Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...

<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>

Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.

So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:

- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole

So lets look at some example of their work:

- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"

- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"

- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"

- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.

- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"

Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them

Thats all the time we have for today,

Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:

- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

So I own a webshop together with a guy I met at one of my previous contract jobs. He said he had a great idea to sell product X because he can get them very cheap from another European country. Actually it is a great idea so we decided to work together on this: I do everything tech related, he does the non tech stuff.

Now we are more than 1 year in business. I setup a VPS, completely configured it, installed and setup the complete webshop, built 2 custom PrestaShop modules, built many customizations, built a completely new order proces (both front and back end), advertised quite some products, did some link building, ensured everything is in place to do proper SEO, wrote some content pages, did administration and tax declarations, rewrote a part of a PrestaShop component because it was so damn inefficient and horribly slow, and then some more. Much more.

He did customer relation management, supplier management and some ad words campaigns. Promised me many times to write the content for our product pages. This guy has an education in marketing but literally said: I'm not gonna invest in creating some marketing plan. I have no ambition in online marketing.

What?! You have the marketing knowledge and skills but refuse to use it to market our webshop and business? What the fuck is wrong with you?!

Today he says to me: 'Hey man, this is becoming an expensive hobby as we don't sell much and have lots of costs. I don't understand why I should be the one to write these content pages. Everything you did in the past 8 months can be done in less than 20 hours! You are a joke and just made it a big deal by spreading your work over so many months. I know for sure because I currently work at a company where I'm surrounded by front end devs! Are you fucking crazy?! You're a liar.'

He talks like this to me every 2 months or so while he can't even deliver the content for 1 single product in 6 fuckin' months! We even had to refund a few of our customers because Mr. client relations manager didn't respond to their e-mails within 1 fucking week!! So I asked him how could that have happened as you do the client relations and support. Well, he replied to me: 'Why didn't YOU respond to our clients? You don't log on in our back office at least once a day?!'.

Of course I do asshole. But YOU don't. He replied that I was lying just like I was lying about what I did for our business.

So, asshole, let's have a look at PrestaShops logs to see who's logging in daily. Well, you can probably guess who's IP was there in most of the entries. It wasn't his.

So, what the fuck have you been doing then?! You can't even manage to respond quickly to a client?!! We have maybe 50 clients and if we get 1 question a month by email it is already a lot. But you keep bitching, complaining and insulting me instead?!!!

Last time he literally admitted on a WhatsApp conversation that he had and still has the hope that he could just sit back and relax and watch me do ALL the work.

Well, guess what you fucking moron. That's not what we agreed upon. You fuckin' retard think you're so smart but you say EVERYTHING on WhatsApp! Including your promises to me. Thank you you fuckin' piece of dog shit because now I have hard evidence and will hand it over to my lawyer to make you pay every god damn cent for all the hours I've spent working on our business. Oh, and I'll take over the webshop and make it a success on my own because I know damn well how to get relevant traffic and thus customers.

You just go get yourself fucked in the ass without lubricant you fuckin' asshole. I have told you you shouldn't fuck with me because I take business very seriously. I even warned you when you were crossing a line again. Well, if you don't listen... You will pay for the consequences. I will be so damn happy to tell you 'I told you so' with a very very big smile on my face. That momemt WILL come, 'partner'.

Fuck you. You will be fucked. Count on that. Fucking asshole.

> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job

I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.

My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.

Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.

I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.

On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄

I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.

I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.

I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.

I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.

But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.

I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.

But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.

So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.

So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.

TL;DR: Fuck you Apple.

10:30 PM, parent needs iPhone update to update Messenger. How hard can this be?
Need to update iPhone from 9.x to latest, which is so outdated it still required iTunes. Fk.

Boot iTunes on Windows 10 pc that is at least 10 years old.
Completely unresponsive
Crash in task manager
Launch and is completely unresponsive. (Also starts playing unrequested music.. Oh joy..)
Fuck this, go to apple.com to download iTunes exe
Gives me some Microsoft store link. Fuck that shit, just give me the executable
Google “iTunes download”. click around on shitty Apple website. Success.
Control panel. Uninstall iTunes. (Takes forever, but it works)
Restart required (of fucking course).
2 eternities later. Run iTunes exe. Restart required. Fk.
Only 1 eternity later. Run iTunes, connect iPhone.
Actually detects the device. (holy shit, a miracle)
Starts syncing an empty library to the phone. Ya, fuck that.
Google. Disable option. Connect phone. Find option to update.
Update started. Going nowhere fast. Time for a walk at 1:00 AM punching the air.
Come back. Generic error message: Update failed (-1). Phone is stuck installing update. (O shit)
1x hard reset
2x hard reset
Google. Find Apple forum with exact question. Absolutely useless replies. (I expected no less)
Google recovery mode. Get into recovery mode.
Receive message: “You can update, but if it fails, you will have to reset to factory settings”. Fuck it, here we go.
Update runs (faster this time). Fails again. Same bullshit error message. (Goddammit, fuck. This might actually be bad.)
Disconnect phone.
… It boots latest iOS version. (holy shit, there is a god)
Immediately kill iTunes. Fuck that shit.
Parents share Apple account
Sign in, 2FA required.
Fat finger the code.
Restart “welcome” process.
Will not send code. What. The. Fuck.
Requests access code on other parent’s iPhone.
No code present. What???
Try restarting welcome process again. No dice. (Of course)
Set code on other parent’s iPhone.
Get message “Code is easy to guess”. Ya. IDGAF
Use code on newly updated iPhone. Some success.
Requires reset of password.
Password cannot be the same as old password (Goddammit)
Change password.
Welcome process done.
Sign in again on same phone after welcome process done in settings. (Nice.)
Sign in again on other phone with updated password
Update Messenger.
Update hangs. Needs more space.
Delete shit.
Update frozen in App Store (Really??)
Restart iPhone.
Update Messenger.
Update complete past 2. Well that was easy.

Apple, fuck you.
Some call Android unintuitive, but I look at the settings app on iPhone and realize you aren’t any better.
This company hasn’t been innovative since 2007. Over 1000 USD for a phone? Are you fucking kidding me?
Updating an iPhone from iOS 9.x is probably uncommon anymore. But this is a fucking joke. Fix your shit.
Shit like this is why I’ll never again own an Apple product. I have HAD IT with the joke of a business.

Thanks for reading.

Hesitated for a while before posting this, as I don't like to whine in public but this should be therapeutical

Beware, it's a #longread

Years ago, I thought about how cool it'd be to have conversation-based interactive fiction on my phone. I remember showing early prototypes to my ex in 2012. It took me over 2 years to build up the courage to make it my priority and to take time off. FictionBurgers.com was born.

A few weeks in, a friend of mine forwarded me a link to Lifeline. I was devastated. I literally spent 2 days cursing my past self for not making a move sooner.

I soldiered on, worked 7 months straight on it. Now the tech is 90-95% finished, content is maybe 60% finished and I just... gave up. Every other week now, similar projects are popping up. I'm under-staffed and under-financed compared to them. Beyond the entertainment space, "conversation-based" is hot stuff in 2016, and I still can't seem to know what to do with what I have.

I feel like I had this fantastic opportunity and squandered it, which makes me miserable.

Anyway, just so you get some cheese with my whine, here are a few lessons I learned the hard way:

Lesson #1 : Don't go it alone. I thought I could hack it, and for over 7 months, I did. But sooner or later, shit gets to you, it's just human. That's when you need someone; just so that their highs compensate your lows and vice versa. Most of the actual writing was done by a freelancer (and he did AMAZING WORK, especially considering that I couldn't pay him much) but it's not the same as a partner, who's invested same as you.

Lesson #1.5 : Complementary skills. Just like my fiction project failed because I was missing a writer partner, my fallback plan of getting into conversational tech hit the skids for lack of a bizdev partner. It's great to stick among devs when ranting, but you need to mingle with a variety of people. Some of them are actually ok, y'know :)

Lesson #2 : Lean Startup, MVP. Google those terms if you're not familiar with them. My mistake here (after MVPing the shit out of the tech) was to let my content goal run amok : what made my app superior to the competition (or so I reasoned) was that it would allow for conversations with multiple characters! So I started plotting a story... with 9 characters. Not 2 or 3. NINE FREAKING CHARACTERS! Branching conversations with 9 characters is the stuff of nightmare -- and is the main reason I gave up.

Lesson #3 : Know your reasons. I wasted some much time early on, zig-zaging between objectives:
"I'm just indulging myself"
"No, I really want it to be a project that pays off"
"Nah, it's just a learning opportunity"
"Damn, why is it bothering me so much that someone else is doing the same thing ?"
"Doesn't matter, I just mine finished"
"What a waste of time !!"
etc etc
And it's still a problem now that I'm trying to figure out what to do!

So anyway, that's my story, thanks for readin'
Check out chatty.im/player/sugar-wars if you want to test the most advance version.

Also, I've also tagged this #startupfail, if any of you fine people want to share the lessons you've dearly paid to learn!

I'm leaving my job.

That had already been decided when I learned that the only other front end guy at the company put in his two weeks notice. I immediately decided that I was morally obligated to put in my 4 months notice to give the company enough time to find a replacement (because, contrary to the beliefs of some programmers, front end plays a critical role in web dev).

With only 2 weeks left, I was put on his project to do some "simple design work".

Jesus christ in heaven alive and dead...

I've never in my career seen CSS with such an intense level of specificity -- nobody on that team should have ever let that code get so out of control.

I've spent the past week cursing, walking out of the room, whispering "I can't believe you've done this", ranting to non-developer friends.

Here's an example: the application has a panel used all over the place with a header and a body. Every Single View has it's own duplicated panel, each with its own unique class names and CSS. And that's just one element.

Every view has hundreds of lines of duplicated CSS. Every button, link, list, all with unique styles.

To any junior developer reading this, please hear me: Write one block of CSS for any element that will be reused. DO NOT duplicate your code when it can be used over and over.

/rant

I had just started as an SDE intern, and was fiddling around with the code base.

Me: Hey, can you send me the link to our version control system?
Mentor: Umm, what!?
Me: You know, where we keep our code backup...
Mentor: Hmm, is there a need for that?
Me: Yeah, I mean, my past experience tells me to always backup code, just in case something goes wrong.
Mentor: Ohh, that's easy. I'll teach you how I do it.

So, he comes to my workplace, and does this:
1. Go to your workspace folder.
2. Right click it.
3. Zip it.
4. Open outlook.
5. Compose email.
6. Attach the zip file.
7. Mail to yourself.
8. That's how it's done!

I was like what the hell!?!?! Is this really happening?? And then he started basking in his glory, as if he had taught me some secret hack! Seeing this, I couldn't even get myself to introduce him to git. That was the worst part.

There's this junior I've been training. We gave him a bigger task than we usually do

"How do I link an object in table X with the corresponding object in table Y?"

"How are objects in two tables usually linked? How did you link Y with Z in the first place?"

"Em... Foreign Keys?"

"Yup"

"But there's not foreign key from X to Y."

"Well, create one. You've got full creative freedom over this task."

I sometimes feel like Juniors are either completely careless about past code or overly carefuly with not editing any past code. Frustrating but adorable

Something strange happened the other day… I requested the "free" Community License of Syncfusion (the company that provides a lot of .net, uwp, web, etc. components).

After a few minutes they called me... although I didn't provide my phone number…
I signed up using my LinkedIn account, but there isn't my phone number there… 🤔
I don't remember I've ever shared my phone number anywhere on the internet, but ok… maybe I did in the past.

More than 800+ components for free (if you're not a big company), a really nice offer.
So I decided to send the link to my friend.

He doesn't even have LinkedIn… he created a fucking new account just for that, without any private information about himself.

10 minutes later… they called him. HOW? 😱

We checked our accounts on Syncfusion, created just before that (without writing anything about ourselves, just by clicking on "Sign In"), and they have our addresses… How do they fucking know where I live?

I still can't understand how they did it, my phone number is registered to my father, so they couldn't just search it…

The same day they sent me an email.
I answered it asking "How did you know my phone number?".
They replied: "I got your number because when you downloaded our community license you put your email and phone number.".
I never did it. They didn't ask me anything.

It'll probably remain a creepy mystery… it's really so easy for a company to steal your data, and they really do it so publicly without any problem?

So...Worked my butt off to have a website developed by a certain date client and I agreed on. Finished the site 3 weeks ago and sent dev link. Client has been completely silent; unreachable by email (I sent 5 in past 3 weeks) and phone (left 2 voicemails and a message with his receptionist today). In ALL five emails I told him I needed the email addresses he wants used to route his sales leads to...Got nada.

So today I seen that the lead forms have been tested on the website. Dude can't get back to me for 3 effing weeks, BUT can test his lead forms.. You know, without the lead email addresses that i asked for 5x. Ugh, idiot!!!

What were some of your "OH MY GOD I'M AN AWESOME CODE WIZARD!" moments?

For example, I can remember two or three:
One was when I, with only cursory knowledge of C, never having worked with it but having been exposed to it (and having lots of experience with C# therefore familiar with the c-family syntax), took 5 minute look at a source code and pointed out a bug that the student working on it was trying to solve for the past 2 hours. Sadly, I don't remember what the bug was anymore.

Second one was on reddit, someone posted to gamedev group a 2minute video from his voxel+ai framework he was working on, I watched it, and without any idea what it's written in, or how, I was like "you seem to be dropping frames in a pretty regular manner unrelated to anything I see happening on the screen. You're creating too much garbage on frame-by-frame basis (probably while your AI is exploring what to do), look into object pooling, it'll help".

And the guy responded in a few hours like "by gosh, you're right! thank you! and what do you think about the source code?" (he linked git repo below the video.

And I was like OMG I'M A MAGE, I DIDN'T EVEN CLICK THE REPO LINK, ONLY NOW AFTERWARDS, AND yeah, it's c++ so sadly nothing for me, but OMG I JUST WROTE THE FIRST THING THAT CAME TO MY MIND, DIDN'T EXPECT IT TO BE CORRECT, I'M AWESOME.

=D and the feeling stayed with me for about two days.

(If it's not clear yet, it's perfectly okay, in fact, required, to brag about yourself in answering this question ;) )

Over the past 2 months I have interviewed with several companies and 2 of them stood out at rejecting me. Let's call them Company A, and Company B!

> I know right? Developers are bad at naming!

I guess part of it is my fault too! I am old and slow. Doesn't like competitive programming and already forgot most of how to answer algorithm question. I can't even answer some of the algorithm question I've flawlessly answered back when I was fresh out of University.

## Company A

When I got chance to interview at Company A, they require me to answer HackerRank style interview. It's my first time in nearly a decade of working in the industry to feel like I'm in a classroom exam again. I hate it, and I deliberately voiced my distaste to the answers comment:

// Paraphrasing
// I'm sorry, I'm dumb!
// I never faced anything like this in real world work...
// ......

But guess what? My answer still pass the score, have a call with their VP, which proceed to have another call with their Lead Engineer.

Talked about my experience with Event Driven System and CQRS+ES and they decided that I am:
- Arrogant
- Too RND in my tech stack
- And overkill in CQRS+ES

And decided they don't need me.
They hate me for having a headstrong personality which translates as Arrogance to the perceiving end.

## Company B

Another HackerRank style interview. Guess I passed their score this time without me typing some strong comment and proceed to have another test with their Lead Engineer.
This time they want 5 question answered in google docs within 60 minutes.
Two of them stood out to me for being impossible to work on 12 minutes (60 / 5 if you're wondering). Or maybe I'm just old and dumb?!
The others are just questions copied word for word from Geeks For Geeks.

One of the question requires me to write a password brute force attack to an imaginary API.

The other requires me to find a combination of math `+` or `-` operation from `a strings of numbers` that results in `a number`.

My `Arrogance` kicks in and I start typing a comment

// Paraphrasing
// I am sorry but I feel this is impossible for me to think of in 12 minutes
// (60 / 5 if you're wondering)
// But I know you guys got this question from Rosseta Code!
// Here's the link, but I don't know the logic behind it

See? I've worked on this question back when I was still a University student and remember where to look at.

Unsurprisingly, I've heard the feedback that I was rejected although I've answered one of their question `FLAWLESSLY`. I know they are being sarcastic at this point. haha.

---

I was trying to be honest about what I can and can't do in the `N` minutes timeframe and the Industry hates me.

I guess The Industry love people who can grind `GFG` or other algorithm websites, remember the solutions out of their head, and quietly answer their `genuinely original question` without pointing the flaws back at them.

When I wrote my first algorithm that learns...

So in order to on board our customers onto our software we have to link the product on their data base to the products on ours. This seems easy enough but when you actually start looking at their data you find it's a fuck up of duplication's, bad naming conventions and only 10% or so have distinct identifiers like a suppler code,model no or barcode. After a week or 2 they find they can't do it and ask for our help and we take over. On average it took 2 of our staff 1-2 weeks to complete the task manually searching one record of theirs against our db at a time. This was a big problem since we only had enough resources to on board 2-4 customers a month meaning slow growth.

I realized when looking at different customers databases that although the data was badly captured - it was consistently badly captured similar to how crap file names will usually contain the letters 'asd' because its typed with the left hand.

I then wrote an algorithm that fuzzy matched against our data and the past matches of other customers data creating a ranking algorithm similar to google page search. After auto matching the majority of results the top 10 ranked search results for each product on their db is shown to a human 1 at a time and they either click the the correct result or select "no match" and repeat until it is done at which point the algo will include the captured data in ranking future results.

It now takes a single staff member 1-2 hours to fully on board a customer with 10-15k products and will continue to get faster and adapt to changes in language and naming conventions. Making it learn wasn't really my intention at the time and more a side effect of what I was trying to achieve. Completely blew my mind.

I am currently looking for a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), because my music projects are starting to get a little too complex for Audacity.

So I started looking for a good, easy-to-learn, ideally free program, and quickly learned that Avid now has a free version of Pro Tools called First.

So I go to their site and fill out the registration form to get the download. In addition to creating an account with Avid, you also need to create one with iLok, which apparently has something to do with how they manage their licenses. Kinda overkill for a free program, but okay...

I download the program (about 3gigs...), install it and try to start it. It gives me an error message about missing some service. Okay? I'm confused because I notice that an 'Application Manager' service has appeared in my tray, and when I open that I can log into my new account just fine. But it still doesn't work.

There's a link in the error message to the iLok website, and it looks like ai need to dowload and install another component. Why didn't that get installed with the program if it's required?

Hmm...

So I go to the iLok site, download it and install it. Pro Tools First still won't start. I realize that the PTF installer asked me to reboot, which I didn't do because: a) I always have a lot of windows open, and b) How often is a reboot ACTUALLY required? Why would you need to reboot?

So I (begrudgingly) reboot, and now the program seems to start initializing... but then it throws an error message about some plugin that it can't load because it doesn't work for the 64 bit version. Then... why are you even looking for it?
And then it says something like: 'I can't handle that, I'm just gonna shut down'.

What?

I try starting it again. Same error appears, but then it gets past it this time... Only to throw another error message about something else it can't load, and therefore it must shut down.

Deep breath.

Third time is the charm, the program actually made it to the project create/load screen! Huzzah!
So I look around a bit, but don't do much. It doesn't seem too intuitive to me, so I start watching some tutorials on YouTube from Avid themselves. It's a little late by now, so I don't get my hands dirty that day.

Next time I want to try out the program I start it up, still get error messages, but it does seem to initialize okay. But then the 'Create project' button doesn't react when I press it.

It turns out that the program takes a looong time to log in to the avid account, even though the manager service is running and logged in...

When it finally logs on I create a new blank project, but it doesn't ask me where to save it to. I see there is a counter saying 1/3 and looking around I find some info about 'cloud based projects'.

It would seem that this program only supports saving projects to the cloud, and you get only 3 projects total. Three. THREE?

Ahem...

I add an instrument track to my new project and select the one and only plugin, which is a synth. I don't see the plugin window, like in the tutorials I watched. I fiddle around with the windows, but I only manage to get the layout fucked up. There's a handy 'Window' menu, but none of the options resets the view. The main window is now sporting a WINDOWS FUCKING 7 BORDER! And partially blocking the view of the top menu.

Blaaargh!

Frustrated, I shut the program down and restart it. I now select one of the project templates (after waiting for it to LOG IN AGAIN!) in the hope that I might have a bit more luck with that starting point.

But when the template has loaded, out of nowhere, the program goes from maximized to windowed mode! And the fucking Win7 border is back again, still messing with the main menu!

FFS!

I get the sucker maximized again and select one of the synth tracks, and Lo and Behold! The synth plugin window actually shows up! But of course there is no sound produced when I play, neither with the keyboard or my midi keyboard.

Oh no, that would have been too easy.

I see some the meters moving when I play, but no sound is produced. I check the options menu, but find out nothing useful except for the fact that the program only support 48kHz sample rate. That's pretty disappointing when you have a 192kHz/24bit soundcard.

I'm done. This piece of shit software is NOT for me. It's bloated, complicated to sign up for and install, extremely limited and buggy as hell!

The final insult is that it takes 5 minutes to uninstall because there is no uninstall option in the so-called 'Application Manager' (of course fucking not!), and doing it through Programs & Features there are 5 (FIVE!!) different apps and services to uninstall, one by one.

0/10, would not recommend.

An intern approached me for help in one of their past exam questions. They said they had already turned in the exam but just wanted to know the answer. The question was not that hard and I had a bit of time to kill so I helped them.

Me: So, to make it O(n), you have to make it a double linked list, and keep a tail.

Them: But the problem requires us to solve it with a single liked list.

Me: You can just iterate it at the end to make it single-linked again. That costs O(n), so the solution is still O(n).

Them: Oh yeah right. I don't think we even need a tail though, we could just have a variable pointing to the last link.

Me: ...which is called a tail.

Avoid ACPICA if at all possible. It's one garbage tier cluster fuck of bad design, horrible documentation and downright misleading and wrong code

It's meant to consist of an ASL compiler, disassembler, debugger, dumper, various user space utitilies and a kernel resident OSPM implementation *if* you can figure out what belongs to what. Even just compiling this pile of trash is a mystery in itself. Think you need the source files in source/common? EEEEH, wrong. Well, at least partially since most of them seem to be for the user space stuff..? Other ones *are* needed on the other hand. At least the disassembler and/or debugger and/or dumper components seem to reference them. Not that I could figure out how to compile those anyways. The real path to your goal seems to be to ignore a seemingly arbitrary subset of source and header files until your linker stops complaining

There's also a bunch of configuration defines, some of which *you* define, some defined *for* you, based on again others. Of course most of them do stupid shit. Enabling the debugger automatically enables debug logging. Enabling the disassembler force enables debug allocation tracking... What?

The code itself isn't of much help either. Looking in "os_specific/service_layers" you find what looks to be reference implementations of acpica functions in certain os' like windows and unix. Of course I had a look because AcpiOsReadMemory is supposed to read physical memory and I don't know how I would even implement that. But hey, osunixxf.c (xf for interface... of course) should tell me. I'll let you see for yourself in the attached image. Apparently it does fuck all and just returns AE_OK. No error, no logging, no nothing. Just ok. As you can imagine, AcpiOsWriteMemory doesn't do much more either.
...okay so maybe physical memory accesses aren't actually used and these functions are some sort of relic from past times? Nope! They are absolutely necessary for doing low level device interaction. WTF. So finally I went to the linux source and checked how *they* implemented them, and just as I thought, these functions are anything but no-ops...
...So for what fucking reason do these stupid interface implementations even exist but to purposefully mislead you?? They aren't used for fucking anything! As far as I know Windows doesn't even *use* ACPICA and Linux have their own fork with working implementations... They just sit there, just to tell you how to NOT do it

So that's some of my thoughts about ACPICA. Note that I haven't even used it as a library yet, I just got it to compile and link and it already fucked with me this much.
There's also so much more I didn't mention like that you *have* to modify the acpica source in order to get your own platform header working (else #error) eventhough the docs explicitely instruct you not too but you get the point

Don't use ACPICA if you don't have to. Save your sanity for something that's worth it

(Part 2/2?)

THE RAT-RACE ARC:

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

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

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

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

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

WHY NOW:

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

THE CORRECTION ARC:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good bye and thank you for listening.

So at our company, we use Google Sheets to for to coordinate everything, from designs to bug reporting to localization decisions, etc... Except for roadmaps, we use Trello for that. I found this very unintuitive and disorganized. Google Sheets GUI, as you all know, was not tailored for development project coordination. It is a spreadsheet creation tool. Pages of document are loosely connected to each other and you often have to keep a link to each of them because each Google Sheets document is isolated from each other by design. Not to mention the constant requests for permission for each document, wasting everybody's time.

I brought up the suggestion to the CEO that we should migrate everything to GitHub because everybody already needed a Github account to pull the latest version of our codebase even if they're not developers themselves. Gihub interface is easier to navigate, there's an Issues tab for bug report, a Wiki tab for designs and a Projects tab for roadmaps, eliminating the need for a separate Trello account. All tabs are organized within each project. This is how I've seen people coordinated with each other on open-source projects, it's a proven, battle-tested model of coordination between different roles in a software project.

The CEO shot down the proposal immediately, reason cited: The design team is not familiar with using the Github website because they've never thought of Github as a website for any role other than developers.

Fast-forward to a recent meeting where the person operating the computer connected to the big TV is struggling to scroll down a 600+ row long spreadsheet trying to find one of the open bugs. At that point, the CEO asked if there's anyway to hide resolved bugs. I immediately brought up Github and received support from our tester (vocal support anyway, other devs might have felt the same but were afraid to speak up). As you all know, Github by default only shows open issues by default, reducing the clutter that would be generated by past closed issues. This is the most obvious solution to the CEO's problem. But this CEO still stubbornly rejected the proposal.

2 lessons to take away from this story:

- Developer seems to be the only role in a development team that is willing to learn new tools for their work. Everybody else just tries to stretch the limit of the tools they already knew even if it meant fitting a square peg into a round hole. Well, I can't speak for testers, out of 2 testers I interacted with, one I never asked her opinion about Github, and the other one was the guy mentioned above. But I do know a pixel artist in the same company having a similar condition. She tries to make pixel arts using Photoshop. Didn't get to talk to her about this because we're not on the same project, but if we were, I'd suggest her use Aseprite, or (at least Pixelorama if the company doesn't want to spend for Aseprite's price tag) for the purpose of drawing pixel arts. Not sure how willing she would be at learning new tools, though.

- Github and other git hosts have a bit of a branding problem. Their names - Github, BitBucket, GitLab, etc... - are evocative of a tool exclusively used by developers, yet their websites have these features that are supposed to be used by different roles other than developers. Issues tabs are used by testers as well as developers. Wiki tabs are used by designers alongside developers. Projects and Insights tabs are used by project managers/product owners. Discussion tabs are used by every roles. Artists can even submit new assets through Pull Requests tabs if the Art Directors know how to use the site interface (Art Directors' job is literally just code review, but for artistic assets). These websites are more than just git hosts. They are straight-up Jira replacement with git hosting as a bonus feature. How can we get that through the head of non-developers so that we don't have to keep 4+ accounts for different websites for the same project?

I gave a technical interview today and here is summary how it went . interviewer asked me to login to leetcode account then .

Interviewer :- "Open this problem( he gave link) and open submission section".

Me :- "Yes sir" I opened it and I have solved that in past .

Interviewer :- "okay so you have solved this one so let's move to next question(2nd)".

I opened it and again I have already solved that in past. Then he gave 3rd and it was also solved by me already .

Then he said " Okay now I will share with you this problem which you have not solved and I am sure ".

He gave me a hard problem which I actually haven't solved . I would have solved the first 3 , the 4th one was actually hard and I was not able to optimise my code on time .

sometimes life is really tough 😪. he could have asked anyone of them 😕.

Last tuesday I was scheduled for a technical interview with company's mobile team lead. First thing he does is noticing my The Legend of Zelda messenger bag. He starts asking questions about the games I've played, my favorite ones, the ones I disliked and keeps on going for about 10 minutes. Then he starts asking about my experience and some technical stuff for 2-3 minutes. Then he walks away saying "our HR lady will contact you to let you know what's next". Nobody contacted me the rest of the week. I guess someone who prefers "Ocarina of Time" over "A Link to the Past" is not a fit for that company.

Today in Windows Clang misadventures from one past wtf

I have 0 fucking clue what is happening, so I am starting to think that this is a windows 11 only bug.

If I (say for example) compile all of my headers into a .dll and then link them to my executable program, an executable will be generated.

If I use the dll to be linked into my executable, but DON'T use any of the code inside, then no executable is generated.

I need to at least use something from within the headers that I create into the main program for it to build and actually throw out an executable.

I could argue that doing this would be the proper way to setup a project in some scenarios, managing your headers and what not.
The only bad part is that it essentially removes the ability for newcomers to just install clang and hello the fucking world into existence.

Mind you, using the Mingw installation is possible still. I-just-don't-fuckig-understand-why-the-fucking-official-build WORKS

THIS is why people are trying to jump into other languages. My dude's shit is solved, but this fucking infuriates me. ANd go on, try googling "clang not building executable" and see how this shit is nowhere to be fucking found sdfksakjdfa

<sanityCheck> //asking for a friend

Some clever b*****ds wrecked a section of our production mysql db. To fix it I need to rollback the affected records 2 weeks - around 50/300 tables are affected, the other data must remain intact.

Currently my plan is to take a 2 week old dump and cherry pick the data I need from it, then combine it with a dump of the db in it's current state, drop the db and recreate it.

I know this approach will work - but it's risky, a pain in the ass and dealing with 300mb text files is tedious so since I only need to start in around 8 hours I figured It wouldn't hurt to post my approach and see if anyone thinks my plan is borderline retarded.

If you have any advice .etc that will make my life easier I would greatly appreciate it.

So in your opinion...

- is there a better/safer way?
- do you know of any db dump merge tools?
- have a recommended (linux) text editor for large text files?
- have you made any personal mistakes/fuck ups in the past you think I should avoid?
- am I just being a moron and overthinking this?
- if I am being a moron - In your humble opinion has the time come for me to give up all hope and pursue my dream of becoming a professional couch surfer?

</sanityCheck>

Note: Alternatively, if your just pissed that my rant is asking for a solution instead of simply trashing the people that created my situation and your secretly wishing it was on SO where it belongs so you can moderate/edit/downvote/mark the shit out it, feel welcome to troll me in the comments (getting dev advice just doesn't feel reliable without a troll - you matter to me). Afterwards If your panties are still in a bunch I'll post it on SO and dm a link to you to personally moderate - my days already fucked and I wouldn't want to ruin yours too.

It's 5 AM I've been awake for like 5 hours. I was asleep for 6 hours total. I'm going back to sleep the last 3 hours. It'll be 8 or 9 AM. I love being a night owl. I managed to get farther along in Legend of Zelda The Minish Cap. Personally I like a Link to the past better; there is less combat in the Minish Cap.

To give you some context, in the past year we have change managers 3 times. Obviously our process (we were trying to follow agile) has suffer the most with all these changes since it seems the managers that have been assigned to us are not really IT people.

We are using TFS (I know...) for our builds and for our scrum and kanban boards, only use developers and QA are really using the board and all the benefits that it provides and the managers are oblivious to what TFS is. I have tried offering them training and workshops but they just don't want to learn.

And now they want us to keep the requirement information on word documents and Excel instead. I'm not sure I can continue my battle against Word/Excel...

I understand they are valuable tools but... Is it really difficult to use a tool that was made specifically for that and it's as easy as filling some text fields and click a button? Why is it so hard to understand that if you want to know the status of a task is as simple as following a link where you can find all the related information?

I think I'm loosing it, even the other developer on my team is in support of using Word... of course the guy doesn't know agile and his cards on the board are shit making him work with QA all the time....

Feel like I'm alone here....

Monday morning meetings:

- Reminding designers what the app looks like to then discuss a defect.
- Reminding everyone else where the online meeting link is, despite the fact we have used it everyday, for the past 7 weeks.

My teacher in school: Starts PC, after booting the SSO login prompt appears - teacher looks confused and doesn't know what to do because: "My computer always displays Google, where's my Google at?"

a friend of mine sent me some hobby drama and it reminded me of this innate fear I have that's difficult to explain and nor do I really know where it's from or how to describe it

honestly, fuck, I don't know how to describe it

because the issue is every time you do something good for the world, the world ends up vilifying you for it

I saw this when I was growing up and making mods for games, I'm seeing it now in this hobby drama to such a striking degree

this person outdid the community, became famed and god-like a figure due to their personal drive being different, and now... even the people describing the drama are editorializing them into a hated villain of the arc. I literally can't find their original posts, people just say rumoured things about them but won't link them which is super suspicious. even if they do link to a post of theirs the account is banned so I can't read the posts, the website link is 404, etc

the community quotes their backtalk to the person instead of what the person actually said and celebrates it and it's making my stomach churn

this feels like a hit job
then they make fun of this person for being "paranoid everyone is against them" um yeah you literally shit talk them, probably are making things up about them, vilifying them at literally every opportunity, trying to use cheap gotchas to feel superior... I'm starting to think this person is correct, and I want to read what they wrote instead (because of the few quotes they had actual insight into the hobby-sphere) but it seems like you've somehow scrubbed it off the internet, wtf?

I like building things but my fear is exactly this. I've done it in the past when I was little and in my experience if you build something people love, somehow it is a gateway to them mistreating you because they feel entitled to you. so why would you ever contribute to humanity if this is what happens? ever since I was a kid I wanted to keep these things to myself. fame is terrifying. does it even make sense? I can't even put it into words

it would be nice if you could do things and make humanity better but somehow by doing things you literally bring out the worst in them. and yeah, you can tank it and endure it, but it makes you ask why are you doing it if it's so evil onto them? why does this happen? it also frankly sucks, like who wants all this drama? you give people stuff and they spit in your face? that's just depressing. how are you to sleep at night, wrestling with that sort of community integration, doubting if that's your place in life, your purpose? why even? does it even make the world better, or are you making it worse by a chemical reaction of your existence combining with the masses generating vitriol fluids in the collective consciousness? it's just somehow so fucked up

So I've tried to unsubscribe myself from a newsletter for the past two weeks ...

It's a service I used exactly once and apparently I got signed up for their newsletter somehow.

When I got the first mail two weeks ago, I clicked that unsubscribe button in the footer to get to their unsubscribe landingpage and hit that confirmation button.

It said something like "... within 24 hours ..." and I was okay with that, but I kept getting a newsletter / offer / whatever every single day for the following two weeks.

Today I figured out, why the unsubscription seemingly had no effect.

I used a GMail alias for that website, so my address contained a + character.
Apparently they just put that mail address into some unsubscribe link template without urlencoding it, so that + turned into a space and they attempted to unsubscribe some mail address with a space instead of a + ...

Remember kids, always urlencode stuff in URLs!

My last post entails how my company moved me to a freelancing role upon completion of my task (VoIP micro service: incoming and outgoing calls, voice mail drop, voice mail greeting, call forwarding, sms, and a couple more features) — app is now live and used by company’s agents to contact leads on our other products (designing), so boss tells HR to tell me (I realized this from HR’s slack screen when on huddle with me) to add WhatsApp integration. I responded that since I’m a freelancer I would charge $30/hour for it. HR said he’d get back to me and it’s been 3 working days now.

They are also trying to have the app on Apps*mo so they cash out for other companies to use the app.

It’s been 2 weeks and a day since the end of my probation (I’ve been with them for 3 months) and no one has acknowledged this — I also wrote to my boss asking why management won’t acknowledge this but three days after probation they changed my role. Same company that held off my offer later to two months later in the job to offer a Senior Python Developer role as “HR has Covid and could not send it until now”.

He has not responded to my message. Pretty much no salary for me these past few days.

I’m now looking for other jobs. Meanwhile, I’m building from scratch AGAIN a VoIP micro service and I plan on making it public and free upon completion.

BUT I feel the company might take action against me. Do note that I did not sign the offer letter as the link had 3 days expiration and HR said he would send a new one but never did, even after I reminded him at least 2 days in a week.

____
While typing this, I got the urge to proceed regardless any circumstance.

i need some advice on how to deal with office culture. i am a covid graduate and this is my first wfo job. it is technically hybrid but quickly turning into full time office, and there are several examples of scenarios, where i am not only feeling just frustrated, but hurt and retaliation.

my whole team is in a different city except 4 of us : pm, sr ios dev, me(android dev) and a sr android dev. in our office, there are 50 more people , but i rarely need to contact anyone except my team from another city or these 3 folks. also, we 4 are new joinees like just joined in last 2 months.

so let's discuss the problems.

1. there have been very shitty decisions that are leading to loss of everyone just because a few are unlucky. here's an example. on may 1, international labor day, we 4 had a leave showing. but it was not showing for other people. maybe because ourbleave calender was aligned to other city or maybe coz we are new, idk. but someone told the boss of manager, and he mailed to us that there is no leave :/ wtf

2. another news: our is shifting from we work to another co-working space. it is being heard that office will be now 3/5 days instead of 2/5 . when we joined, it was showing 3/5 days in our hr portal, but hr assured that it is 2/5 days. and we would still go 2/5 days only. but like that holiday scenario, people are buzzing and talking, and they might end up getting our 2/5 culture tonget fucked too. this is very stupid, since i am wasting 4 hrs everyday travelling.

3. let's talk about the snakes in the 4 ppl group. the ios dev and manager are sweet looking girl snakes. ios girl is the meek snake and pm is the wicked snake. once i discussed with ios girl about how we need to rush every morning at 8 am to reach office as our standup is at 10. i told her that i would raise this matter in standup and when i did, she was just mum as fuck. didn't even voted a fucking yes when the boss said "ok let's have a vote on it" . i mean man what the fuck are your scared of? the boss won't kill you bitch for clocking 30 mins late

4. the other snake is pm. i am pretty sure she was one of the people for which that leave was not showing and she informed the boss's boss. day before that i told her jokingly that once i leave the office, I won't be opening my laptop and since today it was decided that tomorrow is the holiday, I am unreachable and therefore enjoying the vacay due to lack of latest info.
the bitch fucking whatsapped me to say that she got a call from boss that tomorrow's a working day. it would have been the perfect fucking leave.
I am pretty sure a lot of people are hating me for leaving so early too. i oeave at 5pm , as i have to be at gym by 7. also 1 minute past 5 and i would be travelling in a jam packed metro, so yeah, no thanks. but this bitch is definitely telling my boss about this.

5 finally the biggest snake is this *cough-cough* "sr" android guy. dude's code is so shittu and hacky, i can sense that he didn't tried to understand the class and just added a function at any place he felt fit. he also is a schemy bitch, as he has somehow convinced noss to let him wotk just 1/5 days in wfo.

but i didn't cared about him much until now. yesterday i sent a link regarding latest Android dev update in the official channel as a fun read, and his reply was "probably should have seen theeynote yesterday" bitch it wasn't even mentioned in that keynote! i just checked its summary after his message, but then it was too late to retaliate.

and now that i see, he always tries to be smug and cool. not that i care, roast me all you want in front of your crush, I won't mind, but if you're trying to show people that am not an able dev, then buckle up bitch, either you or me are counting last breaths.