Customer at a first meeting:
- "Didn't realize you're a developer, you're almost good looking!"
Never got a more bittersweet compliment.

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." - Rich Cook

Fucking awesome. The 'encryption backdoor law' in Australia went through!

Now, whenever served with such warrants, companies which are active in Australia will have to pay hefty fines if they don't give encrypted messages to law enforcement in readable form. No matter whether this means just decrypting it with the keys they have or pushing backdoors/inject code into the messaging apps/services in order to extract the contents.

Now let's see how much the big companies really care about their users! (I'd expect them to pull out of Australia but the chance that this'll happen is as tiny as about nothing)

Today I learned: typing "man ascii" into the terminal on Linux will print out the ascii table.
Guess I don't need to go online to find it anymore

Anyone else put in headphones with absolutely no intention of listening to anything, just to make people less likely to bother you?

Damn Dijkstra!

Best DHCP server ever.

Employer bans StackOverflow and Github but still wants me to develop stuff. Planning to quit.

A client called

Client: Hello Mr. Can you come to our office today?

Me: Yes sure

In fews hours I was there

Client: Check this email we are getting every day

It was email from spammers who asking to redesigning their website because it was not responsive

Me: 🧐Thinking ‘valid point !’

Me: So what you need me to do for you then?

Client: We need you to redesign the site

Lol - thanks spammers for bringing in new client

If Doctors Were Like Coders
(cross-posted from https://medium.com/@c09b6133a238/...)

Problem: The patient has a broken leg.

Solution:

1. Ask the patient to reproduce the exact scenario that resulted in the broken leg. Watch closely to see if the leg breaks again. Check for consistency by repeating the scenario a few more times.

2. Explain that this isn’t an intended use case for the leg, and besides, it only affects one person. Ask the patient if, all things considered, he really wants to prioritize his broken leg over your other work.

3. Point out that the patient’s other leg performs just fine under the same circumstances. Ask if he can use his other leg instead, at least as a workaround.

4. Attach several accelerometers to the broken leg and break it again. Stare at the data received from the accelerometers, then shrug and declare it useless.

5. Decide that the patient’s problem must be in his spleen. After all, that’s the only part of his body you don’t really understand.

6. Track down the people who created the patient. Ask them if he’s ever had spleen problems before. When they seem confused, explain that he has a broken leg. Ignore them when they tell you that the spleen they created could not possibly cause a broken leg.

7. Ask Google where a person’s spleen is. Spend half an hour reading the Wikipedia article on Splenomegaly.

8. Open the patient and grumble about how tightly-coupled his spleen and circulatory system are. Examine the spleen’s outer surface to see if there are any obvious problems. Inform him that several of his organs are very old and he should consider replacing them with something more modern.

9. Compare the spleen to some pictures of spleens online. If anything looks different, try to make it look the same.

10. Remove the spleen completely. See if the patient’s leg is still broken. If so, put the spleen back in.

11. Tell the patient that you’ve noticed his body is made almost entirely out of cellular tissue, whereas most bodies these days are made out of cardboard. Explain that cardboard is a lot easier for beginners to understand, it’s more forgiving of newbie mistakes, and it’s the tissue franca of the Internet. Ask if he’d like you to rebuild his body with cardboard. It will take you longer, but then his body would be future-proof and dead simple. He could probably even fix it himself the next time it breaks.

12. Spend some time exploring the lymph nodes in the patient’s abdominal cavity. Accidentally discover that if the patient’s leg is held immobile for six weeks, it gets better.

13. Charge the patient for six weeks of work.

Dear team,

Train people well enough so they can leave

Treat them well enough so they don't want to

Regards,
A member of dev team

This guy

EDIT: devRant April Fools joke (2017)
-------------------------
@trogus and I have had an absolute blast working on devRant over the last year. However, we're strong believers in only working on a project if you're passionate about it, and over the last few months, we've sadly lost some of that passion so we've to announce, with heavy hearts, that we will both be moving on. We've decided to focus 100% of our energies on our next product, one which we are confident has billion dollar potential: Semicolon JS (http://semicolonjs.com).

We identified this sizable market opportunity as we were building out the new devRant website. Every JavaScript framework we tried left us wanting more. More efficiency. More elegance. More extensibility. That's what Semicolon JS is: more. More than a framework, it's a guiding philosophy. We believe that Semicolon JS will do for front end development what Material Design has done for user interface design. We're calling it Semicolon JS because even though you can still develop JavaScript without it, like a semicolon, we think it will soon become a standard and synonymous with quality JS development.

So comes the obvious question. What will happen to devRant? We wanted to make the announcement today because we will be officially shutting down the product in 30 days. So that gives everyone a full month to take in the last memories, look at those rants they really loved, and hopefully take some time to chat with @trogus and I about Semicolon JS and what we have planned.

With so many thanks and looking towards the future,
- @dfox and @trogus

Too true, too true...

When it's time to go into evil mode

okay, I promise.

:o didn't know it

Prevention..

Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*

We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:

- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings

Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!

*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*

Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason

*audience: ooooohhhhh*

You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.

*audience: laughs*

Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.

Backstory:

We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!

... oh to have a time machine

Working with C:

- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.

- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".

- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.

- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.

- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.

- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.

- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.

... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.

- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:

Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"

... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?

- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.

- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).

- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.

- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.

- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.

- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?

You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.

I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.

Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex

I'm browsing DevRant, giggling to myself, my girlfriend asks to see why I'm laughing,

I show her...
*Stares at it with a blank look on her face*
"I don't get it, explain it for me please"

I explain that: even if I explain it to her, she STILL wouldn't understand.

2 hours later she's made her first "Hello World" Java App so she can join DevRant 😂😂😂