'll get my frustration level.

PS: The cluster has several dozen terabyte and a lot od nodes. If you have good advice, you're welcome - but please think carefully about this fact.

I might have accidentially vaporized people sending me links with solutions that don't work on large scale TM.

Sooo a coworker and I tonight were working on some software and somehow got side tracked on discussion regarding our thinking process, and how one of our other coworkers always things so strangely always defensive etc.. which then lead us to saying it would be nice if we could like see and feel how another persons brain is and how they draw conclusions and think..
this conversion immediately changed to the inner-monologue discussion.

And holy shit went go distracted for 4 hours tonight!

I have inner monologue, visual, auditory, symbolic and non symbolic abstract thinking in my mind, and it’s all happening at the same time, like a million miles a minute.

The other coworker has no inner monologue at all.

4 hours questioning each other trying to understand how the other one things then debating what we believe how the one perticular Coworker thinks. And then placing bets on what we think all the other coworkers are.

I’ve never had such a deep discussion on how my brain works nor how someone else thinks.

Like I was like joking but serious not in a bad way I’m not crazy my brain switches thinking depending on the situation I don’t have to. Try or think about it just occurs..

Like remembering things I’ll daisy chain and hop pictures, words and thoughts to bring back things but no effort it just occurs.
When a song is playing I can remember the last time I heard that song or part of the song I can feel how it was, I can see what I was doing what was happening in the world etc.
In the shower or driving I will have debates in my mind and play scenarios out in my mind on how a conversation or situation will go. I visually see and hear and feel the conversation that did or did not occur at that time. And I can jump to “playing” each person.

Or when a large decision is to be made or brainstorming an idea to me I like having the British parliament in a room, and debating the topic.

When people are talking I visually see what they are saying.

I thought EVERYONE was like this.. apparently not lol.

But this conversation did bring up a lot of realization of why I can quickly jump to conclusions or quickly move thru a conversation or concept but my coworker is lagging behind. Or having a hard time visualizing what I’m saying, thus me drawing it very fast and him/them saying how did you come up with that that quickly... ugh because in my mind I’ve already drew it up I’m just drawing what I see. Almost having to slow down and go back in time to explain something to them.

THEN we called a few of my “Star” interns haha and asked them, apparently they are all think the same way I do or atleast somewhat, which explains why some people I work i able to express ideas and continue thru a topic very quickly. While others I must slow down.

We need more of these discussions until now I had no idea there was “a different way people mentally process things” the entire conversation was very enlightening for the both of us, now I know what I must do differently and so does the other one.

But then we thought what caused this? Is this a learned trait from experience as a child? Or evaluation? Or just the deck of cards we are delt? Is this left hand people or right hand? I’m left hand and the two interns are left hand and they think the same, but the other coworker in the discussion was a right hander.. then we thought was this a result of imaginary friends as a young child? Was this a result of reading as a young child? Is one version better at math than the other.. music etc... is this a result of hyperactive brain? Drugs? Could drugs induce it? What does alcohol do to it...

Yeah we questioned all these things and more seriously went down the rabbit hole tonight... lmfao, tomorrow we will be surveying the rest of the team to see if we can draw any spurious informer conclusions and how accurate our bets were based on what we know personality wise of the other coworkers

SOOOOO thoughts???? Hahah

How many of y’all knew the other type existed? What type are you? And are you introverted or extroverted? Any rational relations we can connect to better explain this shit?

"Download our app for some lovely additional ass licking features....."

Why tech industry love apps? also I hate these days not only mobile phones, but also computers are in progression of "applification."

Programs are only installed do some advanced things that were absurd and inappropriate to work on web browser. like video editing or programming, or file management.. etc. but in recent days, everything is fucking apps. why just not improve your web version of your service and make the shortcut from that? Weather app. youtube app. reddit app. 'tips' app by apple that is totally useless. news app. map app. so much wasteful. these kind of services are MUST be on the UPPER layer than the web browser laid on. also apps are taking much resources on local hardware and that makes my hardware too much slow.

That is not how tech works. that is not how software engineering, hardware engineering works, every single thing in technology must NOT work like that. If it does, then that is not technology, and just stack of cow shit.

!rant

I was just browsing around on devRant as usual and I got an idea. Though I'm pretty sure many people must have had it already.

But still, don't you guys think it would be nice to not hide the rant when you tap on it to expand because on slow networks it takes a long time to load the whole rant so we as users could just read the short version of the rant while it's being loaded and save some time. We could then just tap a long rant for it to expand and then read the smaller version until it does, it'll just save time I think.

Sorry if it sounds stupid..! :/

pgAdmin 4.29 was released while I was downloading 4.28. Those guys release a new version every month...

must be my slow internet connection

So there is this owner team who reviewed my code recently. I don't have much context about the their system and architecture. We try to build our changes with less context and rely in owner team's knowledge for any review gap.
The guy from the owner team missed something in my review and changes went to prod, review already took more that it was expected to take. He took 1 week for small change reviews. Now, not him but with someone else's advice they had to revert.
I wrote a mail shooting to manager, the guy who reverted and the guy who reviewed, asking the reviewer guy to explain why didn't he mentioned about any issues at the time of the review.
I have tried best from my side. But all this, god!!!
Why everything I do has some kind of weird issue. I feel so bad blaming the guy, I just think that, the way I used to feel anxious he must be feeling the same, but what can I do? I don't want to take the blame I don't even see if I can and I shouldn't be. If it was a major issue it should have been raised but he didn't. I feel so bad that I am almost crying, I am feeling that like always I am going to be judged by my team that work is slow and on top of that I can't do anything for the guy I blamed it on.

I don't know, is it my mistake? but I cannot think of anyway I would have known this.

Just when I thought that surely a single SIMD dot product instruction must be the fastest way to calculate a damn dot product on a processor, agner fogs instruction tables come flying out, hitting me over the head telling me that manually calculating a dot product may actually be faster sometimes

Why must computers be like this?

I just came out of a bad relationship with hardware rasterization being horribly slow and now I can't even trust my processor to do things properly

This is how people develop trust issues

Many smartphone cameras lack the ability to turn off burst shot mode.

The burst shot feature on smartphone camera software is almost always not helpful, only annoying. All it does is spam the storage with useless near-duplicate photos.

"Then simply don't hold the camera shutter button!"

Sometimes, this happens by accident. Or the phone has an I/O lag in the moment of releasing the shutter button, so the release of the shutter button is not registered and burst mode is initiated after the I/O lag.

The only purpose of burst shot seems to be making many low light photos to find one that is not shaken. Even then, there must be an option to turn it off.

Also, the point-and-shoot intuition of holding the camera shutter button to set focus and exposure, and releasing to capture a photo is far more convenient. On newer phones, that has been replaced with highly annoying burst shots.

"Then use a third-party app that does allow turning off burst mode."

The problem with third-party applications is that they are awfully slow, since they can not be optimized for a specific device like pre-installed camera applications are. This slowness, as one might expect, leads to missed moments.
On some smartphones, third-party applications can not even access all camera features, such as 2160p video recording. Some phones use a proprietary API that can only be accessed with the pre-installed camera app.

So I have given this small project, which should be a work of maximum a week.

But unfortunate things are happening. I couldn't work for week due to some personal things so took a week off. And now can't be productive because another thing happened.
I have been a very slow developer and it's been 4 years in industry. People with less skills are earning more.
I don't know what my colleagues or stakeholders must be thinking about me.

VSCode. I used to be a WebStorm guy, but at one point I found out that I could do like 85% of the stuff in VSCode, and switched over. Things I still kinda miss from the JetBrains ecosystem:
- the elaborate refactoring
- the built-in navigation across the file and the project
- the really clever expand select and go to open/closing bracket (VSCode is kinda getting there, but for expand select it honours camel case words and that can't be turned off, it's weird with HTML files with inlined JS or CSS; for bracket jumping it must rely on an extension)
- the way that everything within the UI is predictable and navigable with keyboard only (tried opening a dropdown in VSCode without having a specific keybinding for that specific dropdown? In WebStorm it was Alt+Up/Alt+Down for any dropdown that has focus IIRC)
- the visual way of changing a colour theme (in VSCode you have to guess what is what before modifying a value; by the way this is an idea for an extension that I might research)

What I like about VSCode:
- the speed (although it can get slow with large files; on the other hand JetBrains IDEs are not that slow except for the startup, given that you're not working on a potato, but here we are)
- its extensibility and very active extension development (and the fact that it's rather easy to write your own extensions, although I haven't benefited from that very much)
- the ease of syncing settings (the Settings Sync extension and now the built-in mechanism introduced I think earlier this month)
- it's free (so I don't have to pay for it myself or nag to my employer to issue me a license)

I've tried Sublime and it's hands down the fastest thing I've seen (it can open a 100 MB text file on the shittiest computer you can find and edit it efficiently), the problem is that it's not so rich in extensions. I've tried vim, nano and whatnot, but I'm far from that, just not my cup of tea. I'm okay for the occasional file edit while SSHd somewhere, but that's all.

In an ideal world we'd have something like Sublime's performance with VSCode's ecosystem and JetBrains', well, brains...