Long but worth it...

So I was cleaning out my Google Drive last night, and deleted some old (2 years and up) files. I also deleted my old work folder, it was for an ISP I worked for over 2 years ago. After deleting the files I had a little twinge of "Man I hope they're not still using those". But seriously, it'd be a pretty big security risk if I was still the owner of those files... right? Surely they copied them and deleted all the info from the originals. IP addresses, Cisco configs, username and passwords for various devices, pretty much everything but customer info.

Guess who I get a call from this morning... "Hi this is Debbie from 'ISP'. I was trying to access the IP Master List and I can't anymore. I was just told to call you and see if there's any way to get access to it again" (Not her real name...)

I had to put her on hold so I could almost die of laughter...

Me: "Sorry about that Debbie, I haven't worked for that company for over 2 years. Your telling me in all that time no one thought to save them locally? No one made a copy? I still had the original documents?!"

Long pause

D: "Uh... Apparently not..."

Another long pause

D: "So is there any way you can give me access to them again?"

Me: "They're gone Debbie. I deleted them all last night."

D: Very worried voice "Can... Can you check?"

This kids is why you never assume you'll always have access to a cloud stored file, make local copies!!

A little bit of background on this company, the owner's wife fired me on trumped up "time card discrepancy" issues so she could hire her freshly graduated business major son. The environment over there was pretty toxic anyway...

I feel bad for "Debbie" and the other staff there, it's going to be a very bad week for them. I also hope it doesn't impact any customers. But... It is funny as hell, especially since I warned the owner as I was clearing out my desk to save copies, and plan on them being gone soon. Apparently he never listened.

This is why you should have a plan in place... And not just wing it...

PS. First Post!

Last year I built the platform 'Tindex'. It was an index of Tinder profiles so people could search by name, gender and age.

We scraped the Tinder profiles through a Tinder API which was discontinued not long ago, but weird enough it was still intact and one of my friends who was also working on it found out how to get api keys (somewhere in network tab at Tinder Online).

Except name, gender and age we also got 3 distances so we could calculate each users' location, then save the location each 15 minutes and put the coordinates on a map so users of Tindex could easily see the current location of a specific Tinder user.

Fun note: we also got the Spotify data of each Tinder user, so we could actually know on which time and which location a user listened to a specific Spotify track.

Later on we started building it out: A chatbot which connected to Tinder so Tindex users could automatically send a pick up line to their new matches (Was kinda buggy, sometimes it sent 3 pick up lines at ones).

Right when we started building a revenue model we stopped the entire project because a friend of ours had found out that we basically violated almost all terms.

Was a great project, learned a lot from it and actually had me thinking twice or more about online dating platforms.

Below an image of the user overview design I prototyped. The data is mock-data.

Me: "Hey, I see you've started your class name with a lowercase letter, It's common practice to start it with a capital letter"

Co-worker that started two weeks ago with almost no experience in c++: "Oh, right. You women and your rules, you must know it then"

Me: *Awkward laugh* *Thinking as long as he changes it i'll let that one slip* *Sends him coding standard guide just in case he doesn't believe me*

-- Two days later --

He still didn't fucking change it. It pains my eyes to look at it each time he asks me for help. Oh and stop calling me "miss", I have a name.

Frack he did it again.
In a meeting with the department mgr and going over a request feature *we already discussed ad nauseam* that wasn’t technically feasible (do-able, just not worth the effort)

DeptMgr: “I want to see the contents of web site A embedded in web site B”
Me: “I researched that and it’s not possible. I added links to the target APM dashboard instead.”
Dev: “Yes, it’s possible. Just use an IFrame.”
DeptMgr: “I thought so. Next sprint item …what’s wrong?…you look frustrated”
Me: “Um..no…well, I said it’s not possible. I tried it and it doesn’t work”
Dev: “It’s just an IFrame. They are made to display content from another site.”
Me: “Well, yes, from a standard HTML tag, but what you are seeing is rendered HTML from the content manager’s XML. It implemented its own IFrame under the hood. We already talked about it, remember?”
Dev: “Oh, that’s right.”
DeptMgr: “So it’s possible?”
Dev: “Yea, we’ll figure it out.”
Me: “No…wait…figure what out? It doesn’t work.”
Dev: “We can use a powershell script to extract the data from A and port it to B.”
DeptMgr: “Powershell, good…Next sprint item…”
Me: “Powershell what? We discussed not using powershell, remember?”
Dev: “It’s just a script. Not a big deal.”
DeptMgr: “Powershell sounds like a right solution. Can we move on? Next sprint item….are you OK? You look upset”
Me: “No, I don’t particularly care, we already discussed executing a powershell script that would have to cross two network DMZs. Bill from networking already raised his concern about opening another port and didn’t understand why we couldn’t click a link. Then Mike from infrastructure griped about another random powershell script running on his servers just for reporting. He too raised his concern about all this work to save one person one click. Am I the only one who remembers this meeting? I mean, I don’t care, I’ll do whatever you want, but we’ll have to open up the same conversations with Networking again.”
Dev: “That meeting was a long time ago, they might be OK with running powershell scripts”
Me: “A long time ago? It was only two weeks.”
Dev: “Oh yea. Anyway, lets update the board. You’ll implement the powershell script and I’ll …”
Me: “Whoa..no…I’m not implementing anything. We haven’t discussed what this mysterious powershell script is supposed to do and we have to get Mike and Bill involved. Their whole team is involved in the migration project right now, so we won’t see them come out into the daylight until next week.”
DevMgr: “What if you talk to Eric? He knows powershell. OK…next sprint item..”
Me: “Eric is the one who organized the meeting two weeks ago, remember? He didn’t want powershell scripts hitting his APM servers. Am I the only one who remembers any of this?”
Dev: “I’m pretty good with powershell, I’ll figure it out.”
DevMgr: “Good…now can we move on?”

GAAAHH! I WANT A FLAMETHROWER!!!

Ok…feel better, thanks DevRant.

Saw this a long time ago. I think it belongs here..

I've given up hope a long time ago...

I started working in 2014. In one of my first jobs they gave me a virtual machine running Windows 2000.

I had a conversation that went more or less this way:

Me: «Why a so old OS?»
Boss: «Because we rely on an old library which has been compiled on Windows 2000»
Me: «What library is it? Who wrote it?»
Boss: «We wrote it. It belongs to our company.»
Me: «Can we try to port it on a more recent OS?»
Boss: «Oh, we've lost the source code a long time ago...»
Me: «...»

Bought a Logitech G13 a few years ago knowing that the Linux support isn't good. Thought fuck it, I'll develop something for it.

That didn't go as planned. Tried numerous times to write something but the fucker is proprietary and I couldn't figure out how to get data from it.

Decided to try it again tonight with a "You're not winning this time, motherfucker!" mindset.

Figured out how to read data from it, looked long enough at the data coming in to discover patterns and started programming while testing my ass off.

Two hours later I have "mapped" all specific data points that the device sends to the hardware keys and now, whenever I have the device connected and run the program (node, no kidding), it displays which key I'm pressing when I press a key!

I finally fucking won.

I delivered a small C# program long time ago.
Unit tests, integrations tests, functional tests, all passing (users even happy).

Colleague of mine approached me.

C: "I finally fixed the program"
M: "Which program?"
C: "Product X"
M: "What was wrong with it?"
C: "Nothing, but now it runs on Python"
M: "..."
C: "Yeah, we lost a few features, but it's Python!"
M: "Aren't you busy with other things?"
C: "That can wait"
M: "..."
M: "..."

HR people working in tech companies, let's talk about them...

*phone rings and I pick up*
HR Lady: Hi, this is [name] from [company]. I'm calling you regarding your application you submitted [some date 2 months ago!].

Me: *realizing that I've applied 2 freaking months ago* Hmmm OK....

HR Lady: Yes, well, we asked for your GitHub account, but you seem to have forgotten to provide it.

Me: *open up the email and see that I've sent them my GitLab account* Well, I have the email right here and I did send you a git account. I mean, it's not GitHub specifically but it's a GitLab account, pretty much the same thing, you should be good with that.

HR Lady: OK, let me put you on hold for a minute.

*2-3 minutes passes*

HR Lady: Hi sir, I've asked my colleague [which I suppose is another HR] and he told me that they're not the same thing, we cannot proceed until you give us the right link, you need to send us a link to your GitHub account.

Me: I mean, they aren't the SAME EXACT thing, but both companies provide essentially the same service, it's like Messenger and WhatsApp. Look, I'm pretty sure that if you give this to another programmer they'll be fine.

HR Lady: No, Messenger and WhatsApp aren't the same thing. Sir, please stay polite. We need a GitHub account not a GitLab account.

Me: *mumbling* Oh boy.... M'am, it's OK, I don't need the job anyway, I've found something. Two months is a long time and I needed something quickly. Thank you, have a good day.

Today I found out my math teacher used to program in C++

I'm finally not the only programmer in school.

But she said her skills are outdated since that was a long time ago, but it's better than nothing! :D

We have alot in common. We're both bookworms, we both like to write, we're both Ravenclaw, we're both Erudite, and we both like to program.

I can safely say, I no longer despise my math teacher. I don't hate her, but I get annoyed how she's always absent right before a test.

Hopefully I can have a programming related conversation with her, assuming she didn't forget anything.

I have just realized the music that was playing in my headphones stopped a long time ago and I've just been sitting here in silence with my headphones on listening to absolutely nothing.

I switched a long time ago!

Worst meeting I’ve been in?

Transitioning from an old system, the CEO said “We will transition on June 30th of next year or … heads … will … roll.”

Everyone knew what ‘heads will roll’ meant.

I wasn’t particularly worried because 90% of my work would be completed by December, the rest would be completed by the users (data transfers, etc.). Realistically, no reason we couldn’t transition by April or May.

June 15th comes around – CEO calls a meeting (managers, VPs, kind of a big deal) because we’re nowhere close to turning on the new system. Needless to say, I was a bit nervous, but my part had been done since November. I worked late nights, weekends, early mornings…I killed myself making sure the system was 100% ready.
CEO starts asking the different managers about what is taking so long…
Mgr-1: ”Well, we aren’t easily able to map our old customer records into the new system. The new system is too hard to use and taking a long time.”
Mgr-2: “We can’t reconcile until the customer records are in the database.”
Mgr-3: “We can’t proof the purchase orders until the customer accounts are reconciled.”
The ‘waiting on him/her’ excuse went around the room.
At this point, couple of the VPs look over at me …I felt like I just turned white …oh crap…I’m going to get fired because all these –bleep-holes just threw me under the bus.
CEO listens…nods…looks at my boss..
CEO: “OK, move the due date out 6 more months. Have your team help out in any way they can. I want this new system working correctly no matter how long it takes. If we need to move the date again, we just do.”

Part of me was relieved, other part was looking for a flame thrower. I worked myself to the bone, risked my marriage (in hindsight, I was not a nice person to her during that time), probably had an ulcer, and these sorry excuse for human beings dragged their asses for months and there was zero accountability.

That meeting was over 15 years ago and it bothered me so much I still remember the CEO was wearing a green button up shirt, khaki pants, and drinking coffee from a Break Time coffee cup.

Upside? Over the next couple of years, every one of those managers either quit or got fired.

Today I told a fellow dev to join devRant, and explained it was "like Reddit, but only for developers"

Wild manager caught us and said "Uh, just what everybody wants, some geek forum. Thank god I left that world a long time ago"

Fucker...

How most recruiter emails go these days:

- Hiring multiple senior lead engineers <— That’s me
- 180k+ <— I like it.
- Must have experience with AWS, GCE, AND Azure <— Okay, you’re looking for a unicorn
- Kubernetes expert
- Experience with Rust, Node, and .NET <— What type of fucking company are you?
- Must be on call and 25% travel <— Why?
- Preferred: experience with printer repair, Raid Arrays, CAT5, and Microsoft Access <— Y’all fucked up somewhere a long time ago. I’m out.

User: Why did you cleaned my recycle bin? I had important documents there!

Happened to me a long time ago. The user was one of the managers... 🐒

>>> print(whoSaid("OlderFriend"))
About 20ish years ago I was working in IT, and it was about around this time where CD-Roms were hitting the stores and becoming the newest craze. However, Microsoft did not write the drivers correctly for this new hardware.

In a nutshell, the driver would be installed and the user would lose the sound to their speaker.

How did this happen? By altering the way the interrupts worked on the computer. At the time there only existed a few unreserved IRQs or Interrupt ReQuests. The installer package would redirect IRQ 5 which is "User Selectable (Sound Cards)" to work with the CD-Rom. This was fine and all unless you wanted to listen to your speakers.

I had come up with a clever hack through rewriting a config file that would be run during bootup. So at the time of boot up IRQ 5 would be dedicated to the sound card, and IRQ7 (which was usually for the Lpt1 Printer) would be dedicated to the CD-Rom. This worked.
And because I was IT at the time, I would get a lot of calls for fixing this problem.

So, as you can imagine, I've gotten **really** good at doing this. I didn't even need to be at a computer to walk someone through the problem.

I receive a call one day, it was a problem with the CD-Rom and sound card. I walk him through the problem and he reboots his computer. I could hear him on the other side jumping with joy when he was able to put in his music CD and hear sound coming from the speakers.

He asks me, how in the hell did you figure this out!? You're a fucking Genius!

And I said, It's not rocket science it's just a computer.

There was a long pause of silence.

Uhhh... Hello? Did I say something wrong?

Sir, I work at NASA I deal with Rocket Science on a daily basis.

So, I sign up for devrant and read all about the school devops fuckery everyone seems to have.

The only problem is, computers at my school's lab has no internet access and only a pirated copy of.... Visual Studio *6*. Hell, that's 5 years older than I am.

No python, no git, nothing. The best part, you ask? They use VS6 just for teaching 9th graders Visual Basic, and for C and C++, they use TurboC++ in DOSBox. 25-year old software. They teach us Pre-ANSI C++.

No fucking wonder people from here re-learn everything on the job. I jumped the gun and started messing with basic C++ in 7th grade, and then had to go back and remember that 25 years ago, they used <iostream.h> instead of just <iostream>.

Everyone just saves their code in the TC/BIN folder in DOS too, making it more of a chaotic mess than anything ever imaginable.

Bringing your own device? Too bad that's against the school rules.

The fact that they went out of their damn way to make me use TurboC in DOSBox on Windows 7 instead of giving me a sane Linux install with an editor and GCC is just... ugh.

My classmates all think I work magic, while all I really do is simple logic. Schools here in India are almost universally terrible.

Well, it's a good thing I started learning it on my own, because if I thought programming was in any way similar to how they try to teach it to us, I would've given up a long time ago.

Here's the time an Amazon recruiter scheduled a call with me just to tell me I wouldn't be getting the job.

A few years ago, I left Uber after the seemingly non-stop public snafus they were getting themselves into (I have a lot of rants about Uber if anyone is interested, some of them mind-melting). I decided to take a two month break given that my financials looked decent for once and I was tired of 100 hour weeks.

During that time, I of course started perusing the typical job-seeking sites I had remembered from before. Somehow, from one of the profiles I set up, I caught the eye of an Amazon recruiter. They emailed me and I agreed to set up a date and time for an introductory chat.

They already had my CV. They already had my StackOverflow/Github information. This wasn't a technical interview, and the recruiter wasn't part of any of the tech teams. This is important information moving forward.

A few days later, I got the call from the recruiter. He introduced himself as the person from the emails, thanking my for my time, etc.. Things started out pleasant with the smalltalk and whatnot, but then the recruiter said "so I have some concerns about your resume".

Under one of the sections I had a list of things I was skilled with - one of which, regrettably, is PHP. Completely ignoring Java, Javascript, C# and C++ knowledge and all of the other achievements I have with those technologies, the recruiter really wanted to drill me about the PHP.

"Do you work a lot with PHP?"
"No, not anymore - from time to time I have to do something with it but it's not my main language anymore. I know it quite well, though."
"Oh okay well we aren't looking for any PHP roles right now, unfortunately."
"Okay, no problem."

Perhaps I could have said more, but from my end of things, I meant "I don't see a problem here, I don't write a lot of PHP and you don't need a lot of PHP".

After a pause that felt like an hour, the recruiter broke the silence and said "Okay well thanks for your time today, I'm sorry things didn't work out."

Bewildered, I asked which technology stack they were using on the team.

"Not PHP, unfortunately. Thank you for your time." and then an abrupt click.

The recruiter found me himself, looked at my resume (assumably), sought out to contact me, arranged a time for a call, and then called me, just to tell me I wouldn't get the position due to knowing PHP at some point in my career.

Years later, the whole interaction still shocks me. Somewhere in my drafts I have a long letter to the recruiter basically going over my entire career history explaining why his call was incredibly... well, fucking weird. Towards the end of writing it I realized it was more therapeutic for me to deal with whatever it was that just took place and that it probably wouldn't change my odds of working at Amazon.

So yeah. That's the story of the time Amazon set up a recruiting call just to tell me I wouldn't be working for them.

Im trying to brute force a rar i made Long ago, sadly i have forgotten the Passwort.
This is how it looks, when you to run it on the length 8-16 at the Same time(all posibilitys).
lets see how Long it will take.
I say 7 Days at 100% cpu usage😂😂

A long time ago on a project far far away, I didn't realize there was a src folder, and made my changes in the build folder instead... And to makes matters worse, I asked a co-worker -- an ex-Googler -- for help with the issue I was working on.

Rarely have I been more embarrassed.

Hey guys :(
The rant will be long.

Today was one of the worst day ever.
I'm feeling so shitty right now.

I'm 19 and I started my apprenticeship about a half year ago on a very small company.
From day one I had many things to do, every day is hard and a new experience. But I'm learning a lot.

Two months ago I had my very first presentation for a client. I was really excited and nervous but everything was fine and the client as well as my boss were proud of me.

Today I should present again a prototype for the same client. But this time not directly personal, instead we did it via TeamViewer. After the client finally found out, how to open and start this shit, the disaster tooked its course.
After explaining him the conzept, I wanted to show him in the software. For some reason it suddenly stopped working. I've just made a change recently which leads in all appeareances to an error .
Because of that error I couldn't proceed, so I have to explain and show him the data I created before I made the changes.
With that everything Just worked fine, I could explain and visualize everything. It didn't Matter and didn't changed anything, only the Name was a Name from me.
The client was very relaxed about this error. He said that it is a prototype , it is not serious.
Furthermore I showed and demonstrated him everything.
But my boss wasn't very surprised and Happy about me. He made me responsable for the error, I should have prepared everything better and this all was Shit.
This made me really,really sad. It sounded so hard.
I know that I've made a mistake, but it's human. I'm only 19. I'm not perfect. Sure, I could have prevented it, if I had tested all possibilites right after I had made the changes again. I prepared the whole presentation on the weekend, on my personal freetime. I spent so often so much time in my freetime just for my job, for my apprenticeship. To get what? A fat bite, a kick in the ass. I'm doing so much, but this is not acknowledged. But when I make something wrong - then I'm the shittiest person.

Damn. Don't know how to handle this situation. This has gone to far today.
Yeah, I could have tested More, but I only tested the existing Data. I prepared the presentation very Well. This is so sad.

I heard this joke a long time ago and I've tried getting laughs ever since. I swear I won't give up trying.

A priest, a surgeon and an engineer are going golfing on a Saturday. The golf club owner says the court is unavailable - on Saturdays the golf course is in use by a group of firemen who lost their eyesight while rescuing golf club members out of the club house a year back. The surgeon exclaims "that's awful! I'll arrange a fundraiser, maybe we can help improve their eyesight." The preacher folds his hands and states "my communion will include them in our prayers." The engineer is silent for a moment, then asks: "Can't they just play at night?"

This was typical for me:

Yesterday evening I was installing a webserver on my Raspberry Pi for experiments with WordPress. I began some days ago, but I had to stop because the downloads took at least to long.

So I started to logi in:

Username: Raspberry
Password: Pi
-> False Password

Wondering why it is not working a tried again. Same result. After some time I remembered that I changed my password.

Username: Raspberry
Password: Ih4G2tgY*
-> false password

*example
Tried again. Still false password. Then I remembered, that I used my another standard password.

Username: Raspberry
Password: U2gra94hY*
-> false password

After that I felt a mix of angry and helplessness. After some other failed attempts I gave up.

I formatted the SD-Card and installed Raspian again.I started my Pi

Username: Raspberry
Password: Pi
-> false password

My thought: WTF, why does this not work!!

This was the moment when I got the brainwave that the Username wasn't Raspberry, it's Pi.

Username: Pi
Password: Raspberry
-> access

Then I hated myself.

My Girlfriend broke with me today.

We was in this relationship from two years now. we was doing very good, our relationship was not toxic, no fights, no bad words, zero problems.

One month ago she goes to travel with her evangelical aunt to the beach. Her aunt have lot of money she gets from scamming all that believers. I was happy for my ex-gf because here in out city she was having lot of problems of health, mainly because she was not very mind stable and that degraded her health.

When she goes, her physical and mental health improve a lot. i was happy she is stable now. Her aunt have some Church around the city they go, aunt started to bring her very often to the church. She started to strongly reinforce they God beliefs.

Of course im atheist, she know that from very long time ago. But of course when she started to be more devoted, feels dont fit with me. I refuse to change my mindset about that topic.

Today she says we must broke because im not a believer. This was the most painful experience in my life. I fall in cry for three hours. I truly love her. I recently wakeup and decide to write this rant. I dont have too much friends to talk apart from her. So i wish to share this here.

Im unemployed, she was my only support all this job hunting times. Now she was gone and im alone, this hurts a lot.

Im trying to dont fall deep af, to non return path.

Fuck religion. and her fanatic aunt.

I hate Microsoft!

But i gotta say, VS Code is a really good IDE. Guess they should've gone open source a long time ago

Looking at code you wrote a long time ago and you can't figure out parts of it...leaves you like:" Damn I was a genius"

Long long ago there was a man who discovered if he scratched certain patterns onto a rock he could use them to remind him about things he would otherwise forgot.

Over time the scratching were refined and this great secret of eternal memory were taught to his children, and they taught it to their children.

Soon mankind had discovered a way to preserve through the ages his thoughts and memories and further discovered that if he wrote down these symbols he could transfer information over distances by simply recording these symbols in a portable medium.

Writing exploded it allowed a genius in one place to communicate the information he had recorded across time and space.

Thousands of years passed, writing continued to be refined and more and more vital. Eventually a humble man by the name of Johannes Gutenberg seeking to make the divine word of God accessible to the people created the printing press allowing the written word to be copied and circulated with great ease expanding vastly the works available to mankind and the number of people who could understand this arcane art of writing.

But mankind never satiated in his desire to know all there is to know demanded more information, demanded it faster, demanded it better. So the greatest minds of 200 years, Marconi, Maxwell, Bohr, Von Nueman, Turing and a host of others working with each other, standing on the shoulders of their brobdinangian predecessors, brought forth a way to send these signals, transfer this writing upon beams of light, by manipulating the very fabric of the cosmos, mankind had reach the ultimate limits of transmission of information. Man has conquered time, and space itself in preserving and transmitting information, we are as the gods!

My point is this, that your insistence upon having a meeting to ask a question, with 10 people that could've been answered with a 2 sentence email, is not only an affront to me for wasting my time, but also serves as an affront to the greatest minds of the 19th and 20th centuries, it is an insult to your ancestors who first sacrificed and labored to master the art of writing, it is in fact offensive to all of humanity up to this point.

In short by requiring a meeting to be held, not only are you ensuring the information is delayed because we all now need to find a time that all of us are available, not only are you now eliminating the ability to have a first hand permanent record of what need to be communicated, you are actively working against progress, you are dragging humanity collectively backwards. You join the esteemed ranks of organizations such as the oppressive Catholic church that sought to silence Galialio and Copernicus, you are among the august crowd that burned witches at Salem, the Soviet secret police that silenced "bourgeoisie" science, you join the side of thousands of years of daft ignorance.

If it were not for you people we would have flying cars, we would have nanobots capable of building things on a whim, we would all be programming in lisp. But because of you and people like you we are trapped in this world, where the greatest minds are trapped in meetings that never end, where mistruth and ignorance run rampant, a world where JavaScript is the de facto language of choice every where because it runs everywhere, and ruins everywhere.

So please remember, next time you want to have a meeting ask yourself first. "Could this be an email?" "Do I enjoy burning witches?" if you do this you might make the world a little bit of a less terrible place to be.

hey there, long time no rant.
remember that manipulative, sociopathic angry manchild turdface PM, the kind that gives you a never ending rant inspiration? the one that got immortalized in like 90% of my rants?

well... it's time for the final update.
i decided to leave the team some months ago. my boss reacted very cool and supportive and suggested topics i could work on instead. when i told my colleague, he decided to leave the team at the same day. we both also complained at HR and added some papertrails about PM's shenanigans.
shortly after, another guy from the team quit and left the company, and i know that it was 100% because of this PM.
so, there were 2 devs left from originally 6 in PM's team.
some other people in the environment of this PM quit, one of his subordinates and someone from a greater project in which the PM's project was embedded.
after some internal investigations and discussions, the PM's team was completely kicked out of this greater project, since after ~ a year, this team was neither able to deliver anything useful nor to define what it actually was what they wanted to provide. instead, they actively blocked the project, solution finding and cooperation between teams. and this is quite very much PM's fault.

the final move came this month when PM got fired. i think, management finally realized that he is a total fraud who has no clue about the whole matter (neither what devices we build nor about software development). or management. or leadership. and that all he can do is produce hot air and bullshit people for some time to make them believe he knows something.
not sure how long he'll still be around, but i'm happy when i don't have to see his face ever again. i'm just sorry for the next company he'll be moving to...

Hello DevRant, im a junior cloud consultant and this is my story:

Last monday a salesman, i call him bob, informed me that he planned me in a project starting next week. So far so good despite im currently working already in an other project....

I tried to explain him that its impossible to be on two locations at the same time.

His answer was quite funny because he said its my problem and he promised this the customer a month ago (without asking me or looking into my calendar)

As you can imagine the customer was not happy when i contacted him, to say him that the project could not start before may.

Of course this escalated to the managing director of my company. Bob tried to made it look that it was my fault.

After a long rant mail, where i told my story and about our incompetent salesforce i got a reply from him that he is sorry and a forced excuse mail from bob.

Happy End

Me: well guys, after the 4th attempt and a week of waiting, I’ve gotten a response from the remote backend team about the errors affecting this release. Which are the same issues affecting the last release 2 months ago. The findings are: “there is in fact some issue with the API”.

I’d like to thank everyone who put in so much effort to get us to this momentous step forward. We can expect a fix any year now.

*equally sarcastic colleague on another team listening in*:
oh wow, this months long thing has just been “some issue” all this time? Well that’s fantastic. You should mark the ticket as “done” and reply “thank you” for all their hard work.

..... I laughed so hard at how ridiculous all this is and the joke, that I nearly did, hoping someone from product/business would have to review it

It's 21:42. I had 1 month to write a report on my internship. Day after tomorrow is submission. I'm starting now.

I deleted Facebook Inc.'s products long time ago, deleted YouTube app, removed Quora account, put filters on suggestions for Stack Exchange networks, blocked Reddit, stopped Spotify, started Trello/Wunderlist/Evernote to organise thoughts, ForestApp and StayFocusd for controlled browsing, deleted Tumblr etc. All this just to focus on the report and get it done as soon as possible.

Now I FOUND devRant! What the fuck world! Why!? I'm now ranting about issue on devRant with this rant. <- this sentence is a meta, if you didn't realise.

So instead of 15 tech-stickers from china, I got 33 rick and morty stickers and actually am not mad, because now I can finally make proper use of my devrant stickers I got a long time ago

the dead morty isn't yet attached to it, because I might get other stickers, that could need space (tiny laptops do make you picky), so I'd slap him on somewhere else or inbetween, that's also the first time I have actually ever put any stickers on my laptops

A long time ago I went to my first web developer interview intending to bluff my way in. A friend working there told me that they used (the infamous) Dreamweaver. So, in the interview, when they asked me what did I used to develop, with all the confidence I could gather I said: "Windriver".
Got the job 'cause the dude (interviewer) knew less than me.

Warning: long read....

I got a call this morning from a client who was panicking about not being able to login to his web panel.

So I went to the web panel and tried to login and was just redirected back to the login page. No errors or anything (at least visible on the page). Went looking for an error_log file and found it.

It turns out there was an error was showing: Disk quota exceeded.

So I went into the cPanel and checked, he used about 16GB out of 100GB and that got me confused. So I looked around and found out he was using about 510000/500000 inodes.

Went looking trough FTP to see where he has so many files and try and remove some.

Well it turns out that there were about 7 injected websites (warez, online casino, affiliate one etc) and a full hacking web panel on his FTP. After detailed analysis some who actually built the site (I just maintain some parts) made an upload form available to public with any checks on it. Meaning anyone could upload whatever they wanted and the form would allow it.

The worst part is that the client is not allowing us to secure the form with some sort of login or remove it completely (the best option) as it is not really needed but he uses it to upload some pdf catalogs or something.

TL; DR;
Old programmer created an upload form that was accessible to anyone on the web without adding any security or check as to see what kind of files was getting uploaded. Which lead to having maximum number on inodes used on server and client being unable to login.

Side note:
And ofc I had to go and fix the mess behind him again, even though he stopped working a long time ago and I started just recently and have been having nightmares of this project.

!dev

So a colleage of mine died a little more then a month ago. His brother in law who also works at the company, and has known him for 20 something years (as long as he has worked for the company), had a really hard time dealing with that. My colleage was sick/hospitalized and in and out of coma for half a year+ so this was the apex of an emotional rollercoaster. When my colleage died he was not in a state to work. He actually went to a physisian and now he's seeing a shrink.

He took one week of to deal with everything, including his own mental well being, and you know what the human thing was my employers did. Subtract that week from his vacation days without telling him.

WOW, just fucking wow... I mean - yeah it's sort of legal to do that, but seriously

TLDR; My 2TB HDD got wiped in one fell swoop by a 9-year old child.

You know... I've never been too great about keeping backups. Even to this day, I only keep one or two local backups and nothing on the "cloud".

So this was about 5 years ago. At the time, I was living together with my girlfriend - who would later become my wife. She had a son from a previous relationship, who at the time was 9 years old.

I had a small desk in the living room of our one-bedroom apartment, that I used for my computer, which has been a laptop for a long time now. One unfortunate thing about the layout of the apartment was that the wall plug near my desk was attached to a light switch.

I had a 2TB external hard drive - with its own power cable - plugged into my laptop. Then, things started to move in slow motion... The GF's son comes inside from playing, my GF asks him to turn off the light. He reaches over, and shuts off power to my laptop - and the external hard drive.

He must have hit that switch at JUST the right fucking time. The laptop ran on battery, no big deal. The hard drive, when I powered it back up - was wiped clean. I tried data recovery on it, but the HDD was encrypted, which makes things more complicated.

Needless to say, I was not happy. I never got that data back, but I did learn not to expose my hard drives to 9 year olds. Very dangerous little creatures.

You want to know the best part? He destroyed another hard drive of mine, a few years later. Should I tell that story?

Definitly !rant; btw long post ahead

Soooo not so long ago i joined this community by chance just cuz i installed some app randomly found on google store and what can i say. Best decision ever!

I can say i never met such an interesting and diverse communitiy ever and i kin of ground fond of it (i usually dont get too attached to peoples).

After a while i felt the urge to get myself involved into some disscusion at some random post and i did it. But it felt empty as my image was just a plain green bubble of anonymity. But yeh, i am cool with it, i will customize it after some ++es. No problem!

I got incremented for a while and i got to make a simple generic avatar. I felt again a urge, but this time to customize even more. Sadly, anything cool needs approval by the people. Soo i kind of let it go as i am not really the kind to find myself talking in other businesses and i moved over.

Until i saw it! Not the tiger, not the bird but the dog! Annnd i wanted it so i made a joke that i am a wizard with an invisible dog. What can go wrong, right? Well the thing is.. it did not go wrong, as expected, but it went great, kinda unexpected.

How? Well, some random stranger felt me and gave me a hunble chance to get closer to my dreamy real dog. And so it begin, my crusade to get that damn dog!

But what i have realised fast is .. this is not facebook! Nor Instagram! People doesnot upvote attention whoreing or such lowly acts, but they are actually prone to support people who just.. get involved.

And so i did. I got involved. I actually got involved in a community! For a awkwardly introvert person that's something, but maybe more than few of you people can relate to this.

And today i finally reached that goal! I have a real doggo! Well, real as in not invisible, not as in a great responsability, but now i have both. But this was not such a big deal. The big deal is that i found people whos interests are alike to mine and are prone to help, support and befriend others. I must say, thanks to all! Wonderful time, and while i am not here for a long time, i will surely be!

Cheers and dev on!

My boss thinks that DevOps is the developers SSHing into a server as root and typing 'git pull'

If firearms were legal where I live I would have blown my brains out a long time ago.

I see many people being irritated when it comes to StackOverflow and If I were to be honest I thought the same a while ago. But I noticed that I was misjudging the main point of Stackoverflow. It's not a forum to help people with their programming problems. It's a huge self writing document to gather every programming related questions and answers under a single platform if possible. That's why they won't down vote you even if you ask a question that was obvious in a language's official document as long as it wasn't in Stackoverflow. That's why questions should also be formatted accordingly which is clear and also informative in itself. I understand why stackoverflow is such a harsh place to ask questions and most of the time I prefer looking things for my self instead of asking a question. And I edit and review most questions on stackoverflow because I enjoy it. That also made me realize that stackoverflow needs to be elitist to preserve it's current quality. Who would want to see unclear duplicate questions that veteran stackoverflow users need to answer over and over again right ?

Asking the right question is hard because we humans most of the time don't know what we don't know. And it makes it really tiring to format your question the way that is fitting for a document. In those times I prefer to ask my questions on a more relaxed and chat focused platform before writing my main question on stackoverflow.

So that was my opinion on stackoverflow and it's harsh environment. It's definetly a hard to get into community which I can't even say I'm really a part of it. But looking at stackoverflow as a document that's being written by ut's users, it's easier to understand it's elitist approach. I hope you had some enjoyment from reading it.

The company I interned at last summer decided to adopt a JS framework a little over a year ago. The managers went with the old Angular 1.x because they didn't want a JS build process. Each page has ~100 script tags on it, and these are manually included in various files (no automated way to include dependencies). None of the CSS/JS files are minified, either.

They really should have chose Angular 2+, or an entirely different framework (React, VueJS). They're also just now upgrading the codebase from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.2 (5.6 support ended a long time ago, and security support ends this month).

I love the company itself but these practices are poor.

I may be working there full time eventually. I hope to eventually help with the inevitable transition to a newer framework once Angular 1.x is dead since I am an avid user of newer JS technologies. Any tips on convincing manager(s) towards newer technology? (Or at least convincing them to combine+minify these files in production to reduce # of requests and bandwidth.)

Also this company's product has millions of active users.

TLDR; I am a piece of shit who writes no documentation or no information whatsoever when I am doing something.

Created a custom version of Windows for our company couple of months ago. Before leaving, I am supposed to pass this valuable information to another new developer.

Obviously, since it has been a long time I have worked on that, I have forgotten a lot of core principles. The process is also automated in Jenkins so never really had to touch it again.

Now that I am about to explain the process to the new recruit, I realised that I have written nothing about that process. No documentation, no information. The only thing I have is a bunch of scripts automating everything for me. WHY WHY do I do this to myself :(

My first dev job didn't start out as a job. I started out writing a database querying program just to see if I could do it, and the software ended up being purchased, and me along with it! Seems like such a long time ago now...

In an interview, when you throw a simple piece of code to a candidate...

Candidate: ...

ME: (maybe I'm too hard on them)

Candidate: ...

ME: (ok, I definitively have to simplify this little pattern example)

Candidate: ...

ME: ...explaining the short piece of code and give'm the answer

Candidate: haaaaa that's what I was thinking but I used that long time ago...

ME: (Yeah... nice try)

Hi everyone, long time no see.

Today I want to tell you a story about Linux, and its acceptance on the desktop.

Long ago I found myself a girlfriend, a wonderful woman who is an engineer too but who couldn't be further from CS. For those in the know, she absolutely despises architects. She doesn't know the size units of computers, i.e. the multiples of the byte. Breaks cables on the regular, and so on. For all intents and purposes, she's a user. She has written some code for a college project before, but she is by no means a developer.

She has seen me using Linux quite passionately for the last year or so, and a few weeks ago she got so fed up with how Windows refused to work on both her computers (on one of them literally failing to run exe's, go figure), that she allowed me to reinstall both systems, with one of them being dualbooted Windows 10 + Linux.

The computer that runs Linux is not one she uses very often, but for gaming (The Sims) it's her platform to go. On it I installed Debian KDE, for the following reasons:
- It had to be stable as I didn't want another box to maintain.
- It had to be pretty OOTB, as first impressions are crucial.
- It had to be easy to use, given her skill level.
- It had to have a GUI abstraction to apt, the KDE team built Discover which looks gorgeous.

She had the following things to say about Linux, when she went to download The Sims from a torrent (I installed qBittorrent for her iirc).

"Linux is better, there's no need to download anything"
"Still figuring things out, but I'm liking it"
"I'm scared of using Windows again, it's so laggy"
"Linux works fine, I'm becoming a Linux user"

Which you can imagine, it filled me with pride. We've done it boys. We've built a superior system that even regular users can use, if the system is set up to be user-friendly.

There are a few gripes I still have, and pitfalls I want to address. There's still too many options, users can drown in the sheer amount of distro's to choose from. For us that's extremely important but they need to have a guide there. However, don't do remote administration for them! That's even worse than Microsoft's tracking! Whenever you install Linux on someone else's computer, don't be all about efficiency, they are coming from Windows and just want it to be easy to use. I use Mate myself, but it is not the thing I would recommend to others. In other words, put your own preferences aside in favor of objective usability. You're trying to sell people on a product, not to impose your own point of view. Dualboot with Windows is fine, gaming still sucks on Linux for the most part. Lots of people don't have their games on Steam. CAD software and such is still nonexistent (OpenSCAD is very interesting but don't tell me it's user-friendly). People are familiar with Windows. If you were to be swimming for the first time in the deep water, would you go without aids? I don't think so.

So, Linux can be shown and be actually usable by regular people. Just pitch it in the right way.

I got unemployed 6 months ago. I tried to find work for about a month but the answer was always "we call you back when a position is available" and "let me ask the team if they think you are good". So far no one responded, then I got tired of that.
The next month I became self-employed so i can make contracts and work for more smaller projects. Not too much time later I met a company that offered me a long time contract for them. I don't hesitated to accept it.
Luckily since then I have this company and a few smaller jobs.
It was a steep change in my life but was worth it.

Switched to Arch from Debian. Should've switched a long time ago.

We just got an intern in our company a few days ago. She is supposed to be a php developer, not good, but at least something okay. I find major errors, that even a newbie should regocnize.
It's going to be a long internship, if I have to help her all the time with basic stuff.

!rant && rant

I've been doing random HTML/CSS/JS crap since I was 11 (I'm 20 now). And worked with NodeJS/Swift/Java/Typescript for the past 4 years. For some reason, I've always been interested in public transit and the combination between public transit and Development seemed magical to me. I've tried making Departure time apps and trip planners for a few years now. And for that you need open data, for which we have a national data source and a Google Group for support with that.

I quit my study two years ago after a year doing nothing and I was on the edge of getting into depression because I didn't do anything useful for two years. Didn't see myself do anything useful in the next few years apart from some random dev crap (still public transit related).

About half a year ago I ranted on that Google Group about shit being not efficient (weird standards, weird documentation but mostly lack thereof).

For some reason a business saw that rant and sent me an email about two months ago and told me they 'potentially' had 'some' work for me. So I had some really informal conversations with that business but I still was very insecure about myself (had some shitty experience with tons of unfinished projects) and I was worried that they had higher expectations for me than what I could give them.

A week later I received an e-mail with a proposal for an actual, full-time job as a back-end developer and obviously took the opportunity.

I started a month ago with a month-long probation period and after three weeks told me I had passed the probation period.

I'm a super happy boy right now. I got a job, being super insecure, without any certifications, without finishing school (Everyone in the Netherlands tells you you NEED a diploma to get a job), more than double minimum wage (minimum wage is quite high in the Netherlands), and most important, at a business that does a lot of public transit stuff.

Apparently ranting about stuff, not finishing your school and being depressed gives you a well-paid job. :)

My trusty old Nexus 5 had a broken microphone for a long time (only worked on speaker phone) and a couple of weeks ago the display died as well. Yesterday, I decided that I can't afford a new one so I took it apart. After a while I had successfully repaired both the microphone and display with small pieces of tissue paper. I guess anything is possible when you're a stubborn problem solver!

So one rant reminded me of a situation I whent through like 10 years ago...
I'm not a dev but I do small programs from time to time...
One time I was hired to pass a phone book list from paper to a ms Access 97 database...
On my old laptop I could only add 3 to 5 records cause MS access doesn't clean after itself and would crash...

So I made an app (in vb6) , to easily make records, was fast, light and well tabbed.
But now I needed a form to edit the last record when I made a mistake...
Then I wanted a form to check all the records I made.
Well that gave me an idea and presented the software to the client... A cheesy price was agreed for my first freelance sell...
After a month making it perfect and knowing the problems the client would had I made a admin form to merge all the databases and check for each record if it would exist.... I knew the client would have problems to merge hundreds of databases....
When it was done... The client told me he didn't need the software anymore.... So I gave it to a friend to use as an client dabatase software... It was perfect for him.
One month later the client called me because he couldn't merge the databases...
I told him I was already working in a company. That my software was ready to solve his problem, but I got mad and deleted everything...
He had to pay almost 20 times more for a software company to make the same software but worst... Mine would merge and check all the databases in a folder... Their's had to pick one by one and didn't check for duplicates... So he had to pay even more for another program to delete duplicates...

That's why I didn't follow programming as a freelance... Lots of regrets today...
Could be working at home, instead had a burn out this week cause of overwork...

Sorry for the long rant.

After i read about Arch Linux for the first time here about a few weeks ago, i thought i'd give Antergos a try on my Laptop which i use solely for working. Found out that Matlab is supported, so i don't even need a VM.

First time having a Linux distro. Still feels a bit odd for being a Win only user for a long time, but i love the look and with every hour it gets easier. :)

That guy at the office who's constantly and vocally upset he hasn't gotten into Bitcoin a long time ago.

That fucking guy.

"Son ur always sitting at home at computer, ur a computer guy so how come u didnt buy one of those crypto coins and become rich with all that computer knowledge you have. I hear in news all the time how people get rich with crypto. If i had the computer knowledge like you do i would be rich a long time ago. Why dont u buy crypto and be rich from it? U study computers so it should be easy for u to do it"
- dad

my blood before: 🩸🩸🩸

my blood after: 🩸🔥🩸🌋🩸♨️🩸🔥🩸🌋🩸♨️🩸🔥🩸🔥🩸

I used to do audits for private companies with a team. Most of them where black box audits and we were allowed to physically manipulate certain machines in and around the building, as long as we could get to them unnoticed.

Usually when doing such jobs, you get a contract signed by the CEO or the head of security stating that if you're caught, and your actions were within the scope of the audit, no legal action will be taken against you.

There was this one time a company hired us to test their badge system, and our main objective was to scrape the data on the smartcards with a skimmer on the scanner at the front of the building.

It's easy to get to as it's outside and almost everyone has to scan their card there in order to enter the building. They used ISO 7816 cards so we didn't even really need specified tools or hardware.

Now, we get assigned this task. Seems easy enough. We receive the "Stay-out-of-jail"-contract signed by the CEO for Company xyz. We head to the address stated on the contract, place the skimmer etc etc all good.

One of our team gets caught fetching the data from the skimmer a week later (it had to be physically removed). Turns out: wrong Building, wrong company. This was a kind of "building park" (don't really know how to say it in English) where all the buildings looked very similar. The only difference between them was the streetnumber, painted on them in big. They gave us the wrong address.

I still have nightmares about this from time to time. In the end, because the collected data was never used and we could somewhat justify our actions because we had that contract and we had the calls and mails with the CEO of xyz. It never came to a lawsuit. We were, and still are pretty sure though that the CEO of xyz himself was very interesed in the data of that other company and sent us out to the wrong building on purpose.
I don't really know what his plan after that would have been though. We don't just give the data to anyone. We show them how they can protect it better and then we erase everything. They don't actually get to see the data.

I quit doing audits some time ago. It's very stressful and I felt like I either had no spare time at all (when having an active assignment) or had nothing but spare time (when not on an assignment). The pay also wasn't that great.

But some people just really are polished turds.

Programming helped me realise, that I'm growing.

Since I've learned git long time ago, all my projects are archived and I can get back to them. When I look at my old code, I can see, how much I've learned, and how much more of a developer I've become.

And it motivates me to keep going.

Long time ago, back in a day of Microsoft Office 95 and 97, I was contracted to integrate a simple API for a payment service provider.

They've sent me the spec, I read it, it was simple enough: 1. payment OK, 2. payment FAILED. Few hours later the test environment was up and happy crediting and debiting fake accounts. Then came the push to prod.

I worked with two other guys, we shut down the servers, made a backup, connected new provider. All looked perfectly fine. First customers were paying, first shops were sending their products... Until two days later it turned out the money isn't coming through even though all we are getting from the API is "1" after "1"! I shut it off. We had 7 conference calls, 2 meetings, 3 days of trying and failing. Finally, by a mere luck, I found out what's what.

You see, Microsoft, when you invent your own file format, it's really nice to make it consistent between versions... So that the punctuation made in Microsoft Word 97 that was supposed to start from "0" didn't start from "1" when you open the file in Microsoft Word 95.

Also, if you're a moron who edits documentation in Microsoft Word, at least export it to a fucking PDF before sending out. Please.

!dev (when do I ever post a dev related story? I only post about my personal life really)

For about 2 years I had a very good friend, and I had a huge crush on her for most of those 2 years. All of my junior year of high school, she dated my best friend, then they broke up the summer after because he'd cheated on her around the time they got together and she had found out. I was there for both of them during the breakup (it was fucking exhausting). The thing is, I was there for the girl more because I had a crush on her, and I started to consider her my best friend rather than her ex.

She knew I had a crush on her for a long time. But she still spent about a year going to parties every weekend, getting fucking hammered, and hooking up with random guys, then proceeded to tell me about it after. I can't count how many times she had to cancel plans because she got hammered the night before.

But I had a huge crush on her, so I essentially put her up on a pedestal, thinking she could do no wrong. Then we hit a point where we didn't talk for a couple months because I hit a low point and she was uncomfortable with me because of it. Around April we started talking again, immediately back to being best friends but my feelings for her came and went for a while. She had a huge crush on our other friend that had a girlfriend at the time. Life went on, she actually ended up being my first kiss while she was drunk one night (I was sober cause I was driving), but I started talking to a different girl a few days before then, so I was very conflicted about everything there.

Then a few weeks ago came. A different friend got a Radeon 5700 XT and I went over to his house to check it out and everything. We ended up talking for a while, and the conversation turned to my whole friend group that I hung out with all the time (the girl being the center of the group). That friend was never very fond of her, and he always made that very clear. Basically he made me realize that she's not perfect, and that I'd been seeing her through rose-colored glasses.

I spent a week or so rethinking our whole friendship, and I realized that she is nowhere near fucking perfect. For example, she ALWAYS has to be the center of attention. If our friend group is focusing on someone else for whatever reason, she essentially throws a fit then gets really quiet to get attention. Also she can't take criticism at all, she always acts like a victim if you try to criticize her in any way. I also feel like every time I tried to better myself in some way, she ended up bringing me down and making me feel like my problems aren't important. She uses her kindness as a weapon, such as "How could you say that about me? I've been nothing but kind to you!" And the list just goes on.

So, about a week ago, I told her that I feel like she's a toxic person, and she does nothing but bring people down over time, because that's truly how I feel. And of course, she couldn't take the criticism, and said "I don't even know why you feel that, I've been nothing but nice to you".

I haven't talked to anyone in that friend group in one week now. And I feel a lot better mentally. Being friends with her felt like a chore. Only one person in that friend group has tried to talk to me, and that was today. Nobody else has texted me or anything since last Monday. And I honestly couldn't care less. I feel like a huge chapter of my life is over, like the depressing chapter in a book.

I don't know how to end this. I'm doing fairly well now, been hanging out with coworkers a bunch lately. Life's actually kinda good for once.

Me and my friend (let's call him Tom) have done tons of projects before and got some decent knowledge, but we got a dude (Bob) working with us on that final project of Uni and he doesn't know what Git is nor what frameworks are so we chose CodeIgniter ONLY to make it easy for him.

2 month after starting the project and getting like half of the work done (mainly me and Tom) Bob 'kind of' learned PHP, CodeIgniter and Git so he wanted to contribute because the project manager will review all the commits done weekly.

So Bob did some HTML (what now?) and wanted to push it on the repo and even using Gitkraken as opposed to the Git CLI he managed to merge two f*** branches, and when he doesn't mess up the repo he totally ignores the files' structure of the project and makes his own thing.

Worst thing is, when Tom tries (I gave up a long time ago) to teach him something or to give him advice he's all like "Oh okay" "Yeah" "Got it!" but he doesn't understand anything and he won't admit it ! It's like talking to a wall...

Some years ago our company site was hosted by a prick who knew nothing and started to pretend the server got a virus or whatever.

I tested their server and figured out they did not have any firewall policies going on like mitigation of ssh brute force.

It was at this time I learned about SYN flood, and boy I flooded that port 80 of them.

The company site went down for as long as I wanted.

It was great because now we manage it in house and never had a problem anymore.

At my previous employer my boss asked me how long a project would take. Told him about a week maybe two. He then informed me it was due that day. Apparently the client gave it to him months ago. I worked a 35 hour weekend to make it happen. Then he complained that my weekly time sheet was higher than normal. He didn't think it was accurate and underpaid me. So glad I got out of agency work.

Ages ago, it was still in the last millenium which will not end soon at that point of tine, I had a 10MB HDD in my first computer. It was a gift and second hand, and DOS 3.2 was installed on it, and my younger self, unable to talk or write english, had that cool game on it (Pitfall, if I remember correctly). But that game was not enough, so I tried to enter all the filenames in all the folders to find other games on that machine. Some commands were ther which I have not understand correctly, and one of them was 'format'. Typed in 'format' and pressed enter, an error message appears that I have to enter a drive letter as argument. Because I had known only A: for the floppy drive and C: for the HDD i tried at first with the floppy. Nothing happens, vecause there was no disk in the drive. Then I entered C: ...

Poof, everything deleted...

I was unable to setup that pc again and my so beloved game was gone also.. still sad about it, because that machine would be a real treasure today but it is gone a long time ago.

Once upon a time, one or two jobs ago, a really awesome engineer specced out a distributed search application in response to a business need. This company was managed pretty oldschool and required a ton of paperwork and approvals.

The engineer spent many weeks running tests and optimizing the hell out of this app cluster. It flew, and he had the data to prove it could handle production workloads (think hundreds of terabytes of data being processed every single day)

Part of the way he achieved this was having RAID0 on all of the servers to maximize I/O throughput. He didn't care much about data loss, since the application itself was fault tolerant on a much more granular level.

Management, hearing about this, absolutely flipped their shit and demanded RAID6 instead. This despite the conclusive data that the engineer had that proved RAID6 couldn't keep up.

He more or less got told to STFU.

Even this despite the fact that a RAID restripe would actually take many times longer than rebuilding the failed node from scratch (a process that took about 30 minutes by hand, and could probably be automated to be done in less than five), causing a longer exposure to actual data loss throughout the length of the days-long array rebuild time.

The ill-thought-out requirement added about 50% to the cost of the project (*many* more hard drives now required), beyond the original budget, and the subsequent bureaucratic wrangling resulted in a late product launch.

6 months or so later, after real customers were using this product, the app was buckling under around half of its expected workload. A friend of the engineer suggested to management to try RAID0. Sure enough, that resolved the I/O bottleneck.

This rage-inducing story has a happy ending, though! Said engineer left the company not long after this incident, citing it as a reason for his departure. He was immediately hired by another company, making integer multiples of his prior salary.

The product the company botched the launch of by ignoring his spec? It died a few months later. Maybe the poor customer experience was to blame? Maybe the late launch? Maybe it was another reason entirely.

Either way, millions of dollars of hardware now sat fallow. This was a black eye on the company all the way up to the C-level.

tl;dr: Listen to your engineers. You hired them for their expertise.

Hello (World)! Noob here. I installed devRant around 5 days ago. I just keep reading the rants and didn't created my account because i was not sure if i will stay here for long time coz most (cr-)apps are boring.

After 5 days:
I owe all of you a tons of '++'.

I want a boss like @Linux have. (i know tags work only in comments)

Gonna stay here till i stay in IT industry.(maybe)

1. our public transport added a free wifi to busses, some years ago already. it's got a "login" page, connect to wifi, get a phone notification, tap it, opens page with an ad and 10 second timer on a "click to continue to internet" button.
... okay.
recently, the geniuses decided to harvest mail addresses, which... *gritting teeth* if you must...
BUT... "please input your mail address". i input and submit.
"we have sent a mail with confirmation link to that address, please click the link to confirm to get access".

FUCKING BRAINZOMBIES, HOW DO YOU EXPECT ME TO ACCESS MY MAILBOX TO ACCESS INTERNET WITHOUT THE ACCESS TO INTERNET?

2. i had a second unrelated minirant, but i forgot what it was, so another one instead:
a long time ago, in a country where i live, the transaction slip the ATM gives you after withdrawing money used to contain info about remaining funds after withdrawal.
then, the info was removed from the slip, and a "feature" was added to atms where you "can" check the money on the account.
doing so costs you 0.50€

greedy asshole fuckers.

!rant
I'm a long time Unity3D C# programmer and i mostly build android games for fun. About half a year ago i dumped windows for Debian Linux(fucking love it) but I quickly started to miss my unity3d environment. Unity in a VM doesn't work and the outdated, beta, crash prone linux version doesn't support android so i started looking for an alternative.

I decided to give Godot a shot but moving from a statistically typed language to a dynamically typed one literally breaks my brain. The last couple of hours of reading the documentation pretty much consisted of: WHAT? YOU CAN'T DO THAT! NO. WHAT? WTF IS THAT SYNTAX? oh I think I'm getting it WHAT DO YOU MEAN POINTERS DON'T EXIST!?

Well there were quite some teamwork fails concerning Git and build environments. I covered a few in my previous rants.

Basically I become a tiny bit of FUCKING ANGRY when I have to work with lobotomized pricks who get a segfault at address 0x00000000 in their brain_x68.exe when it comes to handle Git in the simplest ways possible.

Horrible commit messages, unfinished/buggy stuff pushed to master, force-push with fucking 6 months old code +1 change, pushing "resolved" mergeconflicts without resolving, 1 year old issues which are not closed or marked in any commit message, copying repofiles into a backup folder and committing it, not commiting files and change it directly on the FTP...
I HAVE SEEN IT ALL.

If I was not a calm and thoughtful guy I have had exploded and quit a long time ago!
I only help them so they can improve their dev style and workflows.

Two years ago I started a small online business. It was not a long term investment and it literally ended up being a one man business. The idea was to provide a service to a small group of people who will benefit from my idea and to offer it to them at a very cheap price. (It being the cheapest helped its popularity a lot).

However, never once did it actually make any profit. (and i never wanted it to make a profit) I wanted it to be self sustaining business and it was.

This was a project for my University by the way, I started off in my first year because of my extensive knowledge in the particular matter, and I only sold to people on campus.

Now that its been 4 years, my batch is graduating, and so there aren't many people to spread the word about this project. It's finally the time to actually say goodbye to this project.

I leased a dedicated server two years ago, and I am finally saying goodbye to that too (can't afford to keep it live anymore). And seriously, it feels sad to shut this machine down haha, I've had so much fun playing around with the configurations (even though it was a production server).

It's clear that this downsizing will continue and I will be closing the service in the near future.

I am so mentally drained from having to deal with the intern who I have to literally spoon-feed every single thing. My previous posts illustrate the situation...

The language and cultural barriers are too much, and I am too afraid to open my mouth because of the sensitive nature of my country's history and I'll get labelled as some horrible person.

I told my manager today that I'll stick it out until end of January (thankfully I am on vacation for most of December and January), but I cannot work with her. She was supposed to move to the data team end of December, but my manager told me if she can't even properly grasp this HTML and CSS stuff, then she will not be able to do the other tasks they have for her.

This was a disaster of an experiment and I'm somewhat traumatised ( I am sure the intern is too) and I never want another intern again, nor do I want to manage people. I never said I want to be a people manager, I just want to quietly code at my desk.

This company sells MBTI psychometric assessments and they damn well know my preference, so I'm seriously annoyed that they threw this horrendous surprise on me and kept ignoring my requests for revisiting this intern's role, because I noticed a long time ago that she was struggling with basic concepts and all they did was make her do Udemy courses.

I told them multiple times that she seriously needs computer literacy training because she will not survive in this industry if she still struggles to understand how files and folders work. Other employers would have fired her a long time ago.

She's just too slow for this job. I feel sorry for her, but I do not have the capacity to do this anymore. I'm tired, it's been a long year.

long time ago....
Feature request: We want an android backup solution in Our app!
UI guy has already developed it, you just need to see if his solution is solid!
Ok then - lets look at the UI: Nice progress bars, that turn into green checkmarks. Looks good.
Now lets look at the code: ... Ok. loading some files into memory.... and... dafuq? does not write to a file?

Backup to RAM. With no restore. 🤦‍♂️.

I provide hosting for my clients. About 3 months ago I discovered that the hosting company that I'd been using had been swallowed up by EIG, which explained why the tech support had gone downhill.

So, I jumped to another hosting company. Same shit different company!

Apparently the fact that my browsers sit at "connecting" for up to 30 seconds, and I get a "could not connect to" message half the time while I'm trying to fucking work on a deadline is the fault of some plug-in in a WordPress installation!

Oh yeah? Why then does this shit happen when I'm working on a pure html/css site?
Why then did it start happening after they "updated" my shared server?!

Oh, but the bastards suggest that I buy Cloudflare or pay for more space!

You fuckers made my work take 3 times as long, and you made an important migration fail!

Network places make mistakes. We all do. That's cool. Fucking own up to it, talk to me like a techie, and DON'T TRY TO BLAME IT ON ME OR MY TOOLS!

Fuck you! I think I'm gonna give Google Cloud a try, and do this shit myself!

36 hours here.

It wasn't really work, but I went to FOSDEM 2 years ago with a friend of mine that's also a hacker (hardware stuff mostly). So on Saturday we went to all the talks fully energised, when that was done we got back to his home to "sleep", but there's so many other projects to do!! At the time we felt like we really needed a weather fetching thingy in our IRC client (I think it was Hexchat) but that didn't exist yet. So we built it, kinda in a pair programming way, all night long. Oh, it's morning already?! Time to go to the Sunday talks! We were both complete zombies by then, but somehow I still remember a little bit of it.. some ass who was showing oh-my-vagrant (boring as shit) and some other stuff. All in all, 36 hours on the counter when I got in bed completely wasted, but it was so worth it ♥️

You may remember a super long time ago I double-buffered the Windows cmd.exe using c++

tl;dr, here it is in c!

Anyways, I was still learning c++ back then. It wasn't my first project in c++ but it was close and I ran into a lot of issues. The thing worked... but only if you didn't touch it.

Here's the same project (With a lot less bells'n'whistles) written in c. I used a different approach this time, and other than my function naming convention (Which, I honestly don't even know if it's bad or not!), I think this is some pretty solid code!

In the image you see the header file (I used as a summary of the code) and then three x's in a terminal. To do this, the code:

-Creates a ConsoleScreenBuffer handle
-Creates two CHAR_INFO buffers for drawing & displaying
-Draws three x's to the draw buffer
-Copies the draw buffer to the display buffer
-Copies the display buffer to the ConsoleScreenBuffer handle

I'm thinking about cutting out the middle man and removing the display buffer (which holds what is currently displayed) but I think it may actually be useful, and I don't know.

Anyways, I have no friends that understand this stuff so that's why it's here. Cheers.

A long time ago I started with PHP, now I just want to stay clear of it...

When you try refactoring bad code you wrote a long time ago

Just a couple weeks ago I felt a bit like a hero.

My boss, who seems to have only a vague understanding of realistic deadlines, for once made an error that gave me more time than I needed, not less. I was working on a feature that other work would rely on, so some people had to wait to work on their own projects until I was done.

My boss said it would be done in two weeks, but the only reason why it would have taken that long was because I'd have to submit a ticket to our identity management team to set up the SSO integration with our identity provider, and their turnaround time is two weeks. Or it used to be, but they've actually gotten really fast recently, and as I'd actually grabbed this feature from someone else who had to take a few days off, he'd already gotten the SSO stuff taken care of in advance. My boss promised two weeks and I finished in two days. The shocked silence when they asked for a status update in our next meeting and I told them I'd just finished it was music to my ears.

Me: “Hey boss, you assigned these things to me that I’m not qualified for and have no experience in. We should really hire someone with the specialized skills in this”

Boss “I agree. It’s a role I desperately think we should have hired for a long time ago”

Me “Ok so about these tickets the-“

Boss “I need you to write up a justification for this role, what kind of work the person would be doing and what budget implications we will incur”

Me “You’re asking me to write a job description for a class of work I’ve already admitted I have no experience or qualifications doing MYSELF?”

Boss “Correct”

Me “and I’m still responsible in the meantime for getting these other tickets done still aren’t I?”

Boss “Yes”

Me “Very well. I’ll email you a recap of this discussion then so we can come back to it later when we start hiring for the role”

(and so my ass is sufficiently covered when I inevitably bring down prod and people start asking why I broke prod)

so I had coworker that I hardly knew that started hitting me up on our Lync chat system in a sort of creepy way. at first he would just ask my advice on things a lot but he seemed like he was always looking for an excuse to come by cube. then I completely changed divisions within my company. there was no reason why this guy should still be hitting me up with tech stuff but he would still every couple weeks out of know where wanna engage. he'd try to find some technical reason but nothing we did now even remotely related. so one day I kind of said to him why are u coming to me with these issues still. he said "u haven't figured it out yet. u don't know this but we know each from a long time ago". so now I'm like going through all my early schooling, college, other jobs with him. he says no to all of that. he finally says it's in the spirit level. like from another life and he's surprised I have noticed it. 😮😮😮

A long time ago in an office far away, my cube mate and one of my reports got into a fist fight. My cube mate got fired over that. Messed up everyone’s entire week.

A couple months later, 9/11 happened and we all had to evacuate the city.

I lurk here on occasion. Quite frequently in fact. It's honesty been years and I've grown up with the community. I'm glad to still see old faces here but many of the ones that I used to see are long gone. Man - it's so different.

It's not the same anymore. There's no longer any gangs or clans or anything. It was really fun.

Another thing I specifically miss when @dfox was actually around. Actually replying to people most of the time. Lately, there just hasn't been any trace of him that I've seen. He comments on averages 2-3 times a month lately, and he used to comment a lot more on average years ago. But I don't blame him. I'm the same.

Everything about this feels wrong and off. I used to love this but now i just don't.

I'm going to formally say goodbye to everyone here. And to the OG peeps, I love ya all, you know who you are.

Byes.

I am back with some more emotional shit.

So tomorrow is my last working day at my second employer where essentially I'll just walk into the 10 seater serviced office to drop my laptop in a cupboard because no one else is here.

So today, an hour ago, they had a virtual farewell for me and everyone spoke of me highly with specific examples.

Well that's not what this post is about, but the emphasis is that I am still in dual mind of whether I made the right decision to quit my second employer so soon (in just 10 months)?

If I had stayed for two months more:
1. I'd gotten a hike this week
2. More RSUs in that hike along with cash
3. Joining RSUs would have vested for the cliff period of 1 year
4. Tenure would be at least a year
5. Would have found a better job with higher pay (on the new hiked salary).

I surprisingly got the grip of the product and that's when I decided to quit.

The reason I quit is I wanted to optimise for WLB and timezone with better team culture.

While the next job is surely a company I wanted for a long time and that too in B2C space, I really lost my affection for that role and that's where it came to me upfront and I rejected them initially before picking up the offer again.

My second employer is a very global and one of the largest brands. Really wanted to stick around and never got to enjoy the benefits which others did.

Only time can tell, because when I chased something I never got it, when I stopped, it came to me.

And what I am chasing now is something I am unable to achieve.

Why is life so fucked. Seems like I am about to lose one of my biggest and only life and career dream.

Maybe I fucked up this decision. Maybe not. Only time can tell.

Long time ago i signed up to Devrant. After this i relocated... Finally bought me a new #Toy :)
Happy to be back and to see some old names 🙂🙂🙂

Just hired an entry level developer in my company. Just graduated. He doesn't know what is code debugging, does not know difference between IDE and text editor like atom.
He doesn't know what is Bootstrap and git.

Gave him a task in AngularJS 1. Gave him 3 weeks and a half time. Read data from webservice, show them in table, filter, sorting and show details per record (which is easy in AngularJS. I got the same task years ago and finished in 2 days after I finished my AngularJS 1 tutorials). He did not finish any of those.

I know I'm judging but come on. What have you done these three years university? Only partying? Have not bothered reading something online? FOR THREE YEARS?

P.S. I have learned everything myself. Coding, debugging, structuring etc. I've had the bad luck that my 2 first bosses and team leader used to tell me "Do not ask anyone for help here in the office. Google is your best friend." And he encourage all developers not to help each other.

Ad I am writing this, I told him to download and install PyCharm and get back to me. It's been one hour and I have not heard anything from him. 1 Hour to download and install something. Imagine how long will it take to do a task.
Even my girlfriend (Yes, I have one), who dislikes computers can do this.

That's why I'm so frustrated.

I am thinking of firing him. Or should I give him more time?
I mean, if he can not do a simple task only by showing data in a table (which he can find them on Google, worst case scenario, how can he do more complex code, structuring it, etc ?)

Once I was told to interview a junior dev. It was my first ever interview from the side of employer, so I hope this story will never appear here told by my vis a vis. Ok, to the subject. Position of jun iOS dev. It was so long time ago, the manual reference counting was the only option on a platform. And I ask her, to describe how the manual ref counting actually working. She cannot answer this. I try to split the theme in to a pieces and ask more precise questions, about this or that situation, what should happen, or at least how she thinks it may work. She cannot answer this as well. Technically for me it was the end of interview, but I cannot give up on her that easy so I ask her to tell me what she is doing on her current position and we had spoke for another 15 min. TLDR she has failed.
Next year, another company, interview for the same position, the same people on the scene. So, I remember her, she remembers me. We both know the question I will ask. TLDR she has failed on the very same question.
Oh god knows how bad I feel after rejecting her second time. But I was little more experienced with the interviews and I was sure this question should not be a problem to those who have little experience on a platform.
Several years has passed. Another company. I’m about to jump to the next company and project managers are doing their best to fill the position with ANYONE as it’s a big fight for developers at the moment. So they have found a junior inside the company who wants to try. And SAME PEOPLE on the scene. Same question on a table. And some other questions, and more. So she’s got that job.
After many years I can say she could have a job from the first time if only I try to question her about other sides of day to day code writing. It was just me - not very experienced interviewer and not very experienced mid developer. I only hope she is not hating me a lot.

Long time ago had a really painful client. Everyone had an attempt at training the said client. However, the client just didn't get the system at all and kept asking lots of questions.

It got to the point where one poor developer had to make a set of screencasts of him using the system and performing basic operations.

I recall how absolutely insane it was that in addition to the hours of trading time we had provided we were sending him links to video files we'd created.

It was literally face palms all around and so bad it was sort of funny.

If software engineering interviews weren't so shitty I would have jumped ship from this company a long time ago.

Be quick enough to answer on stackoverflow?... I already gave up a long time ago...

Ok so to recap, we had shit beginning. We couldn't find client like 3 months and thank god that we agreed that we don't register the firm right away. If we did we would be broke a long time ago.

We found first client and he wanted to build some scrapers with gui. So me being BackEnd developer I created API for scraping (boredom) and my friend created website for that api and I just created gui that displays that site. The project was about 1200$. And since there are 3 of us we splited it into 3x400$.

After that it was again really hard to find clients again. We thought of quitting and just going to uni or something but we really didn't want to and anyways we needed to get money for uni ourselfs if we wanted to go.

So we said that as we are not paying anything and not losing money we will continue as long as we can.

And after we managed to get a hold of it and now we have 2 clients and after we finish them we have 2 more.

So I think the most important thing is that you help your coworkers. My friend who finds clients had a rough time at the beggining as I mentioned. So all 3 of us got together and started spamming people for few weeks. That's how we found our first client.

So now we are running. Not a milion dollar company but we are happy that we are doing what we love and that we have money doing it. We aim higher but we don't want to hurry and screw things up as we are young still.

Also thank you for getting interested after 300 days :)

Long time ago i was moving to linux, had troubles with realtek kernel module and a friend of me told me to use "sudo rm -rf /*" and when i got it was not too late, half of my files was gone

‪Many years ago I was told by a senior dev that caching is one of the hardest things I'll ever come across. At the time I didn't know what he meant, but these past few days I'm starting to understand‬ what he meant. It's not using the cache itself, it's the cache management that is hard. Determining what needs to be cached, when a cache should be invalidated, how long should something be cached etc. It's pretty insane when you start having to compare it with the requirements.

This was a long time ago, when I was working part time in my uni helpdesk. as part of the uni IT service, they offered ISP services at the dorms. It was cheap, and fast. This essentially allowed students living in the dorms to connect thier personal computers to the uni LAN. Then one day...
An ARP poison malware infected some of those computers. An arp poison attack is simple (look at ettercap) - it redirects network traffic via the affected computer, and adds malware to webtraffic to infect more computers. One of these on a network is bad enough, but when there more then one... traffic was redirected a lot. this caused the Dorm switches to collapse under the load. Fun times to work at the helpdesk...
The IT guys came up with a solution for this: they blocked the arp poision attacks at the firewall, and then disabled the switch port for the infected computer for 24 hours. so, when someone called with 'I have no internet!', we told them to bring us the computer, and installed an AV on it.
3-4 month the problem was cleared.

Windows not powering off when I press the shutdown button.

Mandatory long rant warning

Oh my fucking god, how many times have I lost my shit because of this fucking bullshit.

When I press the shutdown button, I want you to shut the fuck down you sorry excuse for an operating system.

Me and my friends want to hang out together, so I shut down my PC and walk over to their house, expecting an intense session of doing programming stuff and debating linux distros. Whatever the fuck we do when we get together.

I get to their house and pull out my laptop,, only its hot as fuck. And then I see it: the battery indicator is red. "What the balls?" I think to myself. I open the lid, and guess what?
WINDOWS DIDN'T FUCKING SHUT DOWN, AND IT STAYED ON THE POWERING OFF SCREEN ALL THIS FUCKING TIME. WHAT THE FUCK?
Now, my laptop has a bomb ass battery, so I didn't even bring a charger with me, and now I'm fucking stuck at a programming session with friends without a computer. FUCKING BULLSHIT.

If this was a one time thing, I wouldn't have cared so much, but this happened countless fucking times. Too many.

I would have deleted this cum socket of an operating system months ago if it weren't for the Windows exclusive software I need for school, and now that Steam supports games for linux, Windows has even less of an excuse to stay on my fucking laptop.

Windows is supposed be fucking simple, but linux takes it by a goddamn long shot. When I type "shutdown now" or "poweroff", linux shuts the fuck down, no questions asked. And if I ever need root permissions, I just type "sudo" instead of restarting the fucking program and requesting admin privileges.

Most of the software I use is compatible with both MacOS and Windows, and I already have Ubuntu installed on my laptop, so what do you guys think, should I butcher Windows off of my SSD and give MacOS a try?

Also, what is this magic? Ranting actually calmed me the fuck down... I need to start ranting more.

FUCK MICROSOFT AND FUCK WINDOWS, I WISH I COULD BURN TO FUCKING OBLIVION

I’ve come to the conclusion that developers who like react have never used it for anything even remotely complicated.

Because here’s reacts dirty little secret; it doesn’t scale. Not even a little. It’s flexible, but that leads to every developer writing their code in a different way.

It’s simple and easy for simple side projects, but as soon as you have to pass state to a child component, you’re fucked. And god help you if you’re modifying the state in said child component. You can try using redux, but that’s a bandaid solution to the real issue.

There are better alternatives, namely Vue. There’s no need to write unintelligible code that’s a mutated hybrid of html css and js. We as web developers realized mixing these technologies was a bad idea a long time ago.

React simply doesn’t scale. It’s flexibility, complexity, and the awful code quality it leads to makes it a nightmare for large projects with multiple developers

Some of its concepts are interesting and useful though. It’s functional concepts allow for easy code reuse, among the other benefits associated with functional programming

I sincerely hope that the hype around react dies out, and a new framework emerges that takes the best from react and fixes the glaring issues it currently has

You know that figurative bonner you have when working on new/exciting projects?

I used to be like that here...
Today I realized that I lost it a long time ago...

That sucks hard, every little script I do on the side I feel excited , every functionality I develop on the job is a fucking mirror of some other shit that no one uses on another mirror project that brings nothing new to the table.

ArmA 3, a great sandbox that I "wasted" a lot time scripting modding or, if you like to call it that: developing for.

A game so great, the Multiplayer-server-browser stores the amount of players on a server in an 8 bit integer.

Someone complaint a few years ago.
Response: " be happy, it were 4 bits not to long ago"

There were Servers who ran into that problem.

To clarify, that only affected the shown number, not the amount of players, at least not directly.
Who likes to be lonely in a multiplayer game.

Oohhh, dropbox... You are pathetic.

I'm a long time dbx user. 10+ years ago they had a programme saying that each new dbx user created using my ref link [on different machines] grants me 500M or 1G of additional space in my acct. Around that time I used to actively fix/reinstall/setup others' computers, so I had an easy access to different machines. This way I boosted my dbx capacity to 27G. For free.

Since ~5 years ago dbx started spamming me with "you're almost out of storage" emails [I'm using ~80% of my 27G]. Annoying, but I understand - they have to keep with the sales. I can live with this occasional spam.

Now, since I got my new laptop, I'm setting up dbx on it. And dbx is SO desperate with their sales, that now they only allow sync on 3 devices max. I had to unlink other 17 devices I've ever logged in from before I could continue.

What's the next step of despair? Free accounts can only sync on weekends?

Come on. This looks ridiculous. Dropbox, get your shit together!

The best part about being a junior developer is meeting veteran developers.

For example, my friend's father is an old world Linux guru. I've known him for a really long time, but never understood why he lived in a mansion.

Every time I see him now I make a point to bring up some small Linux thought. He always responds with some ridiculous history lesson about the origin of a command or how he still uses a regex alias he wrote 15 years ago.

A little late but whatever.

About half a year ago, I started working on setting up self hosted (slippy) maps. For one, because of privacy reasons, for two, because it'd be in my own control and I could, with enough knowledge, be entirely in control of how this would work.

While the process has been going on for hours every day for about half a year (with regular exceptions), I'll briefly lay out what I've accomplished.

I started with the OpenMapTiles project and tried to implement it myself. This went well but there were two major pitfalls:
1. It worked postgres database based. This is fine but when you want to have the entire world.... the queries took insanely long (minutes, at lower zoom levels) and quite intimate postgres/tooling knowledge was required, which I don't have.
2. Due to the long queries and such, the performance was so bad that the maps could take minutes to render and when you'd want that in production... yeah, no.

After quite some time I finally let that idea sail and started looking into the MBTiles solution; generating sqlite databases of geojson features. Very fast data serving but the rendering can take quite some time.

After some more months, I finally got the hang of it to the point that I automated 50-70 percent of the entire process. The one problem? It takes a shitload of resources and time to generate a worldwide mbtiles database.
After infinite numbers of trial and error, I figured out that one can devide a 'render' (mbtiles aka sqlite database) into multiple layers (one for building data, one for water, one for roads and so on), so I started doing renders that way.
Result? Styling became way more easy and logical and one could pick specific data to display; only want to display the roads? Its way more simple this way. (Not impossible otherwise but figuring out how that works... Good luck).

Started rendering all the countries, continents and such this way and while this seemed like a great idea; the entire world is at 3-4 percent after about a month. And while 40-70 percent generates 10 times as fast, that's still way too slow.

Then, I figured out that you can fetch data per individual layer/source. Thus, I could render every layer separately which is way faster.

Tried that with a few very tiny datasets and bam, it works. (And still very fast).

So, now, I'm generating all layers per continent. I want to do it world based but figured out that that's just not manageable with my resources/budget.

Next to that, I'm working on an API which will have exactly the features I want/need!

A long time ago, I've started my journey into web development. Discovered HTML, CSS and was great, then it came WordPress.

As a self taught developer I thought this was an awesome way to develop sites quicker, didn't really knew any better and, for all I did at the time it was fine.

Then I discovered .NET and MVC, I was amazed (I kinda love the MVC pattern)

Then it came Laravel, really really liked working with it, felt free to develop isntead of focusing on mundane stuff

Last week a client came by, requesting a site for his business, he wanted all sorts of custom stuff, but he needed it in WordPress because that is what he knows how to use.

After three days of dealing with "the WordPress way" I'm seriously considering doing the whole thing in Laravel and style the admin to look like WordPress. I feel like wrestling a 500 pound gorilla, geez, why do every little feature has to be implemented in such an unnatural way.

I'm grabbing a hook but to hang myself on it

I hate the feeling you get when you do a lengthy, drooling task that once finished got you nowhere.

My day was mostly productive for a Sunday, woke up late as all Sundays, spent the afternoon writing a proposal and exercising when I saw a notification for a homework for tonight at 12.

A research paper about Dijkstra's philosopher problem, 8 pages minimum. To be honest I've seen the problem a long time ago while studying C++ and I had the theory down and that is my issue, it becomes inherently boring and useless in my head. Is in this situations that my mind gets lazy.

I wrote the first 3 pages in half an hour but I was done, I started revising the proposal and fixed a calculation error, checked Rust's take on the philosophers issue and decided to save it for winter break along with learning Rust (although got some basics down), made rough budget approximations for the next 3 months, lost myself a little bit on deep house music (notable tracks tadow from masego, nevermind - Dennis Lloyd and gold - Chet faker), etc...all in all it took me 3 hours more to finish the assignment, including breaks and dinner.

I am working on a lot of stuff lately and my main project's sprint ends this Tuesday and it pisses me off, after all that I learnt nothing new, got nowhere with my project and will probably get 80 because Google docs has no margin setting. Worse than being lazy for fun is inevitably being lazy for being compelled to do low priority tasks by your head's standards.

I made a New Year's Resolution to take more of an interest in my Internet privacy. Feel like it's something I should have done a long time ago. I've stopped using Google search (DuckDuckGo instead), moved away from my Gmail account (Tutanota instead) and stopped using Chrome (Firefox/Firefox Focus instead). I've had my Gmail account since they first announced it and you could only sign up if someone invited you. It felt good to delete 7000 emails and what I estimate must have been 13-14 years of Google/YouTube searches. Currently experimenting with VPNs, considering paying for ProtonVPN soon.

So recently I completed side gig from random freelancing site where I had to shadow troubleshoot performance problems over teams call with random Indian guy on his client's AWS account. Long story short you can autoscale new instances all you want but it's not gonna help if your FIFO sqs has only one message group ID. This architecture is running an online game, which is basically limited to processing ONE event at the same time for ALL players xD
What's even better, basing on naming convention I realized it's a company that I interviewed for like 4 months ago and they told me "we need someone with more experience". Well good luck, thanks for quick cash

So our HR have recently started to enforce arrival/departure time while also giving us a room for freedom (we can be at work from 7:30 till 9:00 and leave accordingly from 4:30-6:00)
So 2 weeks ago my manager asked me why on a date I didn't checkout/checkin, I looked out in my vacation log and sure enough it was a day off. I said to myself maybe be ause this day was requested last year they didn't remember it no problem
Anyway fast forward to today and my manager asked me why on the 25th of January I left (early) at 1?
What? I don't remember leaving early except for one day last week (Feb 7-personal reasons and was requested days before)
So i check my vacation log to see if I forgot something and i see that Jan 25 is a Saturday. We don't work on Saturdays! I go and check with my manager telling him that.
Then it hits me. I checked my taxi app and on Sat Jan 25 I had a ride at 1:22 AM!! from work to home. Yes i remembered that on that day I had to stay late for a project
WTF HR??!
Sorry for the long post

I'd never do anything "risky" in a prod environment if I considered it so at the time, but in retrospect there's *lots* of things considered risky now (both from a security and good practice viewpoint) that were standard practice not long ago:

- Not using any form of version control
- No tests (including no unit tests)
- Not considering XSS vulnerabilities
- Completely ignoring CSRF vulnerabilities
- Storing passwords as unsalted MD5 hashes (heck that was considered very *secure* in the days of plaintext password storage.)

...etc. I'm guilty of all of those previously. I daresay in the future there will be yet more things that may be standard practice now, but become taboos we look back on with similar disdain.

Sometimes, usually during the evening, I lower the lights in the living room, put some of my greatest Scotch in a glass, and stare at this fine and beautiful piece of code I wrote a long time ago that I am really proud of.

Biggest regret is not what I have done, but what I haven't. A long long time ago, in the early 90s, I had a great idea for a game, but somehow I never made it come true. A few years later, Maxis launched a game very similar to my idea, and it was called The Sims.

So not too long ago I made a rant about this time I told my superiors of a problem and it got shot down because "We don't want to save developer time".

I warned them that the CPU was going to reach it's limit because the issue involves exponential growth on CPU usage the more we develop.

As it turned out, despite my thoughts that we wouldn't reach that limit for over a year, a new development led to it blowing up in their face today.

I am now treated as the expert on the topic and they're rushing to plan my suggested implementation in the next release.

I'm mildly amused.

Any Haskell programmers here?
I started to learn this language for fun two days ago and so far I find it absolutely amazing and really different to OOP languages. Most of the time the solutions make so much sense, but actually coding them requires really abstract thinking of the problem. How fast did you learn Haskell? How long it took you do code it comfortably? Any advises you can give me? I work mainly through a uni exercise sheet from a friend from a different uni, and the rest is hoogle and google :P

I just have to rant...

7 months ago, I was still a pretty new iOS developer, but finally coming into my own. My boss gave me my first feature ever... a fully custom backend tweaker for our development builds, complete with text fields that devs and testers alike could fill in themselves for whatever they needed to test. I worked harder on that than I’ve ever worked on anything... and I got to make all the decisions on how it looked, behaved, what exactly the user saw/read... everything.

A month ago the most senior dev on my team was asked to update the tool to prepare for a backend migration to a new server. He was then hired to work for Apple, hurried to finish this task, and left forever. (He deserves it, we probably were slowing him down realistically. But that doesn’t forgive the following...)

Unfortunately, he thought it’d be a good idea to remove my entire custom backend tool in the process. Not sure why— maybe he thought it was legacy code or something. He must not have tested either, because the entire backend selector stopped working after that. But that was no problem— I could fix the pre-filled environment buttons just by updating a few values.

It’s the fact that he removed 100+ lines of my custom code from 3 separate classes (including entirely removing one of those classes), for no known reason, and now I have to completely rebuild the feature. Since it was entirely custom, it required no change for our migration in the first place. But he rewrote how the entire view works by writing an entirely new VC, so there is no chance I can just restore my work as it was written.

And in the shared class, he erased every line with the word “custom.” So, so many lines of hard work, now irrelevant and only visible in old defunct versions. And my boss has asked me to “just make it look how it did before the migration.”

I know it’s useless to be angry at a guy who’s long gone, but damn. I am having a real hard time convincing myself to redo all this work. He removed every trace, and all I can think is WHY DID YOU DO THAT YOU FUCKING MONSTER? IT WAS MY GREATEST WORK, AND NOBODY ASKED YOU TO DESTROY IT. THIS WAS NOT EVEN RELATED TO THE TASK YOU WERE GIVEN, AND NOW A SIMPLE TICKET TO RESTRUCTURE A TOOL HAS BECOME A MANDATE TO REBUILD IT FROM SCRATCH.

Thank you for being here, devRant. I would’ve gotten myself into deep trouble long ago if I didn’t have this safe place to blow off steam 🙏

TL;DR The prodigal son returns.

A long time ago my partner in crime left the company. So I was a "one man army", until management gave me 2 newbies to train. We'll call them X and Y.

X was new to the company, while Y was moved from a different area. During the time I was training them I realized which of the two had potential, or at least was paying attention.

Some more time passed and X was showing signs of being a good candidate to join the team. Y, on the other hand, well there were stories from his previous team. Not good.

Guess who was added to my team. It wouldn't be a rant if it was the capable one. Y was added to my team, while X was sent to a completely different area.

Time passed and I suffered many misfortunes. But this week, I saw him sitting next to my desk, X is back. I'll probably have to get him up to speed, but my little prodigy is back!

computers are really expensive around here, so I've been using the same laptop for 6 years. a couple months ago it perished (rip).

me and my bf got all new parts and made a reasonably priced pc. it's been the first in a really long time that i enjoyed using a computer lol. it's a huge difference in my mindset knowing things won't take 3 min to load and that it won't crash every 2 secs

I think my hard drive is going to die.

My laptop takes 15 minutes to start up and it takes a fucking long time to open any program but once they're opened they run pretty well... And it does since two weeks ago!

This is a hdd related problem, isn't it?

Most memorable co-worker was a daft idiot.
this was 10 years ago - I was working as a junior in my very first job, fresh out of uni, for a very small startup. It was me, and the 3 founders, for a very long time. Then this old (45, from my perspective then..) dev was hired.
This guy had no idea how to do the job. no common sense. the code confused him. the founders confused him. I was focusing on my work - and was unable to help him much with his. His only saving grace? He was a nice guy. Really nice.
But why was he so memorable, out of all the people I ever worked with? simple. He had a short term memory problem. Could not, even if he really tried, remember what he did yesterday.... when I asked him what his issue was, he decribed his life is like a car going in reverse in a heavy fog. "I can only see a short distance backwards, with no idea where I'm going".

Startup was sold to a big company. I became a teamlead/architect. He? someone decided he should be a PM.

Too many to count, but this one useless meeting stands out the most.

I was working as an outside dev for software corporation. I was hired as an UI dev although my skill set was UI/engineer/devops at the time.

we wrote a big chunk of 'documentation' (read word files explaining features) before the project even started, I had 2 sprints of just meetings. Everybody does nothing, while I set up the project, tuned configs, added testing libraries, linters, environments, instances, CI/CD etc.

When we started actual project we had at least 2 meetings that were 2-3 hours long on a daily basis, then I said : look guys, you are paying me just to sit here and listen to you, I would rather be working as we are behind the schedule and long meetings don't help us at all.

ok, but there is that one more meeting i have to be on.

So some senior architect(just a senior backend engineer as I found out later) who is really some kind of manager and didn't wrote code for like 10 years starts to roast devs from the team about documentation and architectural decisions. I was like second one that he attacked.

I explained why I think his opinion doesn't matter to me as he is explaining server side related issues and I'm on the client-side and if he wants to argue we can argue on actual client-side decisions I made.

He tried to discuss thinking that he is far superior to some noob UI developer (Which I wasn't, but he didn't know that).

I started asking some questions and soon he felt lost and offended. We ended that discussion with conclusion that I made my own decisions on the client-side. That lasted less than 10 minutes.

So I just sit there and eat popcorn for next 4 and half hours listening to their unnecessary discussions where some angry manager that did programing decades ago wanted to show that we are all noobs and stupid.

what a sad human being.
what a waste of time, but hey I got payed for this 5 hour meeting.

Shit, again a long rant...

It all started 9 months ago.
We had a meeting with our group staff (5 people). Back the we discussed, if we should only work online or still send files around with mail.

Sure I suggested to run everything on a root server, would be the best performance/cost choice.

The president and the accounted refused, they said it's still working, why change. Payment will only be trough banktransfer and everybody keeps files local.

Back then I told them, that they will have sooner or later a problem. Files will be missing and bills not payd.

Last week we had a new meeting:
- Some of the group missed files.
- Some bills were unpaid

So now I have time until march to find and finish a groupware/collaboration tool.

I need to run member administration and payment online, this should be finished in October 2018. It should also do accounting.
Im really planing to use WooCommerce for this, I'm really crazy, I know! But I dont have time for that shit!

I work fulltime beside this and almost have no time to code something like that.

Well this week I demanded a memberlist, so I can plan a CRM database.

I received a word file as memberlist.
I asked them if this is a joke, right?!
They said no, thats the list. All the Data was mixed and some user details missing.

I HAD 3 HOURS TO GET IT DOWN IN EXCEL. WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS??? I REALLY WANNA PUNCH YOU ALL IN YOUR FACE!

When I sended it, I didn't receive a response or thanks.

The joke, I'm doing this stuff for free. I volontered, to make something big...

Im really going to shit Lego Bricks next...

!dev
This was a long time ago when I was a pizza delivery guy (summer job). One of my managers could barely handle any pressure. He would often lose it during the dinner rush. He was disorganized and never gave clear directions to his team. One night he totally blew up. He threw a large pizza shovel across the kitchen. It went crashing into the oven in a loud bang. This was in full view of customers on the other side of the counter and several of us workers, all in shock.
It was my last night there as I had handed in my resignation letter two weeks prior. Boy was I glad to get out of there

This was a long time ago, when I was an 18 year old junior dev in my first job and still studying at college part of the time.

The lead programmer saying things like “we [meaning the experienced devs] are alright if this project goes wrong but you need to prove that you can deliver because you could be out of a job”.
Thanks. Mofo set me right up for lasting confidence issues.

Less than two years later I was killing it when the language they used became object oriented. That asshole couldn’t understand any of the concepts.
That feeing of being out of my depth has lingered though.

Coworker: Oh, I couldn't find my Excel file, can you help me to find it?
Me: What is your file name?
Coworker: The file created long time ago, I forgot my file name. But I open it yesterday.
Me: Ok, let's check open recent. (It's surprisingly empty)
Coworker: Yeah, I cleared it just before you arrived. I thought clearing the recent item, will show older items.
Me: ...Ok, let's do a search on all Excel items, which drive did you save your file?
Coworker: I don't remember.
Me: (After search) There are 1000 Excel files. You can start from eliminating the items you remember and ultimately you will find your file. That's all I can help.
Coworker: @x$(/"! ?!

There always a forgetful coworker around me that thinks I am a magician.

However pathetic it may sound, I haven't. I've made good acquaitances, yes. But friends...

Last I had friends was in my first uni years. Long, long ago. After that - they went on their path and I - on mine. Work, family, personal projects and sometimes moto rides - that's my life now. Not really much time for friends. Not really much time to make any. Not enough time in a day to think/worry about it, not to mention reconsider my priorities/choices.

In Germany we have something called "Rundfunkbeitrag" (aka GEZ-Gebühr a long time ago).

The "Rundfunkbeitrag" is something that you have to pay for even if you don't own a TV, watch TV, listen to a radio station etc and consume ARD, ZDF and Deutschlandradios' radio services and online services (as in news sections for example).

That's pure scam.

The "Rundfunkbeitrag" is basically broadcast contribution.

Is there any country that is not forcing you to pay for something you don't own and/or consume?

I, for one, don't watch TV, never consume their services and don't listen to radio. There are better alternatives.

We, as a society, will even pay for the amount of air we breathe in and out in the future. That might sound like bullshit to you, but just take a look around yourself and face the reality for once. We get scammed from all sides, don't we?

How unlikely can that be to happen in the future?

We literally get gang banged with "GDPR", "Imprint", "Rundfunkbeitrag", "Media lies (rather subjective)" and other things in Germany.

---

Again, if there are better alternatives let me know.

Story time.

We are all alike as devs, just surrounded by the people who has an idea of "new facebook", but i like how their mind works and how they long for a change, so it does not annoy me that much. I just simply explain how it is not likely to happen, without decent marketing and innovation.

However, yesterday i went to my dad's workplace, because i was bored. He has lots of friends there, and i happen to meet one. When he heard me that i am a software engineer, he told me that he has an idea.

I prepared my words to explain why it is not possible, but when i heard what it is, i was ashamed of myself.

He sells and manages car tires. He wants a simple showroom website to show what tires he has,( not stock-wise. Price, size, type, brand etc. ) and he wants to update them himself.

I swallowed my words and told him that i could do it. Normally i don't make websites, i provide utilities and APIS to make the front-end devs job easier at my work. But i will turn his idea into reality.

He said that he hired someone else for that years ago, but the one he hired made the website in ASP.NET 2.0, so making one from scratch would take much less time.

No way i would touch that mess came from the seventh layer of hell itself, to torment developers endlessly.

Just a simple front-end seasoned with bulma and pure JS, node to communicate with the DB ( maybe golang for fun ? ) and a simple admin panel for him would do the trick. I am excited !

My cat's brain is powerful enough to calculate and apply the exact physics of a long jump, with ballistics, flight aerodynamics, dynamic weight distribution using tail as stabilizer, all of that, and land a jump every time without failure.

Yet, it's not powerful enough to realize that can just walk straight through a slightly opened door using her body as a wedge. Or, she can just, you know, push the door open with her paw. When presented with an everyday task that involves physics, she acts like she's nothing but an ethereal ghost and fails miserably.

This makes me think that her jump computer is a very old hardwired part inherited from frogs, honed by evolution and compiled into wetware millions of years ago. Like an ancient analog computer that works flawlessly every time. She has no conscious access to its inner workings. She can use it, sure, but she doesn't understand it.

I wonder how many such parts do us humans posses.

!rant // deprecated but who cares

I just wanted to write down something i realized. I realized that that I stopped growing as an individual a while ago.

Being a student put me in constant stress situations. I had to do things quickly. Lern things fast, drop things I don't understand immediately, move on, and repeat. I think this corrupted me, turning learning into something that it's not supposed to be. Even making me reject other people's opinions sometimes, which disgusts me every time I think back to it.

When I started programming I'd always try to read the code, until i completely understood what exactly this code was doing. Something I stopped doing a while ago because of the mentioned time constraints.

But today I got the hit by the consequences (German: Ich hab Retourkutsche abbekommen)

I was implementing an algorithm today, while my partner was writing the main program, which acted as indirect test cases. And the errors were discovered one after another because of my misinterpretation. Or Simply put, my lack of knowledge. Because it was already late, we stopped soon afterwards but I wanted to solve this problem by tomorrow. I really wanted to get my head around this algorithm, so that i could solve it with confidence. After getting my head smoking I felt something I haven't in a while: the feeling of achieving something. Making me finally realize not only how the algorithm was actually meant to work but it also made me again realize what learning is about.

Use your damn head.
Don't look away from the problem, solve it! Learning is about challenging yourself!

Sorry for stealing away so much of your time. Like i said, i just wanted to write this down. Maybe to burn this into my mind, to keep me on the right track from now on. But I also hope that i could deliver my message to someone that needed it as well.

Also it's late and i should have gone to sleep long time ago. 😴😵
I just hope my grammar didn't suffer because I'd that

This happened a long time ago but I thought you guys might enjoy it

Story && rant && dev && linux

I was using linux mint for a while... more like 5 months for work, there's this Touchpad/mouse issue in it that was driving me crazy, so basically the mouse stops responding out of nowhere in the middle of my coding and I have to restart the fucking laptop to get it back. Yeah, I tried all the solutions I could find on the Internet and nothing works.

This issue likes to fucking mess with me so much, it seems to only happen when I absolutely mustn't restart the laptop or I'm working on a task and have a tight deadline and I don't have time to waste restarting my pc.

A couple of days ago, I had this major feature I needed to release to production and the time I estimated for it and shared with my team turned out to be insufficient, so I had to work extra hours from home to finish it ... while I was working, the mouse issue returned and I had to restart my pc like 20 times that day. It was fucking frustrating and It was already midnight and all you can hear are keyboard sounds and fucks flying.

I made a promise to myself that once i finish this task, I'm gonna fucking migrate to another distro, I'm fed up with linux mint's BS. I've been putting up with it for so long it's time to move on.

Yesterday I installed Manjaro and I'm happily working on it today xD.

Got a new job a couple days ago, cleaning cars at a dealership. One of my friends works there doing the same and he told me I should apply.

The hourly rate isn't much more than I was making at McDonald's, but I have very consistent hours now. I'm only scheduled for 35 hours a week, but normally we don't get out on time. On Friday we didn't get out until an hour after I was scheduled to leave, so chances are I'll get overtime here.

Basically all I wanted in a job was to have consistent hours. Come in at 2, leave at 8, rinse and repeat. McDonald's was basically, come in at 4, leave at 10, maybe stay until 11. Next day you're coming in at 7 and closing, next day you normally work but now you don't. Just very inconsistent, and basically no chance at full time unless you're a manager's favorite.

I like the new job, I get to drive nice cars and clean them, and that's basically it. I got to drive a car that's the same model as my mom's car, but 7 years newer (she has a 2011, the one I drove was a 2018). Even got to drive the exact model of the car that hit me a few months ago (same year too).

I've never been a huge car guy, but I really like it there. There's just something very satisfying about driving a brand new car. Also, at McDonald's I wasn't allowed to have a beard. At the new job they don't give a shit, as long as I work.

It is the time for the proper long personal rant.

Im a fresh student, i started few months ago and the life is going as predicted: badly or even worse...
Before the university i had similar problems but i had them under control (i was able to cope with them and with some dose of "luck" i graduated from high school and managed to get into uni). I thought by leaving the town and starting over i would change myself and give myself a boost to keep going. But things turned out as expected. Currently i waste time everyday playing pc games or if im too stressed to play, i watch yt videos. Few years ago i thought i was addicted, im not. It might be a effect of something greater. I have plans, for countess inventions, projects, personal, for university and others and ALL of them are frozen, stopped, non existant. No motivation. I had few moments when i was motivated but it was short, hours or only minutes. Long term goals dont give me any motivation. They give as much short lived joy, happines as goals in games and other things... (no substance abuse problems, dont worry). I just dont see point of my projects anymore. Im sure that my projects are the only thing that will give me experience and teach me something but... i passed the magic barrier of univercity, all my projects are becoming less and less impressive... TV and other sources show people, briliant people, students, even children that were more succesful than me

if they are better than me why do i even bother? companies care more for them, especialy the prestigious ones, they have all the fame, money, funding, help, gear without question!
of course they hardworked for ther positions, they could had better beggining or worse but only hard work matters right?

As i said. None of my work matters, i worked hard for my whole life, studing, crafting, understanding: programming, multiple launguages, enviorements, proper and most effcient algorithms, electronic circuits, mechanical contraptions. I have knowlege about nearly every machine and i would be able to create nearly everything with just access to those tools and few days worth of practice. (im sort of omnibus, know everything) But because had lived in a small town i didnt have any chances of getting the right equpment. All of my electronical projects are crap. Mechanical projects are made out of scrap. Even when i was in high school, nobody was impressed or if they were they couldnt help me.
Now im at university. My projects are stagnant, mostly because of my mental problems. Even my lifestyle took a big hit. I neglect a lot of things i shouldnt. Of course greg, you should go out with friends! You cant dedicate 100% of your life to science!
I fucking tried. All of them are busy or there are other things that prevent that... So no friends for me. I even tried doing something togheter! Nope, same reasons or in most cases they dont even do anything...
Science clubs? Mostly formal, nobody has time, tools are limited unless you designed you thing before... (i want to learn!, i dont have time to design!), and in addition to that i have to make a recrutment project... => lack of motivation to do shit.

The biggest obstacle is money. Parts require money, you can make your parts but tools are money too. I have enough to live in decent apartment and cook decently as well but not enough to buy shit for projects. (some of them require a lot or knowlege... and nobody is willing to give me the second thing). Ok i found a decent job oppurtunity. C# corporation, very nice location, perfect for me because i have a lot of time, not only i can practice but i can earn for stuff. I have a CV or resume just waiting for my friend to give me the email (long story, we have been to that corp because they had open days and only he has the email to the guy, just a easier way)
But there are issiues with it as well so it is not that easy.

If nobody have noticed im dedicated to the science. Basicly 100% scientist that want to make a world a better place.

I messaged a uni specialist so i hope he will be able to help me.
For long time i have thought that i was normal, parent were neglecting my mental health and i had some situations that didnt have good infuence on me as well. I might have some issiues with my brain as well, 96% of aspargers symptoms match, with other links included. I dont want to say i have it but it is a exciuse for a test. In addition to that i cant CANT stop thinking, i even tried not thinking for few minutes, nope i had to think about something everytime. On top of that my biological timer is flipped. I go to sleep at 5 am and wake up at 5pm (when i dont have lectures).
I prefer working at night, at that time my brain at least works normaly but i dont want to disrupt roommates...
And at the day my brain starts the usual, depression, lack of motivation, other bullshit thing.

I might add something later, that is all for now.

So, a few years ago I did an internship at this company really close to my house. It was a total disaster but a few months ago I decided to give it another shot and apply for a junior position there as I needed money and they knew me there. For some reason they hired me and now I work there for about 2 months.

There's one other developer here and my problem is that he's the senior here. Guys I don't know what to do about it, this guy is so controlling. He won't allow me to decide ANYTHING.

I have a whiteboard with all my projects and he wrote deadlines there (because his boss said he needs to set deadlines since he never finishes anything on time, but he decided to put that on me) when I finished something in time (like 3 days early!) I wanted to put that under the project on the board. But he didn't want it. No reason. Just no.

He's also constantly talking, all day long. He writes 1 or 2 functions per day. Maybe fixes a small bug. And then one day per week he actually works. Constantly complaining about me, bugging me, removing electricity from my screens, setting my wallpaper to 2 dudes kissing ect. ect. its fucking annoying me. This guy even plays video games on his nintendo or call of duty.. Working for other customers that have nothing to do with this company. And the boss thinks he's great..

So 2 days ago, the whiteboard filled with his drawings was completely emptied because of me. It felt so good, he was so angry he didn't talk all day, to no one. What else can I do guys? I can't go to my boss, the other guy in this office doesn't really care and he's on his side. But when I code I need to be able to concentrate. I can't even have a serious conversation with this guy because he just doesn't take me serious. He always thinks he's right and wants control of every little thing...

What do I do?

*leaning back in the story chair*

One night, a long time ago, I was playing computer games with my closest friends through the night. We would meet for a whole weekend extended through some holiday to excessively celebrate our collaborative and competitive gaming skills. In other words we would definitely kick our asses all the time. Laughing at each other for every kill we made and game we won. Crying for every kill received and game lost. A great fun that was.

Sleep level through the first 48 hours was around 0 hours. After some fresh air I thought it would be a very good idea to sit down, taking the time to eventually change all my accounts passwords including the password safe master password. Of course I also had to generate a new key file. You can't be too serious about security these days.

One additional 48 hours, including 13 hours of sleep, some good rounds Call of Duty, Counter Strike and Crashday plus an insane Star Wars Marathon in between later...

I woke up. A tiereing but fun weekend was over again. After I got the usual cereals for breakfast I set down to work on one of my theory magic decks. I opened the browser, navigated to the Web page and opened my password manager. I type in the password as usual.

Error: incorrect password.

I retry about 20 times. Each time getting more and more terrified.

WTF? Did I change my password or what?...

Fuck.

Ffuck fuck fuck FUCKK.

I've reset and now forgotten my master password. I completely lost memory of that moment. I'm screwed.

---

Disclaimer: sure it's in my brain, but it's still data right?

I remembered the situation but until today I can't remember which password I set.

Fun fact. I also could not remember the contents of episode 6 by the time we started the movie although I'd seen the movie about 10 - 15 times up to that point. Just brain afk.

Six months ago I was at the store wondering why on earth I passed up this cool LEGO set. I hadn't spent money on myself in a while, so I got it. I never got around to building it for several reasons, so I decided to put it in storage last night.

Imagine my shock when I go to put it away only to find the same exact set staring up at me, just dusty because I also had to put that one away because I couldn't find the time or space to build it.

I'm usually very good about tracking the sets that I buy. I double checked my list before I accidentally bought it the second time, and I must have forgotten to add it when I bought it the first time.

It is an expensive set, even for LEGO, but the return date for both has long since passed. Which means I get to build two blacksmith shops after I retire in 40 years.

Hi all,

This might be a long post so bear with me. I work for a company and there was a project for a huge client. I'm junior in skill (been programming for about two years) but my job title doesn't reflect that. Anyways, I got the design about a month ago but I was on deadline for two other projects so I couldn't pick it up until last week Wed. Ironically, that's when the final design was delivered & told me it was due next week Wednesday. I built it as fast as I could. Finished mobile but for some reason, this last part for desktop just wasn't working out and it just so happens to be the most crucial part of the piece. (I was also sick the entire time and didn't sleep for the last two days nor did I eat). I was supposed to demo it yesterday but I still needed to make a few updates and the project coordinator took me off the project & gave it to a dev with more experience. This has never happened to me before. I'd go as far as to say this is my first big fuck up. I've always delivered on deadline and I'm taking this pretty hard. Has anyone been in similar situations? What do I do? Any advice?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This moment you find a library/software on GitHub which actually does exactly what you looked for/tried to implement by yourself... Then you notice the last commit was in 2010 and there are 3000 open issues... Not a single one contains a response... the typical github repository...

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.

A long time ago I started a project to make a devRant client with Python and Qt5.

I got far but got bored, or whatever. Was still in school, etc.

I have started from scratch again. Including a nogui mode. Sharing because I actually have made some pretty good progress in the past two days.

Plans: Besides the obvious fully-featured client: full support for plugins, custom themes, custom CLI commands. Multiple logins.

Considering a system that allows you to run a bot, and a bot framework (parsing arguments for you, marking notifs read, etc.)

And yes, it's called qtpy-rant (Pronounced cutie pie rant)

I was just informed by email that it's my 9 year anniversary at my company....

Which also means I've been working for... 9 years.

First thing I checked was whether I'm fully qualified for social security and disability.... Apparently I was qualified a long time ago.

Next thought was "it's almost 10 years since I graduated...."

<insert obligatory "long time lurker" statement here>

Started a role about 6 months ago. I'm the sole IT programmer. A bit of the mess I inherited...

- 100+ stand-alone applications/tools (luckily most of them aren't too big).
- No documentation.
- Some applications' only copy of the code exists in production.
- We only have production.
- A single file consisting of 30K+ lines of VB. Little to no comments. The one comment at the top says to keep old code by commenting it out and state what you changed.
- Previous devs didn't like foreign keys.
- No. Fucking. Version. Control. At. All.
- And so much more...

Luckily I was hired due to my experience so I could fix all these problems. Its actually a really great job.

At the time I had been squatting, arrested, driven 300 miles across country only to be released - mistaken identity with just the clothes on my back. Decided to stay and lined up a couple of interviews. I got offered both but took the one which meant 2 busses and a ferry and 2 hours each way for a data entry position.

They were migrating to a new database and my job was to type it in to a screen so from print outs. Didn’t take long for me to work through that and they were struggling to find stuff for me to do, I mean at one point I was filing paper files. So I saw the 2 it guys doing the same thing with loads of excel files , hours and hours a month just wasted. I wrote a vba excel macro to do it for them at the click of a button and suddenly a position opened up as a junior programmer. Still at the same place 16 years later and were still using software I wrote 15 years ago (.net 1.1) quite happily on win10 surprisingly.

Thus happened a long time ago in high school. My classmate was asked to press F5 to refresh the page in web dev lab. She literally pressed F and then 5.

So about two months ago in my consulting firm I was asked to replace a colleague on a project (node and Angular). The project is only a few months old but it’s already a total clusterfuck. DB is very poorly designed. It’s supposed to be a relational database but there’s not a trace of a foreign key or any key for that matter and I’ve seen joins like tableA.name = tableB.description (seriously, that’s your relation??). The code is a mess with entire blocks of code copied from another project and many parts of the code aren’t even used. He didn’t even bother renaming variables so they would make sense in the context they were shamelessly thrown into. The code is at best poorly typed if not typed at all.

During our dailies I sometimes express my frustration with my other colleagues as I very politely allude to my predecessor’s code as being hard to work with. (They are all “good friends" with him). I always get the same response from my colleagues: "yeah but you’ve gotta understand Billybob was under a lot of pressure. The user stories were not well defined. He didn’t have time to do a proper job". That type of response just makes me boil inside.

Because you think I have time to deal with this shit? You don’t think I’m working with the same client and his user stories that are barely intelligible? How long does it take to write type definitions for parameters going into a function? That’s right, 30 seconds at most? Maybe a minute if it’s a more elaborate object? How much time do you think you’ll save yourself with a properly typed function or better yet an interface? Hard to tell but certainly A LOT MORE than those 30 seconds you lost (no, the 30 seconds you INVESTED) in writing that interface!!!

FUCK people with their excuses! Never tell me you don’t have time to do a proper job! You’ve wasted HOURS of my time just because you were too fucking lazy to type your functions, too lazy to put just a little more thought into designing your tables, too lazy to rename a variable so that it’s name actually makes sense where it’s being used. It’s not because you were short on time. You’re just lazy!
FUCK!!!!!!

It took AWS about a month to figure out why their load balancer was screwing up content length for requests from our site. Multiple times the ticket was closed due to inactivity because they took so long to investigate. Turns out there's a bug with how AWS load balancers scale, and when they are below a certain traffic threshold they truncate extremely long content. Their solution was to edit the balancer behind the scenes to always be scaled up, and then tell us to never delete it.

So then every time we needed to set up a staging environment we had to contact support so they'd edit the balancer. Which always took ages since most of the support agents didn't understand the convoluted issue and had to forward it on to more technically inclined staff, who then had to investigate fresh every time.

This was ridiculously annoying, so I spent months writing an automated solution to spin up staging new environments on the spot, this made use of a haproxy server which had to edit rules on the fly so that the AWS balancer could be circumnavigated. It was a better system then the old way anyway, but all the same an irritating issue to be forced to deal with.

All around a very shitty experience. This was a few years ago now and I'm not employed there any more, but I hope AWS fixed this since then.

Friday was a really really long time ago and I have no idea what I did...

How to deal with situations when in work people are overstepping personal boundaries too much?

My situation is that 2 months ago I started working in a very small startup and it currently consist of 3 ceos(main ceo, marketing ceo, product manager) and 3 employees (backend, android and ios).

What I currently dread is tea breaks. There is one at monday before work which lasts for 1 hour. And there is another one at Friday after lunch which lasts 1 hour again. I hate these Friday talks about "what are your plans for the weekend" which then triggers a circlejerk of ppl trying to impress each other about what they are going to do on their weekends. Same happens on mondays they circlejerk about how their weekend was amazing.

My situation is that I came to this country just to get skills and make shit ton of money when Im at it. Besides my fulltime work, I also am freelancing part time in my previous gig and also Im managing 2 other hobbie projects. I like to keep myself occupied during weekends so they usually consist of shopping/pc repairs/gym/working on my hobbie projects.

So basically when I tell them what I've done over the weekend the ceo's don't seem to be impressed so they start suggesting me to do something else. I completely loose any motivation of sharing my personal life when they start telling me what to do with my life.

I don't feel like exploring the city or meeting new people since maximum Im going to stay in this country is 6-9 more months. Then I'm probably going back to my own country.

Anyways even overall, I started dreading this companies culture. The politeness is so fake. For example there is an employee which has worked 3 years for them and the ceos haven't even increased his salary. I joined 2 months ago and I get paid more than him! They dont value loyalty at all since immigrants can be replaced easily. Another example: 2 weeks ago it was my birthday and no one from ceos even shook my hand, for them it was normal to just say happy bd during a standup.

So fking weird. I feel like I'm seeing redflags every day and not sure how long more I can stay here.

OK...so not to long ago some guy I know from my old school contacted me regarding a start-up he was planing on doing...first he wanted me to work for free (which, in retrospect should've been the first warning sign) and then offered me shares of his non-existing company as payment. I didn't want that so I told him that I'll only work for real money. After some discussions he agreed (tho for less money than I demanded) and I started investing more time into the project (talking to him and his partner about what they expect, looking into some libraries and evaluating whether they can be used in the project or not...stuff like that). Some weeks later (some days before I would sign the contract) he calls me and tells me that he had found someone else to do it who would accept shares as payment...fuck that fucking self-righteous prick and his fucking start-up...the idea was stupid anyways...

Joined a big corporate for the first time in my life a few months ago, after years and years in small companies and startups.

Went from designing new creative solutions and finding challenging problems to working on small stupid tasks and obeying a fucking idiotic company culture, that is nothing but words that are not applied in reality. Creativity and enthusiasm are discouraged for the sake of maintaining the status quo.

Probably the worst decision in my life. I don't think I can do this for long.

Boooooy symfony has changed a lot since laaaaaaaaast time I used it a long time ago.

Some days ago I finished a little project I built using express and mongo. I want to port it into symfony to see how the newest version (which is 4) fares and I must say. I am really impressed and happy with what I am seeing :D

This sucks because I am going to be dying to use this at work and I know that I am not going to be able to use it unless i act all sneaky and shit

I just finished reading the last chapter of the DevOps Handbook, its an eye opener, but not an easy read. And still recommended.

I've been reading this book for the past year and a half, little by little. It was hard since I started understanding why my work was so frustrating (I'm in System-Cloud-Ops position). The book made sense, while the work did not, it got harder since the book provides solutions, but whenever I dicussed any solutions with management they dismissed everything.
I started to initiate improvements by myself:
Prioritizing tasks I thought were more important to improve the way of work - do now and ask questions later... I got yelled at, I got my managers angry, but afterwards more often then not they admitted I was right.
To make it possible I worked overtime and on weekends, trying to prove a better way is possible, by implementing a long term solutions to solve problems instead of workarounds, automating a lot of stuff, creating labs, preparing presentations and documentation.
Time and time again I tried to pitch more ideas related to DevOps but the managers didn't care...
I know now my burnout started 8 months ago slowly, my hairline started receding, I started clenching my teeth (the doctor said stress was the cause) which was very fainful.
I continued to work but I noticed I was also more cynical, frustrated, and tired.

In the process I neglected myself.
So finally after 2 years and a half I quit my job, to focus on myself, at least for a little while.
I hope in my next job will be better.

Here is a little story about why I do not like to have to purchase developer tools and libraries..

Long story short it has taken at least 10 people more than 3 months to purchase two licenses of this component library which we still do not yet have licenses for.

It all starts with this guy who works here and has the job title 'solution architect'. He saw an ad on a website about some html component library. Then he asks me and the other developer here to look at it. He is super excited saying things like if we save only x days of time the cost is nothing in comparison to developer time..

The other developer and I both spend a few days reading the docs and trying some sample code. It offers some things we can use but I suggest not bothering with it.

Despite my suggestion he goes to the technical manager and they write up a business case. After about a month our receptionist cc me on an email chain from the it commercial manager who is asking for the licensing information so they can add the component creator as a vendor in the purchasing system. I send them a link to the component website which lists all that.

Jump forward two more months to last week and I got a spam email from the component company saying they have some new version out. I am wondering what has happened so I ask our receptionist she says it is with accounts payable and waiting payment - but it is marked urgent and she will find out.

Today I am cc in an email saying they have paid for it two weeks ago. So where is the license info? Nobody knows.

Here's a nightmarish tale that happened to me not long ago:
One of our stores was moving, so they asked me for help with the systems. Thinking it'd be fun, I said yes, and went. All I had to do was unplug everything and reorder it at the new location, sounds really easy right?
They hadn't cleaned the computer area in ten years.
Each time something broke, they replaced it...and left the old cables there. But that was nothing compared to just a little later, when I tackled the network situation.
For two stations, they had:
2 routers. 5 switches. A wi-fi adapter, even though the routers had that capability, an adsl modem backup and a...56k modem. ALL plugged. ALL linked.
Turns out they switched providers, and they didn't bother removing the old equipment. They just linked everything together.
Man, what a night it was -_-

TLDR;
I remissness about Yahoo site builder and talk about finding the record of the Google search that changed my life a long time ago and I think it's fucking great.

Earlier I re-installed google chrome but unlike every other time, this time I forgot to turn off the auto-sync feature. I only realized this when I opened gmail and it pre-populated my login info with the info of my very first, long forgotten gmail account.

So naturally I went exploring... after going through the mails I decided to check out the actual Google account to see if there was anything of interest there and lo and behold I found around 7 years of browsing history that I had no idea Google stored at the time.

As scary as it was to see I'm kinda glad about it now because aside from finding out that I was going through an Asian porn phase in 2008 I also found the one Google search record that changed my life.

It was a search to download Yahoo site builder followed by a bunch more on how to use it.

I had stumbled across a random article about it and it caught my eye because I needed a website for the grocery store I was a manager of back then.

Thankfully it was a fucking horrible WYSIWYG editor. I recall it acting almost identical to Word at the time - I would save and back up my site constantly because moving something 1px would fuck the layout up and burn everything to the ground, cntrl+z would try and do something, reversing only my last action while leaving the rest of the site in tatters and I didn't have the skills to understand or fix it...

Ultimately my frustration led me learn a bit of html & css and a week or so later It became apparent it would be easier to scratch code the damn thing so I uninstalled Yahoo site builder and started all over again.

Learning & building that site in notepad ignited my passion for coding and less than a year later I left my shitty dead end job to join a brand new tech company created with the help of a like minded investor officially employed as a developer. Let help you understand just how big this achievement was for me - I had been trying to find a job, ANY job in I.T even at a call center level without success for 6 years because I dropped out of school.

In 6 years as an active job seeker I only received one phone call about a job opportunity which ended very quickly once they realised they had misread my CV. In all those years I never even got a single job interview.

After that I spent the next 3 years rolling out and improving the cloud based loyalty card system I had written for my store out on a national scale and the rest is history. Since then I have never been judged by a crappy piece of paper, hated my job or struggled to find a new one.

What a beautiful search result that was to find.

I dedicate this rant to Yahoo, with my sincere gratitude for making a shitty WYSIWYG editor that was so bad it pissed me off enough to make me actually learn something.

Software engineering doesn't evolving the way you think of it.

There are no new big patterns. There are no new big concepts and ideas to bring that evolution to us. Rob Pike thinks that the concepts he used twenty years ago are the best possible way of implementing everything and he creates Golang.

The evolution of software engineering, and maybe the whole evolution as a concept is a tick-tock. Software engineering had its latest tick at nineties, when the concepts we call modern were developed. And the latest tock was the rise of the internet, and it given the single-computer-centered Von Neumann architecture really hard challenges. I mean ticks are theoretical inventions and patterns and ideas and etc, while tock is more of some practical, business-oriented implementations.

PHP is still in use. We have troubles with scaling and deployment. Banking systems still run old Java, Windows XP and even COBOL. We had persistence really, really long time ago, and now frontenders reinvent it and call it 'immutability'!

We had our tick many, many years ago. It's time for tock. With not only scientific but commercial use of things such as Clojure, CRDTs and maybe Rust lang, we are heading straight to our new big tock, which'll bring us new great problems to solve.

That's how any evolution goes.

About 4-5 hours ago I wanted to make simple websocket to get input from textarea and parse it on server and somehow got myself into developing in asyncio -> aiohttp -> graphql-core -> graphql-ws -> aioredis
and svelte-> typescript
I still didn’t make the stuff I wanted but I’m very close on backend at least.
I have some frontend part somewhere in my old prototypes so it will be faster if I figure out svelte.

Still don’t understand what the fuck just happened.
Maybe it’s because I wanted try those frameworks for a long time.

All ‘simple’ examples I found have around 20-30 files for backend and same amount for frontend so more then 50 files to get this shit working.
They’re called oh irony “simple chat”.
Now I see why no one fucking understands this shit.

I’m trying to cut mine to 5 files.

I thought developers are lazy bastards who don’t like write code.
But now after this they’re all looking like adhd coders.

Looks like Monday won’t be my best day.

I made that request a month ago or so, not long after i started to use devrant more often than any other app, and i can say only that i am glad that i pressed "install" that time when i found it in the GoogleStore.

Thank you all for making this community more like a family than a refuge!

Truth is i feel a little bad now for doing that but i might be able to repay the founders and all mambers of this community somehow, someday. And i am looking forward to do it 😁

Cheers!

This is a rant thats been waiting a long time to be said...

About half a year ago I got a refurbished laptop, and decided to run manjaro on it (primarily because I didn't have the time to setup arch). I spent time configuring it, I tried out different things, and all in all I learnt tons about linux, and just random things about computers in general.

I dont regret this in the slightest!

Despite the many times where something went horribly wrong, like after I moved over to efi (without a hitch, actually!) I forgot to add to fstab my esp and f-ed the whole boot system. Or when, right in the beginning of this adventure, I tried to move over Xorg to my nvidia gpu and left optimus on. Big Mistake! But I learnt, and I came out a better sysadmin, a better dev than when I first went in.

And again, I dont regret it in the slightest!

Is there an api to fetch avatars?
@dfox

I mailed to you a long time ago, but not getting any responses.

Struggling

Started a new job not super long ago with the intention of "learning new tech" and so I get my wish, I'm thrown into a project as the LEAD ENGINEER

And my junior dev proceeds to run circles around me and I know literally nothing about what is going on in this project aside from the architectural / feature planning discussions I've had with marketing/junior

I've been trying to learn vuejs for what seems like weeks and weeks and I'm just not "getting it" I come from a strong oop php background and this paradigm is using tons of tech I know basically nothing about. Every time I talk to junior I get super depressed cause he's speeding along and I'm still completely clueless.. what the FUCK do I do

Long time ago I worked with a few developers on some relatively simple web project. We were using php and smarty and we used svn for versioning. At one point some dude joined the project as a php developer (with a few years of experience).

After a few days without any commits, we found out that he doesn't know what a SVN is or how to use it. After he learned how to use it we found out in our repo bunch of files with a following naming scheme:

filename.php
filename_1.php
filename_2.php
filename_3.php
filename_4.php
filename_5.php