If Programming Languages Were Girls:

Java: Your current girlfriend, you've been going steady for a while now. Things are okay.

Kotlin: The girl Java finds you cheating on, she's just amazing, and you wish you'd met her sooner.

Visual Basic: The girl you accidentally started a relationship with because you didn't know how to say no. But quickly realised your mistake and regretted it.

JavaScript: A childhood friend you occasionally hook up with. But you could never settle for a relationship with them.

Python: A bossy, manipulative girl who quickly turned things sour. But everyone else loves her because of her huge libraries.
-----------------------------------------------------
My and a co worker were joking the other day about what programming languages would be like if they were girls. This is what we came up with (Original inspiration: the Distracted Boyfriend meme (Feel free to add your own!)).

Yesterday, in a meeting with project stakeholders and a dev was demoing his software when an un-handled exception occurred, causing the app to crash.

Dev: “Oh..that’s weird. Doesn’t do that on my machine. Better look at the log”
- Dev looks at the log and sees the exception was a divide by zero error.
Dev: “Ohhh…yea…the average price calculation, it’s a bug in the database.”
<I burst out laughing>
Me: “That’s funny.”
<Dev manager was not laughing>
DevMgr: “What’s funny about bugs in the database?”
Me: “Divide by zero exceptions are not an indication of a data error, it’s a bug in the code.”
Dev: “Uhh…how so? The price factor is zero, which comes from a table, so that’s a bug in the database”
Me: “Jim, will you have sales with a price factor of zero?”
StakeholderJim: “Yea, for add-on items that we’re not putting on sale. Hats, gloves, things like that.”
Dev: “Steve, did anyone tell you the factor could be zero?”
DBA-Steve: “Uh...no…just that the value couldn’t be null. You guys can put whatever you want.”
DevMgr: “So, how will you fix this bug?”
DBA-Steve: “Bug? …oh…um…I guess I could default the value to 1.”
Dev: “What if the user types in a zero? Can you switch it to a 1?”
Me: “Or you check the factor value before you try to divide. That will fix the exception and Steve won’t have to do anything.”
<awkward couple of seconds of silence>
DevMgr: “Lets wrap this up. Steve, go ahead and make the necessary database changes to make sure the factor is never zero.”
StakeholderJim: “That doesn’t sound right. Add-on items should never have a factor. A value of 1 could screw up the average.”
Dev: “Don’t worry, we’ll know the difference.”
<everyone seems happy and leaves the meeting>

I completely lost any sort of brain power to say anything after Dev said that. All the little voices kept saying were ‘WTF? WTF just happened? No really…W T F just happened!?’ over and over. I still have no idea on how to articulate to anyone with any sort of sense about what happened. Thanks DevRant for letting me rant.

Dear self proclaimed wordpress 'developers/programmers', kindly go fuck yourself.

I'm not talking about wordpress devs/designers who don't claim to have a better skillset than they have and are actually willing to learn, those are very much fine.

I'm talking about those wordpress people who claim that they're developers, programmers or whatever kind of bullshit which they're obviously not.

"A client's site crashed, you have to fix it!!!!!" sorry, come again? It's YOUR client's site. It's hosted on our hosting platform meaning that WE are responsible for KEEPING THE SERVERS UP AND FUNCTIONING.
You call yourself a wordpress 'developer' with 'programming experience' for 10 years but the second one of your shitty sites crashes, you come to us because 'it's your responsibility!!!'.
No, it's not. Next to that fact, the fact that you have to ask US why the site is crashing while you could easily login to your control panel, go to the fucking error logs and see that one of your facebook plugins crashes with a quite English error message, shows me that you definitely don't have 10 years of programming experience. And if you can't find that fucking article which tells you exactly where the motherfucking error logs are, don't come crying to us asking to fix your own fucking bullshit.

"My clients site got hacked, you have to clean it up and get it online again ASAP!!!!" - Nah, sorry, not my responsibility. The fact that you explicitly put your wordpress installation on 'no automatic updates' also doesn't help with my urge to fucking end you right now.
Add to that that we have some quite clear articles on wordpress security which you appearantly found too difficult (really? basic shit like 'set a strong fucking password' is too difficult for you?), you're on your own.

"I'm getting an error, please explain what's going wrong as soon as you can! this is a prio 1!!!!" - Nope. You were a wordpress dev/programmer right? Please act like one.

I'm not your personal wordpress agent.

I'm not your personal hacked wordpress site cleanup guy.

I'm not even a fucking wordpress professional. No, I'd rather jump off a bridge than develop wordpress bullshit for a living.

That you chose to do this, not a problem. Just don't rely on me for fixing your shit.

I'm sick of cleaning up your bullshit.

I'm done with answering your high prio tickets about bullshit which any dev could find out with just a few minutes of searching.

Oh your wordpress site isn't showing up so high in google? Yeah sure, shoot a ticket at us blaming us for your own SEO mess. I'm a fucking sysadmin, not a SEO expert.

I'm fucking done with you.

Go die in a fucking corner.

Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.

Some context first and then the rant!

Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.

Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!

Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.

In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)

He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.

The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.

Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).

Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.

Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!

Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.

Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).

Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.

From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.

I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.

I always like to approach a new coding project by concentrating on the data model first. I've seen a lot of projects built on extremely convoluted database structures and it really hurts because it makes it hard to add new features to the project.

So I look at the requirements of the new project and try to come up with a basic data model. Then I like to think about what logical future additions to the project could be. And using those, I try to see if the data model is flexible enough to be able to handle those additions fairly easily or if complex migrations or hacks would be needed to account for new use cases and features.

I think once you have a solid data structure and database technology, planning out an API or rest of the software is pretty straight forward. I like to create reusable pieces of middleware early on in the project which makes it easy to apply consistent functionality with ease to different API endpoints.

Today was my last day of work, tomorrow i have officially left that place. It's a weird feeling because i'm not certain about the future.
The job was certainly not bad, and after all i read on devrant i'm beginning to believe it was one of the better ones. A nice boss, always something to eat/drink nearby, a relaxed atmosphere, a tolerance for my occasionally odd behaviour and the chance to suggest frameworks. Why i would leave that place, you ask? Because of the thing not on the list, the code, that is the thing i work with all the time.

Most of the time i only had to make things work, testing/refactoring/etc. was cut because we had other things to do. You could argue that we had more time if we did refactor, and i suggested that, but the decision to do so was delayed because we didn't have enough time.

The first project i had to work on had around 100 files with nearly the same code, everything copy-pasted and changed slightly. Half of the files used format a and the other half used the newer format b. B used a function that concatenated strings to produce html. I made some suggestions on how to change this, but they got denied because they would take up too much time. Aat that point i started to understand the position my boss was in and how i had to word things in order to get my point across. This project never got changed and holds hundreds of sql- and xss-injection-vulnerabilities and misses access control up to today. But at least the new project is better, it's tomcat and hibernate on the backend and react in the frontend, communicating via rest. It took a few years to get there, but we made it.
To get back to code quality, it's not there. Some projects had 1000 LOC files that were only touched to add features, we wrote horrible hacks to work with the reactabular-module and duplicate code everywhere. I already ranted about my boss' use of ctrl-c&v and i think it is the biggest threat to code quality. That and the juniors who worked on a real project for the first time. And the fact that i was the only one who really knew git. At some point i had enough of working on those projects and quit.

I don't have much experience, but i'm certain my next job has a better workflow and i hope i don't have to fix that much bugs anymore.
In the end my experience was mostly positive though. I had nice coworkers, was often free to do things my way, got really into linux, all in all a good workplace if there wasn't work.

Now they dont have their js-expert anymore, with that i'm excited to see how the new project evolves. It's still a weird thing to know you won't go back to a place you've been for several years. But i still have my backdoor, but maybe not. :P

In a user-interface design meeting over a regulatory compliance implementation:
User: “We’ll need to input a city.”
Dev: “Should we validate that city against the state, zip code, and country?”
User: “You are going to make me enter all that data? Ugh…then make it a drop-down. I select the city and the state, zip code auto-fill. I don’t want to make a mistake typing any of that data in.”
Me: “I don’t think a drop-down of every city in the US is feasible.”
Manage: “Why? There cannot be that many. Drop-down is fine. What about the button? We have a few icons to choose from…”
Me: “Uh..yea…there are thousands of cities in the US. Way too much data to for anyone to realistically scroll through”
Dev: “They won’t have to scroll, I’ll filter the list when they start typing.”
Me: “That’s not really the issue and if they are typing the city anyway, just let them type it in.”
User: “What if I mistype Ch1cago? We could inadvertently be out of compliance. The system should never open the company up for federal lawsuits”
Me: “If we’re hiring individuals responsible for legal compliance who can’t spell Chicago, we should be sued by the federal government. We should validate the data the best we can, but it is ultimately your department’s responsibility for data accuracy.”
Manager: “Now now…it’s all our responsibility. What is wrong with a few thousand item drop-down?”
Me: “Um, memory, network bandwidth, database storage, who maintains this list of cities? A lot of time and resources could be saved by simply paying attention.”
Manager: “Memory? Well, memory is cheap. If the workstation needs more memory, we’ll add more”
Dev: “Creating a drop-down is easy and selecting thousands of rows from the database should be fast enough. If the selection is slow, I’ll put it in a thread.”
DBA: “Table won’t be that big and won’t take up much disk space. We’ll need to setup stored procedures, and data import jobs from somewhere to maintain the data. New cities, name changes, ect. ”
Manager: “And if the network starts becoming too slow, we’ll have the Networking dept. open up the valves.”
Me: “Am I the only one seeing all the moving parts we’re introducing just to keep someone from misspelling ‘Chicago’? I’ll admit I’m wrong or maybe I’m not looking at the problem correctly. The point of redesigning the compliance system is to make it simpler, not more complex.”
Manager: “I’m missing the point to why we’re still talking about this. Decision has been made. Drop-down of all cities in the US. Moving on to the button’s icon ..”
Me: “Where is the list of cities going to come from?”
<few seconds of silence>
Dev: “Post office I guess.”
Me: “You guess?…OK…Who is going to manage this list of cities? The manager responsible for regulations?”
User: “Thousands of cities? Oh no …no one is our area has time for that. The system should do it”
Me: “OK, the system. That falls on the DBA. Are you going to be responsible for keeping the data accurate? What is going to audit the cities to make sure the names are properly named and associated with the correct state?”
DBA: “Uh..I don’t know…um…I can set up a job to run every night”
Me: “A job to do what? Validate the data against what?”
Manager: “Do you have a point? No one said it would be easy and all of those details can be answered later.”
Me: “Almost done, and this should be easy. How many cities do we currently have to maintain compliance?”
User: “Maybe 4 or 5. Not many. Regulations are mostly on a state level.”
Me: “When was the last time we created a new city compliance?”
User: “Maybe, 8 years ago. It was before I started.”
Me: “So we’re creating all this complexity for data that, realistically, probably won’t ever change?”
User: “Oh crap, you’re right. What the hell was I thinking…Scratch the drop-down idea. I doubt we’re have a new city regulation anytime soon and how hard is it to type in a city?”
Manager: “OK, are we done wasting everyone’s time on this? No drop-down of cities...next …Let’s get back to the button’s icon …”

Simplicity 1, complexity 0.

Things I wish I could tell my 18 year old self.

1) Accept you will make mistakes.
2) Truly learn the language you are using.
3) Write idiomatic code for the language you are using.
4) Be upfront about not knowing something.
5) Don't let not knowing something stop you from learning it.
6) None of us knew X until we learned it.
7) Understand your strengths and weaknesses as a developer, play to them.
8) Be willing to try new things.
9) X language isn't ALWAYS the best choice, X paradigm isn't ALWAYS the best choice. Choose wisely.
10) You won't know everything, but you might know more than others.
11) Your ideas and ego don't matter more than ensuring the product works.
12) "Perfection is the enemy of the good [enough]" - Voltaire
13) "Perfection is not achieved when there's nothing more to add, but when there's nothing more to remove." - Einstein.
14) Conflicts happen, deal with it.
15) Develop a toolset and really learn them.
16) Try new tools, they may prove better than what you were using.
17) Don't manage your own memory unless you absolutely have to, you are probably not smarter than the collective intelligence of the team that built the various garbage collection methods.
18) People can be dicks, especially online.
19) If you are new and people are being dicks to you, did you skip past the irc message about etiquette? If you did, you're the dick in this situation.
20) It can be tough, but it is fun, so have fun!

Gahaa!!! Finally back home, after 7 fucking hours of sitting in busses and trains!

BUT I GOT MY NEXUS 6P!! Yoo-hoo!!! :D

And I've got a nice story about it.

So when I bought it, the guy selling it to me was a nontechnical type (I think?) whose wife was the previous owner. So I thought to myself, cool a nontechnical user used it.. probably no hardware mods or anything to worry about. Apparently they even factory reset it for me :)

Now, when I left to go back home, I of course immediately booted up the thing and did the whole doodad of logging into it, setting up the device etc.

Then it struck me. When I booted up the device and wanted to log in, there was a lock from Google that required me to first authenticate as either a previous account of the device, or their unlock pattern. So I figured, eh fuck it, I'll just flash some AOSP without GApps or send the owner an email asking what the previous pattern is.

But I still had to wait 30 minutes at the bus stop so I thought to myself.. previous owner was a nontechnical woman.. maybe I could crack it. No way to know if I don't try. So I started putting in random unlock patterns.

3 attempts later - I shit you not! - pattern accepted.
Do you want to add this account?

Oh boy Google, of course I do! Thanks for letting me in pal!

3 fucking attempts. That's all it took to crack the unlock pattern of an unknown person. 😎

I just hate npm dependencies.

If you want to write a small website with npm dependencies (some frontend deps like Bootstrap and some development deps like gulp or babel) you will have more npm dependencies in your project than own code. It is ridiculous, how some lazy developers just add dependencies to their projects, without evaluating their dependencies. The source code of one of my projects is around 4MB (without any dependencies). If you then run yarn as required, it grows to around 80MB (where 73MB are node_modules).

This is just terrible.

I rant about this, as I made the mistake to upload my node_modules directories when restoring a backup of my server. Worst idea one could ever have.

Once upon a time there was a dev.
The dev had a resume that said he could dev.
We called the dev, he sounded intelligent.
We hired the dev, who was a bit green, on a three month probationary period.
The dev did very little.
When asked, we said he contributed to discussions, but seemed unclear about what to do, and maybe they could keep him as an intern if they wanted to have him at all.
They hired him. As a full time dev.
6 months later, that dev was shocked to find we could log into the servers with a privileged account.
We (his team mates) were sad.
We asked him to fix a few prod errors.
A little while later he said "Done!"
We then had to walk him through how to actually fix them, not just add a couple pieces of info to the table.
We were sad, again.
We asked him to fix some prod errors again.
We had to walk him through the process again
We expressed concerns to our superiors about his abilities because he was all theory, no hands on ability
They promoted him
We were sad
A few of us said "Fuck you guys, I'm going home"
They said OK
Now that guy is the only one that "knows" that code base
I get calls sometimes asking me questions.
I told them to pay me a consultant fee.
They said no
I said no
They called again
I laughed at them

Listen to the people who know when you ask them questions.
Listen to the people who know when they tell you there is a problem
Don't be like that company

F in Internet explorer stands for fast!!
U in client stands for understanding!!
C in iPhone stands for customizable!!
N in US stands for net neutrality!!

B in devRant stands for boring!!

Our website once had it’s config file (“old” .cgi app) open and available if you knew the file name. It was ‘obfuscated’ with the file name “Name of the cgi executable”.txt. So browsing, browsing.cgi, config file was browsing.txt.
After discovering the sql server admin password in plain text and reporting it to the VP, he called a meeting.
VP: “I have a report that you are storing the server admin password in plain text.”
WebMgr: “No, that is not correct.”
Me: “Um, yes it is, or we wouldn’t be here.”
WebMgr: “It’s not a network server administrator, it’s SQL Server’s SA account. Completely secure since that login has no access to the network.”
<VP looks over at me>
VP: “Oh..I was not told *that* detail.”
Me: “Um, that doesn’t matter, we shouldn’t have any login password in plain text, anywhere. Besides, the SA account has full access to the entire database. Someone could drop tables, get customer data, even access credit card data.”
WebMgr: “You are blowing all this out of proportion. There is no way anyone could do that.”
Me: “Uh, two weeks ago I discovered the catalog page was sending raw SQL from javascript. All anyone had to do was inject a semicolon and add whatever they wanted.”
WebMgr: “Who would do that? They would have to know a lot about our systems in order to do any real damage.”
VP: “Yes, it would have to be someone in our department looking to do some damage.”
<both the VP and WebMgr look at me>
Me: “Open your browser and search on SQL Injection.”
<VP searches on SQL Injection..few seconds pass>
VP: “Oh my, this is disturbing. I did not know SQL injection was such a problem. I want all SQL removed from javascript and passwords removed from the text files.”
WebMgr: “Our team is already removing the SQL, but our apps need to read the SQL server login and password from a config file. I don’t know why this is such a big deal. The file is read-only and protected by IIS. You can’t even read it from a browser.”
VP: “Well, if it’s secured, I suppose it is OK.”
Me: “Open your browser and navigate to … browse.txt”
VP: “Oh my, there it is.”
WebMgr: “You can only see it because your laptop had administrative privileges. Anyone outside our network cannot access the file.”
VP: “OK, that makes sense. As long as IIS is securing the file …”
Me: “No..no..no.. I can’t believe this. The screen shot I sent yesterday was from my home laptop showing the file is publicly available.”
WebMgr: “But you are probably an admin on the laptop.”
<couple of awkward seconds of silence…then the light comes on>
VP: “OK, I’m stopping this meeting. I want all admin users and passwords removed from the site by the end of the day.”

Took a little longer than a day, but after reviewing what the web team changed:
- They did remove the SQL Server SA account, but replaced it with another account with full admin privileges.
- Replaced the “App Name”.txt with centrally located config file at C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\config.txt (hard-coded in the app)
When I brought this up again with my manager..
Mgr: “Yea, I know, it sucks. WebMgr showed the VP the config file was not accessible by the web site and it wasn’t using the SA password. He was satisfied by that. Web site is looking to beat projections again by 15%, so WebMgr told the other VPs that another disruption from a developer could jeopardize the quarterly numbers. I’d keep my head down for a while.”

I've had many, but this is one of my favorite "OK, I'm getting fired for this" moments.

A new team in charge of source control and development standards came up with a 20 page work-instruction document for the new TFS source control structure.
The source control kingpin came from semi-large military contract company where taking a piss was probably outlined somewhere.

Maybe twice, I merged down from a release branch when I should have merged down from a dev branch, which "messed up" the flow of code that one team was working on.
Each time I was 'coached' and reminded on page 13, paragraph 5, sub-section C ... "When merging down from release, you must verify no other teams are working
on branches...blah blah blah..and if they have pending changes, use a shelfset and document the changes using Document A234-B..."

A fellow dev overheard the kingpin and the department manager in the breakroom saying if I messed up TFS one more time, I was gone.

Wasn't two days later I needed to merge up some new files to Main, and 'something' happened in TFS and a couple of files didn't get merged up. No errors, nothing.
Another team was waiting on me, so I simply added the files directly into Main. Unknown to me, the kingpin had a specific alert in TFS to notify him when someone added
files directly into Main, and I get a visit.

KP: "Did you add a couple of files directly into Main?"
Me:"Yes, I don't what happened, but the files never made it from my branch, to dev, to the review shelfset, and then to Main. I never got an error, but since
they were new files and adding a new feature, they never broke a build. Adding the files directly allowed the Web team to finish their project and deploy the
site this morning."
KP: "That is in direct violation of the standard. Didn't you read the documentation?"
Me: "Uh...well...um..yes, but that is an oddly specific case. I didn't think I hurt any.."
KP: "Ha ha...hurt? That's why we have standards. The document clearly states on page 18, paragraph 9, no files may ever be created in Main."
Me: "Really? I don't remember reading that."
<I navigate to the document, page 18, paragraph 9>
Me: "Um...no, it doesn't say that. The document only talks about merging process from a lower branch to Main."
KP: "Exactly. It is forbidden to create files directly in Main."
Me: "No, doesn't say that anywhere."
KP: "That is the spirit of the document. You violated the spirit of what we're trying to accomplish here."
Me: "You gotta be fracking kidding me."

KP grumbles something, goes back to his desk. Maybe a minute later he leaves the IS office, and the department manager leaves his office.

It was after 5:00PM, they never came back, so I headed home worried if I had a job in the morning.

I decided to come in a little early to snoop around, I knew where HR kept their terminated employee documents, and my badge wouldn't let me in the building.

Oh crap.

It was a shift change, so was able to walk in with the warehouse workers in another part of the building (many knew me, so nothing seemed that odd), and to my desk.

I tried to log into my computer...account locked. Oh crap..this was it. I'm done. I fill my computer backpack with as much personal items as I could, and started down the hallway when I meet one of our FS accountants.

L: "Hey, did your card let you in the building this morning? Mine didn't work. I had to walk around to the warehouse entrance and my computer account is locked. None of us can get into the system."

*whew!* is an understatement. Found out later the user account server crashed, which locked out everybody.

Never found out what kingpin and the dev manager left to talk about, but I at least still had a job.

The most pissed off I've been at work?

Client X came to us for a website.
We secretly outsourced the work.
Client X is coming for a visit in 10 mins...

MD to me: "I've told them your lead dev on this. They're not super-technical so if they ask you about the project just tell them it's going well."

Now I'm not a comfortable blagger, I don't have that kind of confidence, so to ask me to lie like this makes me feel really stressed and uncomfortable. Furthermore, I had literally no idea about any aspect of the work we were supposedly doing for this client. I can barely contain my panic but my colleagues help me piece together a basic understanding.

The MD returns: "They're here now. Can you quickly go and check that the toilets are clean."

WHAT THE FUCK!? The little prick. I'd knock him out if wasn't so meek and pathetic. I tell myself that I'm being helpful and nice but in truth I'm just his fucking doormat and he has zero respect for me.

I have no problem cleaning stuff (we all basically tidy up behind us) but this is something he could have done. Furthermore, who cares? None of us leave the loos with piss on the floor and shit smeared across the walls. They're never anything less than client-ready so to ask me to check means that he's already checked them himself and one of the loos is not quite shiny enough.

The reader may feel that this is no big deal (and in some ways you're right) but everything about this scenario was fucked up. The MD had embroiled the whole company in a lie and assumes we're all okay with that, then to add insult just nonchalantly orders me to clean the bogs. The cunt.

FWIW The client didn't ask to talk to me or use the toilet during their visit.

If y'all need a lil help with clients and conversating, here's my personal way of ending conversations. Just acknowledge it! (If all else fails, take things into consideration)

Friend: I hear that the most viewed youtube video ever is now despacito
> I acknowledge that
*conversation end*

Co-worker: I love my new shoes!
> I acknowledge that
*end*

Hot girl: hey sexy, you're looking fine today
> I acknowledge that
*end*

Client: hey could you add x?
> No
*end*

Sibling: you're adopted
> I acknowledge that
*end*

(Consideration example)
Windows: I will update
> I will take that into consideration
*end*

trogus: I will make a line of debugging ducks with capes with their respective language on it
dfox: I acknowledge that
*end*

Bus driver: sir please wake up the busses are closed
> I acknowledge that *sleeps*
*end*

Python: wrong amount of tabs/spaces
> I acknowledge that *uninstalls python*
*end*

devRant: you are running out of characters for this rant
> I ackno

Sometime in mid 2013 or 2014 as a junior dev I woke up to a call from my company's CEO. He informed me that the legacy system they use for order processing is down nationwide that nobody can add new orders until it's fixed and that I needed to fix it. I had been working there 6 months and was hired along with a senior dev to begin developing a web app to replace this legacy system. The senior dev had left the company two weeks earlier for a better offer so it was put on me to figure it out. I was very frank with the CEO and told him I didn't know if I could fix it and suggested he try to call the company they hired to create it. I didn't even know where the source code was let alone what the design paradigm was or whether or not there was any documentation. He said he would try figuring out who created it and give them a call and asked "As a developer you shouldn't you be able to fix this?" I just told him it wasn't that simple and left it at that.

I get to work and the CEO has discovered that the company who created the software no longer exists and I tell him he may need to find a company to consult on this if I can find the source code and if I can't find the code he might be screwed.
I found the source code in a random IT shared folder there is no source control, no documentation, no unit tests, no test environment, and it looks like nobody had touched it since 2005 or about 8 years.

Despite being completely unfamiliar with the code and the design paradigm I was able to figure out that they were validating customer addresses against an old Google geocoding API that was shutdown the day before and the lack of response was killing the application. I fixed the issue and warned the CEO before deployment that I wasn't able to test but he said to go ahead and thankfully all went well.

Had a job interview recently that went well besides one little disagreement... and it has made me question my sanity. Tell me if I'm wrong.

They asked the difference between a GET and POST request.

Wow, that's an easy one, they're giving me a break, I thought to myself.

I said "GET is used to retrieve data from a server, whereas POST is used to add data to a server, via it's body, which a GET lacks" or something like that.

They were like "ya mostly, but GET can be used to enter data into the server too. We were just looking for the body thing."

And I'm like.... yeah, you could do that, but that's not what it's meant for.

They mention stuff about query parameters and I hold steady that GET and POST are different because GET has a specific purpose. Otherwise, we wouldn't need the "method" part of an HTTP request at all. We could just either include a body or not include a body.

I ended it with "Well, POST implies that you are adding data to a server, and GET implies you are querying data from the server. When I'm reading documentation, that's how I quickly determine what an endpoint does."

My confidence was a little shaken at this point. Crazy what two people with (I assume at least) 10+ years of experience telling you you're wrong will do to your confidence.

When I quit my previous job, they hired 3 guys to replace me. One of them was a swedish guy that was completely useless. He lived in another part of the country, and our manager and a senior dev flew him in and interviewed him at the airport. That was obviously not sufficient.

I got tasked with helping him get started. The code base seen in retrospect sucked really hard, but he got the simplest tasks at first. One time he needed to add a checkbox to a form, and do something different in the BL when that box was checked. I showed him where in the code he needed to do the change, and let him on his own. 1 hour later he asked again. He hadn't even been able to place the if-statement. Omg.

I told our manager that they really should get rid of this guy, since he isn't qualified to be a developer. They didn't listen.

In Norway we have a 6 month test period where it's easier to let someone go. After that, it's quite hard to fire someone.

After a while I talked to a old colleague of mine, and they had finally been able to get rid of him. That had taken months. When he was told that he had to improve, he went to the doctor and got a sick leave. You can't fire someone on sick leave.. Finally he got the option of resigning himself, or being fired. He chose the first option..

He should have been transferred to sales. If he could sell himself as a developer, he could sell anything to anyone... :D

tl;dr; I've worked 117.5h/week for a month because of a project lead that doesn't understand what I do despite countless attempts at explaining

So, once a year I do this large project for a voluntary organization, it takes me about 80h (and this is of course on top of my normal work and voluntary engagement (60-80h/week))

This year, I realized I don't have as much spare time as I used to, so I emailed the project lead several months in advance like "hey, you know that I do all my work on this before the rest of you start working on it, and you know I need you to sit down for about an hour and put together the list of things I need to know to get this done properly. Could you please do that a bit earlier than usual, a week or two extra would make a big difference", they replied "absolutely, no problem!"

Time went by, and about two weeks before I wanted that info I emailed a small reminder. Shit me not, a month later, after a countless amount of reminders I finally get a half finnished version of the list I need, note that this is two weeks before I'm supposed to be done. Which is fine, it's the usual timespan, not what I hoped for as I hoped for an extra two weeks, but not too late either.

Then shit starts to happen

I reply to the list I've gotten with some requests for the project lead to complete some of the information, to which I receive multiple replies with different answers to the same questions, okay, that's fine, I'll just use the last answer.(?)

So, I finnish the thing on time, clocking out on a total of 117.5h of work per week, two weeks in a row. Still fine, it's just two weeks.

Release day!

I arrive at the release meeting, and is greeted by the project lead handing me two papers with the words "we haven't been able to look through your work yet to make sure it's like we want it, but we sat down yesterday and here's a list of how we want things to be". So I remind them that the thing is supposed to be done that day, and that it takes me 80h to redo, and those papers will require me to redo everything from scratch. To which the project lead responds "but it doesn't have to be finnished until December, right?"

That is not true, not at all, in any way.

See, there are 600 people that depend on this project, and they need, yes, need to be able to access it from the day it's launched every year. That is an absolute requirement.

So after trying to tell this project lead, for multiple years, how much time I devote to this project (for free) every year, during a short period of time, and after trying countless times to explain why it has to be done when the project is released, I became quite irritated.

So, during the two weeks that have passed since, I've been receiving about 200 emails from people wondering why the thing isn't finished yet and why they can't use it. (forwarded every single one of them to the project lead) and have been redoing it all during the past two weeks, from scratch.

I'm finally done, I released it yesterday, finally! I accompanied it with a bitter email to the project lead.

Because seriously, this is the worst respect for both my time and the people that should use the project's time in all of those years I've been doing this. This year, I've been ignored multiple times; they've shat on my work because it didn't live up to their expectations, even tough they never told me their expectations; I've been misinformed etc.

And now it's starting to get to me, this is the first weekend in a month when I've been able to shut down my laptop, sit down, drink a cup of tea, read a fricking book, chat with some friends etc, and most importantly, sleep. Signs of the stress I've had for a month now is starting to remind themselves.

And there's this little though nagging me in the back of my head: if the project lead would've worked for an hour in September I would've had to do half the job I ended up doing, on double the time. I hate realizing that they don't give a shit about my part of this, even tough I do half the work.

Then why do I continue, year after year? Because I feel that those 600 people that benefit from this really deserve it! But why does there have to be a dick project lead in the middle that makes me feel sick working on the thing I love the most!

So, as I'm not really used to ranting like this, i have to add that I really have no point with this rant. Just had to get it off my chest!

I wrote a database migration to add a column to a table and populated that column upon record creation.
But the code is so freaking convoluted that it took me four days of clawing my eyes out to manage this.
BUT IT'S FINALLY DONE.
FREAKING YAY.

Why so long, you ask? Just how convoluted could this possibly be? Follow my lead ~

There's an API to create a gift. (Possibly more; I have no bloody clue.)
I needed the mobile dev contractor to tell me which APIs he uses because there are lots of unused ones, and no reasoning to their naming, nor comments telling me what they do.

This API takes the supplied gift params, cherry-picks a few bits of useful data out (by passing both hashes by reference to several methods), replaces a couple of them with lookups / class instances (more pass-by-reference nonsense). After all of this, it logs the resulting (and very different) mess, and happily declares it the original supplied params. Utterly useless for basically everything, and so very wrong.

It then uses this data to call GiftSale#create, which returns an instance of GiftSale (that's actually a Gift; more on that soon).

GiftSale inherits from Gift, and redefines three of its methods.

GiftSale#create performs a lot of validations / data massaging, some by reference, some not. It uses `super` to call Gift#create which actually maps to the constructor Gift#initialize.

Gift#initialize calls Gift#pre_init (passing the data by reference again), which does nothing and returns null. But remember: GiftSale inherits from Gift, meaning GiftSale#pre_init supersedes Gift#pre_init, so that one is called instead. GiftSale#pre_init returns a Stripe charge object upon success, or a Gift (and a log entry containing '500 Internal') upon failure. But this is irrelevant because the return value is never actually used. Pass by reference, remember? I didn't.

We're now back at Gift#initialize, Rails finally creates a Gift object using the args modified [mostly] in-place by all of the above.

Another step back and we're at GiftSale#create again. This method returns either the shiny new Gift object or an error string (???), and the API logic branches on its type. For further confusion: not all of the method's returns are explicit, and those implicit return values are nested three levels deep. (In Ruby, a method will return the last executed line's return value automatically, allowing e.g. `def add(a,b); a+b; end`)

So, to summarize: GiftSale#create jumps back and forth between Gift five times before finally creating a Gift instance, and each jump further modifies the supplied params in-place.

Also. There are no rescue/catch blocks, meaning any issue with any of the above results in a 500. (A real 500, not a fake 500 like last time. A real 500, with tragic consequences.)

If you're having trouble following the above... yep! That's why it took FOUR FREAKING DAYS! I had no tests, no documentation, no already-built way of testing the API, and no idea what data to send it. especially considering it requires data from Stripe. It also requires an active session token + user data, and I likewise had no login API tests, documentation, logging, no idea how to create a user ... fucking hell, it's a mess.)

Also, and quite confusingly:
There's a class for GiftSale, but there's no table for it.
Gift and GiftSale are completely interchangeable except for their #create methods.

So, why does GiftSale exist?
I have no bloody idea.
All it seems to do is make everything far more complicated than it needs to be.

Anyway. My total commit?
Six lines.
IN FOUR FUCKING DAYS!

AHSKJGHALSKHGLKAHDSGJKASGH.

Man, I think we've all gotten way too many of these.

Normally most interactions that I have are through email. Eventually some would try to contact me via phone. These are some:

"Hey! We are calling you from <whatever company name> solutions! (most of them always seem to end on solutions or some shit like that) concerning the Ruby on Rails senior dev opportunity we were talking about via email"
<niceties, how are you doing, similar shit goes here...eventually>

So tell us! how good/comfortable would you say you are with C++?"

Me: I have never done anything serious with c++ and did just use it at school, but because I am not a professional in it I did not list it in my CV, what does it have to do with Rails?

Them: "Oh the applications of this position must be ready to take in additional duties which sometimes happen to be C or C++"

Me: Well that was not anywhere in the offer you sent, it specifically requested a full stack Rails developer that could work with 3 different frontend stacks already and like 4 different databases plus bla bla bla, I did not see c++ anywhere in it. Matter of fact I find it funny, one of the things that I was curious about was the salary, for what you are asking and specifically in the city in which you are asking it for 75k is way too low, you are seriously expecting a senior level rails dev to do all that AND take additional duties with c++? cpp could mean a billion different things"

Them: "well this is a big opportunity that will increase your level to senior position"

Me: the add ALREADY asks for a senior position, why are you making it sound that I will get build towards that level if you are already off the bat asking for seniors only to begin with?

Them: You are not getting it, it is an opportunity to grow into a senior, applicants right now are junior to mid-level

ME: You are all not making any sense, please don't contact me again.

=======

Them: We are looking for someone with 15 years experience with Swift development for mobile and web

Me: What is up with your people not making these requirements in paper? if I knew from the beginning that you people think that Swift is 15 years old I would have never agreed to this "interview"

Them: If you are not interested in that then might we offer this one for someone with 10 years experience as a full stack TypeScript developer.

Me: No, again, check your dates, this is insulting.

===

* For another Rails position

Them: How good are you with Ruby on Rails in terms of Python?

Me: excuse me? Python has nothing to do with Ruby on Rails.

Her (recruiter was a woman) * with a tone of superiority: I have it here that Python is the primary technology that accompanies Rails development.

Me (thinking this was a joke) : What do you think the RUBY part of Ruby on Rails is for? and what does "accompanies Rails development" even means?

Her: Well if you are not interested in using Rails with Python then maybe you can tell us about your experience in using Javascript as the main scripting platform for Rails.

Me: This is a joke, goodbye.

====

To be fair this was years ago when I still didn't know better and test the recruiters during the email part of being contacted. Now a days I feel sorry for everyone since I just say no without even bothering. This is a meme all on itself which no one has ever bothered to review and correct in years for now. I don't know why recruiters don't google themselves to see what people think of their "profession" in order to become better.

I've even had the Java/Javascript stupidity thrown at me by a local company. For that one it was someone from their very same HR department doing the rectuiter, their shop foreman was a friend of the family, did him the service of calling him to let him know that his HR was never going to land the kind of developer they were looking for with the retarded questions they had and sent him a detailed email concerning the correct information they needed for their JAVAscript job which they kept confusing with Java (for some reason in the context of Spring, they literally wanted nothing with Spring, they wanted some junior to do animations and shit like that on their company's website, which was in php, Java was nowhere in this equation)

I think people in web development get the short end of the stick when it comes to retarded recruiters more than anywhere else.

Background: I'm not drunk yet, BUT I'M WORKING ON IT.

okay.

I just finished a second sprint on my React app. The first was to build a merchant onboarding flow. The second was to do substantial cleanup as I learned more about react/redux, and to create a "supply order" flow -- basically purchasing marketing materials and services. I finished that in a week, and I'm pretty proud. api-guy wanted it done in a day. i laughed. he probably could have, but it would have been a copy of the code in a new repo with some lines changed.

ANYWAY. it's all done and It's super pretty and works amazingly well. It has both the onboarding flow and the ordering flow, with a nice pop-out sidebar for navigation, namespaced actions, etc. Everything is pretty clean. I even added a cart to the ordering (despite everyone telling me not to) because wtf, what if someone wants to order TWO items? dumbasses. So I made that. it's sexy.

Anyway, it's all done and shiny and fancy and wonderful and I'd *love* to share screenshots if only it didn't give away where I worked. :<

... but the point of the rant!

After the first sprint, I made a copy of the repo so I could rework it and add more functionality without touching the original. (Hey! That's what a branch is for, right? Why didn't I branch it up?
well, read on)

I knew we were going to have multiple separate flows for this app: onboard, ordering, merchant tools, admin tools, support, etc. So, I wrote its server portion (the webpack builder + http server) so it would serve the same app at whatever url the user hit, and set a cookie containing that host+url. This allows the app to serve different content (basically showing/hiding content) based on the URL and future login roles. If someone hits /order, it would hide everything but the order flow. If they're a merchant, it would show all the merchant views plus ordering, etc.

tl;dr This way I can use the same codebase for multiple sites, drastically simplifying development, branding, and what have you. This new app could obv also be a drop-in replacement for the original onboarding project because of the above.

HOWEVER. this apparently isn't good enough for api-guy. He's terrified that adding/updating future components will affect all the existing content somehow.

so.

now we have three repos for basically the same codebase. 1) onboard aka "surfboard", 2) ordering, 3) merchant tools, aka "ferrari" (the "future" app).

Except.
1) "surfboard" is a very old version of the code. 3) "ferrari" is also old, since 2) "ordering" has newer content in it now.

... and somehow this is better?
fuck if i can figure out how.

His reasoning is "well, you won't be touching surfboard or ordering for 6 months, so now you don't have to worry about it." Sure, except, you know, it'll be a pain in the ass in 6 months now when I have a crapton of code and branding to redo. ffs.

Oh. We also have three Heroku pipelines for these three repos. for the same codebase.

and now you know why i'm drinking.

A few weeks ago a client called me. His application contains a lot of data, including email addresses (local part and domain stored separately in SQL database). The application can filter data based on the domain part of the addresses. He ask me why sub.example.com is not included when he asked the application for example.com. I said: No problem, I can add this feature to the application, but the process will take a longer.

Client: No problem, please add this ASAP.

So, the next day I changed some of the SQL queries to lookup using the LIKE operator.

After a week the client called again: The process is really slow, how can this be?

Me: Well, you asked me to filter the subdomains as well. Before, the application could easily find all the domains (SQL index), but now it has to compare all the domains to check if it ends with the domain you are looking for.

Client: Okay, but why is it a lot slower than before?

Me: Do you have a dictionary in your office?

<Client search for a dictionary, came back with one>

Me: give me the definition of the word "time"

<Client gives definition of time>

Me: Give me the definition of all words ending with "time"

Client: But, ...

Never heard from him again on this issues :-P

As a German developer living in Germany, I am used to write my code completely in English. In all of my former companies that was also the norm. In one company, we even talked completely in English with each other to a point where even if only German people where in a room, they would default to English at one point in a conversation because it became second nature to us.

(That company was very international and we had a lot of people from all over the world working there.)

Now, I work at a new German company that focuses on the German market. And for some reason I failed to ask them:

Do you write your code in English?

Because that's the norm, isn't it!? I just assumed it to be the case.

Nope! This time it is a mess of German and English term intermixing in glorious abysmal ways I never thought possible.

Sometimes we translate terms, sometimes we don't. So you have to wrap your mind around collections of words that COULD mean the same thing unless they don't. Best case, you have two words for the same thing, but I've seen up to five words (or abbreviations) to describe one business entity. Madness.

And don't get me started on the plurals. In English, it's almost exclusively: add an `s`.

In German, the singular and plural can be the same (e.g. all nouns ending with `-er`) so tough luck determining if you are on an object or an array of objects. (Weak typing language in use does not help either but that's an entirely different rant.)

Would the web be better off, if there was zero frontend scripting? There would be HTML5 video/audio, but zero client side JS.

Browsers wouldn't understand script tags, they wouldn't have javascript engines, and they wouldn't have to worry about new standards and deprecations.

Browsers would be MUCH more secure, and use way less memory and CPU resources.

What would we really be missing?

If you build less bloated pages, you would not really need ajax calls, page reloads would be cheap. Animated menus do not add anything functionally, and could be done using css as well. Complicated webapps... well maybe those should just be desktop/mobile apps.

Pages would contain less annoying elements, no tracking or crypto mining scripts, no mouse tracking, no exploitative spam alerts.

Why don't we just deprecate JS in the browser, completely?

I think it would be worth it.

Worst client request.
Craziest client.
Worst accident.
Accident you thought were impossible in the dev world.
Story time, that one time where you f*cked up really bad.
Best boss.
Nicest client.
Most satisfying hobby project.
Best dev food.
Most helpful accident.
Your favorite project you had to trash, explain why.
Weirdest thing someone asked you to fix because you worked with computers.
Most memorable thing from devRant.
Best thing to happen to you because of devRant.

Its 6am and i feel productive, its not even my app got dammit.

Project you took too far.
Best/worst drunk coding experience.
Weirdest thing you ever ended up fixing because you know stuff about computers.
Worst setup you have seen someone have.
Worst treated hardware you have ever seen.
Best skill to have picked up because of your interest for development, but isnt completely dev related.
Best/worst choice in your carreer, what happened.
Sketchiest email a coworker, friend, boss or client sent.
That one accident that prevented you from using your computer or the internet.
Moment when you thought your dev environment would get a huge boost, but ended with a plot twist.
Worst disturbance while working.

If i come up with more ill either post again, or comment here. This was all i could get off the top of my head, believe it or not.

Edit, gotta add this one: Cable porn

The tech stack at my current gig is the worst shit I’ve ever dealt with...

I can’t fucking stand programs, especially browser based programs, to open new windows. New tab, okay sure, ideally I just want the current tab I’m on to update when I click on a link.

Ticketing system: Autotask
Fucking opens up with a crappy piss poor sorting method and no proper filtering for ticket views. Nope you have to go create a fucking dashboard to parse/filter the shit you want to see. So I either have to go create a metric-arse tonne of custom ticket views and switch between them or just use the default turdburger view. Add to that that when I click on a ticket, it opens another fucking window with the ticket information. If I want to do time entry, it just feels some primal need to open another fucking window!!! Then even if I mark the ticket complete it just minimizes the goddamn second ticket window. So my jankbox-supreme PC that my company provided gets to strugglepuff along trying to keep 10 million chrome windows open. Yeah, sure 6GB of ram is great for IT work, especially when using hot steaming piles of trashjuice software!

I have to manually close these windows regularly throughout the day or the system just shits the bed and halts.

RMM tool: Continuum
This fucker takes the goddamn soggy waffle award for being utterly fucking useless. Same problem with the windows as autotask except this special snowflake likes to open a login prompt as a full-fuck-mothering-new window when we need to open a LMI rescue session!!! I need to enter a username and a password. That’s it! I don’t need a full screen window to enter credentials! FUCK!!! Btw the LMI tools only work like 70% of the time and drag ass compared to literally every other remote support tool I’ve ever used. I’ve found that it’s sometimes just faster to walk someone through enabling RDP on their system then remoting in from another system where LMI didn’t decide to be fully suicidal and just kill itself.

Our fucking chief asshat and sergeant fucknuts mcdoogal can’t fucking setup anything so the antivirus software is pushed to all client systems but everything is just set to the default site settings. Absolutely zero care or thought or effort was put forth and these gorilla spunk drinking, rimjob jockey motherfuckers sell this as a managed AntiVirus.

We use a shitty password manager than no one besides I use because there is a fully unencrypted oneNote notebook that everyone uses because fuck security right? “Sometimes it’s just faster to have the passwords at the ready without having to log into the password manager.” Chief Asshat in my first week on the job.

Not to mention that windows server is unlicensed in almost every client environment, the domain admin password is same across multiple client sites, is the same password to log into firewalls, and office 365 environments!!!

I’ve brought up tons of ways to fix these problems, but they have their heads so far up their own asses getting high on undeserved smugness since “they have been in business for almost ten years”. Like, Whoop Dee MotherFucking Doo! You have only been lucky to skate by with this dumpster fire you call a software stack, you could probably fill 10 olympic sized swimming pools to the brim with the logarrhea that flows from your gullets not only to us but also to your customers, and you won’t implement anything that is good for you, your company, or your poor clients because you take ten minutes to try and understand something new.

I’m fucking livid because I’m stuck in a position where I can’t just quit and work on my business full time. I’m married and have a 6m old baby. Between both my wife and I working we barely make ends meet and there’s absolutely zero reason that I couldn’t be providing better service to customers without having to lie through my teeth to them and I could easily support my family and be about 264826290461% happier!

But because we make so little, I can’t scrap together enough money to get Terranimbus (my startup) bootstrapped. We have zero expendable/savable income each month and it’s killing my soul. It’s so fucking frustrating knowing that a little time and some capital is all that stands between a better life for my family and I and being able to provide a better overall service out there over these kinds of shady as fuck knob gobblers.

Man I really need to get this off my chest. So here goes.
I just finished 1 year in corporate after college. When I joined, the team I got was brilliant, more than what I thought I would get. About 6 months in, the project manager and lead dev left the company. Two replacements took their place, and life's been hell ever since.

The new PM decided it was his responsibility to be our spokesperson and started talking to our overseas manager (call her GM) on our behalf, even in the meetings where we were present, putting words in our mouth so that he's excellent and we get a bad rep.

1 month in, GM came to visit our location for a week. She was initially very friendly towards all of us. About halfway through the week, I realized that she had basically antagonized the entire old team members. Our responsibilities got redistributed and the work I was set to do was assigned to the new dev (call her NR).

Since then, I noticed GM started giving me the most difficult tasks and then criticizing my work extra hard, and the work NR was doing was praised no matter what. I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but lately the truth hit me hard. I found out a fault in NR's code and both PM and GM started saying that because I found it, it was my responsibility to fix it. I went through the buggy code for hours and fixed it. (NR didn't know how it worked, because she had it written by the lead dev and told everyone she wrote it).

I found out lately that NR and PM got the most hike, because they apparently "learnt" new tech (both of them got their work done by others and hogged the credit).They are the first in line to go onsite because they've been doing 'management work'. They'd complained to GM during her visit that we were not friendly towards them. And from that point on if anything went wrong, it would be my fault, because my component found it out (I should mention that my component mostly deals with the backend logic, so its pretty adept at finding code leaks).

What broke my patience is the fact that lately I worked my ass off to deliver some of the best code I'd written, but my GM said in front of the entire team that at this point "I'm just wasting money". She's been making a bad example out of me for some time, but this one took the cake. I had just delivered a promising result in a task in 1 week that couldn't be done by my PM in 4 weeks, and guess what? "It's not good enough". No thank you, no appreciation, nothing. Finally, I decided I'd had enough of it and started just doing tasks as I could. I'd do what they ask, but won't go above and beyond my way to make it perfect.

My PM realized this and then started pushing me harder. Two days back, I sent a mail to the team with GM in cc exposing a flaw in the code he had written, and no one bothered to reply (the issue was critical). When I asked him about it, he said "How can you expect me to reply so soon when it's already been told that when anything happens we should first resolve within the team and then add GM in the loop?" I realized it was indeed discussed, but the issue was extremely urgent, so I had asked everyone involved, and it portrayed him in a bad light. I could've fixed it, but I didn't because on the off chance if it broke something, they'd start telling me that I broke the tool, how its my fault and how its a critical issue I have to fix ASAP, etc. etc., you get the idea.

Can anyone give me some advice of how to deal with this kind of situation? I would have left but with this pandemic going on, market being scarce and the fact that I'm only experienced by 1 year, I don't think I qualify for a job switch just now.

Worst code review experience?

Hard to pick just one, but most were in a big meeting room with 4+ other developers not related to the project and with some playing Monday-Morning-Quarterback instead of offering productive feedback.

In one code review, the department mgr reviewed the code from a third party component library.

<brings up the code on the big screen>
Mgr: "I can't read any of this, its a mix of English and something else."
Me: "Its German."
Mgr: "Then why is 'Button' in English? This code is a mess."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how I should respond, I mean, I didn't write any of this code."
Mgr: "Yes, but you are using it, so it's fair game for a code review."
Me: "Its not really open source, but we can make requests if you found something that needs to be addressed."
Mgr: "Oh yes, all this...whatever this is..<pointing again to the German>"
Me: "I don't think they will change their code to English just so you can read it."
Mgr: "We paid good money, you bet your ass they'll change it!"
Me: "I think the components were like $30 for the unlimited license. They'll tell us to go to hell first. Is there something about my code you want to talk about?"
Mgr: "<Ugggh>...I guess not, I couldn't get past all that German. Why didn't we go with an American company? Hell, why didn't we just write these components ourselves!?"
Me: "Because you gave a directive that if we found components that saved us time, to put in a request, and you approved the request. The company is American, they probably outsourced or hired German developers. I don't know and not sure why we care."
Mgr: "Security! What if they are sending keystrokes back to their servers!"
Me: "Did you see any http or any network access?"
Mgr: "How could I? The code is in German!"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback1: "If it were me, I would have written the components myself and moved on"
Me: "No, I don't think you could for less than $30"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback2: "Meh...we get paid anyway. Just add the time to the estimate."
Mgr: "Exactly! Why do we even have developers who can't read this mess."
Me: "Oh good Lord! Did anyone review or even look at my code for this review!?"
<silence>
Mgr: "Oh...ok...I guess we're done here. Thanks everyone."
<everyone starts to leave>
Me: "Whoa!...wait a sec..am I supposed to do something?"
Mgr: "Get that company to write their code in English so we can read it. You have their number, call em'...no...wait...give me their number. You keep working, I'll take care of this personally"

In they nicest way possible, the company did tell him to go to hell.

I have got a new director at work. My previous director had to retire already, the man was already feeling it and he had been on the institution for more than 35 years....I am 30, so this tells you how much the man has been there.

This new dude.....has the presence of a Caterprie (Pokemon) or an Oompa Loompa. In contrast, the previous director felt like a 4 star General (never been in the presence of a 5 star since those occurrences are world war rare) but I had respected that man so much and loved working with him. I really did loved my boss, he was stern and professional, but kind and friendly to his staff, fiercely protective, no one took advantage of I.T while he was there, he would literally fight for us and took our word before anything else. The man was, well, a true man. A true leader.

He took a chance in putting me as the head of my department, but he had faith in me, and coached me and trained me as much as he could. Had the requirement for his position not been a masters he himself told me that he would have loved to make me his successor, even when I would constantly tell him that I was scared shitless of the work he did and the amount of things he did for the institution, to me this is a very laaaaaaaaarge cowboy hat to fill (this is Texas, he wore a hat, the saying is normally "shoes to fill", but fuck it)

This new guys looks away when the other managers are speaking to him. He constantly interrupts us. He constantly tells us about how the other institution in which he was (rival might I add) does X or Y, its fucking annoying to the point that me and the other managers have a drinking game, for every time he references his old institution we drink one beer over the weekend. It is Saturday night and I am 36 in in total (this is my favorite part of it tho) and it is just annoying.

His train of thought makes no sense to me:

"This application, where did you buy it? we tried purchasing one on Y when I was still there but found none"

Me: "Well, since it was a new government mandate and had nowhere to go we had to develop it in house"

Him: "We had tried to purchase what you guys had but found no place that sold it, so why didn't you try purchasing it?"

Me:.....well, because it was brand new, purchase it from where? We also don't like dealing with vendors that manage these sorts of things because every new requirement takes them weeks to produce on very high budgets, historically, my department has only had maintenance fees for the software that we have and even those applications crap themselves all the time and they take weeks to answer back to us.

Him: So you decided to develop it in house instead? we would never do that! back at y we purchased everything our engineers never really developed anything!

Me: Well then, what is the purpose of having engineers if they are not going to actually develop an application?

Him: IF there is something out there that is better then why should you reinvent the wheel?

Me: For this one I did not reinvent the wheel, I am not talking about creating a programming language from scratch, but how does custom solutions that specifically feed the needs of the institution to be produced otherwise? The department has developers for a reason, because they have very specific needs in here that can only come from a team of developers that are in house satisfying those needs.

Him: Well our engineers never had to do that. Sure projects sometimes had to put on holds because the vendor was busy, but such is the nature of development

Me: No it is not, the nature of development is to create things, it is one thing for my team to go through bugs and software considerations, it is another for me to not provide a service because some random company is taking two weeks on a $300 dllr an hour contract to put a simple checkbox on a form. If a project fails the board is not going to care that some vendor is not doing their job, they are just going to blame me, if that is the case then I would much rather the blame be actually mine than some sucky third party "developer" also, your engineers where not even engineers, they were people with a degree that purchased things, that's it, please do not compare them to my guys or refer them as engineers in front of me, they are not.

Him: Well, maybe.

MAYBE?!! motherfucker I did not kill myself learning the ins and outs of architecture and software engineering on my own time after my fucking bachelors in C.S for your codeless background ass to tell me MAYBE. My word IS the fucking WORD here, not yours. Fuck me I really dislike this dude's management practices.

The shitty part? He is not a bad person, he is not a bad dude that is out to get us, just a simple minded moron with no place as a leader.

I know leaders, I know what a leader is, this is not one.

Long rant ahead.. so feel free to refill your cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂

It's completely useless. At least in the school I went to, the teachers were worse than useless. It's a bit of an old story that I've told quite a few times already, but I had a dispute with said teachers at some point after which I wasn't able nor willing to fully do the classes anymore.

So, just to set the stage.. le me, die-hard Linux user, and reasonably initiated in networking and security already, to the point that I really only needed half an ear to follow along with the classes, while most of the time I was just working on my own servers to pass the time instead. I noticed that the Moodle website that the school was using to do a big chunk of the course material with, wasn't TLS-secured. So whenever the class begins and everyone logs in to the Moodle website..? Yeah.. it wouldn't be hard for anyone in that class to steal everyone else's credentials, including the teacher's (as they were using the same network).

So I brought it up a few times in the first year, teacher was like "yeah yeah we'll do it at some point". Shortly before summer break I took the security teacher aside after class and mentioned it another time - please please take the opportunity to do it during summer break.

Coming back in September.. nothing happened. Maybe I needed to bring in more evidence that this is a serious issue, so I asked the security teacher: can I make a proper PoC using my machines in my home network to steal the credentials of my own Moodle account and mail a screencast to you as a private disclosure? She said "yeah sure, that's fine".
Pro tip: make the people involved sign a written contract for this!!! It'll cover your ass when they decide to be dicks.. which spoiler alert, these teachers decided they wanted to be.

So I made the PoC, mailed it to them, yada yada yada... Soon after, next class, and I noticed that my VPN server was blocked. Now I used my personal VPN server at the time mostly to access a file server at home to securely fetch documents I needed in class, without having to carry an external hard drive with me all the time. However it was also used for gateway redirection (i.e. the main purpose of commercial VPN's, le new IP for "le onenumity"). I mean for example, if some douche in that class would've decided to ARP poison the network and steal credentials, my VPN connection would've prevented that.. it was a decent workaround. But now it's for some reason causing Moodle to throw some type of 403.

Asked the teacher for routers and switches I had a class from at the time.. why is my VPN server blocked? He replied with the statement that "yeah we blocked it because you can bypass the firewall with that and watch porn in class".
Alright, fair enough. I can indeed bypass the firewall with that. But watch porn.. in class? I mean I'm a bit of an exhibitionist too, but in a fucking class!? And why right after that PoC, while I've been using that VPN connection for over a year?

Not too long after that, I prematurely left that class out of sheer frustration (I remember browsing devRant with the intent to write about it while the teacher was watching 😂), and left while looking that teacher dead in the eyes.. and never have I been that cold to someone while calling them a fucking idiot.

Shortly after I've also received an email from them in which they stated that they wanted compensation for "the disruption of good service". They actually thought that I had hacked into their servers. Security teachers, ostensibly technical people, if I may add. Never seen anyone more incompetent than those 3 motherfuckers that plotted against me to save their own asses for making such a shitty infrastructure. Regarding that mail, I not so friendly replied to them that they could settle it in court if they wanted to.. but that I already knew who would win that case. Haven't heard of them since.

So yeah. That's why I regard those expensive shitty pieces of paper as such. The only thing they prove is that someone somewhere with some unknown degree of competence confirms that you know something. I think there's far too many unknowns in there.

Nowadays I'm putting my bets on a certification from the Linux Professional Institute - a renowned and well-regarded certification body in sysadmin. Last February at FOSDEM I did half of the LPIC-1 certification exam, next year I'll do the other half. With the amount of reputation the LPI has behind it, I believe that's a far better route to go with than some random school somewhere.

I swear I work with mentally deranged lunatics.
Dev is/was using TFS's web api to read some config stuff..

Ralph: "Ugh..this is driving me crazy. I've spent all day trying to read this string from TFS and it is not working"
Me: "Um, reading a string from an web api is pretty easy, what's the problem?"
Ralph: "I'm executing the call in a 'using' statement and cannot return the stream."
Me: "Why do you need to return a stream? Return the object you are looking for."
Ralph: "Its not that easy. You can return anything from TFS. All you get back is a stream. Could be XML, JSON, text file, image, anything."
Me: "What are you trying to return?"
Ralph: "XML config. If I use XDoc, the stream works fine, but when I step into each byte from the stream, I the first three bytes have weird characters. I shouldn't have to skip the first three bytes to get the data. I spent maybe 5 hours yesterday digging around the .Net stream readers used in XDoc trying to figure out how it skips the first few bytes."
Me: "Wow...I would have used XDoc and been done and not worried about that other junk."
Ralph: "But I don't know the stream is XML. That's what I need to figure out."
Me: "What is there to figure out? You do know. Its your request. You are requesting a XML config."
Ralph: "No, the request can be anything. What if Sam requests an image? XDoc isn't going to work."
Me: "Is that a use-case? Sam requesting an image?"
Ralph: "Uh..I don't know...he could"
Me: "Sounds like your spending a lot of time doing premature optimization. You know what your accessing TFS for, if it's XML, return XML. If it's an image, return an image. Something new comes along, modify the code to handle it. Eazy peezy."
<boss walks in from a meeting>
Boss: "Whats up guys?"
Ralph: "You know the problem with TFS and not being able to stream the data I had all day yesterday? I finally figured it out. I need to keep this TFS reader simple. I'll start with the XML configs and if we more readers later, we can add them."
Boss: "Oh yea, always start simple and add complexity only when you need it."

Frack...Frack..Frack...you played some victim complaining to anyone who would listen yesterday (which I mostly ignored) about reading data from TFS was this monumental problem no one could solve, then you start complaining to me, I don't fall for the BS, then tell the boss the solution was your idea?

Lunatic or genius? Wally would be proud.

First I wanna say how grateful I am that devRant exists, because my friends either don’t understand this vocab or don’t care lol.

Last week I worked on a pretty large ticket, opened a PR with 54 file changes. Just to follow standards I set the PR milestone to a future release version, but the truth is I didn’t care which version this work ended up in— I just needed it to go into the develop branch asap.

Since it was a large PR there was some expected discussion that prolonged its merging, but in the meantime I started a second branch that depended on some of the work from this branch. I set the new branch’s upstream to develop, fully expecting my PR to merge into develop, since that’s what I set the PR base to.

I completed all the work I could in the new branch, and got two colleagues to approve the initial PR so it would be merged into develop, I could add the finishing touch and get this work done seamlessly before the week was over. They approved, it got merged, I pulled develop, and… my work wasn’t there. I went to look at my PR and someone had changed the base branch to a release branch. It was my boss, who thought he was helping. (Our bosses don’t actually work on the same team as us, so he didn’t know. it’s weird. We have leads that keep track of our work instead.)

I messaged him and told him I really needed this in develop, knowing our release branch won’t be in develop for probably another week. I was very annoyed but didn’t wanna make him feel too bad so I said I’d just merge the release branch into my new branch. So many conflicts I couldn’t see straight. His response was “yeah and you’ll probably have a bunch of package manager conflicts too because that’s in that release.” He was right— I have so many package manager conflicts that I can’t even see how many compiler conflicts there are. I considered cherry picking my changes, but the whole reason I set develop as my upstream was to avoid having any conflicts since I’m working in the same functions, and this would create more.

So I could spend the next (?) days making educated guesses on possibly a thousand conflict resolutions, or I can revert my release branch merge and quietly step back and wait for the release branch to be merged into develop.

I’m sure cherry picking is the best option here but I’m genuinely too annoyed lol, and fortunately my team does not care to notice if I step back and work on something else to kill time until it’s fixed automatically. But I’m still in dire need of a rant because my entire plan was ruined by a well-meaning person who messed with my PR without asking, so here is that rant and I thank you for your time.

“Don’t learn multiple languages at the same time”

Ignored that. Suddently I understood why he said that. Mixed both languages. In holiday rechecked it and it was ok.

Sometimes mistakes can lead to good things. After relearning I understood it much better.

“Don’t learn things by head” was another one. Because that’s useless. If you want to learn a language, try to understand it.
I fully agree with that. I started that way too learning what x did what y did, ... But after a few I found out this was inutile. Since then, I only have problems with Git

Another one. At release of Swift, my code was written in Obj-C. But I would like to adopt Swift. This was in my first year of iOS development, if I can even call it development. I used these things called “Converters”. But 3/4 was wrong and caused bugs. But the Issues in swift could handle that for me. After some time one told me “Stop doing that. Try to write it yourself.”

One of the last ones: “Try to contribute to open source software, instead of creating your own version of it. You won’t reinvent the wheel right? This could also be usefull for other users.”

Next: “If something doesn’t work the first time, don’t give up. Create Backups” As I did that multiple times and simply deleted the source files. By once I had a problem no iOS project worked. Didn’t found why. I was about to delete my Mac. Because of Apple’s WWDR certificate. Since then I started Git. Git is a new way of living.

Reaching the end: “We are developers. Not designers. We can’t do both. If a client asks for another design because they don’t like the current one tell them to hire one” - Remebers me one of my previous rants about the PDF “design”

Last one: “Clients suck. They will always complain. They need a new function. They don’t need that... And after that they wont bill ya for that. Because they think it’s no work.”

Sorry, forgot this one: “Always add backdoors. Many times clients wont pay and resell it or reuse it. With backdoors you can prohibit that.”

I think these are all things I loved they said to me. Probably forgot some.

I'll use this topic to segue into a related (lonely) story befitting my mood these past weeks.

This is entire story going to sound egotistical, especially this next part, but it's really not. (At least I don't think so?)

As I'm almost entirely self-taught, having another dev giving me good advice would have been nice. I've only known / worked with a few people who were better devs than I, and rarely ever received good advice from them.

One of those better devs was my first computer science teacher. Looking back, he was pretty average, but he held us to high standards and gave good advice. The two that really stuck with me were: 1) "save every time you've done something you don't want to redo," and 2) "printf is your best debugging friend; add it everywhere there's something you want to watch." Probably the best and most helpful advice I've ever received 😊

I've seen other people here posting advice like "never hardcode" or "modularity keeps your code clean" -- I had to discover these pretty simple concepts entirely on my own. School (and later college) were filled with terrible teachers and worse students, and so were almost entirely useless for learning anything new.

The only decent dev I knew had brilliant ideas (genetic algorithms, sandboxing, ...) before they were widely used, but could rarely implement them well because he was generally an idiot. (Idiot sevant, I think? Definitely the idiot part.) I couldn't stand him. Completely bypassing a ridiculously long story, I helped him on a project to build his own OS from scratch; we made very impressive progress, even to this day. Custom bootloader, hardware interfacing, memory management, (semi) sandboxed processes, gui, example programs ...; we were in highschool. I'm still surprised and impressed with what we accomplished.

But besides him, almost every other dev I met was mediocre. Even outside of school, I went so many years without having another competent dev to work with. I went through various jobs helping other dev(s) on their projects (or rewriting them), learning new languages/frameworks almost every time: php, pascal, perl, zend, js, vb, rails, node, .... I learned new concepts occasionally (which was wonderful) but overall it was just tedious and never paid well because I was too young to be taken seriously (and female, further exacerbating it). On the bright side, it didn't dwindle my love for coding, and I usually spent my evenings playing with projects of my own.

The second dev (and one one of the best I've ever met) went by Novo. His approach to a game engine reminded me of General Relativity: Everything was modular, had a rich inheritance tree, and could receive user input at any point along said tree. A user could attach their view/control to any object. (Computer control methods could be attached in this way as well.) UI would obviously change depending on how the user could interact and the number of objects; admins could view/monitor any of these. Almost every object / class of object could talk to almost everything else. It was beautiful. I learned so much from his designs. (Honestly, I don't remember the code at all, and that saddens me.) There were other things, too, but that one amazed me the most.

I havent met anyone like him ever again.

Anyway, I don't know if I can really answer this week's question. I definitely received some good advice while initially learning, but past that it's all been through discovering things on my own.

It's been lonely. ☹

This is going to be a rant, but personally, I'm pleased with the outcome of my life now.

I was part of a community for a few years and decided to help them out with my knowledge of programming Lua nearly 2 years ago since they lacked developers for the project itself.

Since it was sort of a custom language that they modified how Lua worked on it, it took me a bit to adapt, but within a few weeks, I was pretty fluent in this so-called custom language they had. Began working on some major updates, additions, removals, and just optimizing this code base. It was a pretty old code base and needed a good chunk of love.

A few months later, I've implemented loads of features, optimized the base whenever I could, and then things start taking a turn for the worse. We get new 'developers' who haven't ever coded the language, and worse they couldn't afford to provide them development servers thus they ended up breaking my servers. I helped them and they learned, they were decent, but now the Seniors and CEO's of the project began to take a toll on me.

I was told that this community had a reputation of driving out developers, ruining their reputations, and that is what started happening. I started getting questioned if I was loyal to helping them, that I've become lazy, even though they were explained I've had mental health issues for a few years and have been hospitalized multiple times.

These sort of attacks kept happening for months, and then they finally pushed my buttons, where I was talking to another Senior of how we should redo the base since it's just so massive and a few tiny updates to the base take a few days to implement across the entire code. What instead happened was that I went to sleep, and this Senior told the CEO I was going to steal the code base and go sell it...

I woke up to messages of how the CEO is all pissed off, and that this what the Senior said. At this point, I started responding with, fuck it. I was so sick and fucking tired of their bullshit. I was the only fucking competent developer, and I did more work in the few months I was there then some people did in 2 or 3 years.

A few hours later I decided to go chat with the CEO and explained what was truly brought up, and he just brushed it off like I was lying. At that point, I lost it. I told him why the code base was horrible since he hired stupid ass developers. He didn't know how to code. People wanted certain items, and he wouldn't be able to add them for fucking months and players sit there making fun of it. Some people state the only differences they see within the code is the code I've done. Basically, he was an incompetent fuck that said he knew what he was doing, and had all these big plans for the future yet couldn't listen to the only competent developer and fucking claimed bullshit.

Now a few months have gone by, I'm looking at their community and it's basically dead with no proper updates except for copy and paste updates claiming to be custom coded. While I'm working on my real life businesses (Which are currently being a headache, but within the year should resolve its issues), starting University for my Computer Science degree here soon, and even considering building my own game here.

Basically, karma is a bitch and that's why when you get loyal people in your life, keep them. (Writing this at 3 am after a few drinks, hopefully, it made sense, I think it does.)

Anyways, goodnight everyone.

My department is focused solely on web development. Of course we are part of the major portion of I.T

The entire I.T department got acknowledged for a very important piece of software. That I wrote.
The ceremony in which we were being recognized did not listed MY department, no, they listed the ENTIRETY of I.T.

Thing is, if this product was not delivered, then I was told that the blame would be MINE (I am speaking as the head of my department) but apparently if it succeeded (which it did) it is to be attributed to people that were not even involved in the project.

My employees tried calming me down when I got upset, one of them stated that it was not even our department's effort, but mine alone. And yes, I was the one that developed the solution. By myself, with complete testing, staging, the whole works. Everything, developed by me. BUT my employees held the entire department down while I was behind close doors developing this solution.
I was fucking upset, more so because my director sent an email thanking the entire I.T department for this "win"
I asked him through or messaging service if he could point out to me who else was involved, since I did not know of anyone else that did absolutely anything in this process other than myself and my guys.

Maybe the output of my program was parsed by another I.T department and something happened from it, maybe the money generated by the application (obscene amounts of it btw) were used to add more to the infrastructure etc, who knows, but as far as I know, you cannot say "if this fails it is on you" just for them to later on thank people that were not involved in the project.

This is why I would gladly move on to a different field. I don't want to be patted on the back constantly, I know how fucking good I am at what I do. But if I do something amazing I do not want to see those efforts being given to someone else.

The dev world is usually a thankless industry, but if thanks are given, then I want the sole credit.

If I am winning or loosing I want the whole fucking credit and you can be any more gangstah than that.

Easy. Was creating a website for a client and they asked if we could add "those, what do you call them? Yeah cliparts" to the website.

Cliparts? Really? Those silly cartoon things from MS Office?

If you are sick...

STAY THE FUCK HOME!

It has nothing to do with how YOU are feeling. It’s about RESPECT for those around you.

Especially if you work in an open office. Coming into an open office when sick is like coughing right on someone’s face repeatedly, it shows that same level of (lack of) respect.

Almost every company I have seen fucks this up so bad. It’s the same shit every year....

People are afraid to take days and stay home. They go in and make everyone sick, then everyone is taking days off and we are “short” on people. Then the incompetent CEO is scratching his head as to why this toxic work environment could produce such a toxic result.

And one more fucking thing.

If you got a cold/flu on Monday and your in the office on Wednesday because you are “feeling a bit better” then your a fucking idiot. At day 3 you are just starting to expel germs while still being highly contagious.

If you come into an open office while sick then I would say...

“Smarten the fuck up! And start showing some respect for the people you work with!”

If you have created (or are creating) a culture that encourages this then I would say...

“Fuck you! You should be fucking smarter than that.”

————

If your still sitting there thinking something like...

“Well I have to attend the meeting” or some other shit. Then let me add this to the pile.

Not everyone has had a rosy fucking life.

You may be working next to someone who has a lowered immune system due to past medical problems. What may be a week of sickness for you could end up being a month in the hospital for them.

You may be working next to a person who has a family member dying of cancer. If you make them sick then they can’t visit that family member (colds can kill cancer patients) and you may be stopping that person from seeing their loved ones one last time before they die.

Don’t be a fucking asshole.

STAY THE FUCK HOME!

When I saw that the Zuckman was gonna go testify for congress I already knew that shit was gonna be retarded.

I had 0 expectations of congress asking the correct questions.

I was still disappointed. That is the beauty of my government. I have 0 expectations and they still disappoint me.

I love playing the devil's advocate. I really do, in this case and even tho I think Facebook is the most toxic shit on the internet (right next to SO) I could not help it but think the entire time that we aaaare told that all our date are belongs to them as soon as we put shit on their application. Its just the nature of the beast. Don't like it? Don't use it! But if you are gonna use it then account for the fact that your data will be used for targeted adds. It makes more sense, I would rather have an add for tutorials and books and shit like i normally get rather than knowing that 10 hot singles are in my area (because those are all lies 9 times out of 10) but then again I would rather not have any adds at all.

One has to account for all the money that fb pours into shit, where do people think fb makes that money from ..duh our data and adds. But shit was too hard to understand for Congress.

I have a junior who really drives me up a wall. He's been a junior for a couple of years now (since he started as an intern here).

He always looks for the quickest, cheapest, easiest solution he can possibly think of to all his tickets. Most of it pretty much just involves copy/pasting code that has similar functionality from elsewhere in the application, tweaking some variable names and calling it a day. And I mean, I'm not knocking copy/paste solutions at all, because that's a perfectly valid way of learning certain things, provided that one actually analyzes the code they are cloning, and actually modifies it in a way that solves the problem, and can potentially extend the ability to reuse the original code. This is rarely the case with this guy.

I've tried to gently encourage this person to take their time with things, and really put some thought into design with his solutions instead of rushing to finish; because ultimately all the time he spends on reworks could have been spent on doing it right the first time. Problem is, this guy is very stubborn, and gets very defensive when any sort of insinuation is made that he needs to improve on something. My advice to actually spend time analyzing how an interface was used, or how an extension method can be further extended before trying to brute-force your way through the problem seems to fall on deaf ears.

I always like to include my juniors on my pull requests; even though I pretty much have all final say in what gets merged, I like to encourage not only all devs be given thoughtful, constructive criticism, regardless of "rank" but also give them the opportunity to see how others write code and learn by asking questions, and analyzing why I approached the problem the way I did. It seems like this dev consistently uses this opportunity to get in as many public digs as he can on my work by going for the low-hanging fruit: "whitespace", "add comments, this code isn't self-documenting", and "an if/else here is more readable and consistent with this file than a ternary statement". Like dude, c'mon. Can you at least analyze the logic and see if it's sound? or perhaps offer a better way of doing something, or ask if the way I did something really makes sense?

Mid-Year reviews are due this week; I'm really struggling to find any way to document any sort of progress he's made. Once in a great while, he does surprise me and prove that he's capable of figuring out how something works and manage to use the mechanisms properly to solve a problem. At the very least he's productive (in terms of always working on assigned work). And because of this, he's likely safe from losing his job because the company considers him cheap labor. He is very underpaid, but also very under-qualified.

He's my most problematic junior; worst part is, he only has a job because of me: I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt when my boss asked me if we should extend an offer, as I thought it was only fair to give the opportunity to grow and prove himself like I was given. But I'm also starting to toe the line of being a good mentor by giving opportunities to learn, and falling behind on work because I could have just done it myself in a fraction of the time.

I hate managing people. I miss the days of code + spotify for 10 hours a day then going home.

Some of the penguin's finest insults (Some are by me, some are by others):

Disclaimer: We all make mistakes and I typically don't give people that kind of treatment, but sometimes, when someone is really thick, arrogant or just plain stupid, the aid of the verbal sledgehammer is neccessary.

"Yeah, you do that. And once you fucked it up, you'll go get me a coffee while I fix your shit again."

"Don't add me on Facebook or anything... Because if any of your shitty code is leaked, ever, I want to be able to plausibly deny knowing you instead of doing Seppuku."

"Yep, and that's the point where some dumbass script kiddie will come, see your fuckup and turn your nice little shop into a less nice but probably rather popular porn/phishing/malware source. I'll keep some of it for you if it's good."

"I really love working with professionals. But what the fuck are YOU doing here?"

"I have NO idea what your code intended to do - but that's the first time I saw RCE and SQLi in the same piece of SHIT! Thanks for saving me the hassle."

"If you think XSS is a feature, maybe you should be cleaning our shitter instead of writing our code?"

"Dude, do I look like I have blue hair, overweight and a tumblr account? If you want someone who'd rather lie to your face than insult you, go see HR or the catholics or something."

"The only reason for me NOT to support you getting fired would be if I was getting paid per bug found!"

"Go fdisk yourself!"

"You know, I doubt the one braincell you have can ping localhost and get a response." (That one's inspired by the BOFH).

"I say we move you to the blockchain. I'd volunteer to do the cutting." (A marketing dweeb suggested to move all our (confidential) customer data to the "blockchain").

"Look, I don't say you suck as a developer, but if you were this competent as a gardener, I'd be the first one to give you a hedgetrimmer and some space and just let evolution do its thing."

"Yeah, go fetch me a unicorn while you're chasing pink elephants."

"Can you please get as high as you were when this time estimate come up? I'd love to see you overdose."

"Fuck you all, I'm a creationist from now on. This guy's so dumb, there's literally no explanation how he could evolve. Sorry Darwin."

"You know, just ignore the bloodstain that I'll put on the wall by banging my head against it once you're gone."

I recently ranted so much about languages but here it goes

JS we need to talk. BECAUSE YOU GOT FAT AND UGLY STUPID BITCH! Dumb piece of bloatware. What even is your problem? Depending on a library for strpad and then blow up like Steve jobs ego. Bastardized fuckfest. I used to like you bro and then you screw me over!
It's like you fuck my wife while I try to fix your car. Why can't you even be usefully on your own anymore? I'd be richer than bill gates if I get a dollar for every damn framework people pull from their asses. Are you writing this fuck while shitting so you can compare colors of your outcome?

Normalize the fucking base, don't add to the bukkakke! bitch is drowning already. Why is everyone jerking of to react and angular? When have YOU written something in vanilla the last time? Why even bother? Remove the core and hardcore every damn framework into the browsers. Guess that saves you 200kb. Oh wait I forgot that's about unminified jQuery.

Now I need to load about 2GB of dependencies, some creating code that puts code in my code to load code out of my code which was generated out of something that remotely resembles JS so every browser is able to execute my fancy shit. But hey, it's fast. And of course there are the fanboys. You are worse than apple fags. You sample your own jizz with your friends in a wine glass. there was a Time it was bad practice to mix logic and view. Now you made it mandatory. "Browser does the rendering" ofc you imbecile pile of fuck don't show me a damn preloader for 1 picture and 20 lines of text. Who fucked your brain so hard?

So react seems to be the cool kid now, then I tell someone I know angular it's like showing up in a pikachu onsie to a formal dinner with the queen.

I used to love you girl. I loved how we could dirty things together. Now you are like a pig. Please loose weight bby the sight of you disgusts me nowadays

[ Introduction ]
In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website add content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk.

[ The story ]
A year ago I had a problem with X software.
I opened a ticket on its repository but a week goes by and no one responds. I need it to work! So I opened a pull request and it got merged in a day or two after a quick review.

Seeing that the tickets were many and the maintainers were few, I decided to stay and help.

Today, I am in the top #10 contributors.
I have made 20 commits and edited 4k lines of code. (Honestly, it's not that much, at work I do way more than that, anyway...)

This repository is an alternative to another popular closed-source software and it's massively used by well-known companies
(tech-giants).

[ Stats ]
User base: 20.000 (all of them are devs)
Total contributors: 200 (1%)
Contributors with more than 1 commit: 60 (0.3%)

[ Consideration ]
I would never have believed a year ago that participation could be so low despite the number of dev-users being so high.

The software does not require great technical expertise and if you are using it for work then you already have the skill-set you need to contribute.

Now listen, I know that not everyone wants to contribute. I know right and I respect it ... but really:

The 0.3% ?! Only 60 devs on 20k are active contributors?! Only 200 (1%) devs have ever made a single commit and then they left.

Holy sh**

Yes yes yes
Let's spend countless hours writing painful spaghetti that generates a financial report, extend that spaghetti for specs, then not bother to check the amounts or status. or where it says the money went. Nope, checking non-unique names is totally good enough. We're so good at this. Ten points to the legendaries.

Let's also make the object factories not create the objects correctly, and make sure that report includes entries for orders that don't include any actual payments. Oh, their status? "Ready to send" of course! Let's send that totally valid $0.00 to nobody!

Oh, but Root. Root, root, root. You can't ADD payments to this. no no no. if you do, it'll break specs everywhere else that uses that factory! Shame on you for suggesting it.

Pssh, now you want to make a payment just for this report? Why would you do that? Our best devs have been working on this for years! What could you possibly know that they don't? No, they're perfect. Don't touch them. Just make them better, okay? No take, only throw!

"I'm almost done, I'll just need to add tests!"

Booom! You did it, that was a nuke going off in my head.

No, you shouldn't just need to add tests. The tests should have been written from the get go! You most likely won't cover all the cases. You won't know if adding the tests will break your feature, as you had none, as you refactor your untested mess in order to make your code testable.

When reading your mess of a test case and the painful mocking process you went through, I silently cry out into the void: "Why oh why!? All of this suffering could have been avoided!"

Since most of the time, your mocking pain boils down to not understanding what your "unit" in your "unit test" should be.

So let it be said:

- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, then just write a function / class whose *only* purpose is: parse the XML file, return a value object. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.
- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, it MUST NOT: download a zip, extract that zip, merge all those files to one big file, parse that big file, talk to some other random APIs as a side-effect, and then return a value object.

Because then you suddenly have to mock away a http service and deal with zip files in your test cases.

The http util of your programming language will most likely work. Your unzip library will most likely work. So just assume it working. There are valid use cases where you want to make sure you acutally send a request and get a response, yet I am talking unit test here only.

In the scope of a class, keep the public methods to a reasonable minimum. As for each public method you shall at least create one test case. If you ever have the feeling "I want to test that private method" replace that statement in your head with: "I should extract that functionality to a new class where that method public. I then can create a unit test case a for that." That new service then becomes a dependency in your current service. Problem solved.

Also, mocking away dependencies should a simple process. If your mocking process fills half the screen, your test setup is overly complicated and your class is doing too much.

That's why I currently dig functional programming so much. When you build pure functions without side effects, unit tests are easy to write. Yet you can apply pure functions to OOP as well (to a degree). Embrace immutability.

Sidenote:

It's really not helpful that a lot of developers don't understand the difference between unit, functional acceptance, integration testing. Then they wonder why they can't test something easily, write overly complex test cases, until someone points out to them: No, in the scope of unit tests, we don't need to test our persistance layer. We just assume that it works. We should only test our businsess logic. You know: "Assuming that I get that response from the database, I expect that to happen." You don't need a test db, make a real query against that, in order to test that. (That still is a valid thing to do. Yet not in the scope of unit tests.)

I am much too tired to go into details, probably because I left the office at 11:15pm, but I finally finished a feature. It doesn't even sound like a particularly large or complicated feature. It sounds like a simple, 1-2 day feature until you look at it closely.

It took me an entire fucking week. and all the while I was coaching a junior dev who had just picked up Rails and was building something very similar.

It's the model, controller, and UI for creating a parent object along with 0-n child objects, with default children suggestions, a fancy ui including the ability to dynamically add/remove children via buttons. and have the entire happy family save nicely and atomically on the backend. Plus a detailed-but-simple listing for non-technicals including some absolutely nontrivial css acrobatics.

After getting about 90% of everything built and working and beautiful, I learned that Rails does quite a bit of this for you, through `accepts_nested_params_for :collection`. But that requires very specific form input namespacing, and building that out correctly is flipping difficult. It's not like I could find good examples anywhere, either. I looked for hours. I finally found a rails tutorial vide linked from a comment on a SO answer from five years ago, and mashed its oversimplified and dated examples with the newer documentation, and worked around the issues that of course arose from that disasterous paring.

like.
I needed to store a template of the child object markup somewhere, yeah? The video had me trying to store all of the markup in a `data-fields=" "` attrib. wth? I tried storing it as a string and injecting it into javascript, but that didn't work either. parsing errors! yay! good job, you two.

So I ended up storing the markup (rendered from a rails partial) in an html comment of all things, and pulling the markup out of the comment and gsubbing its IDs on document load. This has the annoying effect of preventing me from using html comments in that partial (not that i really use them anyway, but.)

Just.
Every step of the way on building this was another mountain climb.
* singular vs plural naming and routing, and named routes. and dealing with issues arising from existing incorrect pluralization.
* reverse polymorphic relation (child -> x parent)
* The testing suite is incompatible with the new rails6. There is no fix. None. I checked. Nope. Not happening.
* Rails6 randomly and constantly crashes and/or caches random things (including arbitrary code changes) in development mode (and only development mode) when working with multiple databases.
* nested form builders
* styling a fucking checkbox
* Making that checkbox (rather, its label and container div) into a sexy animated slider
* passing data and locals to and between partials
* misleading documentation
* building the partials to be self-contained and reusable
* coercing form builders into namespacing nested html inputs the way Rails expects
* input namespacing redux, now with nested form builders too!
* Figuring out how to generate markup for an empty child when I'm no longer rendering the children myself
* Figuring out where the fuck to put the blank child template markup so it's accessible, has the right namespacing, and is not submitted with everything else
* Figuring out how the fuck to read an html comment with JS
* nested strong params
* nested strong params
* nested fucking strong params
* caching parsed children's data on parent when the whole thing is bloody atomic.
* Converting datetimes from/to milliseconds on save/load
* CSS and bootstrap collisions
* CSS and bootstrap stupidity
* Reinventing the entire multi-child / nested params / atomic creating/updating/deleting feature on my own before discovering Rails can do that for you.

Just.
I am so glad it's working.
I don't even feel relieved. I just feel exhausted.

But it's done.
finally.

and it's done well. It's all self-contained and reusable, it's easy to read, has separate styling and reusable partials, etc. It's a two line copy/paste drop-in for any other model that needs it. Two lines and it just works, and even tells you if you screwed up.

I'm incredibly proud of everything that went into this.
But mostly I'm just incredibly tired.

Time for some well-deserved sleep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm coming off a lengthy staff augmentation assignment awful enough that I feel like I need to be rehabilitated to convince myself that I even want to be a software developer.

They needed someone who does .NET. It turns out what they meant was someone to copy and paste massive amounts of code that their EA calls a "framework." Just copy and paste this entire repo, make a whole ton of tweaks that for whatever reason never make their way back into the "template," and then make a few edits for some specific functionality. And then repeat. And repeat. Over a dozen times.

The code is unbelievable. Everything is stacked into giant classes that inherit from each other. There's no dependency inversion. The classes have default constructors with a comment "for unit testing" and then the "real" code uses a different one.

It's full of projects, classes, and methods with weird names that don't do anything. The class and method names sound like they mean something but don't. So after a dozen times I tried to refactor, and the EA threw a hissy fit. Deleting dead code, reducing three levels of inheritance to a simple class, and renaming stuff to indicate what it does are all violations of "standards." I had to go back to the template and start over.

This guy actually recorded a video of himself giving developers instructions on how to copy and paste his awful code.

Then he randomly invents new "standards." A class that reads messages from a queue and processes them shouldn't process them anymore. It should read them and put them in another queue, and then we add more complication by reading from that queue. The reason? We might want to use the original queue for something else one day. I'm pretty sure rewriting working code to meet requirements no one has is as close as you can get to the opposite of Agile.

I fixed some major bugs during my refactor, and missed one the second time after I started over. So stuff actually broke in production because I took points off the board and "fixed" what worked to add back in dead code, variables that aren't used, etc.

In the process, I asked the EA how he wanted me to do this stuff, because I know that he makes up "standards" on the fly and whatever I do may or may not be what he was imagining. We had a tight deadline and I didn't really have time to guess, read his mind, get it wrong, and start over. So we scheduled an hour for him to show me what he wanted.

He said it would take fifteen minutes. He used the first fifteen insisting that he would not explain what he wanted, and besides he didn't remember how all of the code he wrote worked anyway so I would just have to spend more time studying his masterpiece and stepping through it in the debugger.

Being accountable to my team, I insisted that we needed to spend the scheduled hour on him actually explaining what he wanted. He started yelling and hung up. I had to explain to management that I could figure out how to make his "framework" work, but it would take longer and there was no guarantee that when it was done it would magically converge on whatever he was imagining. We totally blew that deadline.

When the .NET work was done, I got sucked into another part of the same project where they were writing massive 500 line SQL stored procedures that no one could understand. They would write a dozen before sending any to QA, then find out that there was a scenario or two not accounted for, and rewrite them all. And repeat. And repeat. Eventually it consisted of, one again, copying and pasting existing procedures into new ones.

At one point one dev asked me to help him test his procedure. I said sure, tell me the scenarios for which I needed to test. He didn't know. My question was the equivalent of asking, "Tell me what you think your code does," and he couldn't answer it. If the guy who wrote it doesn't know what it does right after he wrote it and you certainly can't tell by reading it, and there's dozens of these procedures, all the same but slightly different, how is anyone ever going to read them in a month or a year? What happens when someone needs to change them? What happens when someone finds another defect, and there are going to be a ton of them?

It's a nightmare. Why interview me with all sorts of questions about my dev skills if the plan is to have me copy and paste stuff and carefully avoid applying anything that I know?

The people are all nice except for their evil XEB (Xenophobe Expert Beginner) EA who has no business writing a line of code, ever, and certainly shouldn't be reviewing it.

I've tried to keep my sanity by answering stackoverflow questions once in a while and sometimes turning evil things I was forced to do into constructive blog posts to which I cannot link to preserve my anonymity. I feel like I've taken a six-month detour from software development to shovel crap. Never again. Lesson learned. Next time they're not interviewing me. I'm interviewing them. I'm a professional.

I've run into problems with the app I'm working on, the problems are related to issues regarding code.

No in fact it's related the last guy who wrote the app, the code has no comments and the variable names make no sense, the only comments in the code are blocks of code... With no reason as to why it was commented.

I have to add in some checks to determine if a person that has logged in is a full member or not (full member has access to the feature I've added) and the way the guy has made this app works makes no sense to me at all.

I've tried my best to avoid all contact with his code because it makes me want to yell out in frustration.

But for this one case I have to work with what's there.

I know I've mentioned this before but I've hit my limit yet again.

And for those who don't know this guy managed to scrape together skeleton code from two apps to make part of this app, rather than using parts of the other apps he left out code that was specifically made for the other apps, (majority of the commented out code).

One app was a taxi app and from the looks of it the feature he used was to get GPS location (which I don't understand before Google maps is a think after all... The taxi app USES Google maps), the other app is some sort of funeral webcasting app (I found code imports for it, without any actual code).

I don't actual understand how this guy could put this together without not thinking "maybe this is a bad idea"

Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live

I'm that psychopath right now..... Fuck that guy (don't know where he lives though)

SM = Scrum Master

SM: "Card #130, you added a comment saying you aren't going to do update the report?"
Me:"Yea, I explained why in the comment"
SM: "Product owner wants it."
Me: "Product owner isn't the manager using it. I talked with Steve, he said the data is accurate and they have to go to the database anyway to verify the error. That report has no way of knowing the message logged could be a false positive."
SM: "That's not our job to decide. If the Product Owner wants the feature, we add the feature."
Me: "It is absolutely is our job. Steve is the user of the report. I could really care less what the product owner said. The only reason he created the card was because Steve told him a specific error logged could be a false positive, and only happens, maybe, once a month. I'm not wasting my time, Steve's time, or this project's time on wild goose chases."
SM: "I'll schedule a meeting this afternoon to discuss the issue with the product owner. Don't worry, if you can't figure out how to filter out the false positives, I'll assign the ticket to me."

fracking fracking kiss ass. I swear, if he goes behind my back again ....I... deep breath....ahhh...OK..Thanks devrant. Work place incident diverted.

Made a Website.
What this friendly old Lady wanted: a update to her poem/song website that looked horrible.
What she got: A goddamn masterpiece considering there is NO backend and I got nearly no ressources to work with.
It took forever to put that stuff together since I thought I dont need any frameworks at all. I didnt know PHP at all back then, so I just went all out with everything that pure HTML and CSS could give me.
I even went outside to make nice photos to put into the Background.
....so, he said no PHP or anything? YES! If you wanna add content you change the HTML and upload stuff via Filezilla. I dont really want to see it ever again. But not because it looks bad.

I know, its not really coding since its HTML but I Count this!

A recipe for COMPLETELY hacking me off - ask for help, pretend my advice is bollocks, then rephrase it as your own and follow it up with a smart arse comment.

"Almond, could you lend me a hand with this regex? I'm trying to match this particular group, but only if it doesn't have 'foo' after it."

"Sure, take a look at negative lookaheads - that sounds like it's exactly what you need"

"Nah that won't work for me, because I need to check for more than one character after it, I need to check for 'foo'"

"What? That doesn't make sense, you can..."

"Ah don't worry, I've found the answer by myself now, I can actually just add '?!' before the text I don't want to match and it'll do it - I'm fast becoming a regex expert here! Let me know if you want me to explain this to you"

DAHHHHHHH THAT IS A NEGATIVE LOOKAHEAD YOU CRETIN

Send help..

The project we're currently working on:

- an angular codebase that's broken beyond recognition - nothing's working as it should

- user stories are estimated in hours, but estimations are treated as hard facts. Since the app is so broken, everything takes longer than usual and it's almost impossible to consider every potential hardship during refinements, therefore, we constantly need more time than we have estimated

- retrospectives (intentional plural here, since one time isn't enough) are used to discuss why we cannot manage to finish tickets within the estimations

- the design was made beforehand and is extremely inconsistent and inaccessible

- if you open a new ticket, you need to add a reason for why this ticket is needed - in addition to the ticket description..

- The moment you move a ticket to QA, the "Scrum Master" breathes down your neck, shoving new tickets in your face. Despite having to finish up the other two you're still working on

- multiple teams are working on the application, but - of course - communication is overrated.

I could go on, but I'm too tired..
We were supposed to help the client for a couple of months - we're close to a year now and still nowhere near done.

Dogecoin hit USD $0.40 recently, which means it's time for the Crypto Rant.

TL;DR: Dogecoin is shit and is logically guaranteed to eventually fall unless it is fundamentally changed.

===========================

If you know how Crypto works under the hood, you can skip to the next section. If you don't, here's the general xyz-coin formula:

Money is sent via transactions, which are validated by *anybody*.

Since transactions are validated by anybody, the system needs to make sure you're not fucking it up on purpose.

The current idea (that most coins use today) is called proof-of-work. In short, you're given an extremely difficult task, and the general idea is you wouldn't be willing to do that work if you were just going to fuck up the system.

For validating these transactions, you are rewarded twofold:

1) You are given a fixed-size prize of the currency from the system itself. This is how new currency is introduced, or "minted" if you prefer.
2) You are given variable-size and user-determined prize called "transaction fees", but it could be more accurately called a "bribe" since it's sole purpose is to entice miners to add YOUR transaction to their block.

This system of validation and reward is called mining.

===========================

This smaller section compares the design o f BTC to Dogecoin - which will lead to my final argument

In BTC, the time between blocks (chunks of data which record transactions and are added to the chain, hence blockchain) is ten minutes. Every ten minutes, BTC transactions are validated and new Bitcoins are born.

In Dogecoin, the time between blocks is only one minute. In Theory, this means that mining Dogecoin is about ten times easier, because the system expects you to be able to solve the proof of work in an average of one minute.

The huge difference between BTC and Doge is the block reward (Fixed amount; new coins minted). The block reward for BTC is somewhat complicated compared to Doge: It started as 50 BTC per block and every 4 years it is halved ("the great halving"). Right now it's 6.25 BTC per block. Soon, the block reward will be almost nothing until BTC hits it's max of 21 million bitcoins "minted".

Dogecoin reward is 10,000 coins per block. And it will be that way for the end of time - no maximum, no great halving. And remember, for every 1 BTC block mined, 10 Doge blocks are mined.

===========================

Bitcoin and Dogecoin are now the two most popular coins in pop culture. What makes me angry is the widespread misunderstanding of the differences between the two. It is likely that most investors buy Dogecoin thinking they're getting in "early" because it's so cheap. They think it's cheap because it isn't as popular as Bitcoin yet. They're wrong. It's cheap because of what's outlined in section two of this rant.

Dogecoin is actually not very far off Bitcoin. Do the math: there's a bit over 100 billion Dogecoin in circulation (130b). There's about 20 million BTC. Calculate their total CURRENT values:

130b * $0.40 = 52b
20m * $60k = 1.2t

...and Doge is rising much, much faster than BTC because of the aforementioned lack of understanding.

The most common thing I hear about Doge is that "nobody expects it to reach Bitcoin levels" (referring to being worth 60k a fucking coin). They don't realize that if Doge gets to be worth just $10 a coin, it will not just reach Bitcoin levels but overtake Bitcoin in value ($1.3T).

===========================

It's worth highlighting that Dogecoin is literally designed to fail. Since it lacks a cap on new coins being introduced, it's just simple math that no matter how much Doge rises, it will eventually be worthless. And it won't take centuries, remember that 100k new Doge are mined EVERY TEN MINUTES. 1,440 minutes in a day * 10K per minute is 14.4 million new coins per day. That's damn near every Bitcoin to ever exist mined every day in Dogecoin

Init and Hello. My name is git and this is my story.

I just arrived in this system recently by the apt highway. It's not the only way though. Some for example used the npm hype-train, others arrived from the ssh shore. No matter where we came from the next step on our agenda was time to introduce our self at the event destined for all new-comers to the system.
"As many of you I reside in the usr-bin district. I'm really into history and commitment! I like it when people work together, so I'm always eager to bring all branches together."
"But what is it actually good for?", asked Curl, which I already met at the bus station. Many nodded in agreement. It was odd. Somehow I felt not quite at home. All the others seemed so different based on their field of work.
"We have worked here in a really agile environment for ages. There is no need for any kind of strange bureaucracy.", said another voice.
All attempts to convince them from the beauty of history or a little bit of management were unsuccessful. It was just the beginning of a not so interesting stage in my life - to say the least.

Today was another of 'those' days. I live in this community for quiet a while now and unfortunately nothing really changed - at least for the good. I sat on my branch of the tree with all the others around and there was nothing really to do for me. Again. I mean, actually it's true. I have to admit it. There is just no work on this world for someone like me. All the others seem to be so busy, while I just have to sit around and question my own existence. Since I grew tired asking these questions to myself, I stopped it. I can't do a thing actually. That's not how this world works.
"Hey fagit, anything meaningful to add to our delightful conversation?", nginx shouted over to me from another branch of the tree. Before I was able to give an indifferent answer the voice just continued.
"Oh, sorry. I forgot that you have no purpose after all. Well, never mind!"
Everyone started laughing at me. It was not too bad by the way. Actually, this was quite ordinary. These fucktards completely ran out of creativity. If it wasn't for that mere emptiness gaping right above my guts, I'd actually be disappointed. I even got accustomed to the alias 'fagit'. Quiet sad given the fact that i really like my real name. If only someone would mind using it... First too quiet to notice but growing in intensity a rumbling emerged from somewhere deep within the tree. Out of a sudden everyone stopped laughing. The voices slowly faded while the growling from afar grew louder. It had come. Not more than a shadow reached out from the tree and faster than anyone could comprehend nginx was simply gone. Killed in an instance.

Disclaimer: This story is fictional. No systems were harmed in its creation.

I’m trying to add digit separators to a few amount fields. There’s actually three tickets to do this in various places, and I’m working on the last of them.

I had a nightmare debugging session earlier where literally everything would 404 unless I navigated through the site in a very roundabout way. I never did figure out the cause, but I found a viable workaround. Basically: the house doesn’t exist if you use the front door, but it’s fine if you go through the garden gate, around the back, and crawl in through the side window. After hours of debugging I eventually discovered that if I unlocked the front door with a different key, everything was fine… but nobody else has this problem?

Whatever.
Onto the problem at hand!

I’m trying to add digit separators to some values. I found a way to navigate to the page in question (more difficult than it sounds), and … I don’t know what view is rendering the page. Or what controller. Or how it generates its text.

The URL is encrypted, so I get no clues there. (Which was lead dev’s solution to having scrapeable IDs instead of just, you know, fixing them). The encryption also happens in middleware, so it’s a nightmare to work through. And it’s by the lead dev, so the code is fucking atrocious.

The view… could be one of many, and I don’t even know where they are. Or what layout. Or what partials go into building it.

All of the text on the page are “resources” — think named translations that support plus nested macros. I don’t know their names, and the bits of text I can search for are used fucking everywhere. “Confirmation number” (the most unique of them) turns up 79 matches. “Fee” showed up in 8310 places before my editor gave up looking. Really.

The table displaying the data, which is what I actually care about, isn’t built in JS or markup, but is likely a resource that goes through heavy processing. It gets generated in a controller somewhere (I don’t know the resource name so I can’t find it), and passed through several layers of “dynamic form” abstraction, eventually turned into markup, and rendered as a partial template. At least, that’s how it worked in the previous ticket. I found a resource that looks right, and there’s only the one. I found the nested macros it uses for the amount and total, and added the separators there… only to find that it doesn’t work.

Fucking dead end.

And i have absolutely nothing else to go on.

Page title? “Show”
URL? /~LiolV8N8KrIgaozEgLv93s…
Text? All from macros with unknown names. Can’t really search for it without considerable effort.
Table? Doesn’t work.
Text in the table? doesn’t turn up anything new.
Legal agreement? There are multiple, used in many places, generates them dynamically via (of course) resources, and even looking through the method usages, doesn’t narrow it down very much.

Just.
What the fuck?
Why does this need to be so fucking complicated?

And what genius decided “$100000.00” doesn’t need separators? Right, the lot of them because separators aren’t used ANYWHERE but in code I authored. Like, really? This is fintech. You’d think they would be ubiquitous.

And the sheer amount of abstraction?
Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.

* A job application followup email I received:

Hi [programmerName],
Thank you for your interest in joining [companyName].

While we appreciate your application, we decided to move forward with other candidates whose skills and experience are a closer match to our requirements for this specific role.
Feel free to check back, as we are always adding new positions.

Best of luck with your career search!
-The [companyName] Team

* My (probably trashed) reply:

Hello

I personally ignore this precompiled stuff you HR people send.
I feel this answer will be probably trashed somewhere but I feel the need to write this.

You know absolutely nothing about my skills because you didn’t even talk with me.

Maybe I am not the best person in writing a resume or an introduction letter, the key skill appreciated in companies doing head hunting instead of building a solid corporate culture and cultivating talent. Or at least HR people in such companies.

Please consider that, maybe you didn’t like my resume or I didn't write a list of words matching your check list, but at least I honestly wrote my experience instead of trying to hack my way to a job interview writing a fake one that triggers usual HR patterns.
Consider that I do a job for a living and I don't live or have the time to make the perfect resume, I don’t even apply for all companies I see, I only apply for the ones I believe I can work well because I like them. I am not a professional job searcher, jumping from a company to another.

You keep posting this very same add since October 2019 and probably even earlier.
This sounds to me like:
- or your selection process does not work well and you end up hiring the wrong people
- or maybe your work place is not that good as you describe it, so that you have zero retainment despite your high salary.
But I cannot be sure because, guess what, I could not check personally.

If you want to talk about my skills and compare me to other people please test me otherwise don’t write (copy/paste) this offensive trash.

Best of luck with your career as a HR person in a tech company!

-A person tired of HR managers that do not give a f**k about the word “human” in their job description.

I remember a few months ago at my school we all had taken the Chromebooks (our county's OS of choice) out and put them on our desks. We were in science, and we needed to take screenshots of websites for some reason. "Everyone go to the chrome store," our teacher said, with a look-how-smart-i-am kind of look on her face, "search for the 'Awesome Screenshot Extension.'" Ugh. This was dumb. I reluctantly searched it up and upon bringing up the description and about to press the "Add to Chrome" button, when I stopped, and made a decision I would later regret. Now, I don't really like this teacher, and she thought she was so fucking smart for finding this shit extension. I raised my hand, and she walked over. "Uhh… I'm pretty sure you can just do Ctrl + shift + []|| to take a screenshot" I said. She was fucking dumbfounded. She yelled out "Class, listen up! [Let's call me 'Ben' for this story] Ben just found an alternative [she was trying to make her extension not seem entirely useless, even though she knew it was] way to take a screenshot. Just press Ctrl + shift plus that box with the two lines next to it. You can use my extension or the one Ben found. Whichever is easier [she damn well knew which was easier]." Three times in the span of the next five minutes she said "just a reminder… you can use Ben's way if you want" to the whole class. Everyone kept looking at me. A few minutes later, she called me up to the computer which was being displayed on the big screen in front of class. She said some people were having trouble, so then pulled all the attention on me to come up to the front of class and demonstrate a goddamn keyboard shortcut. She was running windows 8, and I knew it wouldn't work on her computer. I pressed a few random keys on the keyboard and said "uhh, I think it only works on their computers" she let me sit back down. She couldn't handle the concept that different computers run different operating systems. I sat down and the guy sitting next to me raised his hand. He said "you could use the 'snippet tool'" Yes. Some people can. But she can't. I stopped him from doing anymore damage on their small brains by saying "uhh, it won't work on the Chromebooks, so that won't help." I hate that teacher. At lunch my friend came over to me. He has the same science teacher as me. "You know what she's been saying all day?" I was confused. "What?" I said. He almost started to laugh. "All day she's [the teacher] has been telling everyone that you found this amazing new technology in the Chromebooks. [Most of the students were smart enough to know that I didnt] she was like 'Ben, from my 2nd period found this amazing thing'" End of story. And guess what? I still hate her.

!rant

Conversation between [C]oworker and... some kind of customer-side [P]roject manager.

P: Hey, our release 2.0 is ready, but somehow I can't add tag to master. Could you try, please?
C: Yeah, sure.... Done... We are missing tag for 1.2 still, should we add it?
P: Oh, right, I forgot about that.
C: Ok, found merge... Done.
P: *displaying repo in GitBlit* Uh, now the order is wrong. And date is the same. Can we do something about that?
Me: We can just push that tag with replaced date. *just guessing*
P&C: You can do that??
Me: Sure
Me.thinking: Thats git... I would be suprised if we could not.
Me: *pushing tag* Check it now.
P: Whoa, nice!

At work the other day...

Guy: "Oh hey I was thinking if you could help me with an application to visualize some data."

Me: "Ooookay...what did you have in mind?"

Guy: "I think we have XML files that could be turned into graphs...oh and we could add some trend lines. (Getting more excited) And maybe we could supplement it with live data...oh hey and maybe we could add real time alerts via email..."

Me: *thinks to self...there is no way in hell I am starting to work on something that he is literally coming up with requirements as he's talking* "I need specifics...so go take some time, think it through and get back to me with concrete details and examples."

Guy: "Ok. That should be enough to get you started for now at least."

That would be a big fuck no, good sir. Haven't started and won't start it. He has never mentioned it to me again since then.

So this is what happened!
It was a rainy Friday, I was asked to add a quick bug fix to a js application, I spent my Friday coding, testing ..., baam the patch is ready ... I wrote a nice commit message explains the problem and the fix but I didn't push the code.

On Monday the fuckin code disappeared, no commit no code no nothing no trace ... To be honest I don't know what happened. I rewrote everything on that Money morning (you can only imagine how pest I was)

I use vim with tmux.
I have done everything I could to figure out what happened to that commit, I even doubted If had did wrote the fix that Friday, but it's not possible to forget few hours of a day
I checked my commit history on the different branches i did everything

No trace ...
Conclusion
My machine is hunted ...
Or I have multiple personalities and one of them is a programmer and he is fucking with me

if there's one thing I love more than coding, it's using metaphors to explain to other people why they're not "getting it". like the all famous contractor:

"yeah I know you need 5 months to build my house, but can you do it in 2. Also, I'm going to pay half. Oh, and when the house is done, could you also add a cellar?"

any more good metaphors out there?

Have a couple I want to air today.

First was at my first gig as a dev, 4-5 months out of school. I was the only dev at a startup where the owner was a computer illiterate psycopath with serious temper tantrums. We're talking slamming doors, shouting at you while you are on the phone with customers, the works...

Anyways, what happened was that we needed to do an update in our database to correct some data on a few order lines regarding a specific product. Guess who forgot the fucking where-clause... Did I mention this boss was a cheap ass, dollar stupid, penny wise asshole that refused to have anything but the cheapest hosting? No backups, no test/dev/staging environment, no local copies... Yeah, live devving in prod, fucking all customers with a missing semi-colon (or where clause).

Amazingly, his sheer incompetance saved my ass, because even if I explained it, he didn't get it, and just wanted it fixed as best we could.

The second time was at a different company where we were delivering managed network services for a few municipalities. I was working netops at that time, mostly Cisco branded stuff, from Voice-over-IP and wifi to switches and some routing.

One day I was rolling out a new wireless network, and had to add the VLAN to the core switch on the correct port. VLAN's, for those who don't know, are virtual networks you can use to run several separated networks on the same cable.

To add a VLAN on a Cisco switch one uses the command:

switchport access vlan add XYZ

My mistake was omitting the 'add', which Cisco switches happily accept without warning. That command however can be quite disruptive as it replaces all of the excisting VLAN's with the new one.

Not a big deal on a distribution switch supplying an office floor or something, but on a fucking core switch in the datacenter this meant 20K user had no internet, no access to the applications in the DS, no access to Active Directory etc. Oh and my remote access to that switch also went down the drain...

Luckily a colleague of mine was on site with a console cable and access to config backups. Shit was over within 15 minutes. My boss at that time was thankfully a pragmatic guy who just responded "Well, at least you won't make that mistake again" when we debriefed him after the dust settled.

Not necessarily ignorant, but funny.
Before my current job I used to work for a company that provided software services to logistic type corporations, import export and all that jazz.

I was asked to generate an admin interface that would allow people to enter scans from different products, sort them in the right place and update the main interface. During the time we were using Classic ASP with VBScript. There, AJAX and similar functionality can get quite tricky, but definitely doable if you know what you are doing, VBScript has many limitations when compared to something like PHP for example. But thus the application was created in about a week once everything was sorted and then the storage manager came back to ask me if I could put a spinner or something in it to show that the information was loading. I asked him if the information was not being updated accordingly or if there were similar issues to that extent.

He said "no, it is working perfectly and I have no problem with the functionality, but these morons keep trying to scan shit because they can't tell if something is being populated into the main table in the interface because it all happens so quickly" Me: "well it is a very simple process, if you want I can add some sort of additional message to that or a spinner or something of the like that would show for two seconds or something, just so they can get some visual clarification"

Him: "This is a pretty stupid thing isn't it?". Me: Yes. Him: "I am so sorry to ask for this, how long will it take you?" Me: "Lol give me about 30 mins maybe less, it is no problem really, let me get this out of the way so that your people can get to it without loosing anymore time"

Such things are the reason why they literally brought me to the head of the company when I told them that I was leaving in an effort for him to try and convince me to stay. I was not to be contracted into their service anymore, but a full time employee. It was nice for them to ask really, but I declined in favor of the benefits I get from my current company.

To this day I think its funny and they remember as well.

I don't know if I'm being pranked or not, but I work with my boss and he has the strangest way of doing things.
- Only use PHP
- Keep error_reporting off (for development), Site cannot function if they are on.
- 20,000 lines of functions in a single file, 50% of which was unused, mostly repeated code that could have been reduced massively.
- Zero Code Comments
- Inconsistent variable names, function names, file names -- I was literally project searching for months to find things.
- There is nothing close to a normalized SQL Database, column ID names can't even stay consistent.
- Every query is done with a mysqli wrapper to use legacy mysql functions.
- Most used function is to escape stirngs
- Type-hinting is too strict for the code.
- Most files packed with Inline CSS, JavaScript and PHP - we don't want to use an external file otherwise we'd have to open two of them.
- Do not use a package manger composer because he doesn't have it installed.. Though I told him it's easy on any platform and I'll explain it.
- He downloads a few composer packages he likes and drag/drop them into random folder.
- Uses $_GET to set values and pass them around like a message contianer.
- One file is 6000 lines which is a giant if statement with somewhere close to 7 levels deep of recursion.
- Never removes his old code that bloats things.
- Has functions from a decade ago he would like to save to use some day. Just regular, plain old, PHP functions.
- Always wants to build things from scratch, and re-using a lot of his code that is honestly a weird way of doing almost everything.
- Using CodeIntel, Mess Detectors, Error Detectors is not good or useful.
- Would not deploy to production through any tool I setup, though I was told to. Instead he wrote bash scripts that still make me nervous.
- Often tells me to make something modern/great (reinventing a wheel) and then ends up saying, "I think I'd do it this way... Referes to his code 5 years ago".
- Using isset() breaks things.
- Tens of thousands of undefined variables exist because arrays are creates like $this[][][] = 5;
- Understanding the naming of functions required me to write several documents.
- I had to use #region tags to find places in the code quicker since a router was about 2000 lines of if else statements.
- I used Todo Bookmark extensions in VSCode to mark and flag everything that's a bug.
- Gets upset if I add anything to .gitignore; I tried to tell him it ignores files we don't want, he is though it deleted them for a while.
- He would rather explain every line of code in a mammoth project that follows no human known patterns, includes files that overwrite global scope variables and wants has me do the documentation.
- Open to ideas but when I bring them up such as - This is what most standards suggest, here's a literal example of exactly what you want but easier - He will passively decide against it and end up working on tedious things not very necessary for project release dates.
- On another project I try to write code but he wants to go over every single nook and cranny and stay on the phone the entire day as I watch his screen and Im trying to code.

I would like us all to do well but I do not consider him a programmer but a script-whippersnapper. I find myself trying to to debate the most basic of things (you shouldnt 777 every file), and I need all kinds of evidence before he will do something about it. We need "security" and all kinds of buzz words but I'm scared to death of this code. After several months its a nice place to work but I am convinced I'm being pranked or my boss has very little idea what he's doing. I've worked in a lot of disasters but nothing like this.

We are building an API, I could use something open source to help with anything from validations, routing, ACL but he ends up reinventing the wheel. I have never worked so slow, hindered and baffled at how I am supposed to build anything - nothing is stable, tested, and rarely logical. I suggested many things but he would rather have small talk and reason his way into using things he made.

I could fhave this project 50% done i a Node API i two weeks, pretty fast in a PHP or Python one, but we for reasons I have no idea would rather go slow and literally "build a framework". Two knuckleheads are going to build a PHP REST framework and compete with tested, tried and true open source tools by tens of millions?

I just wanted to rant because this drives me crazy. I have so much stress my neck and shoulder seems like a nerve is pinched. I don't understand what any of this means. I've never met someone who was wrong about so many things but believed they were right. I just don't know what to say so often on call I just say, 'uhh..'. It's like nothing anyone or any authority says matters, I don't know why he asks anything he's going to do things one way, a hard way, only that he can decipher. He's an owner, he's not worried about job security.

!rant

Got back into android development recently and while everything was pretty flawless ( I managed to get the basic concepts implemented in a day) something wasn't right.

For some reason I was not happy with the code i wrote, although I took examples from google and tried to adapt their code style. It looked aweful. I hated my code.
But the code itself wasn't the core of the problem. I could easily add new features and replace components with new implementations without breaking the app. All those "good code quality" identifiers were there.

Turn out the problem is Java. Or to be more specific: Java 1.6
Every listener which only calls a single function once a worker has finished needs 6 lines of code. If you implement the inferface in the class it gets messy once there are multiple workers and you have a generic interface. And there are no lambdas!

So I made the switch to Kotlin.
The app was converted to kotlin in 30 Minutes​. Android studio can convert the classes automatically and very little manual work is needed afterwards.
After that I spent 2 hours replacing the old java concepts with Kotlin concepts: lamdas, non-nullable types, getters and setters in kotlin style (which in this case is c# style) and some other great thing.
The code is good looking now. I like it. I like kotlin as it has a lot of cool things.
Its super easy to learn. It took me about 2 hours to get into it. It combines concepts from java, javascript, c# and maybe a few other languages to form a modern jvm 1.6 compatible typesafe language.

Android dev is fun again!

I wrote a node + vue web app that consumes bing api and lets you block specific hosts with a click, and I have some thoughts I need to post somewhere.

My main motivation for this it is that the search results I've been getting with the big search engines are lacking a lot of quality. The SEO situation right now is very complex but the bottom line is that there is a lot of white hat SEO abuse.

Commercial companies are fucking up the internet very hard. Search results have become way too profit oriented thus unneutral. Personal blogs are becoming very rare. Information is losing quality and sites are losing identity. The internet is consollidating.

So, I decided to write something to help me give this situation the middle finger.

I wrote this because I consider the ability to block specific sites a basic universal right. If you were ripped off by a website or you just don't like it, then you should be able to block said site from your search results. It's not rocket science.

Google used to have this feature integrated but they removed it in 2013. They also had an extension that did this client side, but they removed it in 2018 too. We're years past the time where Google forgot their "Don't be evil" motto.

AFAIK, the only search engine on earth that lets you block sites is millionshort.com, but if you block too many sites, the performance degrades. And the company that runs it is a for profit too.

There is a third party extension that blocks sites called uBlacklist. The problem is that it only works on google. I wrote my app so as to escape google's tracking clutches, ads and their annoying products showing up in between my results.

But aside uBlacklist does the same thing as my app, including the limitation that this isn't an actual search engine, it's just filtering search results after they are generated.

This is far from ideal because filter results before the results are generated would be much more preferred.

But developing a search engine is prohibitively expensive to both index and rank pages for a single person. Which is sad, but can't do much about it.

I'm also thinking of implementing the ability promote certain sites, the opposite to blocking, so these promoted sites would get more priority within the results.

I guess I would have to move the promoted sites between all pages I fetched to the first page/s, but client side.

But this is suboptimal compared to having actual access to the rank algorithm, where you could promote sites in a smarter way, but again, I can't build a search engine by myself.

I'm using mongo to cache the results, so with a click of a button I can retrieve the results of a previous query without hitting bing. So far a couple of queries don't seem to bring much performance or space issues.

On using bing: bing is basically the only realiable API option I could find that was hobby cost worthy. Most microsoft products are usually my last choice.

Bing is giving me a 7 day free trial of their search API until I register a CC. They offer a free tier, but I'm not sure if that's only for these 7 days. Otherwise, I'm gonna need to pay like 5$.

Paying or not, having to use a CC to use this software I wrote sucks balls.

So far the usage of this app has resulted in me becoming more critical of sites and finding sites of better quality. I think overall it helps me to become a better programmer, all the while having better protection of my privacy.

One not upside is that I'm the only one curating myself, whereas I could benefit from other people that I trust own block/promote lists.

I will git push it somewhere at some point, but it does require some more work:
I would want to add a docker-compose script to make it easy to start, and I didn't write any tests unfortunately (I did use eslint for both apps, though).
The performance is not excellent (the app has not experienced blocks so far, but it does make the coolers spin after a bit) because the algorithms I wrote were very POC.
But it took me some time to write it, and I need to catch some breath.

There are other more open efforts that seem to be more ethical, but they are usually hard to use or just incomplete.

commoncrawl.org is a free index of the web. one problem I found is that it doesn't seem to index everything (for example, it doesn't seem to index the blog of a friend I know that has been writing for years and is indexed by google).

it also requires knowledge on reading warc files, which will surely require some time investment to learn.

it also seems kinda slow for responses,

it is also generated only once a month, and I would still have little idea on how to implement a pagerank algorithm, let alone code it.

Sooooo I am not a fanboy. I do have my reservations when it comes to technology and whatever, but I live and let live and normally don't shit on stuff as long as it does not affect me or has any reasonable opportunity to affect others.

But my lead developer does, highly opinionated dude for a lot of shit (he ain't really my lead dev anymore in the sense of him being over me, i actually got promoted to a different department but have to continue working with him) and as such we sometimes go on some huuuuge rants regarding tech. With me, shit is simple man, you tell me you like something and I'll dig it, even if i don't necessarily dig it....i am pretty chill like that...ya dig?

Well the other day he was talking about how tvs like mine were too small for him, mine is a 55 inch, i don't think its small, it doesn't inconvenience me in any way really. But to his royal blindness shit is small.

I mentioned that I watch most of my shit lying down on my ipad pro, to were he starts talking massive amounts of shit about apple.

Now, as a previously hired and annoyed mobile developer, ios has a special place in my heart in which my only complaint about the platform was how xcode would fuck up from time to time. The languages were glorious(Obj C and swift) the cocoa apis were amazing(between ios and mac desktop....oooh la la) and the care that the apple store takes in not letting every other add infested garbage app to play a part in their store, the gloriousness of having your data secured as well as havinf applications compiled into the actual fucking operating system REALLY TOUCHES HOME WITH ME. ITS COOL IF IT AIN'T YOU, I AM TALKING ABOUT ME.

Oh. And ipads are smooth as fuck. This was something that I had to mention when he said that anything that I could do with my 1000+ dllr ipad could be done with his samsung table. Normally, I would be like "cool man" but diz doode insisted on making an android vs ios argument.

He insisted on me trying on his tablet. Boy it was the jankiest, laggiest shit I had laid hands on.......just like any other underpowered Android device. Don't get me wrong, my s9 works fucking amazing, but why in the name of heavens would you make an argument against a tablet whilst simultaneously using a piece of shit that doesn't even work properly? Are people really that delusional in their arguments that they would really be that wrong while still insisting on being right?

Small feature request, but I think it would be cool if you guys could add some devducks with colored capes as well as keep the classic yellow duck as an option inside Desk Items (L).

I know its impractical to add text for obvious readability issues, but I think the base color of the actual capes would be cool, you know to match your current devduck irl :) Maybe keep the classic duck at +100 and have a higher ++ for the devducks with capes? Anyways, I'll just leave this here...
@dfox @trogus

DevDuck Cape Colors:

#222242 // Purple
#b22028 // Red
#f4f6f9 // White
#f4753e // Orange
#171615 // Black
#3a6894 // Blue

If this isn't the worst thing.

I was asked to develop a WordPress plugin as an intern developer and I've been on it since last week. I got stuck when i finally had the loops running but couldn't find a way to format the output without overwriting the existing values on each iteration.

For the last one week I've been showing the progress on my code to the CTO and this is how it has been.

Me: Hello. Everything is coming along fine, I have most of the functions running properly, do you mind looking into the algorithm?

CTO: Oh not at all, let's see what you got. Omg great code for an intern. I think you should add a new variable there and maybe clean up that function over there because it's deprecated now and yeah HaHa, Great work.

Me: Thanks xD I'll have it finished latest next week.

CTO: Oh great. I can't wait to see what you'd have by next week so we can install it on our WordPress.

*Next finally week comes and I'm done with the code.

Me: Hello, I'm done with the entire code! Want to take a look? The plugin works just exactly as described.

*CTO takes a look

CTO: Omg?

Me: Omg?

CTO: This is completely bad programming practice, so you are running 4 nested loops that all send queries to our data base and make changes to data. This would have a very drastic effect on the server considering the traffic we get.

Me: But you saw this exact code last week and said it was okay, I only changed some CSS since the last time.

CTO: Omg, we can't accept this, you have to develop it again from the scratch without using those loops and queries.

Me: What? Okay, fine. Any hints?

CTO: Yes.

Me: What?

CTO: Just start. That's the greatest hint I could ever give. And also, always have a plan before you begin.

Me: Yeah, thanks for those. It's the first time I'm hearing them and they would totally be applicable to building this thing.

I was just writing a long rant about how my rant style changed, and how I could fix anything that annoys me in a heartbeat by just putting my mind to implementing a change. Then YouTube once again paused the synth mix that was playing on my laptop in the background, with that stupid "Video paused. Continue watching?" pop-up. I even installed an add-on for it in Firefox to make it automatically click that away. I guess that YouTube did yet another bullshit update to break that, for "totally legitimate user interface improvements" or whatever. Youtube-dl faces similar challenges all the time, and it's definitely not alone in that either. I also had issues with that on Facebook when I wanted to develop on top of that, where the UI changes every other day and the API even changes every other week. And as far as backwards compatibility goes, our way or the highway!

So I did the whole "replace and move on" type of thing. I use youtube-dl often now to get my content off YouTube into a media player that doesn't fuck me over for stupid reasons like "ad fraud" (I use an ad blocker you twats, what ads am I gonna fraud against), or "battery savings" (the damn laptop is plugged in and fully topped up for fucks sake, and you do this crap even on desktop computers). Gee I wonder why creators are moving on to Floatplane and Nebula nowadays, and why people like yours truly use "highly illegal" youtube-dl. Oh and thank you for putting me in Saudi Arabia again. Pinnacle of data mining, machine learning and other such wank could not do GeoIP. for a server that used to be in a datacenter in Italy for years, and recently has been moved to another hosting provider in Germany. It's about as unchanging and static, and as easy to geolocate as you can possibly get. But hey, kill off another Google+ when?

Like seriously, yes I'm taking your Foobar challenges and you may very well be the company I end up working for. But if anything it feels like there's a shitton of stuff to fix. And the challenges themselves still using Python 2.7 honestly feels like the seldom seen tip of the iceberg.

I think that two criterias are important:

- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind

1) Some simple anti examples:

- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-

2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.

E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.

Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.

When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
--
One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.

It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo

Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.

Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.

My worst enemies....

Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(

Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.

I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.

Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?

XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????

Pull-to-refresh is useless.

If you are a mobile app developer, please get rid of pull-to-refresh. Your users will thank you.

I have the impression that mobile app developers choose to implement the pull-to-refresh gimmick just in order to make their app comply with a design trend. It seems like a desperate attempt to appear "modern" and "fancy", not because of the actual usefulness of the gesture.

Pull-to-refresh is one of those things that are well-intended but backfire. It appears helpful on first sight, but turns out to be a burden.

It takes effort and cognitive strain to avoid triggering a pull-to-refresh. The user can't use the app relaxed but has to walk on eggshells.

Every unwanted refresh wastes battery power, mobile data (if it is an Internet-connected app), and can lead to the loss of form data.

To avoid pull-to-refresh, the user has to resort to finger gymnastics like a shorter swipe for scrolling up or swiping slightly up before down. Pull-to-refresh could even be triggered while pinch-zooming in or out near the top of a page, if the touchscreen does not recognize one of the two fingers.

Pull-to-refresh also interferes with the double-tap-swipe zoom gesture. If one of the two taps are not recognized, a swipe-down to zoom in can trigger a pull-to-refresh instead.

To argue "if you don't like pull-to-refresh, just don't use it" is like blaming a person who stepped on a mine, since the person moved and the mine was stationary.

A refresh button can be half a second away in the menu bar, URL bar, or a submenu, where it is unlikely to be pressed accidentally. There is no need for a gesture that does more harm than good.

Using a mobile app with pull-to-refresh feels like having Windows StickyKeys forcibly enabled at all times. The refresh circle animation sticks to the finger.

If the user actually wants to refresh, pull-to-refresh is slower than a refresh button in a menu if the page is not at the top, meaning pull-to-refresh is useless as a shortcut anyway if the page is in any other position than the top.

An alternative to pull-to-refresh is pull-for-details. Samsung did it in some of their apps. Pulling down against the top reveals additional information such as the count and total size of selected items.

If you own a website, add this CSS to make browsing your website on the pre-installed Android web browser not a headache:

html,body { overscroll-behavior: none; }

Why is this necessary? In 2019, Google took the ability to deactivate the pull-to-refresh gesture on their Chrome browser for Android OS away from users. On Chrome for Android, pull-to-refresh can only be disabled on the server side, not the user side. The avalanche of complaints? Neglected.

Good thing several third-party browsers let the user turn off this severe headache.

Fuck this client's IT department. They're a bunch of Microsoft asslickers.

How am I supposed to push code to your self-hosted GitLab instance if you restrict me to Citrix RDP????? No OpenVPN access because I'm on Linux?? Seriously? Because I am not using any of your laptops?

FUCK YOU DUMBASSES, I COULD DO A BETTER JOB THAN YOU AND I JUST PLAY WITH LINUX.

When I said I only needed terminal access I would have never imagined they were thinking of Putty inside an RDP. What a steaming shit.

Oh you guys don't have a secret management service as any enterprise should? Oh I cannot add a secret management service as part of the solution I am building for you guys because "Hurr Durr yOu HaVe NoT pUt ThIs In ThE pRoJeCt PrOpOsAl sO nO"

Fuck you guys. You guys only don't want to move to the cloud to not lose your jobs. I would be far more productive than relying on you pieces of dumbassery.

They are all having each others back in using shit technology and practices.

I promised a friend to have a look over his dads website to add a small blog. No big deal, I've got it on my drive, can reuse it just need to adapt it to the environment.

I take a look at what I'm working with and I see the most terrifying piece of "Please, take my data" code I could possibly imagine (And I've seen passwords, in plain text in a script tag). I quote "function queryDB(mode, val) {
var query=" ";
if(mode==="findProd")
query="Select * from Products where ProdNam=" +val;
... (same shit for different cases)
sendQuery(query) ;
}

He literally built the query on the client side sent it to a php script (without validation) and inserted it into the database.
You could literally call window.sendQuery with any sql query and get the result printed into the console.
And other than the plain text passwords guy that wasn't some kid someone knew, this was a "Webdesign" Agency.
Now I took the entire thing offline, called my friends dad, explained it to him and try to sort this out. I would not charge a good friends father but that hack will get a quite hefty bill since my hourly rate just tripled.

And the worst thing : If I publicly name that asshole or warn the people in his portfolio I can, according to Google, be sued. (But, and I assume thats vague enough not to count as bad mouthing, if anyone of you has a customer from Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany with a preexisting page, please have a look at the database interface)
I will call that agency tomorrow, ask for a detailed explanation for why they apparently let trained monkeys write their code and anonymously warn everyone in their portfolio about those flaws...

I don't know if I'm cursed or if there are just that many bad devs but it seems that once a year I have to stumble over some "mistakes" that make me question my sanity.

When I was in college OOP was emerging. A lot of the professors were against teaching it as the core. Some younger professors were adamant about it, and also Java fanatics. So after the bell rang, they'd sometimes teach people that wanted to learn it. I stayed after and the professor said that object oriented programming treated things like reality.

My first thought to this was hold up, modeling reality is hard and complicated, why would you want to add that to your programming that's utter madness.

Then he started with a ball example and how some balls in reality are blue, and they can have a bounce action we can express with a method.

My first thought was that this seems a very niche example. It has very little to do with any problems I have yet solved and I felt thinking about it this way would complicate my programs rather than make them simpler.

I looked around the at remnants of my classmates and saw several sitting forward, their eyes lit up and I felt like I was in a cult meeting where the head is trying to make everyone enamored of their personality. Except he wasn't selling himself, he was selling an idea.

I patiently waited it out, wanting there to be something of value in the after the bell lesson. Something I could use to better my own programming ability. It never came.

This same professor would tell us all to read and buy gang of four it would change our lives. It was an expensive hard cover book with a ribbon attached for a bookmark. It was made to look important. I didn't have much money in college but I gave it a shot I bought the book. I remember wrinkling my nose often, reading at it. Feeling like I was still being sold something. But where was the proof. It was all an argument from authority and I didn't think the argument was very good.

I left college thinking the whole thing was silly and would surely go away with time. And then it grew, and grew. It started to be impossible to avoid it. So I'd just use it when I had to and that became more and more often.

I began to doubt myself. Perhaps I was wrong, surely all these people using and loving this paradigm could not be wrong. I took on a 3 year project to dive deep into OOP later in my career. I was already intimately aware of OOP having to have done so much of it. But I caught up on all the latest ideas and practiced them for a the first year. I thought if OOP is so good I should be able to be more productive in years 2 and 3.

It was the most miserable I had ever been as a programmer. Everything took forever to do. There was boilerplate code everywhere. You didn't so much solve problems as stuff abstract ideas that had nothing to do with the problem everywhere and THEN code the actual part of the code that does a task. Even though I was working with an interpreted language they had added a need to compile, for dependency injection. What's next taking the benefit of dynamic typing and forcing typing into it? Oh I see they managed to do that too. At this point why not just use C or C++. It's going to do everything you wanted if you add compiling and typing and do it way faster at run time.

I talked to the client extensively about everything. We both agreed the project was untenable. We moved everything over another 3 years. His business is doing better than ever before now by several metrics. And I can be productive again. My self doubt was over. OOP is a complicated mess that drags down the software industry, little better than snake oil and full of empty promises. Unfortunately it is all some people know.

Now there is a functional movement, a data oriented movement, and things are looking a little brighter. However, no one seems to care for procedural. Functional and procedural are not that different. Functional just tries to put more constraints on the developer. Data oriented is also a lot more sensible, and again pretty close to procedural a lot of the time. It's just odd to me this need to separate from procedural at all. Procedural was very honest. If you're a bad programmer you make bad code. If you're a good programmer you make good code. It seems a lot of this was meant to enforce bad programmers to make good code. I'll tell you what I think though. I think that has never worked. It's just hidden it away in some abstraction and made identifying it harder. Much like the code methodologies themselves do to the code.

Now I'm left with a choice, keep my own business going to work on what I love, shift gears and do what I hate for more money, or pivot careers entirely. I decided after all this to go into data science because what you all are doing to the software industry sickens me. And that's my story. It's one that makes a lot of people defensive or even passive aggressive, to those people I say, try more things. At least then you can be less defensive about your opinion.

Long time lurker, I now have something to show you and it's something I've proudly made!

I've been working on OctoLenses lately, a Chrome extension allowing you to filter your PR and issues on Github. I find it really useful on a daily basis; and you might too

It can be used to:
- Monitor the PRs that need a review (or that have been reviewed successfuly)
- Find issues on open-source projects you like that you could take on
- Anything you can express with a Github search basically

It's good enough that I feel like I can share it with you, and I'd really like if you could take some of your time to give me a bit of feedback.

What do you like?
What you don't?
Which feature should I add?
Anything constructive basically :)

Thank you (and sorry for the self-promotion)!

Oh gee whiz fellas. I lived through my nightmare. Recently too.

(Multiple rants over last few months are merged in this one. Couldn't rant earlier because my login didn't work.)

I joined a new shithole recently.
It was a huge change because my whole tech stack changed, and on top of that the application domain was new too.

Boss: ho hey newbie, here take this task which is a core service redesign and implementation and finish it in two weeks because it has to be in production for a client.

Normally I'd be able to provide a reasonable analysis and estimate. But being new and unaware of how things work here, I just said 'cool, I'll try my best.' (I was aware that it was a big undertaking but didn't realize the scope and the alarming lack of support I'd get and the bullshit egos I'd have to deal with)
Like a mad man I worked 17+ hours a day with barely a day off every week and changed and produced a lot of code, most of it of decent quality.

Deadline came and went by. Got extended because it was impossible (and fake).

All the time my manager is continuously building pressure on me. When I asked questions I never got any direct/clear answers. On asking for help, I'd get an elaborate word vomit of what was already known/visible. Yet I finally managed to have an implementation ready.

Reviewer: You haven't added parameter comments on your functions and there aren't enough comments in code. We follow standards. Clean code and whatnot. Care for the craft verbal diarrhea.

Boss: Ho hey anux, do you think we'll be able to push the code to production?

Me: Nope. We care for the craft and have standards. We need to add redundant comments to self documented code first, because that is of utmost importance as Nuthead reviewer explained.
(what I wish I had said)

What I actually said: No, code is not reviewed yet.

And despite examples of functions which were not documented (which were written by the reviewer nut), I added 6-7 lines of comments for my single line functions describing how e.g. Sum takes two input integers and returns their sum and asked for a review again.

Reviewer: See this comment is better written as this same-meaning-but-slightly-longer way. Can we please add full stops everywhere even though they were not there to begin with? Can we please not follow this pattern and instead promote our anti-pattern? Thanks.

Me: Changed the comments. Added full stops. Here's a link for why this anti-pattern is bad.

Reviewer: you have written such beautiful code with such little gems. Brilliant. It's great to see how my mentoring has honed your skills.
.
.
.
I swear I would have broken a CRT on his stupid face if we weren't working remotely (and if I had a CRT).

It infuriates me how the solution to every problem with this guy is 'add a comment'.

What enrages me more is that I actually thought I could learn from this guy (in the beginning). My self doubt just made me burnout for little in return.

Thankfully this living nightmare will soon be over.

The everything is Data science craze trend.

Honestly it's not even sustainable with every kid and their grandmother wanting to be data scientists because it's a 'passion' and a 'dream job' and all of that click bait stuff.

It's just become ridiculous at this point and I doubt we'll even have the long awaited 'breakthroughs' people have been talking about for so long.

Also I have a strong feeling everyone thinks it's their 'passion' because it tops the lists of highest paid jobs out there and everyone thinks with 3 months of training they're a fully fledged data scientist because some Python or R package implements all the algorithms he could ever think of using.

Add to that the fact that most advertised data science jobs are actually data engineering where you maintain a date store and that's it.

Agree or disagree that's my piece and if you can convince me otherwise I'll be surprised because I've been subscribed to this idea for so long that it lost me some real good opportunities because I thought it was just what I was meant to be doing which turned to be false after I thought about it. There's a million other jobs that are more impactful and with pursuing.

My new favourite commit message:

"All changes as of 18th Sept"

How tremendously useful? There I was looking to know what changes were made to enable a feature / service, thought I could look for that in the commit message, but no you've given me a much more efficient way of finding out.

I simply need to download the contents of your memory, find out what date you made a change, and then dig through the massive commit to find the piece of info I need.

Forget experience using Git features, managing merges, following Git flow, or even any other SCM ... how can people be so tick when it comes to recording what they've done.

Heres a little cheat sheet for those struggling:

- Commit message
Describe what you actually ****ing did. Don't tell me the date or the time, thankfully Git records those. Don't tell me the day of the week, if I need to know I can figure that out, just tell me what ... you ... did.

- Feature branch names
Now this is a tricky one. You might be surprised to know that this isn't in fact suppose to be whatever random adjective or noun popped into your head ... I know, I too was shocked. The purpose of this is to let other people know what new feature is being worked on in this branch.

- Reusing feature branches
Now I know you started it to add some unit tests, and naming it "testing" is sort of ok. But its actually not ok to name it testing when you add 3 unit tests ... then rip out and replace 60% of the business logic. Perhaps it would have been wiser to create a new feature branch, given you are now working on a new feature.

developer makes a "missed-a-semicolon"-kind of mistake that brings your non-production infrastructure down.

manager goes crazy. rallies the whole team into a meeting to find "whom to hold accountable for this stupid mistake" ( read : whom should I blame? ).

spend 1-hour to investigate the problem. send out another developer to fix the problem.

... continue digging ...
( with every step in the software development lifecycle handbook; the only step missing was to pull the handbook itself out )

finds that the developer followed the development process well ( no hoops jumped ).
the error was missed during the code review because the reviewer didn't actually "review" the code, but reported that they had "reviewed and merged" the code

get asked why we're all spending time trying to fix a problem that occurred in a non-production environment. apparently, now it is about figuring out the root cause so that it doesn't happen in production.

we're ALL now staring at the SAME pull request. now the manager is suddenly more mad because the developer used brackets to indicate the pseudo-path where the change occurred.
"WHY WOULD YOU WASTE 30-SECONDS PUTTING ALL THOSE BRACES? YOU'RE ALREADY ON A BRANCH!"

PS : the reason I didn't quote any of the manager's words until the end was because they were screaming all along, so, I'd have to type in ALL CAPS-case. I'm a CAPS-case-hater by-default ( except for the singular use of "I" ( eye; indicating myself ) )

WTF? I mean, walk your temper off first ( I don't mean literally, right now; for now, consider it a figure of speech. I wish I could ask you to do it literally; but no, I'm not that much of a sadist just yet ). Then come back and decide what you actually want to be pissed about. Then think more; about whether you want to kill everyone else's productivity by rallying the entire team ( OK, I'm exaggerating, it's a small team of 4 people; excluding the manager ) to look at an issue that happened in a non-production environment.
At the end of the week, you're still going to come back and say we're behind schedule because we didn't get any work done.
Well, here's 4 hours of our time consumed away by you.

This manager also has a habit of saying, "getting on X's case". Even if it is a discussion ( and not a debate ). What is that supposed to mean? Did X commit such a grave crime that they need to be condemned to hell?

I miss my old organization where there was a strict no-blame policy. Their strategy was, "OK, we have an issue, let's fix it and move on."
I've gotten involved ( not caused it ) in even bigger issues ( like an almost-data-breach ) and nobody ever pointed a finger at another person.
Even though we all knew who caused the issue. Some even went beyond and defended the person. Like, "Them. No, that's not possible. They won't do such dumb mistakes. They're very thorough with their work."
No one even talked about the person behind their back either ( at least I wasn't involved in any such conversation ). Even later, after the whole issue had settled down. I don't think people brought it up later either ( though it was kind of a hush-hush need-to-know event )

Now I realize the other unsaid-advantage of the no-blame policy. You don't lose 4 hours of your so-called "quarantine productivity". We're already short on productivity. Please don't add anymore. 🙏

So I'm gonna send the e-mail with these 4 questions, is that OK or am I missing anything?

"Go ahead"

* Clicks send *

"Could you also ask..."

NO! DON'T SAY THAT'S IT'S OK TO SEND IF YOU STILL WANT TO ADD STUFF TO IT!

Why is the interviewing process becoming worse over the years?

About 2 years ago I applied for a company and got into 2 interviews: one with the hr to see if I am bsing them and one with the tech people, to be sure I am not using buzzwords without context. Pretty straightforward, could be done in a single interview IMHO, but it's making me waste max 2 weeks.

Fast forward to one year ago: 1 interview with the hr, 1 interview with the tech people, 1 interview with CEO (why? Just.. why?)

Fast forward to today: 1 interview with hr, 1 interview with tech people, 1 interview with the CEO (again... why?), 1 coding assignment which "it's only going to take a couple of hours" and punctually has either poorly documented APIs to rely on or has trick questions/points. So "it takes a couple of hours", but if you want to pass it you need to spend a day on it... (and let's add that they may be using old docker versions so if it doesn't work cause they are using docker 1.0 and it fails too bad, you lost time for nothing, we are not trying to solve it, you just don't pass!).

Not kidding the last assignment I took and dropped required: external API, testing, don't use CSS libraries and make your own CSS, you must use TS and it was supposed to take "3 hours max".

My question is: why? Why is the interviewing process slowly becoming less of a: "I understand that your code may not be perfect for us but that you are a human being able to reason and adapt your code to our standards" and more of a: "You must do everything PERFECTLY and we don't give a sh*t about your time, start giving us your free time and then we see if we want you."

I just keep giving up after I analyze the assignments, cause a part of my brain thinks that if this is the way a professional relationship starts it's too easy to foresee weekend shifts and lots of overtime cause some manager thinks that "come on, it just takes a couple of hours!"

I am so mad, I have no words for how fucking much I hate ever having to work or pass work to other incompetent developers or teams, what a fucking waste of time and resources.

After handing off the frontend - for the client to find some team, that would do it in the short time and budget he needs (multiple developers, more fast, much good), he found a team that seemed to be alright for the job and seemed alright to me too, now maybe a month or two later, the client contacts me, that they fucked something up and if I could talk to them.

The email I then received from them seriously made me speechles, mad and sad, all at same time, I spent multiple upon multiple hours, getting a very good readable documentation up (markdown with TOC, properly rendered headers, bulletpoints, all that shit), with all files, all services used, all credentials, even converted all ssh keys into putty ppk format, in case the developers are using windows and are too dumb to do it themselves, nginx configs, it had seriously everything, even too much to list.

They somehow managed to fuck up the entire server, while attempting to "add ssh keys themselves", EVEN FUCKING THOUGH I have included all the keys they need, all the hosting credentials, everything, yet they decided to fuck with shit themselves and completely annihilate the server in the process (HOW?!), so not even the webserver works anymore.

I am fucking speechless, I made it so fucking easy to gather all info and files they need, all properly put into well named folders, along the documentation in an archive and they somehow managed to nuke the fucking server, while attempting to add ssh keys?!

If you don't know how to config a server, then don't fucking touch it and just use everything, that got served to you on a fucking silver platter.

---

I'll just instantly answer the most annoying comment, that somebody could come up with: "why didn't you do it yourself?"

Because in a perfect world, a fully managed team, can do much more than a single developer can, especially in the same timeframe and from what I heard of said client, atleast they did something in terms of developing the system. (which surprises me, considering it's the same people that nuked a server, while trying to add ssh keys)

People: "Well we could put this data in the address book.....?"

Me: "Wait, what does that data have to do with the address book? Does a given address need that data / is it specific to that address?"

People: "No it's not related to addresses ... we just thought we could put it there."

Me: ....

Me: "So if you use that address you always want that specific data you want stored in the address book?"

People: "Oh no it's not tied to addresses."

Me: ....

Me: "So help me out here, when do you use a given piece of data? In the example here, what made you add that information?"

-Silence-

People: "Um, I'm not sure."

Me: "I think it would be a good idea if we found out. That might provide us some important guidance here."

Hey guys, I have a serious question for you: How do you define science?

And yes this is going to be a long Rant. This topic really pisses me off.

A bit of context first. I come from a "humanities" background. I study history and dude, I love it. The problem is that even though we fucking pull our brains out studying historical phenomena with a fucking ton of conceptual tools, our work is mostly seen as literature to entertain the elderly during their lonely evenings. But that's not really the point of this rant.

My fucking problem is that while we try to do some serious work; actual work that could help society for real, it all goes into that magical fucking kingdom called "humanities". HOW THE FUCK DO THEY DARE TO CALL SOMETHING "HUMANITIES". IT'S A FUCKING HISTORICAL TERM THAT MEANS "TO FULFILL MEN IN ALL IT'S ASPECTS", AND NOW THEY'VE REPURPOSED IT, MAKING IT CONTAIN ANY STUDY THAT ISN'T "EMPIRICAL", "OBJECTIVE", ADD ANY FUCKING SCIENTIFIC DELUSIONARY TERM YOU CAN THINK OF.

And don't get me started on "objectivity". Oh boy, your fucking objectivity is hollow as a kid's balloon. There is no such thing as a objective study, even when it applies your "rational" "godly" scientific method. Some guys follow that shit as if it was a fucking religion. I do understand it's useful and all that, but in the end it's just a tool, you can't fucking define "science" by it's tools.

"""Q: What is carpintery?
A: Well, it's hammers, nails and wood. Yep. Hammers, nails and wood."""

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD WAS FUCKING INVENTED DURING THE XVIII CENTURY, WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK WAS GALLILEI BEFORE THAT? "HUMANITIES"?

Why do I say objectivity isn't posible? Well, guess what? YOU ARE FUCKING HUMAN. Every thing you know is full of preconceptions and fucking cultural subjectivities invented to understand the world. And it's ok, becouse if you understand your own subjectivity, at least you can see yourself in a critical sense, and at least "tend" to objectivity, in the same way functions tend to infinity.

And here comes the best part: people studying "cs" in my university pass most of the time studying a ton of shit that isn't really science, but is taken as scientific becouse it is related to "science". These guys spend entire semesters just learning programming fundational stuff that in my opinion isn't really science, it's just subjective conceptual constructs built to make the coding process better. They only have TWO fucking classes on discrete mathematics and another 3 or 4 in actual scientific fields related to computing. THESE GUYS AREN'T FUCKING BEING TAUGHT TO BE COMPUTER SCIENTISTS; THEY ARE TEACHING THEM TO BE PROGRAMMERS. THERE'S A HUGE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CS AND PROGRAMMING AND THAT IS THE WORD SCIENCE. And yes, I'm being drastic on the definition of science on purpose becouse guess fucking what? I'M PISSED OFF.

"Hey, what are you doing?"
"Just doing science with scrum and agile development."

I understand most of you guys would think of science as "the application of the scientific method", "Knowledge by experimentation and peer-review", "anything techy". Guys, science is a lot broather than that. I define it as "the search for truth", mainly becouse that's what we are all doing, and what humans have been doing to gain knowledge through the ages. It doesn't matter what field of truth you are seeking as long as you do it seriously and with fundaments. I don't fucking care if you can't be objective: that's impossible. Just acknowledge it and continue investigating accordingly.

I believe during the last centuries the concept of science has been deformed by the popular rise of both natural and applied sciences. And I love the fact that these science fields have been growing so much all this time, but for fucks sake don't leave every other science (science as I define it) behind. Governments and corporations make huge mistakes becouse they don't treat history, politics and other sciences seriously. Yes, I called history a "science", fuck you.

And yes, by my definition programming is not a science. I don't know what most of you think programming is, but for me it's a discipline that builds stuff, similar to carpintery or blacksmithing. Now if you are pushing the limits, seeking ways to make computing go further, then that's science. The guys that are figuring out AI are scientists, the guys that are using it to detect hotdogs aren't - unless they are the same person- deal with it. I guess a lot of you guys are with me on this point.

In the end, we are all artisans building abstract tools by giving orders to a machine.

I still have some characters left, so I want to thank the community as a whole for letting me vent my inner rage. I don't have much ways to express myself on these matters, so for me DevRant is a bless.

Think I am going to try out my first stuff for my game engine in 2D. The games I have the most fond memories of were 2D. Sure I like what has happened on the 3D side. But it would be fun to recreate some of my favorite 2D games. Except with one caveat: procedural generation. Never play the same game twice. For testing purposes I will have a seed system to regenerate the same worlds. I would have played these games so much longer if they had been based on a seed for generation of content.

I also like the idea of weapons and armor never being exactly the same. Sure they can look similar, but on close inspection you could see differences. It will be fun to start with base models and then add imperfections and differences.

Another issue I have with fantasy games is always leveling up the weapon by buying something better. Sure we have improvement systems though smithing and magic, but some weapons are always better than others. I wanted to have a game where weapons could be improved by usage and upgrades. Kill 1000 trolls and the weapon gets imbued with trollbane. Kill a dragon and the blood infuses and it deals fire damage. So a player could start out with the family sword and end up with a god tier weapon at the end of the game. Make weapons become legendary. Not because it has more power, but because trolls recognize the blade and the wielder and are scared shitless.

Terrain in 2D should be a lot easier to generate. Weapons, armor, etc should be easier to modify and generate. This should give me the grounding I need to develop the algorithms for a future 3D system. Godot is currently stronger in 2D than 3D. That will change in the next couple of years as more focus is put on the engine. There is no reason I cannot experiment with mixing 2D and 3D as well.

Holy shit, I was just thinking I cannot imagine the amazing shit they could have done with the games I played as a kid with 2D physics!

Haha, something they had in the older games was actual gambling. You could bet on monster fights and slot machines in game. I wonder if that takes a hard hit with ESRB now?

Currently stuck in tutorial hell. Learning how the engine works and seeing what features are available. I get more excited each video I watch. The engine is packed with goodies and the addons are crazy good.

tldr: First project will be short game in 2D. Will explore procedural content.

Those of you who run Linux *exclusively*... What are you doing in the OS that makes it a big deal for you?

Personally, I spend the bulk of my time in *apps*---editor, IDE, browser, messaging, calendar, etc. OK, a little time in command line, but minutes a day, if I add it up. And I can get Bash anywhere.

Now, you could argue that, if I spend most of my time in apps, then I should have a minimalist OS. Fair comment. Is that all it is?

But, I feel OS is quite an unimportant part of my day. App launcher for much of it.

"This is ridiculous, why don't the docs explain this? This is absurd, it seems like thousands of people should be having this issue. Why do maintainers fucking not get it? Why write software if you don't intend for anyone else to use it?"

versus

"Hey, could you explain X to me? I'm having trouble understanding it."
"Sure, here: ..."
"Thanks - maybe we could add it to the docs, that's the first place I looked."
"Absolutely, good idea."
<closed in a8b7cb8d>

Which one was easier, folks? It's not this difficult. 100% going to help you if you ask - to me, at least, there's no such thing as a stupid question (seriously, I'll answer the most inane questions 100 times over if I need to). However, there's definitely a stupid comment, and unfortunately they seem to be the majority I receive on Github.

These ignorant comments about arch are starting to get on my nerves.

You ranted or asked help about something exclusive to windows and someone pointed out they don't have that problem in arch and now you're annoyed?

Well maybe it's for good.

Next comes a very rough analogy, but imagine if someone posts "hey guys, I did a kg of coke and feeling bad, how do I detox?"

It takes one honest asshole to be like "well what if you didn't do coke?".

Replace the coke with windows.
Windows is a (mostly) closed source operating system owned by a for profit company with a very shady legal and ethical history.

What on earth could possibly go wrong?

Oh you get bsod's?
The system takes hours to update whenever the hell it wants, forces reboot and you can't stop it?
oh you got hacked because it has thousands of vulnerabilities?
wannacry on outdated windows versions paralyzed the uk health system?

oh no one can truly scrutinize it because it's closed source?

yet you wonder why people are assholes when you mention it? This thing is fucking cancer, it's hundreds of steps backwards in terms of human progress.

and one of the causes for its widespread usage are the savage marketing tactics they practiced early on. just google that shit up.

but no, linux users are assholes out to get you.

and how do people react to these honest comments? "let's make a meme out of it. let's deligitimize linux, linux users and devs are a bunch of neckbeards, end of story, watch this video of rms eating skin off his foot on a live conference"

short minded idiots.

I'm not gonna deny the challenges or limitations linux represents for the end user.

It does take time to learn how to use it properly.
Nvidia sometimes works like shit.
Tweaking is almost universally required.
A huge amount of games, or Adobe/Office/X products are not compatible.
The docs can be very obscure sometimes (I for one hate a couple of manpages)

But you get a system that:
* Boots way faster
* Is way more stable
* Is way way way more secure.
* Is accountable, as in, no chance to being forced to get exploited by some evil marketing shit.

In other words, you're fucking free.
You can even create your own version of the system, with total control of it, even profit with it.

I'm not sure the average end user cares about this, but this is a developer forum, so I think in all honesty every developer owes open source OS' (linux, freebsd, etc) major respect for being free and not being corporate horseshit.

Doctors have a hippocratic oath? Well maybe devs should have some form of oath too, some sworn commitment that they will try to improve society.

I do have some sympathy for the people that are forced to use windows, even though they know ideally isn't the ideal moral choice.
As in, their job forces it, or they don't have time or energy to learn an alternative.

At the very least, if you don't know what you're talking about, just stfu and read.

But I don't have one bit of sympathy for the rest.

I didn't even talk about arch itself.
Holy fucking shit, these people that think arch is too complicated.

What in the actual fuck.

I know what the problem is, the arch install instructions aren't copy paste commands.
Or they medium tutorial they found is outdated.

So yeah, the majority of the dev community is either too dumb or has very strong ADD to CAREFULLY and PATIENTLY read through the instructions.

I'll be honest, I wouldn't expect a freshman to follow the arch install guide and not get confused several times.
But this is an intermediate level (not megaexpert like some retards out there imply).

Yet arch is just too much. That's like saying "omg building a small airplane is sooooo complicated". Yeah well it's a fucking aerial vehicle. It's going to be a bit tough. But it's nowhere near as difficult as building a 747.

So because some devs are too dumb and talk shit, they just set the bar too low.

Or "if you try to learn how to build a plane you'll grow an aviator neckbeard". I'll grow a fucking beard if I want too.

I'm so thankful for arch because it has a great compromise between control and ease of install and use.

When I have a fresh install I only get *just* what I fucking need, no extra bullshit, no extra programs I know nothing about or need running on boot time, and that's how I boot way faster that ubuntu (which is way faster than windows already).

Configuring nvidia optimus was a major pain in the ass? Sure was, but I got it work the way I wanted to after some time.

Upgrading is also easy as pie, so really scratching my brain here trying to understand the real difficult of using arch.

Why is web development such a headache?

I'm writing a responsive wesbite from scratch. All goes perfect, even cross browser.
It all works, adapts to screen size etc. Nice! About to get this code into production.

Me: I'll test the iPhone 5 viewport size before I push the code...

Responsive Developer Tools:

FireFox: nu uh, there's a magic random 1px margin to every element on your page now, which you cannot find in your css or in the computed tab. It's magical.

Me: weird, what if I change the viewport size to the iPhone 6's dimensions?

Issue persists.

Me: hmm, what if I add or substract one fucking pixel from the viewport width or height?

FireFox: What 1px margin? Don't know what you're talking about ... There never was one...

Me: ok, weird (sets viewport size back to the iPhone 5 format for testing)

FireFox: I present to you: the magic random 1px margin.

I'm at a loss. I really am. Been clicking and unclicking almost every responsive part of my css I could find for this page and it just doesn't want to work persistently. And I swear to god that it worked a week ago in that exact viewport size. It's so frustrating.

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.

Read it online today
"Hello Google,
You have made great maps. If you could only add one little extra feature which would tell if we should go on the flyover or beside it. How could a man see a half a milimeter deflection on a 5 inch screen.

Your's Truly
A guy who had to take a UTurn after going 2km more"

Today a task was assigned to a coworker, he is a good guy, but one of those that never complain, never say anything, get there early, go to lunch at the exact same hour everyday, doesnt talk to anybody and gets off at exactly 6pm.

So, the task was submitted by QA, according to them, a disabled input could be enabled by going into the dev tools and enabling it...

So i went over the pm and told her (cos she is a cunt) that the ticket was just bullshit and that first of all, we had no control of it, but if that is the case, we can go over and add event listeners to all the inputs in the platform to avoid people changing them...like wtf?

Since she is a dumb cunt, she 'escalated' the task to the senior dev... he is also a total fucktard who doesnt know a shit. The dude said that the task was ok and we had to do it or not but it was better to do it, justifying the ticket in the most stupid and incoherent way... like wtf is to do with it? Tell the user to not go over the devtools and enable it? The fuckkkk

I felt like i was about to shit my kidney, seriously, but what can i do? It is not the first time things like that happen. The stupid fuck also let one of his friends add several migrations to change several tables columns just because of 'good practices' which in first place left the databas all fucked up and with fucked relations.

I'm just so tired of these fucks, incompetent motherfuckers... I told a friend about it and he said that that was nothing, it is worse when you have to work for banks and that the only thing i could do was to let it go and learn from it, to not do the same mistakes. Im thinking in quitting... what should i do?

ideal sprint fallacy.
total days 10 , total hours(excluding breaks ) 8 hrs per day= 80 hrs per dev

code freeze day = day 8, testing+ fixing days : 8,9,10. release day : day 10
so ideal dev time = 7days/56 hr
meetings= - 1hr per day => 49 hrs per dev

- 1 day for planning i.e d1 . so dev time left . 6 days 42 hrs.
-----------
all good planning. now here comes the messups

1. last release took some time. so planning could not happen on d1. all devs are waiting. . devtime = 5 days 35 hrs.

2. during planning:
mgr: hey devx what's the status on task 1?
d: i integrated mock apis. if server has made the apis, i will test them .
mgr : server says the apis are done. whats your guestimate for the task completion?
d : max 1-2 hrs?
m : cool. i assign you 4 hrs for this. now what about task 2?
d : task told to me is done and working . however sub mgr mentioned that a new screen will be added. so that will take time
m : no we probably won't be taking the screen. what's your giestimate?
d : a few more testing on existing features. maybe 1-2 hrs ?
m: cool
another 4 hrs for u. what about task 3?
d : <same story>
m : cool. another 4 hrs for u. so a total of 12 hrs out of 35 hrs? you must be relaxed this sprint.
d : yeah i guess.
m cool.
-------
timelines.
d1: wasted i previous sprint
d2 : sprint planning
d3 : 3+ hrs of meetings, apis for task 1 weren't available sub manager randomly decided that yes we can add another screen but didn't discussed. updates on all 3 tasks : no change in status
d4 : same story. dev apis starts failing so testing comes to halt.
d5 : apis for task1 available . task 3 got additional improvement points from mgr out of random. some prod issue happens which takes 4+ hrs. update on tasks : some more work done on task 3, task 1 and 2 remains same.
d6 : task1 apis are different from mocks. additionally 2 apis start breaking and its come to know thatgrs did not explain the task properly. finally after another 3+ hrs of discussion , we come to some conclusions and resolutions
d7 : prod issue again comes. 4+ hrs goes into it . task 2 and 3 are discussed for new screen additiona that can easily take 2+ days to be created . we agree tot ake 1 and drop 2nd task's changes i finish task 2 new screens in 6 hrs , hoping that finally everything will be fine.

d8 : prod issue again comes, and changes are requested in task 2 and 3

day 9 build finally goes to tester
day 10 first few bugs come with approval for some tasks
day 11(day 1 of new sprint) final build with fixes is shared. new bugs (unrelated to tasks. basically new features disguised as bugs) are raised . we reject and release the build.

day 2 sprint planning
mgr : hey dev x, u had only 12 hrs of work in your plate. why did the build got delayed?

🥲🫡

I worked with this hack of a backend dev that was too lazy to add a complex(ish) object to our CMS tool. His solution?

One giant-ass text box with the label "put JSON here".

If tech people were using it I wouldn't mind, but our poor content managers have no idea what json is. Plus like... no examples, no schema... they would have to change shit then go look at the website to see if it worked. Fucking asshole.

Plus.. I mean SHIT, MAN! This was in a Node.js tool... if you have the Json parser you could just GENERATE the respective form fields. DO YOUR JOB

I've been reading devRant at work for the past 6 months and it kept me sane through a few moments. Thanks. :)

And now I finally started to feel that maybe even I could have some horror stories to share. (I've been in the company for more than 4 years)

(Sorry for long post.
TL;DR: break time laws suck in my country.)

One example would probably be how our company decided to cut 5 minutes from our lunch time (down to 25 minutes) and add 3 minutes to our 5 minute coffee break(*"gifted" by our CEO) in the afternoon.

You're probably asking yourself, "What happened to the remaining 2 minutes?".

*Well, it's simple. In my country it's somehow still legal to have only 30 minutes of break time for the whole day if working hours don't exceed 10 hours. It's actually written in the law that you CAN divide that lunch break time to be placed at different times. To me that sound like fucking nuts...

Thankfully nobody's taking that time change quite literally and most people still use the full 30 minutes. But some people here have been fired for much less, so I don't play around. I just pretend to work while reading devRant. 😎

I once went to a client to get a brief for a website (the twat can't be bothered to write it, so he gets me to do it). I wrote all the details down and fired as many questions as I could. When I got back I wrote up the notes into a brief and sent it back to check before I costed it. He said it was spot on, so I sent an estimate. A few days later he must have shown it to another director, they both call me on speaker phone. Them: Will it do this, will it do that? Me: "It" doesn't exist, if you want to add some requirements then write or extend the brief and I will re-cost it.
They ignored that and rang a little later. Them: We have been discussing it, will it do .... and will it do.... Me: I repeated what I had said earlier, but my tone of voice had changed to reflect my annoyance. I never heard from these pathetic twats again. Moral: I always do background checks on a company, as well as accounts and financials check it's good to tap in to your network of colleagues, designers, freelancers. It can set the alarm bells going long before you commit any time.

2 hour meeting to brainstorm ideas to improve our system health monitoring (logging, alerting, monitoring, and metrics)

Never got past the alerting part. Piss poor excuses for human being managers kept 'blaming' our logging infrastructure for allowing them to log exceptions as 'Warnings', purposely by-passing the alerting system.

Then the d-head tried to 'educate' everyone the difference between error and exception …frack-wad…the difference isn't philosophical…shut up.

The B manager kept referring to our old logging system (like we stopped using it 5 years ago) and if it were written correctly, the legacy code would be easier to migrate. Fracking lying B….shut the frack up.

The fracking idiots then wanted to add direct-bypass of the alerting system (I purposely made the code to bypass alerting painful to write)

Mgr1: "The only way this will work is if you, by default, allow errors to bypass the alerting system. When all of our code is migrated, we'll change a config or something to enable alerting. That shouldn't be too hard."
Me: "Not going to happen. I made by-passing the alert system painful on purpose. If I make it easy, you'll never go back and change code."
Mgr2: "Oh, yes we will. Just mark that method as obsolete. That way, it will force us to fix the code."
Me: "The by-pass method is already obsolete and the teams are already ignoring the build warnings."
Mgr1: "No, that is not correct. We have a process to fix all build warnings related to obsolete methods."
Mgr2: "Yes. It won't be like the old system. We just never had time to go back and fix that code."
Me: "The method has been obsolete for almost a year. If your teams haven't fixed their code by now, it's not going to be fixed."
Mgr1: "You're expecting everything to be changed in one day. Our code base is way too big and there are too many changes to make. All we are asking for is a simple change that will give us the time we need to make the system better. We all want to make the system better…right?"
Me: "We made the changes to the core system over two years ago, and we had this same conversation, remember? If your team hasn't made any changes by now, they aren't going to. The only way they will change code to the new standard is if we make the old way painful. Sorry, that's the truth."
Mgr2: "Why did we make changes to the logging system? Why weren't any of us involved? If there were going to be all these changes, our team should have been part of the process."
Me: "You were and declined every meeting and every attempt to include your area. Considering the massive amount of infrastructure changes there was zero code changes required by your team. The new system simply worked. You can't take advantage of the new features which is why we're here today. I'm here to offer my help in any way I can with the transition."
Mgr1: "The new logging doesn't support logging of the different web page areas. Until you can make that change, we can't begin changing our code."
Me: "Logging properties is just a name+value pair dictionary. All you need to do is standardize on a name and how you add it to the collection."
Mgr2: "So, it's not a standard field? How difficult would it be to change the core assembly? This has to be standard across all our areas and shouldn't be up to the developers to type in anything they want."
- Frack wads smile and nod to each other like fracking chickens in a feeding frenzy
Me: "It can, but what will you call this property? What controls its value?"
- The look I got from both the d-bags I could tell a blood vessel popped.
Mgr1: "Oh…um….I don't know…Area? Yea … Area."
Mgr2: "Um…that's not specific enough. How about Page?"
Mgr1: "Well, pages can cross different areas, and areas cross different pages…what do you think?"
Me: "Don't know, don't care. It's up to you. I just need a name."
Mgr2: "Modules! Our MVC framework is broken up in Modules."
DevMgr: "We already have a field for Module. It's how we're segmenting the different business processes"
Mgr1: "Doesn't matter, we'll come up with a name later. Until then, we won't make any changes until there is a name."
DevMgr: "So what did we accomplish?"
Me: "That we need to review the web's logging and alerting process and make sure we're capturing errors being hidden as warnings."
Mgr1: "Nooo….we didn't accomplish anything. This meeting had no agenda and no purpose. We should have been included in the logging process changes from day one."
Mgr2: "I agree, I'm not sure why we're here"
Me: "This was a brainstorming meeting as listed in the agenda. We've accomplished 2 of the 4 items. I think we've established your commitment to making the system better. Thank you all for coming."

- Mgr1 and 2 left without looking at me or saying a word.

Today's rant: JavaScript's type system.

I realized halfway through that I can't happily call JavaScript a "programming language" so just assume
alias programming="scripting"

I'm sure it's not actually as frustrating as it seems to me. Thing is, I'm used to either statically-typed languages or dynamically-typed languages that actually make sense. If I were to try to add an integer to something I'd forgotten was a string in Python, it'd immediately tell me "look, buddy, do you want me to treat this as a concatenation or an addition? I have no idea the way you've got this written." I've found that mistakes are a common thing with dynamic typing. Maybe I'm just not experienced enough yet, maybe it's really as stupid as it looks. JavaScript just goes "hey look I'm gonna tack all of these guys together and make a weird franken-string like '$NaN34.$&' because that's absolutely what we want here!" Then I run my webpage and instead of a nice numeric total like I wanted, good old JavaScript just went "Yep, I have no idea what I'm doing here I'm just gonna drop this here and pretend it's right." Now absolutely I do not expect my programming language to make correct assumptions and read my mind, otherwise JavaScript would be programming me and not the other way around. But it could at least let me know that I had incompatible types going on rather than just shamelessly going along with what it's doing. Good GRIEF, man, some of the idiosyncrasies of the EMCAScript language definition itself just make me want to punch a horse.

a lot of people claim video games cause violence. imo they do.

a lot of the arguments try to prove that because the majority of video game players aren't shooters isn't valid in my opinion, because, in tjis situation, even if 99.99% of gamers with access to a gun don't have a mads shooting, the 0.01% is enough.

add in a loneliness, a bad childhood, mental health issues, and being in a bad place at the time, i think it's possible.

now don't get me wrong - i don't believe video games should be banned or something, i'm just saying i believe it's feasible that video games could be a contributing factor in a mass shooter's choice to do unspeakable actions.

do you guys think i'm being naive or logical ?

I really really hope that no one post this,a friend texted it to me and I wanted to share it because made my day.

Idk where it comes, so feel free if know where this came from to post it:

//FUN PART HERE
# Do not refactor, it is a bad practice. YOLO

# Not understanding why or how something works is always good. YOLO

# Do not ever test your code yourself, just ask. YOLO

# No one is going to read your code, at any point don’t comment. YOLO

# Why do it the easy way when you can reinvent the wheel? Future-proofing is for pussies. YOLO

# Do not read the documentation. YOLO

# Do not waste time with gists. YOLO

# Do not write specs. YOLO also matches to YDD (YOLO DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT)

# Do not use naming conventions. YOLO

# Paying for online tutorials is always better than just searching and reading. YOLO

# You always use production as an environment. YOLO

# Don’t describe what you’re trying to do, just ask random questions on how to do it. YOLO

# Don’t indent. YOLO

# Version control systems are for wussies. YOLO

# Developing on a system similar to the deployment system is for wussies! YOLO

# I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I do it in production. YOLO

# Real men deploy with ftp. YOLO

So YOLO Driven Development isn’t your style? Okay, here are a few more hilarious IT methodologies to get on board with.

*The Pigeon Methodology*
Boss flies in, shits all over everything, then flies away.

*ADD (Asshole Driven Development)*
An old favourite, which outlines any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions. Wisdom, process and logic are not the factory default.

*NDAD (No Developers Allowed in Decisions)*
Methodology Developers of all kinds are strictly forbidden when it comes to decisions regarding entire projects, from back end design to deadlines, because middle and top management know exactly what they want, how it should be done, and how long it will take.

*FDD (Fear Driven Development)*
The analysis paralysis that can slow an entire project down, with developments afraid to make mistakes, break the build, or cause bugs. The source of a developer’s anxiety could be attributed to a failure in sharing information, or by implicating that team members are replaceable.

*CYAE (Cover Your Ass Engineering)*
As Scott Berkun so eloquently put it, the driving force behind most individual efforts is making sure that when the shit hits the fan, you are not to blame.

Wouldn't it be cool if you could add your favorite ranters as "friends" or something like that?
I also would welcome some feature like a personal chat personal with other ranters.
Just a few ideas.

Major rant incoming. Before I start ranting I’ll say that I totally respect my professor’s past. He worked on some really impressive major developments for the military and other companies a long time ago. Was made an engineering fellow at Raytheon for some GPS software he developed (or lead a team on I should say) and ended up dropping fellowship because of his health. But I’m FUCKING sick of it. So fucking fed up with my professor. This class is “Data Structures in C++” and keep in mind that I’ve been programming in C++ for almost 10 years with it being my primary and first language in OOP.

Throughout this entire class, the teacher has been making huge mistakes by saying things that aren’t right or just simply not knowing how to teach such as telling the students that “int& varOne = varTwo” was an address getting put into a variable until I corrected him about it being a reference and he proceeded to skip all reference slides or steps through sorting algorithms that are wrong or he doesn’t remember how to do it and saying, “So then it gets to this part and....it uh....does that and gets this value and so that’s how you do it *doesnt do rest of it and skips slide*”.

First presentation I did on doubly linked lists. I decided to go above and beyond and write my own code that had a menu to add, insert at position n, delete, print, etc for a doubly linked list. When I go to pull out my code he tells me that I didn’t say anything about a doubly linked list’s tail and head nodes each have a pointer pointing to null and so I was getting docked points. I told him I did actually say it and another classmate spoke up and said “Ya” and he cuts off saying, “No you didn’t”. To which I started to say I’ll show you my slides but he cut me off mid sentence and just yelled, “Nope!”. He docked me 20% and gave me a B- because of that. I had 1 slide where I had a bullet point mentioning it and 2 slides with visual models showing that the head node’s previousNode* and the tail node’s nextNode* pointed to null.

Another classmate that’s never coded in his life had screenshots of code from online (literally all his slides were a screenshot of the next part of code until it finished implementing a binary search tree) and literally read the code line by line, “class node, node pointer node, ......for int i equals zero, i is less than tree dot length er length of tree that is, um i plus plus.....”
Professor yelled at him like 4 times about reading directly from slide and not saying what the code does and he would reply with, “Yes sir” and then continue to read again because there was nothing else he could do.

Ya, he got the same grade as me.

Today I had my second and final presentation. I did it on “Separate Chaining”, a hashing collision resolution. This time I said fuck writing my own code, he didn’t give two shits last time when everyone else just screenshot online example code but me so I decided I’d focus on the PowerPoint and amp it up with animations on models I made with the shapes in PowerPoint. Get 2 slides in and he goes,
Prof: Stop! Go back one slide.
Me: Uh alright, *click*
(Slide showing the 3 collision resolutions: Open Addressing, Separate Chaining, and Re-Hashing)
Prof: Aren’t you forgetting something?
Me: ....Not that I know of sir
Prof: I see Open addressing, also called Open Hashing, but where’s Closed Hashing?
Me: I believe that’s what Seperate Chaining is sir
Prof: No
Me: I’m pretty sure it is
*Class nods and agrees*
Prof: Oh never mind, I didn’t see it right

Get another 4 slides in before:
Prof: Stop! Go back one slide
Me: .......alright *click*
(Professor loses train of thought? Doesn’t mention anything about this slide)
Prof: I er....um, I don’t understand why you decided not to mention the other, er, other types of Chaining. I thought you were going to back on that slide with all the squares (model of hash table with animations moving things around to visualize inserting a value with a collision that I spent hours on) but you didn’t.
(I haven’t finished the second half of my presentation yet you fuck! What if I had it there?)
Me: I never saw anything on any other types of Chaining professor
Prof: I’m pretty sure there’s one that I think combines Open Addressing and Separate Chaining
Me: That doesn’t make sense sir. *explanation why* I did a lot of research and I never saw any other.
Prof: There are, you should have included them.
(I check after I finish. Google comes up with no other Chaining collision resolution)

He docks me 20% and gives me a B- AGAIN! Both presentation grades have feedback saying, “MrCush, I won’t go into the issues we discussed but overall not bad”.

Thanks for being so specific on a whole 20% deduction prick! Oh wait, is it because you don’t have specifics?
Bye 3.8 GPA

Is it me or does he have something against me?

Worst collab was in bootcamp. Group projects always suck because there’s always someone not pulling their weight. In my case it felt like everyone was terrible. My only regret was not putting a specific person on my “don’t want to collab” list when groups were being assigned. That probably would have saved me from so much stress.

One person in my group didn’t know how to start up the project…two weeks into us working on it. She even had the privilege of having an outside mentor. Mentor didn’t know how to work the project either—but let’s be real, that’s not the mentor’s responsibility. She forgot she needed to run npm install. We were six months into this bootcamp and she forgot one of the simplest commands.

Another person was just a follower and couldn’t think for himself. He was so faithful to another teammate’s choices and direction that I wondered if they were screwing each other. Other teammate could be absolutely (and destructively) wrong and he would defend her as “well she’s taking initiative and showing leadership.” It wasn’t leadership, it was bullying. They weren’t dating/screwing, but I did suspect he liked to be controlled/dominated by “strong”women.

The “strong” woman teammate is someone I suspect of being the spawn of Satan. You were only useful to her if you agreed with her or could help her. If you gave her any sort of pushback, she’d turn on you. I think she wanted me to be both her parent and her scapegoat for the sketchy things she wanted to do. She pulled a lot of bullshit and tried to blame everything on me. Seriously, she would invest a lot of time in stupid things like getting me to agree to use bitmoji for team pics; I just wanted to check with the bootcamp first because they might have an unwritten rule about using your real face for presentations so guests know who you are. I had to get the bootcamp staff to support me because she was out of control. She tried to say that I was sabotaging the group from day one. The staff explained to her how her story of me “sabotaging” the group doesn’t add up. She backed down a little but she’d still try to screw me over through the remainder of the project.

There was one dude who was alright. He was the keep your head down type. Spawn of Satan would be on his ass about being late to class and he’d just stare at her stoically. He was a husband and a dad so he was choosing how to expend his energy. I don’t like people being late either, but show some compassion and don’t snap at people.

If I saw these people again, I would not even pretend to be friends with most of them. Spawn of Satan especially: I’d take out my crucifix and send her back to hell.

Pentesting for undisclosed company. Let's call them X as to not get us into trouble.
We are students and are doing our first pentest at an actual company instead of assignments at school. So we're very anxious. But today was a good day.
We found some servers with open ports so we checked a few of them out. I had a set of them with a bunch of open ports like ftp and... 8080. Time to check this out.
"please install flash player"... Security risk 1 found!

System seemed to be some monitoring system. Trying to log in using admin admin... Fucking works. Group loses it cause the company was being all high and mighty about being secure af. Other shit is pretty tight though.

Able to see logs, change password, add new superuser, do some searches for USERS_LOGGEDIN_TODAY! I shit you not, the system even had SUGGESTIONS for usernames to search for. One of which had something to do with sftp and auth keys. Unfortunatly every search gave a SQL syntax error. Used sniffing tools to maybe intercept message so we could do some queries of our own but nothing. Query is probably not issued from the local machine.

Tried to decompile the flash file but no luck. Only for some weird lines and a few function names I presume. But decompressing it and opening it in a text editor allowed me to see and search text. No GET or POST found. No SQL queries or name checks or anything we could think of.

That's all I could do for today. So we'll have to think of stuff for next week. We've already planned xss so maybe we can do that on this server as well.

We also found some older network printers with open telnet. Servers with a specific SQL variant with a potential exploit to execute terminal commands and some ftp and smb servers we need to check out next week.

Hella excited about this!

If you guys have any suggestions let us know. We are utter noobs when it comes to this.

PM looking at Concept Design: "There were checkboxes and now you have radio buttons"

Me: "Those are two separate screens. One is the user inventory, the other populates an add"

PM: "So which is it? Are we using checkboxes or radio buttons?"

Me:"...both? Each where it makes sense?"

PM: "So what's the point of the radio button? If the user can only click one row, why do we need a radio button?"

Me: "Visual representation of what they selected. We could use row highlighting as well, it doesn't really matter"

PM: "But what's the point?"

Me:"...."

@dfox feature request, as part of the menu links in a rant, if you could add open in web version.

Why?
Sometimes links aren't clickable on my devrant version (using latest Android version am on Lollipop 😧)
Sometimes really large images don't load

So I usually copy link then paste in my browser

I knew this might be an issue, but really Linux just sucks balls. It may not be Linux's fault, but the user experience could be a fuck ton better.

Spent 1.5 hours trying to get mint installed on second drive. It works fine if you don't want to do anything with it.

As you can probably surmise I died on getting the gpu driver installed. Just starts to a black screen. No amount of juggling is helping. It just refuses to show the screen with an nvidia driver installed. What is worse is that settings that might help are not set. Like nomodeset in grub. If you know some drivers fuck up the grub interface then add nomodeset and not leave it up to the user to "figure this shit out". Because users are tired of figuring this shit out.

Really really fucking disappointed. I thought to myself: lets install steam and see how it does. The reality: fucking stuck for 1.5 hours on trying to boot into x with graphics acceleration and failing.

Many of you hate on windows, but one thing it has going for it. It doesn't do fucked up shit like this. It has failsafes that try and account for this.

Fuck you linux. You need to fucking grow up and stop relying on users to fix every damn thing in the command line. Go back to server where you belong.

I know I will get the "I told you so" messages, but guess what? The computer I got doesn't come preinstalled with windows. You have to pay to get it. At this point windows is the only fucking viable solution to make my shit work.

Nvidia, go die in a fire bitch. Fix your fucking Linux support you worthless shit heads.

This has been a rant brought to you by "the pain of others". I hope you enjoyed the experience.

PS, I love you all. Even the "I told you so" bitches.

I really hate PHP frameworks.

I also often write my own frameworks but propriety. I have two decades experience doing without frameworks, writing frameworks and using frameworks.

Virtually every PHP framework I've ever used has causes more headaches than if I had simply written the code.

Let me give you an example. I want a tinyint in my database.

> Unknown column type "tinyint" requested.

Oh, doctrine doesn't support it and wont fix. Doctrine is a library that takes a perfectly good feature rich powerful enough database system and nerfs it to the capabilities of mysql 1.0.0 for portability and because the devs don't actually have the time to create a full ORM library. Sadly it's also the defacto for certain filthy disgusting frameworks whose name I shan't speak.

So I add my own type class. Annoying but what can you do.

I have to try to use it and to do so I have to register it in two places like this (pseudo)...

Types::add(Tinyint::class);
Doctrine::add(Tinyint::class);

Seems simply enough so I run it and see...

> Type tinyint already exists.

So I assume it's doing some magic loading it based on the directory and commend out the Type::add line to see.

> Type to be overwritten tinyint does not exist.

Are you fucking kidding me?

At this point I figure out it must be running twice. It's booting twice. Do I get a stack trace by default from a CLI command? Of course not because who would ever need that?

I take a quick look at parent::boot(). HttpKernel is the standard for Cli Commands?

I notice it has state, uses a protected booted property but I'm curious why it tries to boot so many times. I assume it's user error.

After some fiddling around I get a stack trace but only one boot. How is it possible?

It's not user error, the program flow of the framework is just sub par and it just calls boot all over the place.

I use the state variable and I have to do it in a weird way...

> $booted = $this->booted;parent::boot();if (!$booted) {doStuffOnceThatDependsOnParentBootage();}

A bit awkward but not life and death. I could probably just return but believe or not the parent is doing some crap if already booted. A common ugly practice but one that works is to usually call doSomething and have something only work around the state.

The thing is, doctrine does use TINYINT for bool and it gets all super confused now running commands like updates. It keeps trying to push changes when nothing changed. I'm building my own schema differential system for another project and it doesn't have these problems out of the box. It's not clever enough to handle ambiguous reverse mappings when single types are defined and it should be possible to match the right one or heck both are fine in this case. I'd expect ambiguity to be a problem with reverse engineer, not compare schema to an exact schema.

This is numpty country. Changing TINYINT UNSIGNED to TINYINT UNSIGNED. IT can't even compare two before and after strings.

There's a few other boots I could use but who cares. The internet seems to want to use that boot function. There's also init stages missing. Believe it or not there's a shutdown and reboot for the kernel. It might not be obvious but the Type::add line wants to go not in the boot method but in the top level scope along with the class definition. The top level scope is run only once.

I think people using OOP frameworks forget that there's a scope outside of the object in PHP. It's not ideal but does the trick given the functionality is confined to static only. The register command appears to have it's own check and noop or simply overwrite if the command is issued twice making things more confusing as it was working with register type before to merely alias a type to an existing type so that it could detect it from SQL when reverse engineering.

I start to wonder if I should just use columnDefinition.

It's this. Constantly on a daily basis using these pretentious stuck up frameworks and libraries.

It's not just the palava which in this case is relatively mild compared to some of the headaches that arise. It's that if you use a framework you expect basic things out of the box like oh I don't know support for the byte/char/tinyint/int8 type and a differential command that's able to compare two strings to see if they're different.

Some people might say you're using it wrong. There is such a thing as a learning curve and this one goes down, learning all the things it can't do. It's cripplesauce.

Are there any fellow devranters who have shitty working memory and have trouble focusing? Basically people who have ADHD/ADD? I got into programming because I love solving problems and am able to hyperfocus for weeks on projects, but outside of work life seems to be a mess :/ Can't even remember simple facts if they don't interest me (don't have that much dopamine).

Could you share some advices on how you managed to treat ADHD/ADD or basically improve your memory?

I mean there is the obvious: sleep, exercise, good nutrition (cutting out dairy, sugar, caffeine, alcohol, smoking).

But maybe there are other ways to do this without using drugs such as ritalin/concerta?

the more i learn about web dev, the more i realise the reason for its mess up . There are 2 major problems in it : the people who create various important concepts and tools for web dev were 1) working on it without any collaboration and agreements on the philosophy and 2) were too stubborn on their ideology i guess.

There is no limitation to anything's functionalities, and the limits that are "defined" are badshit crazy. for eg:

====================================
HTML creator : "I am gonna make a language that would provide a skeleton to web page. it will just have the text and basic markers to let the scripting and styling engines/languages know which text is supposed to be rendered and how.
It won't provide any click or loading functionality.

someone: "So i guess opening a page or loading an image would be handled by JS or other programming language? also, bold , italic or division would be added via CSS?"

HTMLguy : Nah, my html engine would ALSO do that.

someone : what , why? won't that just be stupid and against your philosophy?
HTMLguy : WHAT? am too awesome, can't hear you
w3c , 50 yrs later : sorry can't change this, gotta support the 50 yrs of web dev and billion sites

=================================

CSS guy: I am gonna make the world's best beautifying stylesheet language to provide colors, styling, fonts and backgrounds to a page. every loadings and clicks would be handled somewhere else

Some1: cool, then clicks, hover and running of animation would be handled by JS only

CSSguy :Umm, i guess i could handle those.

Some1 wha-?

CSSguy : Thankyou Thankyou Thankyou for the nobel price!

====================================

JS guy : I am gonna make a god web programming language! It can do everything: add/remove html tags, add styling, control animations, control browser, handle clicks , perform operations, everything!

some1: cool! you must be making very large programming language with lots of modules.

JS guy: No! i am gonna keep it small. no built in classes and file imports! just use the functions directly. if someone wants the additional lib functionality, install them on your server

some1 : innovative! what's typeof NaN ?

JSguy :shut up.

I'm finishing up the most depressing client engagement ever. Ultimately it all traces back to their worthless Expert Beginner EA who thinks he's a genius but can't write code. I don't mean that he's not great at it. It's some of the worst I've ever seen by a person in his position.

In the time I have left here I could do so much to help them clean this stuff up so that future developers could ramp up more easily and there wouldn't be tons of duplicate code.

But I've just given up. You can't help someone who thinks their code is perfect. I don't even bother suggesting stuff any more (like don't have two methods in a class - a "real" one and one for unit testing) because he gets mad or just says that's his "pattern."

If I have a useful improvement, first he'll want me to put all new code in some new library, which is fine as an end result but you don't start with putting single-use code in a library separate from where you're using it. You work with it for a while to see what's useful, what's not, and make changes. But, you see, he just loves making more libraries and calling them "frameworks."

He tells me what he wants me to name classes, and they have nothing to do with what the classes do. When you haven't done any development yet you don't even know what classes you're going to create. You start with something but you refactor and rename. It takes a special breed of stupid to think that you start with a name.

I've even caught the dude taking classes I've committed and copying and pasting them into their own library - a library with one class.

The last time we had to figure out how to do something new I told everyone up front: Don't waste time trying to figure out how you want to solve the problem. Just ask the EA what he wants you to do. Because whatever you come up with, he's going to reject it and come up with something stupid that revolves around adding stuff to his genius framework. And whatever he says you're going to do. So just skip to that.

So that's the environment. We don't write software to meet requirements. We write it to add to the framework so that the EA can turn around and say how useful the framework is.

Except it's not. The overhead for new developers to learn how to navigate his copy-pasted code, tons of inheritance, dead methods, meaningless names, and useless wrappers around existing libraries is massive. Whatever you need to do you could do in a few hours without his framework. Or you can spend literally a month modifying his framework to do the same thing. And half the time his code collapses so that dozens of applications built on his framework go down at once.

I get frameworks. They can be useful, but only if they serve your needs, not the other way around.

I've spent months disciplining myself not to solve problems and not to use my skills.

Good luck to those of you who actually work there. I am deeply sad for the visa worker I'm handing this off to. He's a nice guy and smart. If he was stupid then he wouldn't mind dragging this anchor behind him like an ox pulling a plow. Knowing the difference just makes it harder.

You constantly see these professional profiles with labels such as 'Expert'/10 years experience/senior/CTO/CIO/Consultant.

Isn't it funny when you go and work with these people in the field, they appear to be frauds? How can these people legitimately have these titles and know less than a snotty freshman year student? Their knowledge is so poor, a 14-year old with basic Windows and Javascript knowledge could outmatch them. If only this weren't true.

I think it's very unfair because they attract employers and they even get hired, while some of us with veteran knowledge in several fields don't get considered for a job.

May I add that it's always the funny guys who get a job. Apparently being a relatable frat bro at an interview is more important than having priceless expert knowledge.

So I now bought an iphone 6 again for development and tried just for fun to make it a daily driver and it feels really limited, especially because apparently theres no jailbreak yet for 11.2.5. (I feel near everything could be solved as soon as cydia etc. get fully released to the alibaba jailbreak)

I didnt even remember, that it doesnt have any option to have haptic feedback when typing, such a basic feature has to be jailbroken..? I thought I remembered that it had it, last time I had one - did they remove such a basic feature?

Also the fingerprint reader is really weird compared to other phones from the same year, first getting it to actually fill all fingerprint lines without saying "try again" or it trolling you and vibrating as if it recognized your finger, but actually didnt (really frustrating when its the last 2 lines...) - is a real challenge, might be that I have some mutant fingerprints, but when I asked my s/o to try it out, it also failed most of the times, so you have to position your finger in a very specific position for it to work, even if you add the max amount of 5 fingerprints.

Most ads on iphones feel HORRIBLE, the amount of lag some can add is incredible, wait till it loaded or youre fucked and besides using some shady adblocker vpn, theres no way to block them, without again - a jailbreak.

Another feature that I used many times on my android phone, is controlling it from the desktop, connect it via usb and then just use it for demonstration purposes on a projector or to instruct how things work - theres no such function without a jailbreak, even if you use osx..

Then theres the feature, that instead of just setting your cursor to a specific location, you have to hold and it zooms in, not sure if I just got too used to the android way of doing it, but I can see myself making less mistakes of where I positioned it with the ios way.

The hardware mute switch feels like a great feature, its just sometimes weird, so if you were inside an app that was playing sound and you mute it, it still plays it until you either close and open that app or just change to another one temporarily, so its not an actual hardware switch as I usually thought, more like a request to mute the phone.

The cable that comes with it is too thin, I am afraid to even unwind it, as it would probably break, so I had to get another one.

Please don't turn this into a shitfest from any of the fanboys, I really just wanted to share my image of finally being able to try it first hand again.

Yet another day at my company, Im rewriting some old code for client (rewriting old, php 4 system for vindications managment) and you know the moment when you are focused and someone comes to you to absolutely ruin your focus. Fine, whatever. Oh, for fuck sake. Again dev is doing as support becouse one moron with second can't login into zimbra admin panel and add fucking mailbox. I show them exacly how they login, remind them they are admins too, slowly show them, so you click "manage" than you click that gear icon and than you click "new", fill in email address and password. As simple as 1-2-3. Okay, fuck it, time to go for a cig. I just finish up few lines and stand, grab my vape and start walking towards door. In door I find my buddy with 2 random people. He told me that they are interns and that I should show them some basics and stuff around that. Oh god, fuck my life. If anything, Im definitely very bad teacher, mainly becouse I often have problems with saying what I mean in the way that somebody actually understans and knows what I am trying to say. Whatever. Fuck it all. I grab two of our old laptops that nobody used in like a year or so, and first thing I quickly figure out, is that one day for some what the fuck reason I dont even dont bothered to remember I installed Arch on both while I dont usually use Arch. I just needed it for some specific reason. Whatever. So I guess I will need to upgrade fucking system. Our network isn't really great so that was like... hour or so. In the meantime I figured what they know about coding in general etc, and holly shit. One of them (there was boy and girl), girl, apparently never ever in her life even touched code. Well... fuck. Why am I wasting my time? Becouse there was some programme or some shit like that... Someone could tell me before so I could mentally prepare.. fuck it. whatever. So while laptops are doing their pacman thing, I sit with them and slowly start to explain based on my machine some really basic concepts. Second guy actually had some expirience, he knew how to make some really really basic logic and stuff, so he had another world of problems, becouse it was PHP and, as we all know, everyone hates PHP, and... yeah.. You can probably imagine his approach. Yes, you get user input in super global array. I really wanted to say "Now shut the fuck up and write that fucking $_POST".

hour or so passed, I was close to giving up to not let my anger rise (im not really good teacher... I mentioned it. I suck at teaching others) but luckly machines upgraded. He wanted to use visual studio code, she didnt care too much, so I installed phpstorm in trial mode. whatever. Since that's linux and they were not comfortable with that, I walked them through installing LAMP stack, and when finally it started to look like LAMP stack, I requested them to google how to install xdebug, becouse xdebug is very usefull and googling skill is your best weapon on that field. I go for cig, come back and what I see boiled me a little bit. The girl was stuck looking at github page randomly looking through xdebug source code and idk... hoping for miracle (she admited she thought there will be instructions somewhere) and the guy was in good place, xdebug has a place to paste your phpinfo() for custom instructions. But it didn't work for him, he claims that wizzard told him it cant help him.. hmm intresting, you are sure you pasted in phpinfo? yes, he is sure. Okay, show me.

Again mindblown how someone can have problems with reading.

so his phpinfo() looked like that:
```<?php
phpinfo();```

I highlighted on the page the words "output of phpinfo". He somehow didn't see it or something. He didnt know, he thought that he needs to put in phpinfo so he did. OMG.

Finally, I figured out I can workaround my intern problem, and I just briefly shown them php.net, how documentation looks, said to allways google in english, if he uses tutorial to read whole fucking thing, not just some parts of it, and left them with simple task, that took them whole day and at which they ultimately failed.

To make 3 buttons labeled "1" "2" "3" and if someone presses one of them, remember in session that they pressed it and disallow pressing other ones.

Never fucking again interns. Especially those who randomly without apparent reason almost literally just spawn in front of you and here, its your fucking problem now.

Fuck it, I have some time to get back to my stuff. Time is running so lets not waste it.

After around 15 minutes my one of my superiors comes in and asks me if I can go on meeting with him and other superior. My buddy goes with us, and next 3 hours I was basically explaining that you cannot do some things (ie. know XYZ happened without any source of information) in code, and I can't listen for callbacks from ABC becouse it wont send anyc cuz in their fucking brilliant idea ABC can't even know that this script would even exist, not to mention it wants callbacks.

Sometimes I hate my job.