Response time of different people on Whatsapp:

Best Friend: 5-10 sec
Friend: 1-2 min
Best Friend(Girl): 3-5 min
Girl Friend: 1-2 day 😢
Client(when me solving bug): 0.00005 sec

Client(when me asking payment): *Blocked*

😕😕😕😕😕

Sister = bee ( who isn't a stranger to Ubuntu)
Me = Cee

Bee: can I use your laptop?
Cee : why ? Use yours ,it's works fine.
Bee : no I want to use yours and I need to work with windows.
Cee: 🤯
Bee : my work can only be done using windows.
Cee : fine do whatever ( doesn't want to argue )
* Le bee opens MS word, and starts her work *
Cee : 😤😤Seriously?
Bee : I don't like libre
Cee : 😑😑😑^∞
* Few moments later *
Bee : my work is done ,you can have your laptop,btw it's updating.
Cee : 😑😑😑😑😑
* 2000 years later *
*Opens Ubuntu *
*Getting a weird bug*
*Tried to fix *
*Can't open OS files * 👏👏👏🎆
* Windows not shutdown properly *
* Opens windows *
* Not able to login via pin *
* Password ? not accepted *
* Changes outlook password *
* Please chose a password you haven't chosen before *
* Logs in *
* types old pin to change pin *
*You've entered wrong pin too many times *
*System hanging a lot *
* Removes pin *
* Gets huge mcAfee restart system popups , every 10 sec *
* Just shutdown , feels irritated for the rest of the day*

* Regrets dual booting, shd have wiped the windows partition 😫😫*

*Wonders,what the hell did my sister even do to my laptop ?*

Worst dev team failure I've experienced?

One of several.

Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.

I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.

The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.

3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.

3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.

4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).

About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.

3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.

About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.

Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.

A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.

Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."

8:30 - get into office, boot windows
Windows: "Oh man, here's this update. If you're not doing it now, I will start in 15 minutes. No questions asked!"

9:45 - checking update status
Windows: "Well i'm nearly finished, just give me a sec..."

9:55 - whats's my pc doing
Windows: "Hey mate, I did it! I also restored those neat shortcuts to MS EDGE for you. Please use my browser"

10:00 - Well i can finally start working
Windows: "Yeah... you would. But i had to remove theese few applications, because they are not compatible anymore."

11:00 - Okay, installed all my stuff, did some coding. Time to test it. Lets boot up my VM.
Windows: "Oh so sorry mate. Not gonna show my network devices to Virtualbox anymore. Have fun reconfiguring your connections without them."

Fuck this fucking Windows 10!

The only reason we have Win10 on our machines, is because people in my office panicked the last day of the "free upgrade period" (and i was on holidays)...

In our morning stand up, dev was bragging about how much code he was refactoring (like over-the-top bragging) and how much the changes will improve readability (WTF does that mean?), performance, blah blah blah. Boss was very impressed, I wasn't. This morning I looked at the change history and yes, he spent nearly two solid days changing code. What code? A service that is over 10 years old, hasn't been used in over 5, mostly auto-generated code (various data contracts from third party systems). He "re-wrote" the auto-generated code, "fixed" various IDisposable implementations and other complete wastes of time. How –bleep-ing needy are people for praise and how –bleep-ing stupid are people for believing such bull-bleep? I think I should get a t-shirt made with a picture of a BS-Meter and when he starts talking, “Wait a sec, I gotta change my shirt. OK…you were saying?”

I could bitch about XSLT again, as that was certainly painful, but that’s less about learning a skill and more about understanding someone else’s mental diarrhea, so let me pick something else.

My most painful learning experience was probably pointers, but not pointers in the usual sense of `char *ptr` in C and how they’re totally confusing at first. I mean, it was that too, but in addition it was how I had absolutely none of the background needed to understand them, not having any learning material (nor guidance), nor even a typical compiler to tell me what i was doing wrong — and on top of all of that, only being able to run code on a device that would crash/halt/freak out whenever i made a mistake. It was an absolute nightmare.

Here’s the story:

Someone gave me the game RACE for my TI-83 calculator, but it turned out to be an unlocked version, which means I could edit it and see the code. I discovered this later on by accident while trying to play it during class, and when I looked at it, all I saw was incomprehensible garbage. I closed it, and the game no longer worked. Looking back I must have changed something, but then I thought it was just magic. It took me a long time to get curious enough to look at it again.

But in the meantime, I ended up played with these “programs” a little, and made some really simple ones, and later some somewhat complex ones. So the next time I opened RACE again I kind of understood what it was doing.

Moving on, I spent a year learning TI-Basic, and eventually reached the limit of what it could do. Along the way, I learned that all of the really amazing games/utilities that were incredibly fast, had greyscale graphics, lowercase text, no runtime indicator, etc. were written in “Assembly,” so naturally I wanted to use that, too.

I had no idea what it was, but it was the obvious next step for me, so I started teaching myself. It was z80 Assembly, and there was practically no documents, resources, nothing helpful online.

I found the specs, and a few terrible docs and other sources, but with only one year of programming experience, I didn’t really understand what they were telling me. This was before stackoverflow, etc., too, so what little help I found was mostly from forum posts, IRC (mostly got ignored or made fun of), and reading other people’s source when I could find it. And usually that was less than clear.

And here’s where we dive into the specifics. Starting with so little experience, and in TI-Basic of all things, meant I had zero understanding of pointers, memory and addresses, the stack, heap, data structures, interrupts, clocks, etc. I had mastered everything TI-Basic offered, which astoundingly included arrays and matrices (six of each), but it hid everything else except basic logic and flow control. (No, there weren’t even functions; it has labels and goto.) It has 27 numeric variables (A-Z and theta, can store either float or complex numbers), 8 Lists (numeric arrays), 6 matricies (2d numeric arrays), 10 strings, and a few other things like “equations” and literal bitmap pictures.

Soo… I went from knowing only that to learning pointers. And pointer math. And data structures. And pointers to pointers, and the stack, and function calls, and all that goodness. And remember, I was learning and writing all of this in plain Assembly, in notepad (or on paper at school), not in C or C++ with a teacher, a textbook, SO, and an intelligent compiler with its incredibly helpful type checking and warnings. Just raw trial and error. I learned what I could from whatever cryptic sources I could find (and understand) online, and applied it.

But actually using what I learned? If a pointer was wrong, it resulted in unexpected behavior, memory corruption, freezes, etc. I didn’t have a debugger, an emulator, etc. I had notepad, the barebones compiler, and my calculator.

Also, iterating meant changing my code, recompiling, factory resetting my calculator (removing the battery for 30+ sec) because bugs usually froze it or corrupted something, then transferring the new program over, and finally running it. It was soo slowwwww. But I made steady progress.

Painful learning experience? Check.
Pointer hell? Absolutely.

Me: Updates my debian.
Nautilus: Is slow af.
Me: *googles alternatives*
Me: Let's try ranger.
Me 10 sec after installing: Holy jumping jesus on a breadstick there's a lot of shortcuts.

imagine having kernel memory leaks in 2020

AT&T or Huawei, whichever, pushed an update for my already-struggling-to-exist phone that made the kernel memory leak go from 480KB/hr avg to 22.5MB/hr avg. When my free RAM is never under 50% of 2GB after the kernel starts loading other shit and i'm able to express free RAM, at any time in use, in megs, with 8 bits... this means my phone crashes, with no apps running aside from a trimmed list of stock apps, every 3-4 hours due to running out of RAM. The only usable (read: not R/O because unrooted) swapfile is located on a tmpfs, so it's completely fucking useless (and eats another 100MB of RAM that I could be using for LITERALLY anything else, that's like another 3 hours of full idle between crashes) and I can't unlock the bootloader to fix any of this as Huawei no longer hands out keys and it'd take 7 years or so to brute (32-bit @ 10/sec)

tl;dr: fuck

how am i supposed to fix anything if they change the priorities on my tickets every 10 sec, like PM's change them, 2 min later MD over rules them and changes them again, so 5 min later PM's change them again because something urgent came up, but then another client starts ringing my MD so that client is suddenly priority

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARG

I give up

After reading some rants abut stupid project managers I remembered this situation that happened to me a decade ago.
One of the tasks was to move some html component to different place on the page. The whole page was a mix trs and tds and to achieve that I had to rewrite the whole page structure. I estimated around half a day to complete that task. It was my first job and I was not great back then, but still it was reasonable amount for this task.

Now lets introduce my PM : the guy was a complete tool. He was a former hardware store manager ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) and had no idea what we were doing.
He started ranting how on earth such simple task can takes so much time. I started explaining myself, but he wasn't listening. Instead he started sharing his screen, he made a screenshot of the page, pasted it to the ms paint, cut the component, and moved it to desired place. Then he said : It took me like 10 sec to complete the task and I have no experience, maybe I will replace you?
I was speechless. I had no words and I just kept silence.
Then he said he would reassign this task to X, because he is competent.
X spend more then 4 hours and I heard no apologies.

About slightly more than a year ago I started volunteering at the local general students committee. They desperately searched for someone playing the role of both political head of division as well as the system administrator, for around half a year before I took the job.

When I started the data center was mostly abandoned with most of the computational power and resources just laying around unused. They already ran some kvm-hosts with around 6 virtual machines, including a cloud service, internally used shared storage, a user directory and also 10 workstations and a WiFi-Network. Everything except one virtual machine ran on GNU/Linux-systems and was built on open source technology. The administration was done through shared passwords, bash-scripts and instructions in an extensive MediaWiki instance.

My introduction into this whole eco-system was basically this:
"Ever did something with linux before? Here you have the logins - have fun. Oh, and please don't break stuff. Thank you!"

Since I had only managed a small personal server before and learned stuff about networking, it-sec and administration only from courses in university I quickly shaped a small team eager to build great things which would bring in the knowledge necessary to create something awesome. We had a lot of fun diving into modern technologies, discussing the future of this infrastructure and simply try out and fail hard while implementing those ideas.

Today, a year and a half later, we look at around 40 virtual machines spiced with a lot of magic. We host several internal and external services like cloud, chat, ticket-system, websites, blog, notepad, DNS, DHCP, VPN, firewall, confluence, freifunk (free network mesh), ubuntu mirror etc. Everything is managed through a central puppet-configuration infrastructure. Changes in configuration are deployed in minutes across all servers. We utilize docker for application deployment and gitlab for code management. We provide incremental, distributed backups, a central database and a distributed network across the campus. We created a desktop workstation environment based on Ubuntu Server for deployment on bare-metal machines through the foreman project. Almost everything free and open source.

The whole system now is easily configurable, allows updating, maintenance and deployment of old and new services. We reached our main goal for this year which was the creation of a documented environment which is maintainable by one administrator.

Although we did this in our free-time without any payment it was a great year with a lot of experience which pays off now.

Found a dumb mistake I made in a query in my project.
Reduced page load from 10 sec to < 1 sec with an hour's restructuring.
Had just assumed it was slow because of my super cheap Azure DB subscription... 🙄

TL;DR: TIL for heavy queries use PDO and not some frameworks DB class

ffs I was trying to save 300k+ lines at once with Laravel for weeks. Mind you from a text file. 1gb ram on the vps so while trying to prepare the text to save: Fatal Error: Allowed Memory Size of bla bla Bytes Exhausted

ok so lets put it in a loop: Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded (set_time_limit(0); lol)

optimising, varying the code got me into a situation when the content got saved in the BD but inconsistent (duplicates) and the table had often more than 1,5M rows. That was what told me its not a performance issue, my code is the issue. (dah)

I was starting to think it would be easier to export a prepared query to a sql file and load the file into the db as thats the fastest possible option...I even started to think about switching to python, then it hit me, Laravel has a shitload of routes to the DB so I switched to PDO

benchmark on 1vCPU, 1GB RAM VPS with SSD
379k lines with 11 columns in less than 10 sec with a loop of saving every ~6000 rows (if i tried choking it to save the whole thing at once it went up to 16-17sec)

!rant

Accidentally figured out you can skip next/previous 10 seconds in yt app by double tapping into right/left video area. I don't know if it's new or familiar. I've wanted to share it with you. But then look at this screenshot👀...

>making bruteforce MD5 collision engine in Python 2 (requires MD5 and size of original data, partial-file bruteforce coming soon)
>actually going well, in the ballpark of 8500 urandom-filled tries/sec for 10 bytes (because urandom may find it faster than a zero-to-FF fill due to in-practice files not having many 00 bytes)
>never resolves
>SOMEHOW manages to cut off the first 2 chars of all generated MD5 hashes
>fuck, fixed
>implemented tries/sec counter at either successful collision or KeyboardInterrupt
>implemented "wasted roll" (duplicate urandom rolls) counter at either collision success or KeyboardInterrupt
>...wait
>wasted roll counter is always at either 0% or 99%
>spend 2 hours fucking up a simple percentage calculation
>finally fixed
>implement pre-bruteforce calculation of maximum try count assuming 5% wasted rolls (after a couple hours of work for one equation because factorials)
>takes longer than the bruteforce itself for 10 bytes

this has been a rollercoaster but damn it's looking decent so far. Next is trying to further speed things up using Cython! (owait no, MicroPeni$ paywalled me from Visual Studio fucking 2010)

Jesus fucking christ, fuck angular sometimes ... most of the times. just fuck it

And fuck me even more for writing such shit components when I started out with it.

Takes forever to find the shit that isn't working due to angulars magic change detection and the shittx performance of local dev environment.

Has to run in JIT because the app it too big, and then it takes 10 sec to build everytime you change something. And during that time i get a 100% cpu usage which kills vscode so I cant do anything properly

fuck it, i just wanna have a nice weekend now