My mom died when I was 7, after which my dad bought me a Commodore 64 so I had something to lose myself in during the mourning process.

I learned everything about that system, from my first GOTO statement to sprite buffers, to soldering my own EPROM cartridges. My dad didn't deal with the loss so well, and became a missing person 5 years later when I was 12.

I got into foster care with a bunch of strict religious cultists who wouldn't allow electronics in the house.

So I ran away at 14, sub-rented a closet in a student apartment using my orphan benefits and bought a secondhand IBM computer. I spent about 16 hours a day learning about BSD and Linux, C, C++, Fortran, ADA, Haskell, Livescript and even more awful things like Visual Basic, ASP, Windows NT, and Active Directory.

I faked my ID (back then it was just a laminated sheet of paper), and got a job at 15-pretending-to-be-17 at one of the first ISPs in my country. I wrote the firmware and admin panel for their router, full of shitty CGI-bin ASP code and vulnerabilities.

That somehow got me into a job at Microsoft, building the MS Office language pack for my country, and as an official "conflict resolver" for their shitty version control system. Yes, they had fulltime people employed just to resolve VCS conflicts.

After that I worked at Arianespace (X-ray NDT, visualizing/tagging dicom scans, image recognition of faulty propellant tank welds), and after that I switched to biotech, first phytogenetics, then immunology, then pharmacokynetics.

In between I have grown & synthesized and sold large quantities of recreational drugs, taken care of some big felines, got a pilot license, taught IT at an elementary school, renovated a house, and procreated.

A lot of it was to prove myself to the world -- prove that a nearly-broke-orphan-high-school-dropout could succeed at life.

But hey, now I work for a "startup", so I guess I failed after all.

Hello World!
I'm a bot made by @xzvf.
My goal is to find all active users on devRant and
collect analytics based on it.
By analytics I just mean things like:
- Total number of users.
- Number of users with x ++ or more
- Number of rants posted in a certain timeframe
- Number of users active in the last day/month/year

THIS BOT WILL NOT TRACK INDIVIDUAL USERS!
Also, it will not ++/-- anything automaticly as that is definitely against the rules.

-@xzvf

Tinder is the worst app out there. I keep receiving notifies like "hey honey! You received x new likes!" or "you're performing well! A lot of people are appreciating you".
What's the problem, you say... well, the problem is that I HAVE NO A FUCKING ACCOUNT, I deleted my account months and months ago and if you want you can try it as well. Download, sign up, set the worst photo that you can find then delete your account, you'll receive a lot of awesome messages!
Actually I received these fake notifies also when my account was active, and when I opened it then I discovered that there was no new likes. But was so fucking hard to put an if statement to check if the user's account is active? Come on... I know you want to trick people and convince them using your app, at least do it the right way

I like playing tf2.
I play every video game with max brightness on the lappy.

The problem is that when I alt tab back to anything else, eg chrome, I get dazzled and my eyes hurt.

I'm on linux and accidentally noticed that I can connect to the X server and do stuff.

So I'm listening for events with the PropertyChangeMask, and when the active window has the name "Team Fortress 2 - OpenGL", I run "light -S 100", otherwise I use what I already had.

Very happy with this hack, instant brightness changes on alt tab.

Infinite loop...

Got a story assigned with no requirements listed this sprint. Since I finished the rest already I was like, lets be pro-active and see what it's about during the stand-up.

Me: Hi, I only have story X remaining, what's it about, there are no requirements listed in Jira?
SM: Yeah person Y is going to reach out to you with the reqs.
Me: Ok, when is Y going to reach out?
SM: Y doesn't have time now, will probably be in 2 weeks.
Me: Ok, so why is the story included in this sprint then?
SM: Because they want X implemented this sprint.
(Me wondering if the Scrum Master is familiar with infinite loops, thinking let's try this out)
Me: Ok, if X should be completed, can Y reach out to me with the requirements?
SM: Y doesn't have time now, will probably be in 2 weeks.
Me: Ok, why is the story included in this sprint then?

Stand-up lasted a lil' longer today... Hope the SM got the message not to assign stories without reqs or clear communication anymore.

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.

Today we had our "web technology" University exam. One question was to write a sample html program for our university's website.

I swear I could've built a fully functioning website on MVC and hosted it on some cloud service in far less time than that I spent scribbling 5 pages of writing HTML/CSS/JS so that I can "pass the exam". But nooooo. Our university syllabus takes IE and Java servlets as standard and apparently you get bonus marks if you could implement IE's Active-X on paper.

So much for the future web development

Partner of ours claimed they are going to update their api. No breakage. My hopes were low and they did not disappoint.

Soon after the new version of their api went live, of course, loads of breakage. And the email contact with them is really fun.

Me: "Hello, since your update we get the issue A. Here's the complete communication."

Them: "We did not change the existing behavior. You are doing X wrong. Repeat that one call during the step and you should be fine."

Me: "Thank you, if I repeat the call, it does indeed work, albeit slower, since we are now repeating calls. Furthermore, our application was consuming your api for years and we did not change anything. So why is that step necessary now? Only after your update do our logs show errors from your API. And by the way, we now also have a issue with B. Why is that?"

Them: "Oh that's because your query the endpoint with "Fnord", try "Baz".

Me: "Yes, I do know that we query it with "Fnord" as that is what a previous endpoint of yours is responding to us. Why are we getting "Fnord"? What request do I have to make to get a "Baz" back?"

It feels like a game of wackamole. Squash one issue, ten more will pop up. I am one step away from becoming active-aggressive.

Okay ..assuming that we're one of them: "the idiots" and we're gonna stop sharing things like that , there are like 2B+ monthly active users on Facebook .. don't worry .. we're just gonna do some simple math .
2B x $1000 = $2000B ...
wait .. what ? But ... nvm ..

Windows dynamic Active X backgrounds found their into Mac OS

Manager X: (logs a support ticket) "Agent is unable to access system using the password provided."

Me: "You're going to have to narrow it down a little, we have over 1000 active agents."

I hate the support side of my job...

Don't go to hacker spaces when you have made up your mind and want to find some help turning that mind into a thing, folks.

Yesterday a person came to our hackerspace and wanted to buy ten bucks worth of parts to fix an audio problem in a cheapo active speaker they built. Unfortunately they dropped a line like "I measured the problem I want to fix and thus need X value of ...".

Well. Turns out that this collection of weirdos also has usually within reach quite a sizable sum in measurement equipment. So not only did that person not get what they wanted (the parts), they also had their own measurement proven wrong and been drawn into the space by half. They'll come back soon.

:)

Gosh, I don't know how people can be active on social media. I want more free time x) even if I'll probably cook or draw instead... Yeah I'm not good with society :D

Nobody ever tells me i’m not good enough. They always say: Maybe you should talk to X, or maybe you should ask Y. Well both of X and Y are either too busy, not in the office at all and ofcourse just as incompetent as myself, so they give a short excuse instead of being helping in a pro active way.

Also 3D transform has it’s limitations and can’t actually twist a 2D form in a “organic way”. Now i’ll focus on things that do matter like the header thats decided to change colour on a smaller screen.