How do you even come up with shit like this?

I have a confession to make.
I do most of my java coding in comic sans ;-;
IT MAKES ME HAPPY FOR SOME REASON

5 words horror story

The beginning of my freelancing time. I was so naive. Didn't even used contracts...

This one client wanted a website with 2 specific features until a certain time. It should look nice, but only the features functionality was defined. All seemed reasonable at first.

I delivered 2 weeks before the deadline. The client was furious, as it didn't look like they imagined. They wrote me 8 lengthy emails with very fractioned feedback. It was becoming unreasonable.

But hey, I'm a newbie in this business. I have to make myself a name, I thought.
Oh was I naive....

This whole project went on for 2 more months. The client was unhappy with every change and 2-5 emails a day with new demands were coming in. I was changing things they wanted done 2 days ago, because they changed their mind.

Then they started to get personal. They were insulting me and even my family. My self-confidence dropped to an all-time low.

In the end I just sent them all the code for free and went to therapy.

BTW: this was also my most important experience, as things went up hill from then on. As Yoda once said: The greatest teacher, failure is.

The horror that is nowadays called "Skype for business"

Who's ready for some horror?

Want to read a horror story?

Number of computers
1900: 0
1950: 100
1980: 10000
1990: 1000000
2000: 1000000000
2010: 1000000000000000000
2020: 1
2030: 1
2040: 1
2050: 1

I used to do some freelancing and one of the main clients I worked with had a project they hired me for that used Drupal. I fucking hated it. I thought it was bloated (and slow as fuck), unnecessarily complex, and just all around a horror to work with.

Even though that was many years ago, from other devs I've met, it seems like Drupal never really got much better. One devops guy who worked at the previous company I was at told me about some benchmarks he had done on Drupal in his previous work. The performance results he got were an absolute joke - awful concurrent performance and just a brutally slow CMS.

Needless to say, since that freelance project, I've never used Drupal again and never will.

Story time:

I was once working on a project that dealt with incredibly sensitive financial data.

We needed a client’s database to do a migration.

They wouldn’t send it over the internet because it was too big and they didn’t think it would be secure.

They opt to send it in the post on an encrypted usb drive.

(Fair enough thinks I)

USB drive arrives.
Is indeed encrypted.

MFW there’s a post it note in the envelope with the password on.

MFW this is a billion dollar multinational petrochem company.

MFW this same company’s ‘sysadmin’ and ‘dba’ once complained because a SQL script I sent them didn’t work - they’d pasted it twice and couldn’t work this out from the fucking “table already created” error message management studio was throwing at them.

Sad but true

Toolbars d horror :P :D...

woke up at 5am

no alarm clock was required

my fucking passion woke me up to get up and code.

i coded outside in my backyard

felt like cold war

it was night

it was dark

a depressing horror atmosphere

just like my whole life

2 hours later i started seeing sun

it was cold outside. alone. in the dark. my arms were freezing.

but 2 hours later i managed to code the feature. it worked.

3 hours have passed. im ripped. quentally.

doing it here. inside now. started the day happy. dropped bullshit from day before. cleanser of all toxicss.

fuck the past. the past will pull you down and kill you.

this. remember. always do not forget.

Forever Alone :'(

So a user reported they couldn't login to our site, so I reset their password to:

uI+ffRT7M2NAzo8uOqzf4QxO3I9tj8PJ4TS0n8zDV7I

And sent them back an email with the updated password. A few minutes later, they replied and said that password didn't work. They even tried a different web browser, etc. I tried it myself, and sure enough, it didn't work.

I spent the next several hours trying to figure out why the password didn't save properly, or why the logic didn't compare them correctly. Perhaps it was some sort of caching issue? Oh the horror.

As it turns out, the problem was a maxlength of 28 on the login form field:

<input type="password" name="password" value="" maxlength="28"/>

I don't know who wrote that code, but it sure wasn't me.

This is what i consider to be true horror...

I just found a developers/designers worst nightmare...

Ooh oatmeal

Horror movie:
A vegan gay Arch user.

He will NEVER stop chasing you to tell you who is he.

One day I developed a simple website for a goldsmith who I already new for a year or so.

We discussed everything and agreed on a feature set, price and a deadline when it should be ready. Based on this we signed a contract and I started my work.

Unfortunately at the same time I lost most of my childhood friends. I moved to a new city and started to study computer science, which was awesome on the contrary.

This is where the horror began.

I was totally occupied by the studying, my partner, myself and by the shit of life.

It knocked on my door. The horror decided to pay me a visit.

"Had a look at your calendar recently? Just saying..."

Shit! The deadline came closer and closer everyday and the pile of work undone grew with it. At that point I had to do something. I don't know what it was or how I did it, but somehow I managed to finish the project just in time. I was totally not proud of it, but it featured what was required.

The day before I contacted my client, the horror knocked on my door again. He said:

"You really should have a look at your hard drive."
"Why? everything seems allright."
"Well, then look closer."
"Fuck."
"Right."

Well, there are backups at least, I thought to myself. I'll just recover the last state. That was an annoying thought, but nothing serious. That's just one or two days of w... - Wait, what? Where are my backups? What the actual fuck? Why is the zip file broken? Why doesn't the flash drive work anymore? FUUUCK!!

I was lost. It was a complete nightmare.

Each time my telephone rang the following days, my heart skipped a beat. Finally my client's name appeared on the display. I answered the call, my hands shaking.

"Hey there! I'm calling to discuss the website project with you."
"Well, about that..."
"Yeah, I know you put a huge amount of efford in it so I'm really sorry to say that I on the other hand can't effort the money. Actually I'd like to simply forget about this whole idea."

Seriously? What the fuck just happend? I suddenly noticed a sticky note infront of me reading:
"It was really fun to see you suffer, but I have to go! See ya
- The Horror"

"Hello, are you still there? Do you hear me?", yelled a voice through my phone.
"Uh, yeah. You know, that project was a lot of work and... but you know what? It was actually a pretty fun exercise and I'm doing well over here, so because it's you I'd agree."
I heared a reliefed sigh from the other end of the line.
"Really good! I owe you something! Bye!"

What. The. Fuck.

My freelancing horror story?

I remember like it was yesterday. It was late at night and I was doing some freelancing. (You know... the good stuff...)

All of a sudden the light began flickering, it got really cold and I felt like something was watching me!

OMG! SOMETHING JUST TOUCHED MY SHOULDER! I TURN AROUND AND...

...nothing. Nobody was there.

"I really need some sleep", I think to myself and turn back to my monitor.

Wait a second, what's that?
"10%..."
"20%..."
"60%..."

Oh my god...
How could this happen to me?
Those bastards got me after all!

I just witnessed...

A WINDOWS UPDATE!!!

The end~
______________________________

I don't feel responsible for pants that need to be washed now.

You want a horror story? Here's one:

IE6

Saw-ftware engineering horror movie concepts

IntelliJ IDEA just saved my ass!
I tried deleting a resource file I had staged, but not commited yet.
A dialog comes up asking to delete alternative configs with "Yes" as the default.
Boom! After I braindead hit the enter key all other files vanished too!
I checked Git and saw to my horror that the files were also not tracked anymore.
I hastly lookup the last backup timestamp - an hour ago - fuuuuu!
I just lost about an hour of work.
I was about to give up and start from scratch when I look at the edit menu in my IDE.
Turns out you can actually undo multiple file deletions!
Kudos to the girls and boys at JetBrains! You saved the day! 😙

"Oh haha I found out why your PC isn't turning on, you forgot to turn on the power switch!"

*flick*

BSOU = Blue Screen Of Update

How can I un-see this 😑😑

in an alternate universe there exists a clientRant, where clients come together and share their horror stories of dealing with devs.

Ok so my server was really dirty and slow and I got tired of it.... So I decided to give it a bath.

At my first job, I got tired of having to type a user name and password every time I debugged the web application. Thinking I was clever, I put in a hack so that if you launched the application with the query string "?user=Administrator" it would log you in as the administrator. So much typing saved!

A couple days after the next release, I realized it shipped like that. In absolute horror, I walked into my boss' office, closed the door, and told him the tale of my mistake.

He just looked back at me, and after a moment or two said, "Loose lips sink ships."

And that was it.

OMFG
Waking up in the middle of the night to a strange feeling in my ear and noises. Started shaking the head, which did nothing except panicking because of intensifying scratch noises in my head.
Getting the fear to be eaten inside out.
Get the phone and call sister to get me to the doc but her phone is powered off. Starting to Google "consequences of an cockroach in your ear", reading this is not as bad as I thought and that some people do not even realize it !??
Laying down for 3 minutes in the dark, *heating up and feeling my pulse* hoping it will crawl out. Which obviously did not fucking happened, this sucker just squatted my ear.
So I go to the bathroom and start filling up the tub. While it is filling up, I Google "how to get cockroach out of your ear". Finding an article that you should pour oil in your ear to suffocate the squatter. So I go to the kitchen, grab my sunflower oil, go to the mirror and start pouring. I am starting to shine like a bodybuilder and hear the noises again. After what felt like an eternity, I hear even more scratching in my head, this is the moment I do half a headbang and *wush* *flap* something hit the ground. I look down in the hope it wasn't just the sunflower oil and see this little thing which is clearly a cockroach. I am fucking relieved, not hearing any noises anymore.

A guy wanted me to convert his Unity project from Android to ios.

He was offering less than 50$....

It dosent end here....

He sent me the files in a zip on Google Drive.....

Also the project size was around 3 gb......

😢😢

Once I had been sick for a couple of weeks. Then came back to this abomination

Didn't make me feel any better 😨

Me-
/ / / / / / / / /
if (bool == true)
{
bool = false;
}
if (bool == false)
{
bool = true;
}
/ / / / / / / / /

My friend-
/ / / / / / / / /
bool = !bool;
/ / / / / / / / /

*not a real story*

The horror when you see a 3000 line Java class - services, daos, tasks - everything in one file.

When I interviewed with for an EA internship, they gave me a coding challenge after on GitHub. I tried it out and when I asked politely over email on the status of the challenge a week after, they rejected me with literally I shit you not "no :)". It wasn't even a answer to my question that makes sense. I was an underclassman so they probably didn't think it mattered that they were disrespectful to me. The lack of empathy and professionalism that truly proved to me what a toxic company they are. Any one have any horror stories like this?

I've fancied the thought of being petty enough to try for their interview again now that I've graduated and have more under my belt just to reject them with a :) but I'm not going to get down their level enough to do so

*production is down*
Ops: At 5pm? On a Friday? *checks deploy history* God! Who did the deploy
Dev: It was a small patch, a tiny patch. It shouldn't have....
Ops: Deploy on a Friday evening?
Colleague: I didn't think it would...

Ops (on the outside) : *takes a deep breath* Its okay Dev, we can fix this. Don't worry

Me(in my mind) : for fuck sakes! Are you fucking kidding me?*** **** *** god damn it! *****

Office prank time! It was some years ago when the horror movie "The Grudge" came out, with that creepy Japanese dead girl who made that horrible "aaahhhhhh" sound. A coworker, who was just as shocked by the movie as I was, would occasionally send me emails with sceenshots from that movie.

One day, I upped it. I knew he was the first in the office in the morning, so I arrived even before him. It was still dark. I put a walkie-talkie under his desk, set it to "no beep", switched off the lights again and hid two rooms away.

Sure enough, he arrived. I waited for about 10 minutes to be sure he was sitting at his desk. Then I used my walkie-talkie and "aahhhhh".

WOAH, his scream was loud even two rooms away!

My six word horror story.

We switched from aws to azure

If I could!

tetris is an inventory management survival horror game

My finger slipped and instead of 64px I typed 63px.
The horror...
The horror...

Story time:

At a precious employer.
Hire shit-hot contractor.
No technical test at interview stage because he’s so shit-hot.
Is a uni lecturer.
PhD in mathematics.

Me: Shit, this guy must be good!

6 months later and a tragedy of errors and clearly misspent company funds later:

Manager: can you look at what x did and merge it into the product?

Me: Sure. *looks* *yells fuck very loudly*

*walks over to manager*

“Soooo... you know those 6 months and thousands and thousands you spent? It’s all for nought. There’s barely anything there, and none of it works.”

Manager: “Shit. What are we going to do? Can you fix it?”

Me: “To be honest, it would be quicker to just do it from scratch than try to work out what he’s done and failed to do.”

Manager: “Fuck. Ok. Go for it.”

I then had to build this entire new lot of systems, a workflow system, a user management and permissions system.

I got it done inside a month or so.

For context, we (the devs) knew something was afoot when the contractor couldn’t work out why his keyboard wasn’t working (it wasn’t plugged in), and he also *really* struggled to find his way around visual studio and git.

The moral of this tale? *always always* screen your candidates. Even if they seem amazing on paper.

Shortest freelancing horror story :

No Jobs.

I'll keep it short:
My nastiest freelancing horror stories contain shitty clients who dont pay, the nastiest fucking legacy code you can imagine, and expectations as high as trump thinks of himself.

The lesson is simple: Choose your freelancing clients wisely and always expect partial payment in advance. Even from family or firends!

Working on a database priorly designed and maintained by some private agency.

The fuck I'm dealing with!

Boolean values stored as 'TRUE'/'FALSE'. It's varchar, my dudes.

There are no FK relations. Just the values of IDs in a column.

There are no indexes, all on just the PKs, nothing else. Nothing.

Null, what's that? I'm dealing with 'N/A', my dudes.

Unique key, what's that? The table which stores users has all the fields nullable. Email is not unique ( even though that's the required behaviour).

ALL the numeric values are stored as varchar. Varchar, my dudes. Varchar. '1', '1.1'

And finally, the good ole, 1 table to rule them all. Normalisation, fuck that.

And what's the root cause of all this? My PM used to hand them Excel sheets she maintains on her local system. FTW. I don't have a enough explanations.

Moved into my a new house. No internet yet, and my mobile data barely connects. Real life horror story.

Oh boy.

I recently, I switched job for an open source company in Lyon, FR.

They had struggles to find me something to do (still has, tbh), so they sent me to a client of theirs, to help for a biiiiig project that's really old (created in 2001)

The thing was... Horrible. Lots of styles were set via JavaScript without condition, I found 3 different versions of jQuery, at one time they added Object oriented development in a context where they had HTML, JS, (inline) CSS and... PHP of course, inside of one PHP file. The architecture was more "uuuh these files in this directory will be about this functionality".

And it goes on forever. I told them that I hadn't the required level of PHP knowledge to have an excuse to get the fuck out of there, my company didn't like it but it was either that or my mental health.

Me: "So, to recap.. I'll be creating an integration between your site and [some software]. It will require [list of todos and features].. I expect this to take 4 hours over the next 2 business days."

Client: "But [referring company] said this would only take like 15 minutes.."

A meeting, non-technical PM to me:
"Could you borrow me your laptop? I haven't taken mine and want to make some notes."
"Yeah sure" I said, launched some text editor and turned the laptop to her side. During this motion other colleague had chance to glance at the screen. His eyes opened wide with mix of horror and WTF look:
"What the... That's really not good idea."

Turned out I was in complete autopilot mode and pressed Win key, entered "gvim", accepted by enter.

I've launched Vim.
To a non-technical person.

did you ever have to maintain a code that is so bad that it makes you physically ill to look at it? i feel like I've seen an eldritch horror

Programmer one-line horror stories? A few off the top of my head:

Segmentation fault (core dumped)

'Undefined' is not a function

Unit test failed: expected '0' but got '-1'

Connection to 'localhost:8080' has been lost

Malformed JSON string at col: 46,372. Expected '}'

- So let’s check if this DNS thingy does work
(4 hours later)
- it doesn’t

'hey honey look what i made! It works!'
- fiance looks, error messages over error messages, program crashes, files disappear, data loss, pure horror

To this day I don't know what happened. I had to restore my project and re-write the last half hour.

WHAT THE HELL??

It's been over TWO WEEKS now and my Arch sticker pack still has NOT arrived!!!

I'm really starting to get mad now.

Unlike the stickers, my brand new laptop has arrived. But as you might have guessed, it's completely useless at the moment.

Like, what's even the point of having a laptop with Arch, when you can't show everyone else you're using Arch? So humiliating, can't even go in public now with that laptop.

People in the cafeteria will look at the back of my laptop without knowing I'm using Arch. The shame... Almost inhuman.

My only option is to go to speak to everyone individually to tell them I'm using Arch.
However, that might be risky. Imagine if I would miss someone!? They would leave without knowing I was using Arch.

In fact, I might not even meet them EVER AGAIN! In that case they would NEVER know I was on Arch! OMG! TOO MUCH HORROR!!!

All this because of a shity manufacturer.
Manufacturers like this really piss me off.
Because YOU can NOT ship on time I have to WASTE precious time now, THANKS A LOT China Stickers Corporation.

"Oracle database" should be the name of the greatest horror movie of all times

I'd like to see a horror movie called "Exception", where the main character experiences exceptions which should not happen according to the code's logic.

3-word horror story:
UPDATE without WHERE

Finally got a new job, but it's already a horror story not even 2 hours in (making this while on break)

Everyone here is an Intern, IT? Interns, Designers? Interns, HR? Interns.

The Person who I should've worked with got fired yesterday, and now I have to work all of his shit up from 0, Documentation? Fragmental, a few things here and there, but nothing really.

IT security also doesn't exist in the slightest, there is an Excel sheet called "Master_Passwords" and every single password is in Plaintext, written out for everyone to see. (at least they used "strong" passwords)

And the place also looks run down, theres PC's, Laptops, Mics, Cables etc. lying literally everywhere no-one knows what works and what doesn't (since everyone is an intern)

Not to mention the "Server Room" is an absolute mess itself, cables hanging from literally anywhere, powerstrips are ontop of servers, each rack has like 2 or 3 2U Servers, (in a 40u Rack) and there are 10 of them!

OMG! Horror movie for RAMs

So I watched this video that tries to convince people, that the jQuery library isn't really best practice anymore and showed how you can achieve basic tasks with vanilla JS, aswell as some frameworks (Vue, React, Angualar) and how they handle interactions with the DOM.

It also talked about how nearly every JS question on SO has top answers using jQuery, and how that's a bad thing.

But what I found in the comment section of this video was pure horror: So-called "Developers" defending jQuery to the death. Of course there were some people who made some viable arguments (legacy code, quick & dirty projects), but the overwhelming majority were people making absurd claims and they seemed quit self-confident.

GOSH!

Want an example?
Look:

Instead of just accepting my proposal about upgrading the server - the customer I have ranted about earlier decided that it would be a good idea to try to install PHP 7.0 on a Debian 5 machine.

I feel horror when I read the bash_history

300+ lines of 8 near identical constructors...REAL HORROR

Short horror story: a coworker of mine renamed a directory in the git repo from ABC to abc. All MacOS users found their repos completely broken after pulling the changes. They didn't know that Apple's crappy HFS+ filesystem was case-insensitive.

I have ~10 coworkers, and each of them wasted at least 1 hour manually fixing this problem. This is like not working for more than a day.

(I'm forced to use a Mac too, but I use an ext3 volume for repositories.)

So I found this in the code:

Inet4Address.getByAddress (new byte[] {0x7f,0x00,0x00,0x01})

It's localhost. Why the actual fuck would you declare 127.0.0.1 as a fucking byte array!

Meanwhile at a presentation.

Me: This is the new feature that I've been working on.

App: "There was an error loading the application!"

Me: (shrieks in horror!)

Short horror stories

I love Linux, use it almost daily
, but those windows update horror storys aren't happening when I'm using windows.

I think those days are gone, and people are just hating.

This is the state of desktop computing: When a web browser uses twice more RAM than a full virtual machine.

To be fair, I did have 5 windows with >10 tabs each, but still...

A friend of mine once showed me a really beautiful and fast login page he made.

After some time I took a look at the front-end code and realized why it was so fast... He queried the database in the JS code...
The user and pass for the database was in the HTML of the website...

I think he deployed that page...

The fact that this week's rant topic exists is the exact reason I never do freelance work. It always ends in horror.

I don't believe good fullstack devs exist. A good junior will assess their talents/passions and specialize to become a senior. They'll keep checking the rest of the market from the corners of their eyes and start moving when necessary. But eventually, focus and specialization is a must.

If that's true for the field of development... why would I invest time in marketing, support, sales, PR, legal?

Maybe you can earn a bit more gross income in freelance work — but I see my employer as a service provider, I "hire" them so I don't have to manage phone calls, lose sleep over court cases, play product owner or worry about getting paid.

When your "simple" example code looks like this, something really needs to change

the shortest horror story:
git merge

I've been lurking on devrant a while now, I figure it's time to add my first rant.

Little background and setting a frame of reference for the rant: I'm currently a software engineer in the bioinformatics field. I have a computer science background whereas a vast majority of those around me, especially other devs, are people with little to no formal computer background - mostly biology in some form or another. Now, this said, a lot of the other devs are excellent developers, but some are as bad as you could imagine.

I started at a new company in April. About a month after joining a dev who worked there left, and I inherited the pipeline he maintained. Primarily 3 perl scripts (yes, perl, welcome to bioinformatics, especially when it comes to legacy code like is seen in this pipeline) that mostly copied and generated some files and reports in different places. No biggie, until I really dove in.

This dev, which I barely feel he deserves to be called, is a biology major turned computer developer. He was hired at this company and learned to program on the job. That being said, I give him a bit of a pass as I'm sure he did not have had an adequate support structure to teach him any better, but still, some of this is BS.

One final note: not all of the code, especially a lot of the stupid logic, in this pipeline was developed by this other dev. A lot of it he adopted himself. However, he did nothing about it either, so I put fault on him.

Now, let's start.
1. perl - yay bioinformatics
2. Redundant code. Like, you literally copied 200+ lines of code into a function to change 3 lines in that code for a different condition, and added if(condition) {function();} else {existing code;}?? Seriously??
3. Whitesmiths indentation style.. why? Just, why? Fuck off with that. Where did you learn that and why do you insist on using it??
4. Mixing of whitesmiths and more common K&R indentation.
5. Fucked indentation. Code either not indented and even some code indented THE WRONG WAY
6. 10+ indentation levels. This, not "terrible" normally, but imagine this with the last 3 points. Cannot follow the code at freaking all.
7. Stupid logic. Like, for example, check if a string has a comma in it. If it does, split the string on the comma and push everything to an array. If not, just push the string to the array.... You, you know you can just split the string on the comma and push it, right?? If there is no comma it will be an array containing the original string.. Why the fuck did you think you needed to add a condition for that??
8. Functions that are called to set values in global variables, arrays, and hashes.. function has like 5 lines in it and is called in 2 locations. Just keep that code in place!
9. 50+ global variables/hashes/arrays in one of the scripts with no clear way to tell how/when values are set nor what they are used for.
10. Non-descriptive names for everything
11. Next to no comments in the code. What comments there are are barely useful.
12. No documentation

There's more, but this is all I can think to identify right now. All together these issues have made this pipeline the pinnacle of all the garbage that I've had to work on.

Attaching some screenshots of just a tiny fraction of the code to show some of the crap I'm talking about.

Connect a pen drive, format it successfully. Connect to a new machine to copy data and see the data exists.

Crap! which drive did I formatted :(

OMG! !rant!!!!
I already ranted about the elevator at home being stoooopid for opening doors on way up when you wanna go down..

But our work elevator is awesome!
I figured today that I can play with the authorisation light with the chip for the home elevator.. so from orange to green (work card) to red (home chip) to green to red... OMG!!! Awesome!!

Also the look of horror on coworker's face was priceless (work elevators have a tendency to malfunction as it is, without me playing with them)!!! xD xD xD

Manager: With all the horror stories why are we even developers?

Me: Because once we get part the horror, we become geniuses.

Manager: So what you're saying is that being a developer is like taking a crap after being constipated for three weeks?

Could anybody manage to get through a day like this?

To my horror I've been asked to cover some small jobs for support whilst he's away.. First tap on my shoulder, can you look at my laptop? it's not charging...
Is it plugged in and switched on at the mains..
Yeah, I'm not silly.
It was neither plugged in or turned on.
I made the long and hard transition to DevOps, I now know it was worth it.
Rant Over

Is it normal to deploy a 5.6MB main.css file?

Last week I had to change some shizzle on a website (externally developed).
Well, I was quite shocked...

We usually deploy a single stylesheet under 700 kB.
But also because we never use CSS "frameworks".

Screw MySQL/MariaDB. Who the fuck thought not to document that utf8 is only 3 bytes and not unicode capable. You have to use utf8mb4 for it to work. Fuck those idiots that don't want to admit they made a mistake and put this info in a footnote on a pricy documentation piece.

Friendly reminder to clean your PCs/Servers every now and then.

Sacrificed my Diwali and made a website for my first client and did not get any payment.
I was new and less confident.

Well this is my freelance horror story.

Now I fucking demand money from client UPFRONT.

Just had to install XP to adapt our VB6 client code for a new release of the server. Oh the horror of it all!

How’s this for a horror story? Adding a new feature to a 6,000 line and 100% undocumented stored procedure in a 20+ year old Oracle database.

You always see fail2ban message:

There has been n failed attempts"

But... Have you ever thought about how many successful logins have been?

I got my first job, first work is monday

I still worrying about this job might be one of the many small shitty company horror story.
I don't know shit about working, so I decided to find out myself. Wish me luck.

Saw this popup in my feed today. Glad I've never had to deal with code like this.

Sauce: @LoganDice@mastodon.social

One sentence horror:

"Hey, did you forget to turn off that GPU instance?"

The unquestionable horror of using a Windows keyboard on a Mac...ugh!

Which horror franchise freaks you out the most?
-Halloween
-Friday the 13th
-Scream
-Windows

Today on forgotten movies – Chronicle.

A very grim, very dark movie about accidental superpowers discovery, but with some school-shooter vibes.

Don't you find it predictable how in regular movies a hero saves the world against all odds in the very last moment? Well, forget about it here – this movie is not "cinematic" at all, and that's what I like about it.

A horror in regular movies doesn't usually scare because the image itself is too perfect – you don't usually see the world like this. It doesn't seem real, that's the problem. By adopting the "found footage" screen language, Chronicle delivers the horror perfectly, because the world in it seems perfectly real, just like you see it through obscure youtube videos named MOV_0115 or IMG1014.

I like it that the characters actually look like real people, not like stereotypical superheroes and not even like enhanced versions of people that try to sell you an idea of what "success" looks like.

People in the movie also act real. They're weak, they're scared, they're irrational, and you really start to believe that yeah, this is what probably gonna happen when a human faces something as unbearable as superpowers discovery. And, as weird as it sounds, the superpower itself also looks totally real – raw, unpolished, uncontrollable force that requires getting used to and probably is too much for a regular human. Definitely not a perfect, tailored thing that turns anyone into Mary Sue.

Overall, this movie is the most immersive one I've ever seen. If you want to see what would really happen if you discover a superpower, this movie is for you.

Security Horror Story:

A password authenticator which is case-insensitive and all special characters are treated as the same value. As a bonus, all passwords are truncated to 4 characters.

Have you ever looked at code you had written years or even decades ago and asked yourself either:

1) How this this even work?

2) What the hell does this do?

3) or, I can’t believe I wrote that. (In horror or serendipitously)

This is a genuine search I just made... Is Google trying to tell us something?!

When you are finish doing the UI of the app then your UI/UX expert suddenly want to change everything, because he/she saw much cooler ui in the pinterest. The Horror!

/*************
* adds 1 to i
***************/
i = i + 1

Everyone has seen at least one comment like this.

Wanna hear a story? The consultancy firm I work for has been hired to work on a WPF project for a big Fashion Industry giant.

We are talking of their most important project yet, the ones the "buyers" use to order them their products globally, for each of the retail stores this Fashion giant has around the world. Do you want to know what I found? Wel, come my sweet summer child.

DB: not even a single foreign key. Impossibile to understand without any priopr working experience on the application. Six "quantity" tables to keep aligned with values that will dictate the quantities to be sent to production (we are talking SKUs here: shoes, bags..)

BE: autogenerated controllers using T4 templates. Inputs directly serialized in headers. Async logging (i.e. await Logger.Error(ex)). Entities returned as response to the front end, no DTOs whatsoever.

WPF: riddled with code behind and third party components (dev express) and Business Logic that should belong to the Business Layer. No real api client, just a highly customized "Rest Helper". No error reporting or dealing with exceptions. Multiple endpoints call to get data that would be combined into one single model which happens to be the one needed by the UI. No save function: a timer checks the components for changes and autosaves them every x seconds. Saving for the most critical part occurring when switching cells or rows, often resulting in race conditions at DB level.

What do you think of this piece of shit?

Amazing API's and SEX!

Alright people, now that I've got your attention, I'm getting to the point where I need to plan and roll out a solid API for a project. So after reading a lot of the horror stories written here, What are the finer points of what makes an amazing API experience to use and integrate with over a poor one?
And don't say documentation (If you do explain why) 😁

Today in horror stories: setting up the local dev environment for a project I'm taking over creates changes and notifications in prod.

Oh and my local dev env is somehow receiving data from actual patients. I don't know how.

Sweet baby Jesus the stories are true. I thought this day would never come but yesterday I found a website in production straight out of a horror story.
Inline script tags that contained spaghetti code and static content. And to top it off inline style with position absolute for everything 😰😰
Also worth mentioning a couple of broken pages(404) and a beatufill repeat-y image for the background😳
I lost all hope😂

Just saw someone use Bing unironically as their main search engine. They have a masters in computer science.
Equal parts horrified and kinda tempted to study them like a creature

That sinking feeling of horror when you are helping a student with a problem in their assignment only to see major logic errors that prove they dont actually understand what they are doing. * drinks wiskey in prep for marking *

I'm on my first free lance project, and devRant asks me for my horror story. -_-
Well, I undersold myself and gave such a stupid time estimation. Fortunately, the client was smarter, and he wants just half the work in same time period and will still gave me the same amount xD

Finished my internship today, turns out I won't be getting hired because upper management is cutting back due to COVID.

Fuck fuck fuckity fuck, compared to the horror stories I've read here, it was beautiful. The work experience was super worth it though, despite the intern pay. Time to start looking for a real job I guess.

I am no frontend dev but I have seen and experienced the horror

TIL that Python's "everything is an object" mentality allows you to do

def some_function():
some_function.variable = "abc"

print(some_function.variable)
> abc

Boi did I forget what a horror is to deal with Wndows...

I just wanted to shutdown a laptop to replace the SSD and a wifi card. Prepared everything, clicked on the [start] and there were only "Update and *" options. Wha the hell I thought, I could spare a few minutes. It's just a software update - should not take long!

Little did I know...
That was 45 minutes ago and It's still shutting down. And I'm just sitting with that screwdrived in my hand, looking at that blue screen and waiting. I feel stupid

UPDATE: I gave up. Long-pressed the POWER button. que sera, sera, right?

Lights go out. I press POWER again to boot it back up (forgot to save smth else). And it boots up back to the "SHUTTING fucking DOWN" AGAIN!!!

Found another Laravel gem in this horror codebase.

My freelance horror story just happened a few weeks ago. Programming final project was due and a classmate payed me to make his project. It was something very simple so I was able to make mine and his different and functional. Grades went up yesterday; he got an A and I got a B+ 🙃 #wk86

Why does MySql least and greatest functions return null if any of the arguments are null? Who was the genius behind the idea that it's the best way to implement it, and to change this behavior in a minor version?

Why does MySql return bigint when i convert a value to integer?

Why does MySql exist?

(As a freelancer I was asked to do a couple of tasks on legacy code)

Let’s check this code, how bad can it be?

- all of the following: unreadable mess, no auto linting

- tests: some are there cause there’s not enough automation, others are poorly named
- frontend: somehow a genius made a react component for every variable in the store which only passes the variable to the child (wtf)
- backend: death by best practices
- ci/cd: “we have it but it’s broken”

Let’s fucking goooo 😎

Diagnosis: my therapist is getting rich
Chances to not cry tonight: close to zero

At least they pay well 🤷‍♂️

The pandemic is more serious than I thought. Out of boredom, I started writing a book. Post-apocalyptic sci-fi horror. I have 75 standard pages behind me and I still have something to write.
I guess a lot of people trying to do the same.

Decided to spend my weekend on a little side project that I thought I could finish quickly.

Not only does my code not work, but what I wrote is so horrible that I'm honestly ashamed. Its like the despicable porn that you sometimes end up watching and the horror of realizing what the hell you just watched after you finish - I thought my code was good, but really, it was trash.

Before I started writing I though to myself, "I'll finish this project and then I'll upload it to my Github to expand my repository", but now I cringe at the thought of someone else reviewing this pile of shit I call my code.

It's 2 am here in Israel. I know I should go to sleep, but I'll just stare at the ceiling, feeling unproductive because everything I did today is literally worthless.

How the fuck do I justify this shit to myself? Calling this a "learning experience" feels like a fucking joke.

Honestly, I don't know why I chose Python to do OOP when Kotlin would have served me much better.

But, there's always tomorrow, isn't there?

I just love how upset the sticker looks with ThinkPad.

Thanks you guys! Your envelope managed to overcome even the horror we know as the Israeli Postal Company 👏

When that bug you thought you’d fixed comes back.

Instructions on how to become suicidal:

- Create an API controller for the /file/ path
- Add an empty endpoint for POST /file/upload (will write it later!)
- Forget about this endpoint at some point
- Later, create a page for /file/upload
- GET /file/upload returns page
- POST /file/upload returns empty 200

Pure psychological horror for like an hour Googling why the fuck my razor page is returning empty responses and my breakpoint on OnPost is not fucking hitting even if I copy and paste example code from the ms website

Oh yeah, that controller.

Let me tell u a 3 word horror story.

what is vim?

My freelance horror story is that I don't work freelance, but rather for a corporation where I am a faceless entity known as asset.

So this i quite a big project, hundreds of files everywhere, pages are rendered using multiple files.

This is one of the latest created page, it was made by my boss, and it just give me the creeps.

I REALLY don't know how he always comes up with shit like these.

I just hate having more than 5 closing tags in sequence...

A 4-words horror story:

“JavaScript runs the web”.

Our project at work goes live in 3 weeks.

The code base has no automated tests, breaks very often, has never had any level of manual testing

will not be releasing with any form of enforced roles or permissions in our first release now due to no time to enforce, however there is a whole admin api where you can literally change anything in our database including roles.

We also have teams in various countries all working separately on the same solution using microservices with shared nuget packages and they aren't using them properly.

Our pull requests are so big - as much as, 75 file changes - in our fe app that I can't keep up with it and I honestly have no idea if it even works or not due to no automated tests and no time to manually test.

We have no testing team, or qa team of any sort.

Every request into the system has to hit a minimum of 3 different databases via 3 different microservices so 1 request = 4 requests with the load on the servers.

We don't use any file streams so everything is just shoved in the buffer on the server.

Most of the people working on the angular apps cba to learn angular, no one across 2 teams cba to learn git. We use git so they constantly face problems. The guy in charge has 0 experience in angular but makes me do things how he wants architecturally so half the patterns make no sense.

No one looks at the pull requests, they just click approve so they may as well push directly to master.

Unfinished work gets put in for pull request so we don't know if the app is in a release state since aall teams are working independently, but on the same code base.

I sat down and tested the app myself for an hour and found 25 fe only issues, and 5 breaking cross browser issues.

Most of our databases are not normalised. Most of our databases make no sense. 99% of our tables have no indexing since there is no expertise with free time to do it.

No one there understands css properly. Or javascript.

Our. Net core microservices all directly use ef in the controller actions so there is no shared code there.

Our customer facing fe app is not dry because no tests so it was decided it was better this way.

Management has no idea on code state, it seems team lead is lieing to them about things like having any level of tests.

Management hire devs that claim to be experts but then it turns out they have basically no knowledge of what they were hired to do, even don't know what json is or the framework or language they are hired for, but we just leave them to get on with it and again make prs too big to review.

Honestly I have no hope that this will go well now but I am morbidly curious to watch. I've never seen anything like the train wreck that we are about to get experience.

After I graduated, I found a junior job in a company where I already knew the only dev, who has been working there for 6 years. Immediately after I signed the contract, the manager told me that the other guy was leaving the company in one month... Horror!

Okay it's FUCKing rant time... FUCK you prestashop!

FUCK your utterly bizarre "coding standard"
Also a big FUCK your config files, since when did config files start to include application logic, multiple includes/requires and modification of super-globals. When did I miss that memo?

This file is full of so much FUCKing horseshit, my FUCKing testicles hurt.

FUCK your "module overrides", yes let's duplicate 20-30MB senseless horror code into another folder, just so we can modify one line, without having future updates breaking our stuff.

And your attempt to migrate to a symphony stucture is FUCKing pathetic, do it properly, or don't do it at all.. FUCKtards..

I know wordpress can be bad, but this...
Prestashop takes FUCKing lousy, headache/cancer- giving, piece of crapware to the next FUCKing level.

I wouldn't even wish this FUCKing upon my worst enemy.

coder's horror story

Playing horror games

| Lights on -> cant see shit on the screen and more vulnerable to jumpscares

| Lights off -> the atmosphere of the room is generally spookier and i get scared of misc. noises

Oh well

Forgive me for I have sinned.

I feel like I need a bleach shower after having had to write these methods in my Dart codebase

The Nameless Game (DS) is MIND-BLOWING. Retro-cool before PS1 graphics was in every indie horror. Original control scheme. A touch of paranoia (your DS can kill you using its Wi-Fi).

Imagine a world where CTRL + Z didn't exist

Microsoft fucking Sharepoint.

How can software so shitty exist?

To upload an image, I need to F12 and increase the dimensions on an iframe so I can click the save button.

Have any Sharepoint horror stories to share?

In horror movies. Characters do things that they them-self know it could kill them. Like getting in basement.

As a developer we all know to never deploy code on Friday. Here we are taking the wrong turn.

I was placed at the company I work at 9 years ago and it was a college recruitment. Due to the recession in 2007,and its effects in 2008,although I graduated in 2008,my company called me only in 2009,roughly after an year of passing out. I really needed the job. After joining the firm,we were all inducted and had our official ID's and email accounts created. There was a mentor to me,who sat right across.
I was naive and had left for lunch without locking my system,only to come back and see the horror:

"Your resignation has been submitted" in bold ,as a wallpaper.
I was shocked and had lot of things in my head because earlier that week some firms had given "pink slips" and it was all over the news.
Finally,my mentor told me he did it for fun. Have never left my system unlocked ever since!

As I am not that advanced (started off as a 'jack of all trades' - huge mistake) in programming (about a bit below average), I'm just overwhelmed by knowledge of someone here, yet I am happy to know how much I can learn in next couple of years. 😀 I feel kinda stupid when I see everyone posting what programming horror or stuff they are going through and I am there be like (sometimes) - I know some of these words 😂
I am a newbie in this community (but soph. student in uni) thus I'd like to just say hi and wish everyone a good day even if things are not good at the time🤗😃💪

"This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes."

Said to a new team member before they embarked on a journey of pain as I took them through a huge web app made with jQuery (think: 10K lines of DOM manipulation horror), WCF, and sadness.

!dev

It’s midnight, I’m alone in the big house, it’s pitch black outside, I had a few beers already and I thought it would be a good idea to watch some horror stuff..

I want to go out to have a smoke but I’m scared as fuck now.
There are cats running around in the dark and there are so many great opportunities for some alien zombie monsters to hide and sneak up to me..

Think I became too old for this shit.

HELP!!!

Imagine the horror of learning C programming with manual memory management, pointer arithmetic and without your cool utility libraries after programming for 2 years in Python just becoz it's in the fukin syllabus!!

Went through changing Apple ID email. I have 💻,📱and⌚️.

Felt like that horror movie moment when protagonist tries to be stealthy but makes a noise and a huge mob of zombies turn heads all at once. For what I love apple, the simplicity, in the email changing process there is none of that.

They forced me to enter my 60 arbitrary obscure characters password on Apple Watch screen.

On the other hand I felt nostalgic. When I was using Linux this all was my day to day experience no matter the distro, and I got a Linux Foundation certificate, I contributed to Elementary. Can’t imagine the experience of a user who just switched to Linux.

Windows? I don’t want to think about that, let alone talking. You only need to know that I successfully configured a SoE setup AND active directory in ad-hoc unstable network of literally rusty old computers. And I still switched to Linux back then.

My freelancing horror story was not getting paid. And having to deal with Turdpress.

No matter how hard I try it will always find its way.

Sometimes it's fun to debug sometimes it's not.

So today it finally happened.

Npm modules broke my system and / or endangered the security of my system.

Installed a global cli utility
That utility depends on package A
That depends on package B

That fucking install a bin called sudo

Yeah.. You heard it right a bin called sudo.

This bin goes in the global module folder that is piped in your path variable.

Now everytime you type sudo you are running somebody else code instead of your system utility.

I am shivering and at loss of swear words.

Opened an issue on the cli that started this matrioska game of horror.

Who the fuck tought that a bin called sudo would be a good fucking idea?

Oh and yes is even an harmless package that try to provide the sudo experience for windows (I went in to check the code of course..)

And I frigging need that cli for work

For now I aliased the sudo in my bashrc still i feel vulnerable and naked now.

When Microsoft shuttered Windows XP, my mom's old laptop became a virus-prone, sluggish machine. She let me have it, soon after which I decided to install Ubuntu on it. One thing I should note about this laptop is that the battery could not hold a charge. The power cord was the laptop's life support, and I made sure to place the power brick on a flat surface.
One day, a new version of Ubuntu was released. I decided to perform a dist-upgrade. Because this laptop was on the older side, the ventilation left a lot to be desired by today's standards. Rather than roast my crotch, I placed my computer on the table and the power brick on a swivel chair next to me.
I was working on an assignment for a class when I saw movement in my peripheral vision. I turned and watched in horror as my power brick fell off the chair, pulling the charging cord out of the laptop and turning off the laptop... MID-UPGRADE!
Moral of the story, learn to navigate a computer via a text interface if you haven't already. It may save your ass someday. It saved mine.

*opens the code of an old project still running today*
*see the horror spaghetti code*
*decide to modernize it with good code and practices learned by the years*
*can fucking decide where to start *
*réalise it is impossible *
*rewrite it from scratch in a few hours*
*be proud*

It's really rewarding to go back to old projects and give them a good hug. You réalise then you really got better

So, I got an iFixIt toolkit with a gift card from xmas. Was excited to tear into my iPhone6 given that it had lasted me a long time, and not that long ago, I had the screen repaired given I didn't know how to at the time and was working stupid long hours. I haven't used the phone in about 6 months now.

Wtf.

I open the device, and immediately 2 screws and a bracket fall out of the device. The inside is filthy, and appears to have corrosion (despite the fact I've never gotten water on it, I was kinda anal with that phone).

Whoever the guy was who "fixed" my screen apparently did so in a way that involved spilling something on my phone, over torquing a screw, breaking a bracket, and the entire thing looks sketch.

All while charging over $100. I can see why he insisted on having an otterbox on the phone now, he fucked up and was worried the one screw pin wouldn't hold the screen on. Motherfucking asshole.

Today I feel like a coding vampire, let me create a new Xamarin project and boOoOost with the code!!
*Creates a clean project, finds 1492 errors* well... f*ck it

Working on codebase of a 20+ year old system that the company I work for bought five years ago and in that time there’s been no refactoring, no security updates, no attempt to create automated testing (there is none), new features have just been built on the codebase with no regard for quality and it’s just spun into the horror cesspool that it is today.

I joined one year ago and I’m slowly refactoring the codebase and updating it to get it to a more modern codebase, cleaner code, faster load times and creating a ton of dev documentation so the devs in India can start getting into best practices and start producing quality code.

WHAT THE FUCK!!!
Whoever says that MacOS is superior or at least on par with Linux in terms of ease of maintenance -- feel free to stick a backwards pinecone up your asshole and push it down with a baseball bat with 5" nails.

The FUCK is this nightmare. You can't even start a process w/o logging in via GUI, password changes are another horror story, esp. for users who have never logged in [warning says to change keystore pass separately... Which doesn't exist...], vnc uses some proprietary protocol, ...

Seriously, even SunOS is easier to maintain, not to mention AIX, compared to this BSD nightmare of a UNIXoid....

Wtf....

Coffee Machine is Broken 😱

Chrome Inspector isn't working.

If it's an open source project and it (shock horror) actually gets a decent userbase, expect it to suck up *way* more time than you originally intended.

I resolved a list of bugs and no new problems came up in testing.

So why am I so scared?

Reading Python code written by Java programmers. I have no words to describe the horror. CamelCase everywhere...

My first freelance dev job thing, turned out alright. For the first year though, the dev job thing became a tech support thing. Oh the horror.

Was called on site because my client was having a problem with a system I developed years ago, a LAN based management system. The horror came when I asked for the most recent backup. It was only two years old..

I just turned my keyboard over and gave it some gentle taps for the first time in three and a half years of working here..

I wish I had not done this..

My freelancing horror story? They wanted me to make use of php...

Anyone ever had exams, where teacher tell you that if you study on said part of the course and you'll pass, then got completely blindsided on the actual exam... Oh the horror 😂

You guys, I've just been away for a week on holiday

No mobile signal, no wifi

The horror 😱

Finally found the place where other deva can relate to the horror/fear of posting a question on StackOverflow

I've learned how to use html and bootstrap with css in class.

Today we learn WordPress...

Stack Overflow is like a re-run of the Milgram experiment. Give a bunch of devs authority over their peers and watch the horror unfold.

Think I'll nip over there and ask what the best JavaScript framework is just to stir them up.

I really don't understand this particular Government Department's IT Unit. They have a system and network to maintain except:

- They don't have a DBA
- They don't have a dedicated Network Engineer or Security Staff
- Zero documentation on all of the systems that they are taking care of (its all in each assigned particular staff's brain they said)
- Unsure and untested way of restoring a backup into a system
- Server passwords are too simple and only one person was holding this whole time and its to an Administrator account. No individual user account.
- System was developed by an in-house developer who is now retired and left very little documentation on its usage but nothing on how its setup.

But, the system has been up and operational for the past 20 years and no major issues whatsoever with the users using it. I mean its a super simple system setup from the looks of it.

1 App Server connected to 1 DB Server, to serve 20-30 users. But it contains millions of records (2GB worth of data dump). I'm trying to swing to them to get me on a part time work to fix these gaps.

God save them for another 20 years.

That cloud of dread that hangs over your weekend because you deployed just before five last night.

What’s a really expensive MySQL Query? I need to add it to a CMS application for “research purposes”.

worst dev tech ever for me was intel x86 assembler. I developed on motorola 68k before and i loved it. x86 was horror.

My original project has morphed and twisted to become this monster where I’ll need to learn PHP, databases, and somehow get a desktop C# app to read the remote database and execute tasks based upon times in the database. God help me.

yesterday I had to use a Windows VM.

Took me less than 5 minutes to remember why I'm no longer using it.

- I'm doing nothing; CPU is at 100%
- Laggy AF
- Windows Updates not only download, but also install themselves and restart my OS automatically
- right after restart it starts downloading and installing another set of updates (restarted my PC while I was away, I come back - all my work is gone. And this dumbass Windows has a popup "I want to install more updates. When should I restart?")

ooohhh the horrors

Spending the weekend playing IT admin on my family's home computers

I wanna rant about a freelance job but I can't. Tell me your freelancing horror stories instead :D

i often do tech support in chat rooms in my free time (because i like spreading good will,) so here's a tech horror story

"""

"hey, can you help me fix something?"

sure?

"so i dug my old XP machine out of my closet and replaced the bad Ethernet card with a different one and when i plug in the ethernet cable the PC bluescreens."

# oboi

did you install the drivers? Sounds like it needs drivers

"no"

then install them

"no"

why not?

"it doesn't need any"

why do you say that?

"it said \"This device is set up and ready to use.\" in the balloon in the corner"

it has generic drivers to deal with devices before the real drivers can be found

"shouldn't they work?"

some devices need the extra support provided by the intended drivers, so the generic ones cause issues in those cases

"ok, well, where do I find them?"

do you have a model number?

"yes, it's " # scrubbed for... privacy? i dunno

gimme a few minutes

<insert 45 minutes of aggressive Googling for (str(DEVICE_MODEL_NUMBER) + " xp drivers")>

alright i have the drivers, go here:
# again, removed for... idk.

"they don't work"

# oh here we go

why not?

"These drivers are not compatible with your system architecture."

what version of XP are you using?

"XP Pro"

x86 or x64?

"x64"

# fucking...

ok so this is gonna get real complicated real fast: use x86 XP or I can't help you, none exist for x64 XP.

"oh ok"

<User left the IRC channel.>

"""

I watched the movie 'happy deathday' today. It really isn't a horror movie but I was thinking of version control the whole time.

The point where she wakes up all the time is the master branch and the different days she experiences are different branches.

So I get an email from college career development for a web developer & designer position.

Read into the requirements & function, I find this....

Who the fuck does put HARD CODING before CODING.. why would you even put that on the requirements. People are going to read that and find out how you run your company.

We all do some hard coding here & there but recruiters think it's a skill that comes before coding.. hard coding isn't coding hard...

They don't say company's name in email so I got suspicious.. or perhaps I thought I can be a detective lol. I was able to find out the company and looked at their Glassdoor.

Of course they have 1.6 stars.. two 1 star reviews by their employees. I can just imagine the horror working at this place lol.

Oh & the manager makes something like 110k.

I wasn't hired to do a dev's job (handled sales) but they asked me to help the non-HQ end with sorting transaction records (a country's worth) for an audit.

Asked HQ if they could send the data they took so I wouldn't need to request the data. We get told sure, you can have it. Waits for a month. Nothing. Apparently, they've forgotten.

Asks for data again. They churn it out in 24 hours. Badly Parsed. Apparently they just put a mask of a UI and stored all fields as one entire string (with no separators). The horror!

Ended up wasting most of a week simply fixing the parsing by brute force since we had no time.

Good news(?): We ended up training the front desk people to ending their fields with semi-colons to force backend into a possibly parsed state.

Three syntax elements, pixels on screen.
By Unknown (for privacy), 2021

In this installation, the Author's desire to prove the whole world that stupidity is achievable with just 2 syntax elements is... self-evident!

Observe! The finely crafted letters composing this installation in their beauty! While the middle element is purely a distraction (one could argue it's there to be sure a critical issue doesn't happen even if the default value is already `true`), the sides of the installation reveals the true horror.

As the vision of the observer is attracted to the center, the peripheral vision sends the informations to the subconcious, making the observer slowly realize both that the Author willingly compiled `.less` files with postcss and that .less files are in the css folder, proving that stupidity is demonstrable in just two syntax elements.

A masterpiece.

I have dabbled with Linux quite a few times in the past (dual booting with Windows) and I'm looking to get into it again. Any recommendations? Any horror stories?

So far I've daily driven Ubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, and CrunchBang. KDE and Gnome are my go-to DEs.