"You gave us bad code! We ran it and now production is DOWN! Join this bridgeline now and help us fix this!"

So, as the author of the code in question, I join the bridge... And what happens next, I will simply never forget.

First, a little backstory... Another team within our company needed some vendor client software installed and maintained across the enterprise. Multiple OSes (Linux, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, etc.), so packaging and consistent update methods were a a challenge. I wrote an entire set of utilities to install, update and generally maintain the software; intending all the time that this other team would eventually own the process and code. With this in mind, I wrote extensive documentation, and conducted a formal turnover / training season with the other team.

So, fast forward to when the other team now owns my code, has been trained on how to use it, including (perhaps most importantly) how to send out updates when the vendor released upgrades to the agent software.

Now, this other team had the responsibility of releasing their first update since I gave them the process. Very simple upgrade process, already fully automated. What could have gone so horribly wrong? Did something the vendor supplied break their client?

I asked for the log files from the upgrade process. They sent them, and they looked... wrong. Very, very wrong.

Did you run the code I gave you to do this update?

"Yes, your code is broken - fix it! Production is down! Rabble, rabble, rabble!"

So, I go into our code management tool and review the _actual_ script they ran. Sure enough, it is my code... But something is very wrong.

More than 2/3rds of my code... has been commented out. The code is "there"... but has been commented out so it is not being executed. WT-actual-F?!

I question this on the bridge line. Silence. I insist someone explain what is going on. Is this a joke? Is this some kind of work version of candid camera?
Finally someone breaks the silence and explains.

And this, my friends, is the part I will never forget.

"We wanted to look through your code before we ran the update. When we looked at it, there was some stuff we didn't understand, so we commented that stuff out."

You... you didn't... understand... my some of the code... so you... you didn't ask me about it... you didn't try to actually figure out what it did... you... commented it OUT?!

"Right, we figured it was better to only run the parts we understood... But now we ran it and everything is broken and you need to fix your code."

I cannot repeat the things I said next, even here on devRant. Let's just say that call did not go well.

So, lesson learned? If you don't know what some code does? Just comment that shit out. Then blame the original author when it doesn't work.

You just cannot make this kind of stuff up.

This was during the first day of my first real dev job, straight out of college. I didn’t have have much experience with version control since I did mostly solo projects in college, and I wasn’t exposed to SVN or Git in school at all.

One of the senior devs was going to give me and another new guy a brief overview of the codebase. He sets us up with the GitHub repo for the codebase and tells us to clone the codebase locally. I didn’t really know what this meant but I felt kind of embarrassed to ask, so I just clicked “download as zip” on The GitHub repo.

After a minute he saw what I had done and was like “yeah, that’s not what you want to do” and showed me how to clone it. I was kind of embarrassed but I learned Git pretty quickly after that.

I don’t really have a moral to this story except that “no question is a stupid one” is much easier said than done for many people, and it can be embarrassing to ask certain questions sometimes.

*came in this morning to see this conversation in slack from the remote teams*

Dev: Hey guys, I'm trying to push to the develop branch, telling me its locked. Is there a new process?

Lead dev: Yes I locked it because the repo is now dead, the last release that went out is the last for this year and ever for this app. Were merging this app with another, starting from the last release's code. We'll all have to swap over to the new repo soon.

Dev: ... eh ok I didn't put anything in the last release branch as it wasn't urgent. Normally our process is anything in /develop goes out in the new year. I've been merging to /develop for the last few weeks ... is that code now gone?
*14 question mark emoji reactions*

Lead dev: Yes
*27 angry emoji reactions*

Engineering manager: WHAT? when was this decided? When was it communicated?

Lead dev: oh I assumed my product counterpart had been spreading the messages around, have they not?

Several teams: no, nope, first i'm hearing of it.

Lead dev: Ok, i'll ask them what happened. Be aware then that most of the stuff thats going into develop now, most likely won't be allowed in until March. They want to prioritise releasing this new merged app and don't want anything to impact it.

Dev: So wait, i'm working on stuff now. What do I do? Where do I base the branch? Where do I merge?

<no response>

*My team comes into the office*

Dev: eeehhh ... what does this mean for our past 4 weeks of work? and all the stuff needed to go out in January?

Me: not.a.fucking.clue

Lads, I will be real with you: some of you show absolute contempt to the actual academic study of the field.

In a previous rant from another ranter it was thrown up and about the question for finding a binary search implementation.

Asking a senior in the field of software engineering and computer science such question should be a simple answer, specifically depending on the type of job application in question. Specially if you are applying as a SENIOR.

I am tired of this strange self-learner mentality that those that have a degree or a deep grasp of these fundamental concepts are somewhat beneath you because you learned to push out a website using the New Boston tutorials on youtube. FOR every field THAT MATTERS a license or degree is hold in high regards.
"Oh I didn't go to school, shit is for suckers, but I learned how to chop people up and kinda fix it from some tutorials on youtube" <---- try that for a medical position.

"Nah it's cool, I can fix your breaks, learned how to do it by reading blogs on the internet" <--- maintenance shop

"Sure can write the controller processing code for that boing plane! Just got done with a low level tutorial on some websites! what can go wrong!"

(The same goes for military devices which in the past have actually killed mfkers in the U.S)

Just recently a series of people were sent to jail because of a bug in software. Industries NEED to make sure a mfker has aaaall of the bells and whistles needed for running and creating software.

During my masters degree, it fucking FASCINATED me how many mfkers were absolutely completely NEW to the concept of testing code, some of them with years in the field.

And I know what you are thinking "fuck you, I am fucking awesome" <--- I AM SURE YOU BLOODY WELL ARE but we live in a planet with billions of people and millions of them have fallen through the cracks into software related positions as well as complete degrees, the degree at LEAST has a SPECTACULAR barrier of entry during that intro to Algos and DS that a lot of bitches fail.

NOTE: NOT knowing the ABSTRACTIONS over the tools that we use WILL eventually bite you in the ASS because you do not fucking KNOW how these are implemented internally.

Why do you think compiler designers, kernel designers and embedded developers make the BANK they made? Because they don't know memory efficient ways of deploying a product with minimal overhead without proper data structures and algorithmic thinking? NOT EVERYTHING IS SHITTY WEB DEVELOPMENT

SO, if a mfker talks shit about a so called SENIOR for not knowing that the first mamase mamasa bloody simple as shit algorithm THROWN at you in the first 10 pages of an algo and ds book, then y'all should be offended at the mkfer saying that he is a SENIOR, because these SENIORS are the same mfkers that try to at one point in time teach other people.
These SENIORS are the same mfkers that left me a FUCKING HORRIBLE AND USELESS MESS OF SPAGHETTI CODE

Specially to most PHP developers (my main area) y'all would have been well motherfucking served in learning how not to forLoop the fuck out of tables consisting of over 50k interconnected records, WHAT THE FUCK

"LeaRniNG tHiS iS noT neeDed!!" yes IT fucking IS

being able to code a binary search (in that example) from scratch lets me know fucking EXACTLY how well your thought process is when facing a hard challenge, knowing the basemotherfucking case of a LinkedList will damn well make you understand WHAT is going on with your abstractions as to not fucking violate memory constraints, this-shit-is-important.

So, will your royal majesties at least for the sake of completeness look into a couple of very well made youtube or book tutorials concerning the topic?

You can code an entire website, fine as shit, you will get tested by my ass in terms of security and best practices, run these questions now, and it very motherfucking well be as efficient as I think it should be(I HIRE, NOT YOU, or your fucking blog posts concerning how much MY degree was not needed, oh and btw, MY degree is what made sure I was able to make SUCH decissions)

This will make a loooooooot of mfkers salty, don't worry, I will still accept you as an interview candidate, but if you think you are good enough without a degree, or better than me (has happened, told that to my face by a candidate) then get fucking ready to receive a question concerning: BASIC FUCKING COMPUTER SCIENCE TOPICS

* gays away into the night

Interviewer: (asks technical question)
Me: (answers correctly)
Interviewer: Oh thank God, most of the people we interview fail to answer that. So, on another note do you believe in rubber duck debugging?
Me: yes, ofc
Interviewer: but it's just a toy you know
[I was kinda taken aback]
Me: ...
Me: God is imaginary too you know
Interviewer: (he just laughed)

(So I laughed with him) 😅

!rant
A few years back, when my youngest cousin was about 7 years old, she asked me the most innocent question ever.

She said, "what's the internet?"
I answered, "it is where you can find anything that came from other people".

"Wanna see baby tigers?" I added then she nodded.

I Google searched 'tiger cubs' and showed the image results to her. She beamed a very big smile and said "let's look for another one!" So we did search for a few animal photos and I saw how happy she was!

Now she's a gamer who loves minecraft, Pewdiepie, and FPS games! :)

"Do you have 2 factor auth for the database?"
a customer asked. I stared on the wall in front of me and suddenly fel and urge to punch and piss on something.
I took a deep breath while thinking to myself
*Oh boy, here we go. Another retard*
I put on my nice voice and asked:
"What you mean?"
The customer seems confused, as if my question did not make sense and he said:
"TWO FACTOR AUTHENTICATION! Dont you know what it is? To make the database more secure."

I was fucking right, this person reads to much shit. The fact that the email signature of that person said "Wordpress Developer" made me more angry.
I, still with the nice voice asked
"How would that work?"
"Two factor authentication when I am connecting to the database."
"So, do you want it by SMS then? You'll get alot of messages if it is going to send you one every time a query is made."
The following 7 seconds was dead silent until I heard the person hang up.

Navy story time again.
I was a cadet, 1st year, final exams in """CS""". Our """professor""" was handing out the exam sheets, when I told him that one of the questions couldn't be answered by what he had taught. He had supposedly taught us C++ (I would insult every C++ tutorial, however shitty, if I called his class introductory or even elemental).
To give you a better idea of the situation, I'll only say this: one of the questions was "Name three brands of antivirus software."
I. SHIT. YOU. NOT.
This was supposed to be a Naval Academy that trained officers, by the way. Anyway, the question at hand was a program that must use recursion to solve a particular problem. I had been studying programming since high school, so I was not bothered by it, but everyone else was. Anyway...
Once I told him that, he threw a fucking fit. He screamed (as our overseeing officer watched in confusion) that we weren't paying attention, that we were just playing around and watching porn sites (BTW I discovered after that, that most porn videos were on the campus server, in write-protected folders that no student had permission to write, but professors and administrators did. Curious... but my ITSec misdeeds are for another day). Anyway, I got so angry at that idiot, I started writing (yes, programming on paper, if you whine about your IDE/text editor, think about that) the program. Until I found out that I didn't know WTF I was writing. The time was up, however, and I had to give my paper. To this day I have no idea what I wrote and what it did (if anything).
Got perfect score. Only one in class.

- I see a question on StackOverflow
- I write a detailed answer, providing a working code and showing a gotcha
- Another user, 1 minute later, answer saying "try this" and append a code which is like mine
- He gets upvoted and I don't

!rant

I feel darn good today! I caught some A-holes cheating the system on Stack Overflow.

So basically a question was asked with no code examples present and not a single reference to any framework being used.
The tag only had 'javascript', which probably limits to only 157.244.457 existing frameworks.

I'm commenting something like 'Show us your code so we can have a look'.

After 2 minutes, out of the blue, an answer appears. AND WOW! This guy had a Magical 8 Ball™!
He could predict the framework AND had a very specific fix. Just a one-liner! Go figure!

So I'm like thinking.. What the fuck just happened? Did I miss something? «Going over the question two more times»

All of the sudden, up-votes start popping up all over the place. The question was marked 3 times, the answer was marked an up-voted multiple times, and THEN it hit me (I'm kind of slow).
I checked both user profiles and instead of the usual 'air of mystery', these guys were actually dumb enough to include their company name.

AssertEquals == true.

So in the comment section, I raise my concerns on the legitimacy of the question as clearly this was 'telephoned' as we say it in Dutch, meaning as much as 'rehearsed' in this context.
But as if that was not enough, this another guy comes in and COPY/PASTED(!) the answer of guy #1. Again. Up-votes. EVERYWhere.

So I start going over some of the questions and answers of The Three Musketeers or TTM, as I'll refer them as of now.

TTM had posted over 15 questions combined, mostly crap and incomplete no-code questions. And they had answered most of their own questions.
Sometimes another guy's answer was accepted with zero up-votes as a smoke screen while the real winner was one of their own.

I marked ALL of these questions for moderation, left for lunch, and came back to see how far my blast radius reached.
Turns out, pretty damn far! Although their accounts have not been deleted, TTM have lost most of their reputation points.

They will remain on my watchlist for a couple of months. I know that is quite childish of me, but I just call it my 'guilty pleasure'! ;D
And besides, what else is there to do, instead of browsing DevRant?

OK morning rant from yesterday.

Get into the venue, connect my surface to the dock, keyboard won't work.
Try more USB ports, try another machine, keyboard (corsair k70) is totally broken.

Ugh.
Fine.

Disassemble keyboard, someone asks me a question, turn around and knock full coffee cup over my surface book.

Fuck sake.
Now I need a new laptop.

Dear children let's talk about how to ask a f***ing question.

You don't just go "I need help. I can't figure it out." We had trainings on this, I sat through 3 hours holding your hand to help you try and understand things.

And yet now we have scheduled another 3 hours to help you figure this out because you said you were having difficulty with it because you couldn't figure it out. How about instead of just saying you "Need help", you start by
1. Explaining what you are trying to accomplish
2. What specific issue are you facing? Is there an error message or something?
3. What have you already tried thus far that didn't work?

Instead of "I NEED HELP I CAN'T FIGURE IT OUT!" that is the sign of a lazy f****ing engineer, someone who doesn't want to think, who doesn't want to learn something new who wants to just coast by. Especially when this is going to become an increasingly important part of your job.

And of course you currently are still a whole job level above me because sitting around and keeping a chair warm for 10 years means you are a valuable contributor, instead of what you can actually DO!

This bugs me so much. So remember kids, when you need help, or need to ask a question, ASK IT THE RIGHT F****ING WAY!

so I called dell to ask a question about a laptop. after navigating their anoying automated system, I get a guy who can barely speak english. I ask my question which he didnt understand until I asked 4 more times. he finally understands and says "please hold on while I search. 10 minutes go by and I ask if he's still there. he says "yes, hold on" I finally ask how his search is going after another 5 minutes. he says "I couldn't find anything on google regarding your question... really dude!?!? I already searched google and came up with nothing helpfull. you're Dell and this is a Dell product. know your shit!

StackOverflow members,
Please read the question properly at least once before marking it as a duplicate of another question with the similar keyword but asks a completely different question 😑😑

Stackoverflow 101:
- spent 6 hours to Search if my problem is already asked and/or answered
- spent another 4 hours to Google the question and make sure there is no article about it,
- Still got banned.

For a week+ I've been listening to a senior dev ("Bob") continually make fun of another not-quite-a-senior dev ("Tom") over a performance bug in his code. "If he did it right the first time...", "Tom refuses to write tests...that's his problem", "I would have wrote the code correctly ..." all kinds of passive-aggressive put downs. Bob then brags how without him helping Tom, the application would have been a failure (really building himself up).
Bob is out of town and Tom asked me a question about logging performance data in his code. I look and see Bob has done nothing..nothing at all to help Tom. Tom wrote his own JSON and XML parser (data is coming from two different sources) and all kinds of IO stream plumbing code.
I use Visual Studio's feature create classes from JSON/XML, used the XML Serialzier and Newtonsoft.Json to handling the conversion plumbing.
With several hundred of lines gone (down to one line each for the XML/JSON-> object), I wrote unit tests around the business transaction, integration test for the service and database access. Maybe couple of hours worth of work.
I'm 100% sure Bob knew Tom was going in a bad direction (maybe even pushing him that direction), just to swoop in and "save the day" in front of Tom's manager at some future point in time.

This morning's standup ..
Boss: "You're helping Tom since Bob is on vacation? What are you helping with?"
Me: "I refactored the JSON and XML data access, wrote initial unit and integration tests. Tom will have to verify, but I believe any performance problem will now be isolated to the database integration. The problem Bob was talking about on Monday is gone. I thought spending time helping Tom was better than making fun of him."
<couple seconds of silence>
Boss:"Yea...want to let you know, I really, really appreciate that."

Bob, put people first, everyone wins.

I actually wanna RAGE QUIT right about now!!!

I wanna fuck off and go somewhere where my talents are appreciated and I'm actually listened to! I'm reaching the point where I hate my job and don't actually want to be here any more.

I asked to be able to work from home (long story... see previous rants) and that was "shut down" after numerous attempts and even when working from was a prerequisite that somehow got lost in translation.

I was stuck in traffic for almost 3 hours yesterday and it is known that there are currently roadworks on my route, and yet they don't seem to move on the notion of working from home.

When I work it out, I sit in my car on average for over 40 hours per month! That's another fucking work week just so that I can get to and from work everyday. Again, they can say what that want, but I mentioned it several times that I wanted to work from home.

They're story is... "We've never had anyone work from home before so we wouldn't know how to approach it". Ok fine, I guess... FIGURE IT OUT, FFS!!!

The other thing was that I would be the "team leader" of the project. With me speaking to a management, they made me the leader. Big fucking whoop! My next question is the leader of what exactly are you making me? Because at the moment I'm the only fucking person working on the project! The other chap who is on "my team" is so busy with these other small side projects that in the 6 months he's been here, the only time he's actually had anything to do with the project is when he's peeped over my shoulder! Also, there was supposed to be more than just one other developer on the "team", but alas!

I'm not happy here at all anymore and I am actually starting to feel the depression creep in and there's nothing I can seem to do about it! I can't stand the traffic to and from work and they have not tried to make anything worthwhile when I get to work, even after my numerous requests!

Admin work, because its all manual:

- Each new project has to fill out an Excel tab in a workbook, with a list of all the major tasks and who is responsible. This then needs to be used to create a Gantt chart, manually, in the same tab, showing in what month a task starts and ends.

- Every month we have to manually enter status updates into a powerpoint slide on a shared deck. Which has a collision at least once per month.

- Once a quarter we need to do something similar as the powerpoint slides, but into a word doc instead.

- Once a week we need to track our time on projects in a tool that can't be integrated with (no API or anything). Meaning we can't link up a ticket tracking system to it, so again, all manual.

- Once every 6 months a new round of research funding opens up and we write proposals. The status for which are tracked in another Excel spreadsheet, manually, once a week until the deadline.

- The instructions for what to do with the proposals are so vague and badly documented that there is an unwritten rule, that for the first time you will have to ask a bunch of questions to the project manager. This is accepted by everyone and its just the done thing.

- Everything is stored in a dropbox style system, which has become so cluttered I can only find resources by saving the links sent out previously.

- Some of these updates / reports also get a 1 hour meeting for everyone to stand up and read out what they've entered.

- From time to time random things will need to be reported on to the higher ups (how many publications, research papers, patents, times and dates etc.). Again rather than a tool, a new Excel spreadsheet is whipped up and emailed to everyone on the team. Whoever sent it out, then has to merge the 20+ copies into 1 doc.

- Some of the staff (mostly the devs), use a ticket tracking system to keep track of everything. Management refuse to use it to track the things they need. Instead we have to copy paste from it into the word docs, powerpoint, excel etc.

- By far the most annoying. Management force all the above as they need the info for finance, accounting, legal etc etc. So we have to do it, but whenever there is a question from legal, management send the question to us. So despite having documented every facet of everything imaginable, it all gets ignored in favour of endless emails.

I once tried to to put an end to all of this madness by proposing the use of a ticket tracking system, and then building reporting tools on top of it.

... I was told that it "wasn't appropriate". Still don't know what that means.

Story Time. Inspired by another rant.

Context: I'm In a coding camp years ago, it's the first day.

We're doing introductions (name, why you're here, etc). Always fun to do that....

The folks running the camp are excited to introduce a student who also at one point was a teacher for some sort of girl power coding organization. So this raises questions, why would someone who teaches be a student in this camp?? And even a bigger question is raised when this person introduces themselves for a long time, and as an aside puts down the girls she taught in this program they taught ... like who does that?

horribleLady does that ...

A few hours later horribleLady asks her 12th question of the day (we haven't even started talking about code). Before she asks her question actually says:

“I know, I’m going to be a problem.” -laugh-

🚨🚨🚨 ヽ ( ꒪д꒪ )ﾉ 🚨🚨🚨

Fast forward to group projects and she's this sort of emotional storm, tears, and a sort of angry shouting that isn't angry enough for some folks to say she's yelling at people ... but she is. Fortunately I'm not in the first group project with her, but because we're all working in the same room we all get to see the train-wreck unfold.

The moment she doesn't get something (all the time) everyone in her group has to STOP and figure out what they're going to do about it, then again STOP because she thinks someone is doing something different than what was planned. STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.

In a way, everything had to go through her, she didn’t declare it that way, she didn't present herself as any sort of authority, she would just stop everyone the moment she thought anything was wrong, or she didn't understand it (all the time), and either inject herself or demand help from her team. Everyone around her had to be drawn into whatever problem she had. It was horrific to watch.

Private slack channels would light up like crazy with "OMG", "WTF", "I DON'T UNDERSTAND HER", "FUCK" and "SHE"S HOW OLD!?!?"

So finally it happens to me and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly (capable guy, nice dude, pretty sure he was high all the time).... we're teamed up to work with horribleLady. Thankfully for just one day. I accept this because I figure one day with her is enough penance to try to avoid any further contact later on.

My approach is straight stone face. I refuse to respond to her sulking, or sighing, or general emotional bait she throws out constantly. I saw other students unwittingly take her bait (they were trying to be helpful) only to have her crap all over them with her frustrations or whatever it is is going on.

Still we're teamed up with her her for the day so I'm going to be a good team member and I explain what guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I are doing / trying.... and so forth. But she's just too upset that she's even assigned to work with us, and tells me I'm just not doing it right, and her explanations about how we're not doing it right makes less than 0 sense. I ask her to show me what she means but she won't type anything on her keyboard, she'd just talk about how she’s thinking conceptually in circles and sulk about it rather than listen. I don't respond to any of her shit and say "I'm going to try this." and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I just keep working.

She would later call the instructor over and complain to him for a while and say: "These guys just get it, they're not helping me, I want to be assigned to another group." She doesn't get her way so she just moves to another table in front of us.

After that day I figured it was a great time to ask .... to NEVER be assigned to anything with her because "If I told her what I thought it would just get a lot worse." I got my way ;)

Other students weren't so lucky. Tears, sulking, her special way of yelling at people that somehow never got her in trouble (she should have been kicked out of the program) just kept going on. She refused to even present one group project she deemed not good enough despite the fact that she contributed nothing functional to the project that the TA's didn't write for her...

Amidst the stories she would tell to students was one of how she sued her totally sexist/racist/evil former employer. She never said what came of it, but that combined with her inability to do things reminded me of a rant I read on here.

I sometimes fear being hired someplace and walking in my first day to find I'm assigned to work with .... horribleLady. In this scenario she managed to get hired and they're too afraid to fire her so they assign the new guy to work with horribleLady...

I've no idea what happened to her after the camp.

(I rewrote this rant a few times because it kept circling back to a larger story about the coding camp I wrote about a few years ago, so if this seemed sort of broken up and wonky, yeah it was / is / yeah)

A few years ago, when I was in high school, we had a teacher who would take a quiz every week. This particular teacher would attach his laptop to the projector and then show us the questions on a slideshow. Each slide had an exact amount of time depending on how hard the question was and we had to write the answer on a paper. One week, we also had another exam so neither of us had studied for the quiz. One of my friends who had another class with this teacher, told us that their projector stopped working, so the teacher didn't take the quiz and it was postponed. Since most of the class agreed to postpone the quiz, we decided to sabotage the projector so the teacher would be forced to postpone the quiz. We couldn't actually harm the projector because we would get in trouble, so one of my taller classmates stood on a chair so that she would reach the projector. Then she slipped a small piece of paper between the hdmi/vga cable and the port located on the projector. That way it seemed like it was connected but in reality it was not.
The teacher came, could not connect his laptop to the projector, so no quiz!
Sorry, teacher!

P.S. We reverted the changes the next day. Blamed the cheap cable for short circuiting!

I am DONE with this woman CONTINUED!

I didn't think I'd have to put another rant about this stupidity at least not this soon but she just keeps on giving!

I have my noise canceling headphones on most of the time and when I want to hear the people around, I just put the right earcup of it to the side of my ear so the music pauses. Today we had a huge disrupt on our services because of a network switch error on the hub. I was also trying to focus on my coding as I didn't wanna do a stupid mistake on the last working day and be sorry about it in the next week.

So this woman sneaks up on me from behind calling my name - meaning she has a question, surprise! -, I say 'yes' moving my head to her side ever so slightly without getting my eyes off of my screen stating subtly that I'm also listening to her while trying to focus on my shit. She starts yelling at me 'look at me!' out of nowhere! I turn my head and ask what the problem is and she asks why I'm not looking at her face! Stupid moron, I might not be too good in understanding your way of communication but you are the one asking so you WILL wait if you'd like to hear answers.

I say I'm working on something and her answer is again 'Why aren't you looking at my face it's going to be quick bla bla did we do this like that?' and I answered I didn't remember because there's no way I'd ever remember without looking further and it was no lie.

This woman clearly has stability issues and everyone else seem to be tolerating it. It's now obvious as I'm not tolerating the nonsense I'll be the one that 'she only has ever had a problem with'.

I was quick to de escalate the situation but now I'm thinking maybe I should've responded in a way that she could understand. I wouldn't ever give a shit about it but this is getting ridiculous.

Question for the senior front end web developer here:

If you guys got a project (big or small), do you guys usually:
1. Get a template from another website and modify or style it to suits your need, or
2. Build it from scratch?

This applies to website like devrant, or swag store

So one year ago I was working at this company from the US, me being in Europe, which automatically implies there is several hours of timezone difference.

The eng. manager decided we would have a release tomorrow (decision was made one month earlier), and stuff was being prepped up to make that happen.

In the US the workday was about lunch time and in EU it was one hour before finishing. The manager gets us in a meeting and asks me and another dude to do some testing that would take several hours to do. This testing could have been done several days or weeks earlier.

40 minutes after that meeting I get a private message from the PM asking for the status of the test...

Me: aaa.. well I started it and will continue tomorrow

Manager: wait what? we have launch tomorrow, this testing has to be done by tomorrow

Me: it's the end of the workday here, I got personal errands that I have to attend to

Manager: uhm ok ... I see...

I was just messaging something in the public chat right before calling it a day and the manager writes "thanks for the input, your day is over now", completely out of context to the conversation I was having with whomever.

There was no question of "can you stay extra hours and do this?", there was no "hey, I know your day is over we will pay you premium hours with this amount as according to our contract, could you do this now as we have release tomorrow?" ..no ..just .. "do it!". I automatically assumed that ..hey, maybe he wants to do this during and after the live launch (and yes I do admit my mistake of not asking just to be clear, but I assumed the manager knows that there is a timezone difference ..like it's a no brainer).

I can not tell you the heat sensation I had after that last reply from the manager ... it was completely uncalled for, and unreasonable.

I mean why not make a pre-launch phase where you put stuff on the staging server, and perform all the necessary tests and then when you get all the green lights from testing you then proceed with the actual deploy? ...no ... mention this like right at the end of the day before the launch....

And another thing that scratched my neuronal cortex is, how does he know exactly how long the tests would take?

How it is to be a dev in my country?

At bit of an odd question this week.

For me (in the USA), it's being technical support for *every* website my family uses.

Over the weekend my wife visited her aunt and I get a call.

Wife: "How do I create an ebay account?"
Me: "I don't like where this is going. We already have an account."
Wife: "Not for me, dummy, Aunt T. She found some books she wants to buy on ebay."
Me: "You go thru the process to create an account? Email, name, password, etc."
Wife: "We tried that, but it's not working."
<few seconds of silence>
Me: "Oookaaay...why isn't it working? Is there an error?"
Wife: "I don't know, we already clicked off of it. Something about the email."
<few more seconds of silence>
Me: "Can you reproduce the error and tell me?"
Wife: "Uggh..are you serious? We've done it like 10 times, its not working. Just tell me what I need to do."
Me: "If you can't tell me the error, I can't help you. I'm not there and can't see what you see."
Wife: "Stop being an asshole."
<Aunt T takes the phone>
T: "Said something about using another email address. Does that help you?"
Me: "Are you sure you don't already have a ebay account?"
T: "No, I don't think so. I hate ebay. but I really want these books. I don't want the same problems as last time."
Me: "Last time?"
T: "Yes, I bought a coffee cup on ebay from China and it never arrived."
Me: "OK, so you do have an account?"
T: "I don't know, I mean, I never got the cup."
Me: "What email address did you use? I'll send a 'remind me' email so you can reset the password and login"
<go thru the motions, she is able to login>
T: "Ahhh...I do have an account! There are the golf balls I bought for <husband> for Christmas."
<face smack>
Wife: "Why didn't you do this from the start? I thought you knew a lot about computers. We basically figured this out ourselves. Goodbye!"
<click>

Ones' Stackoverflow question is another mens treasure

During my first-ever technical interview, the interviewer asked me "Do you know the FizzBuzz problem?"
"Uhh, not really." (I was just thinking ok this problem has a name, must be some algorithm problem)
"So the problem is basically to give you the numbers 1 to 100, if the number is divisible by 3, print 'Fizz', if divisible by 5, print 'Buzz', if divisible by 3 and 5, print 'FizzBuzz'. For other numbers just print out the number itself."

After hearing the problem, I felt so many ideas popping out of my stressed brain.

I thought for a bit and said "ok, so if the digit sum of a number is a multiple of 3, then the number is divisible by 3, and if the last digit is either 0 or 5, it's divisible by 5."
Then I started to code out my solution until the interviewer said "there's an easier solution. Can you think of it?"

This stressed me out even more.

I thought for a bit and said "well, starting from 3, keep a counter that records how many iterations are done after 3. When the counter hits 3, that number would be divisible by 3 for sure. Should I try this solution?"
The interviewer said "Sure." So I started again.

However, I struggled for about another 3min until I realized this solution is a lot harder to implement. The interviewer probably saw my struggle too.

This was the point where he stepped in and asked me "Ummmm there's an easy way of solving this. Have you heard of the MODULO OPERATOR?"

In sheer embarrassment, I finished the code in 30s.

Of course, there was no further question after this, and I felt the need to seriously reevaluate my intelligence afterwards.

I was in a technical interview for a web development position. When it was time for them to choose a question they showed me this:

How can you make this code display 0 to 9 correctly?
for (var i=0; i < 10; i++){
setTimeout(function(){
console.log(i);
}, 1000);
}

When I saw the question I instantly smiled and rubbed my hands ready to answer since I knew exactly the answer and they told me:
"Oh you looked already familiar to this one, we'll choose another for you"

I legit stood up and left the fucking interview right there.

!dev
!!politics (kinda)

Here’s a gem from our recent harassment and diversity training at work:

Speaker: “All of these things are protected from discrimination in California! Wow! It’s a huge list, isn’t it? Now let me ask you a question: is a single white male under 40 protected?”

Everyone: *crickets*

Fucking really?
After immediately jumping on all of the other speaker’s questions, you can’t answer this one?

And later, here’s another gem:

Speaker: “If you witness an employee harassing another employee outside of work and work hours, completely unrelated to work, should you report it? What if you ask the person being harassed and she says no?”

Speaker: “Always report it! While it’s not *technically* required by law, you must report it! Why? Because you have the same protections she would! And maybe it’s easier for you to say something than for her.” (Surprise gendering was her own addition)

Fair on that last point, but against the person’s wishes? Totally not cool. Maybe it wasn’t harassment, or you don’t know the situation. Heads up: you probably don’t. Or maybe it wasn’t a big deal at all, but you think it’s earth-shattering. But all that reporting it against someone’s wishes does is create drama and possibly legal trouble. And if it wasn’t harassment or the case goes poorly, you just created enemies for yourself, or for one or both of them if you’re reporting it anonymously, and possibly even ruined one or both of their jobs/careers by doing so. Good fucking job, asshole.

Snitches get stitches.

Had a project intro ppt at college. Panel of 3. I spent hours on making a 47 slide ppt, trying to make sure that the ppt was simple and lucid enough for them to understand and also enjoy. They did not listen to a single word i said. Before one of them even understood the title, she started questioning me. And she kept questioning and questioning. But she never listened to my answers. She asked one question, and as soon as I said one word, she started another question. The other two kept nodding or looking bored or even fucking talking among themselves. The funny thing was, my ppt had all the answers. If she had bothered listening, she never would not have needed to ask anything. And in the middle of their senseless questioning, they all started talking about how their fucking tea needed sugar😡😡😡😡
I have lost all motivation to work on the project.

You wanted to hear more about my "glorious" teacher. I deliver. So get a cup of tea, take a seat and prepare for insanity.
As I already told in a comment my programming teacher is one special snowflake who lives in his personal bubble. We have final exams in less than a month and he spents at least half a lesson talking about vanishing bees and missing plants from his garden. Other topics he likes to talk about (and tries to turn every freaking conversation into at least one of these):
1. Other students and their stupidity
2. Diesel scandal
3. His sick wife
4. "Why does noone read newspapers anymore?"
5. Why he can't teach Java but really really really wants to and everyone hates him and forces him to do C#.

Even if I try to interrupt him he'll go on until he thinks we gained some "common knowledge" - this is how he justifies these topics.

Everytime he introduced us to a new command he compared it to Java and sometimes he even falsely corrects code because he confuses them.
We are only 6 people including me (another story for another time) and he is not able to help everyone during a 90min lesson. He normally sticks with one person for at least one hour and just talks to them or even do their tasks. This is really annoying if you have a simple question. He won't answer you until he's finished whatever he's doing.

Most of the time he doesn't seem to understand what he's talking about/trying to teach us. He's muttering statements from our textbook to himself switching halfway through to another sentence while drawing not decipherable shit on the blackboard.

Another gem are his "guidelines" for classtests. We are allowed to use any command we know. Except the ones we learned not in class. And the ones he doesn't like. And the ones he doesn't want to exist. And of course not the ones which make you're life easier. So basically we are bound to use his favourite commands or we won't get a good grade. Example: use an array. List is not allowed. Never.
He has some weird fetish with arrays.

I once presented him perfectly fine code I wrote in my freetime and asked what some warnings meant. (Was because of different Visual studio versions as I learned later.) He scolded me for using things he didn't taught us yet and ranted about how I'm pressuring him into rushing these things now - I never wanted to show this to my classmates nor was this anything else than a project for fun and learning something new. (FYI the "new stuff" where classes and objects because i was tired of kilometers of spaghetti code). His rant went on a good 20minutes and - obviously - he didn't answer my question. I asked my fiance that evening and he explained it to me.
This should it be for this time. I'm sure I have more stories to tell for another time!
Thank you for reading. ^^

During the interview they asked if I had other interviews or offers. I had one more interview and am offer. They emailed me the next day and say "we don't like to be strong armed". I'm assuming it's because I told them the truth about having an offer? We hadn't even talked about salary yet so it's not like I somehow "bullied" them into giving me more money.

Part of me didn't care because obviously this company was garbage and I dodged a bullet (plus I had an offer that was decent anyways). But the other part of me couldn't believe how fragile they were and how entitled they felt. Why ask the question if you don't want to know the answer? Where I'm at now, I got another offer before they made a decision. I had to decide within a couple days. I told them, and without any further conversation made me an offer 10k above the originally discussed salary. It was clear they were decent and so far I've been right.

Hello devRant, a question for you.

I'm looking to redisign/setup my server 'infrastructure'.

It'll exist out of:
7 vps's (6+gb ram/500gb+/100mbs up/down per vps)
2 dedicated servers running as virtualization servers. (16gb/4tb/1gbit up/down and another one but let's leave that one out for now because it's gonna take a shit ton of time to solve that clusterfuck)

One server will function as an entry point for all websites I run, multiple database servers and multiple backup ones.

Any advices/tips/ideas?

Just a very serious hobby thing :)

Inspired by the comment I posted on another rant.

My uni decided to be one of those progressive tech schools that start people with Python. Mind you, I had prepared myself with studying as much as I could with math and programming by automating things and similar stuff in our computer when I was at my previous job, so I had a better idea as to what i could expect.

Introduction to computer science and programming with Python or some shit like that was the name of the class, and the instructor was a fat short ugly woman with a horrible attitude AND a phd in math, not comp sci and barely any industrial knowledge of the field.

She gave us the "a lot of you will fail" speech, which to me is code for "I suck and have no clue what I am doing"

One assignment involved, as per the requirements the use of switch cases. Now, unless someo knew came about, Python does not have swio cases. Me and a couple of less newbie like students tried to point out that switch cases were non existent and that her switch case example was in Javascript, not python, curly braces and everything. She told us to make it work.

We thought that she meant using a function with a dictionary and we pass the key and shit, a simple way of emulating the switch case.

NOPE she took points and insisted that she meant the example. We continuously pointed out that her example was in JS and that at the time Python did not have switch cases. The nasty woman laughed out and said that she didn't expect anyone to finish the assignment with full points.

Out of 100 points everyone got a 70. No problem. Wrote a detailed letter to the dean. Dean replied and talked to her (copied her in the email because fuck you bitch) and my grade was pulled up to full mark.

Every other class I had with her she did not question me. Which was only another class on some other shit I can't remember.

Teachers are what make or break a degree program. What make or break the experience, going to college is putting too much faith on people. If you ask me, trade certification, rigorous training is the future of computer science, or any field really. Rather than spending 4+ years studying a whoooole lotta shit for someone to focus on one field and never leave it.

Another real-world argument for why I always say git is worth learning properly.

Had to track a really weird bug down today. Had no idea where it came from, how long it'd been in the code and hadn't the foggiest what was causing it. Realistically it could have been introduced any time in the last year or two, and that's tens of thousands of commits in this repo.

Git to the rescue. Knocked up a quick script to test the case in question, fed it into "git bisect run", and 30 seconds later git found the exact (small) commit that caused the issue.

It's a brilliant part of git, yet it seems like almost no-one I know uses it. Some use "git bisect", but using "git bisect run" and passing a script to it seems to be alien to most - yet it's probably my most used tool when it comes to tracking down bugs like these.

I asked a question on StackOverflow. Everyone ignored me so I did find other way to do what I intended (it was still not an answer). So at least I fucking hoped to get another fucking tumbleweed badge!!!

So today a fuckhead, seventh viewer of my question answered it in a way that insulted my intelligence. So I got no answer and no fucking badge!!! FUCK.

So my friends PC died, since he lives in another country I help him over Signal.

He assembled his own PC a year ago and does a lot of programming for his study. Today Im helping him troubleshoot why his pc does not boot. Does it get into the bootmenu or not? He knows it doesnt. Then I recommend him to try unplugging his graphics card and plug his monitor in the motherboard. I then get a question if there are two HDMI types. Im smiling and think he is messing with me. That must be a displayport. Nope he was serious, he has this HDMI cable that doesnt fit his motherboard.

I sat in a tram and laugh out loud.. Because this is what he send me.
If it was anyone who didnt do anything with computers I didnt think it was laughable, but come on every programmer should know the difference between HDMI and DisplayPort

I used to work for a Mexican bank in Mexico, as a developer I opened (and use) an account, since the bank was not famous(most of its business was with the government), going to the bank and see no waiting lines was an advantage, so I started using it as my only bank account even nowadays.

Now I live in NYC, and some years later I see on the news the bank merged(was absorbed) with another bank, 'sounds good, I don't care' I thought.

Well, I open my online account and the nightmare begins:

1) Redirection to the 2nd bank page
2) My credentials does not work
3) Call the original bank(no answers)
4) After several calls and days I got a phone contact
5) 'well, try all other passwords you have' (transaction passwords, operative passwords, login passwords, etc), among many other stupid answers, which by the way, were preceded by infinite question about the 2nd bank, like:

- when did you open the account with the 2nd bank?
- what is your 2nd bank account number

6) after 20 calls like that, they asked for documents, information and screenshots, and send all that to the 2nd bank tech help email.

7) After several days a person responded: 'Go to your bank(which fucking bank?)' and ask for a new user.

8) a ton of calls to know what bank I was assigned

9) called the bank: 'well, you have to come in person(no exceptions allowed) and request to close your 1st bank account and open a 2nd bank account' (I am not sure if that is gonna work)

All the technology nowadays and still I have to travel thousands of miles hoping this 'solution' works.

to be continue....

Inb4 2 question ahead

1. So in another 2 weeks I’ll be getting a new storage to upgrade my laptop, and since I will be developing C# both MVC and ASP.net should I stick to windows or there is a linux distro I could try using. Probably will dual booth if I have to use windows, so friendly linux is nice

2. For the storage I’ll be getting 860 EVO 250gb, any feedback? Also 4gb ram for the upgrade

I fucking love HP.

Why, you may ask, given that I've ranted about their crap so many times now? Great question!

I love HP because every time I go to town on their hardware because yet again it got me infuriated somehow, I don't feel bad about it afterwards. Instead I feel oddly satisfied, liberated from another piece of crap from them. And besides, usually it's their or Acer's shitty hardware that gets me worked up anyway.

That said, fuck you HP. Filthy Microsucking pieces of shit.

.. anyway. I've just went around disassembling an old vacuum cleaner this morning, to liberate its 800W single phase AC motor. I'll probably have to underrun it with a step-down transformer but at e.g. 200VAC it should probably work no problem 🙂

This rant is inspired by another rant about automated HR emails like "we appreciate your interest [bla bla] you got rejected [bla bla]". (Please bare with me).
I live in an underdeveloped country, I graduated in September, did Machine Learning for my thesis and I will soon publish a paper about it, loved it wanted to work as ML/data science engineer. On all the job postings I found there was only one job related, I sent resume, they didn't answer, couple months later that company posted that they want a full stack web dev with knowledge of mobile dev and ML, basically an all in one person, for the salary of a junior dev.
- another company posted about python/web scraping developer, I had the experience and I got in touch, they sent me a test, took me 3 days, one of the questions took me 2 days, I found an unanswered SO question with the exact wording dating to 6 months ago, I solved it, sent answers, never heard back from them again.
- one company weren't really hiring, I got in touch asking if the have a position, they sent a test, I did it, they liked it, scheduled an interview, the interviewer was arrogant, not giving any attention to what I am saying, kept asking in depth questions that even an expert might struggle answering. In the end they said they're not really hiring but they interview and see what they can find. Basically looking for experts, I mentioned that im freshly graduated from the very beginning.
- over 1000 applications on different positions on LinkedIn across the whole world, same automated rejection email, but at least they didn't keep me waiting.
- I lost hope. Found a job posting near me, python/django dev, in the interview they asked about frontend (react/vueJS) and Flutter, said I don't have experience and not interested in that, they asked about databases, C and java and other stuff that I have experience in, they hired me with an insulting salary (really insulting) cuz they knew im hopeless, filling 2 positions, python dev and tech support for an app built in the 90s with C/java and sorcery... A week into the job while I'm still learning about the app I'm supposed to support, the guy called me into the office: "here's the thing" he said, "someone else is already working on python, i want you to learn either react or vueJS or flutter" I was in shock, I didn't know what to say, I said I'll think about it, next week I said I'll learn react, so I spent the week acting like im learning react while I scroll on FB and LinkedIn (I'm bad, I know).
- in the weekend a foreign company that I applied to few weeks ago got in touch, we had some interviews and I got hired as DevOps/MLOps. It's been a month and I'm loving it, the salary is decent and I love what I do.
Conclusion: don't lose hope.

Introduced a ‘new’ logging framework for our web site. Web team is testing the integration and I get an email saying the logging wasn’t working. Instead of sending me how she is searching the logs, she sends me a screen shot of the code (which is ass-backwards of how I documented the logging library, but that’s another rant). OK, she wrote 5 lines of code that should be one line, but OK, the error still should have logged fine. I search the logs, and sure enough, there they are. Errors logged just as they should.
So I email back (with screenshot of the search query and results) asking how she searched for the errors.
Hour later she responds ..”I don’t know.”
That’s it.
WTF do you mean “I don’t know”?…WTF…you are a –bleep-ing developer too! This is not the first –bleep-ing splunk query you’ve written!
OK..I’m calm..feeling better. Wouldn’t be so bad if she emailed just me with the question (I’m not a splunk query expert either, we can figure it out together), but she was sure to cc 3 of the PMs involved in the integration, my boss, and other team members to make it sound like the problem was my code.

HR Firms are the worst!!
Just wasted 30 mins of my life.
Interviewer: Tell me about experience.
[ me after talking about various project I have worked on/ build using (js, ruby, React js, git...bla bla bla).
[ 10mins later answering pretty dumb question ]
Interviewer: Do you know about coding?
Me: jeez really, c'mon... is that a question - I just told you about my X years of experience and you asking me if I know how to code?
[Interviewer look at another dumb questions from her list]
Me: You know there are so many different broken links on your websites right? on the landing page there are many links that direct you to the HTML templates.
Interview: thanks...

Mom asked me one question.

How money transfer from one bank to another?

It was longest communication we ever had in few months.

I am happy for that question.
😊😊😊😊

Me: IE7 sucks and should no more be supported in 2018.
Dev: NO IE7 IS THE BEST BROWSER EVER IN THE UNIVERSE FUCK YOU!!
Same Dev in another Rant: Fuck I hate IE and Microsoft!!!

One question guys: what's up with always trying to find a way to be anti, no matter what? Even if what you defend totally opposes your view. Is this something like a new trend or is this like the new cool now?

The other day a non-programmer colleague asked me:
"How do you know what to type in, like, did you write all of that?"
As I responded, he asked me another question; "but how do you know wuat to type".

I use to have those same thoughts years ago.

It occurred to me that through constant bugs, errors, bad (team) projects and failures that its become second nature, like breathing.

So, as an experienced developer to people just learning the craft and juniors. Don't give up on your collabs, don't be disheartened by group projects, don't be discouraged by your peers who seemingly try to make your life harder.

Take it as an experience to better yourself and teach them something.

These are the experiences that will make you a better developer.

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.

Me: Are you sure you want this in the acceptance test procedure?
Lead: Yes.
Me: I'm just saying, we don't have any requirements for this feature so it doesn't really belong there.
Lead: Just put it in.
Me: Are you sure? It's a lot of work for something that isn't even required to be there.
Lead: Go do it.
Me: Okay.
*I do the work and it goes to peer review*
High ranking person from another team: I don't see any requirements traceability. Why is this in here if there are no requirements?
Me: WELL AIN'T THAT A GOOD GODDAMN QUESTION!?

Story time on my job hunt: Currently interviewing with Google during my notice period.

I always had a love hate relationship with Google. Unlike my hate towards Meta or Amazon, where I had a reason to hate them for how ill intended they are, I never had a valid reason to dislike or hate Google apart from the fact that they steal my data.

That's it. That's my only reason why I hate Google. But I fell in love with their products during my trip to Istanbul and how throughout my journey, Google products were there for me to solve all my needs.

As y'all know, I was treated badly during my Meta interview, last October. With Google, the experience is on another level.

People are fucking smart and ingenious, but at the same time very polite, humble, and respectful.

During my 3 interviews so far (2 more remaining), each one of them made me so comfortable that I was more anxious before the interview than during or after.

They supported me during each question they asked. They made me felt heard and focused on my strength, instead of the weaknesses (or trying to break me down unnecessarily).

The interview syllabus is so fucking vast, and recruiters know so much that they helped me not only with preparation material, but also guided me personally. Haven't seen such knowledgeable recruiters.

The questions were dynamic in nature and thankfully because of my preparation, I was able to answer them most.

Overall, the culture at Google seems brilliant and an environment where one can flourish. No wonder companies are trying to copy every aspect of how Google operates and no surprise that Google is doing well at scale.

I feel so high on emotions (positively), after these interviews that I wonder how would it be to work at Google with such phenomenal people and exceptional environment.

Lots of fun open source stuff, but I had a lot of fun working on a survey taking m&m dispenser. The goal was to encourage students to answer survey questions that would help the faculty get a better idea of what the students found most valuable (different things they wanted to learn, classes they found useless, etc.). So me and another student built this :) Its a node server running on an Intel Galileo, which served up an admin and survey interface using React. When a student answered a survey question, a servo would turn a gear, which interfaced with a rack and pinion that had two little pits in it. When it would slide under the jar, two m&ms would fill the pits, then the rack and pinion would push them out. Then we had a webcam hooked up to the end of it that would compare the colors of the m&ms to see if they were the same. If they were the same, the student would get more m&ms. The gear pieces were 3D printed.

We could never get the webcam stuff to work right with the Galileo because OpenCV (the computer vision library we were using to interact with the webcam) could not be built/compiled on such a specific version of Linux. Later, I was able to do it with a RaspberryPi, but never got it reintegrated.

So, to anyone defending IBM at this point, a member of a client's offshore team used their paystub as test data. Aaaaand I was horrified by what I saw.

Their pay is less than $2/hr ($3973/yr, 300k INR).

I can't even. Not only that someone would pay so little to a supposedly degreed professional (I question the validity of that claim based on performance, that's a story for another time), but that companies feel comfortable giving full production system access to people I would not blame for taking bribes.

Fuck.

Man, fuck the SO community
I asked a question on software engineering (all fancy like, links quotes checked spelling and grammar etc.)
if it would be beneficial to switch to another language in order to increase performance and memory limitations during a specific task

Literally one guy said it violated 4 of their rules
Opinion based; asking for language switch; too vague and another one

About 20/30 minutes later my question had a -3 score...

Fuck off with too vague, also why shouldn't I switch language for a single task... If it would be faster..

Anyway found an even better solution, but it cannot be enough said.. the SO community is a bunch of old stubborn fucks who only care about their score.

At one of my former jobs, we devs had to do all sorts of non-dev work, such as writing quotes and even contracts!

The CEO of that company had this naughty habit to contact devs directly without delegating through the CIO. Sure, if it's really urgent like when some system is down because of a bug, go ahead and disturb a dev. But interrupting coders to write some freaking quote? Come on!...

Once, that CEO asked me to stop everything I was doing to write a quote to a customer ASAP, as this was really urgent.

I spent several hours writing that quote. It had to be done right as any specifications in our quotes were used in our agreeements and were referred to in the case of any dispute. So not only were we devs and salesmen in the same time; we also needed to be lawyers.

When I was done and delivered the quote to the CEO, he told me he had no intention to take on that customer in the first place. Instead, he wrote a polite we-are-not-interested e-mail to the customer and cc:d it to me just so that I could read for myself how very sleek a businessman he was.

Me: why did I have to write that quote when you knew all along that you were not going to use it anyway?
Him: It's for your own personal development.

Another naughty habit of that same CEO is that he made "jokes" and remarks that I found inappropriate, such as "You walk like a drunken sailor".

Later, he decided to discontinue our team/product because "it isn't proftable". Well, what do you expect when devs are forced to waste half day completing pointless tasks?!

It was for the better anyway, and I was actually relieved when I left the company. I'm still thinking though, that the real reason he sacked me is that I am too honest and not the docile kind of employee that would be ideal for him. I did question some of my tasks, and worst of all: I didn't laugh at his stupid jokes.

Me: Asking a lot of junior questions
Dev: Stop! Before you ask another question - think for 10 minutes, google another 15 minutes and if you don't find anything - ask me.

^ This was the best thing he said, after that I can google pretty much anything, and hell, I even go to 5-th page of the google from time to time!

Another incident which made a Security Researcher cry
[ NOTE : Check profile to read older incidents ]
-----------------------------------------------------------
So this all started when I was at my home (bunked the office that day xD) and I got a call from a..... Let's call him Fella as I always do . So here we go . And yeah , our Fella is a SysAdmin .
-----------------------------------------------------------
Fella - Hey man sup!
Me - Good going mate , bunked the office , weather's nice , gonna spend time with my girl today . So what's goinon?
Fella - Bruh my network sharing folders ain't working no more .
Me - Did you changed or modified anything?
Fella - Nope
Me - Okay , gimme your login creds lemme check .
Fella - Check your inbox *texts me the credentials*

*I logged in and what I'm seeing is that server runs on Windows2008R2 , checked the event logs , everything's fine and all of a sudden what I found is fucking embarrassing , this wise man closed SMB service*
Me - Did you closed SMB service?
Fella - Yeah
Me - You know what it does?
Fella - Yeah it's a protocol , I turned it off to protect the server from Wannacry .
Me - Fuckerrrr!!!!! Asshole dumbass you fuckin piece of Dodo's shit!! SMB is the service responsible for files and network sharing!!!
Fella - But....I just wanted protection
Me - 😭😭😭

*A long conversation continues with a lot of specially made words to decrease the rate of frustration which I used already*

Fella - Okay I'm turning it on .
Me - Go on....... Asshole
Fella - It worked! Thanks a lot bro
Me - Just leave me and my soul away from evil and hang up .

*Now the question is , who the hell gives them the post of SysAdmin? While thinking this question , I almost thought of committing suicide​ but then my girl came with coffee and my rubber duck*

Can't say I am a religious type, not really into discovering/discussing religions and comparing them either... BUT I do hope there is someplace (like hell on steroids!!) for developers who don't test their code before checking it in and/or puting it on production..
Also another question, can I plead not guilty due to insanity when killing such devs?!? O.o FUuuuuuuuu!!!!

Well on my last full-time job, that ware using cookies for authentication (not something new, eh?). The thing is, you see, the cookies had the 'accountId' which if you change to another number, kaboom you're that account, oh but that was not all, there was an option to mark the account type in there 'accountType', which was kind of obvious in VLE (virtual learning environment), 'Teacher', 'Student', 'Manager' put what of those values and boom you are that role for the session

Thing was open of SQL injection from the login form, from said cookies and form every part you can pass input to it, when I raised the question to my TL he said 'no one is going to know about thatt, I don't see what is the problem', then escalated to higher management 'oh well speak to *tl_guy*'

Oh and bonus points for it being written in ASP CLASSIC in 2014+ (I was supposed to rewrite, but ended up patching ASP code and writing components in PHP)

In 2015-2016, in a private college, charging kind-of big money per year

When I was about 13, I opened up command prompt on Windows, and changed the color of it to green then ran the tree command. So, not thinking of anything, this was in the library in front of about 60 people and 2 teachers.

All others saw was green text going down fast, and instantly presumed that I was hacking since they knew I was into coding and finding exploits, and just knew how to use a computer better than them in simple terms (HACKER MAN). Thus this lead to me getting sent to the principal's office... I almost got suspended cause I ran the tree command in green.

Two questions for me remain unanswered, that I would love to know. What would've happened if command prompt was printing text in red. Another question becomes, what would've happened if people saw me pinging Google or some popular site.

Pick his nose and well
You know what happened next..

Hey! You said what another dev did, not mandatory dev related! Exploited the question

Every time I have a question my boss answers with another question.

I CAME HERE LF ANSWERS YOU BASTARD

It happened during my campus placement.

My friend was working in the company and he too had come for the interviews. So when I walked into the interview room and saw him, we both acknowledged that we knew each other so the coordinator had my panel changed. The interview went well enough and the interviewer liked me. However when the results were announced my name wasn't there. I was really depressed. Just thought I could never get a job and all that.

Then my friend calls me a week later and tells me because of the mix up during changing the panel, even though i had cleared the round, was not in the final list.
This really was one of the worst moments.

I must come clean as my friend was able to get me another interview and obviously this time I had to blow it. I literally just went blank. I got my first question wrong and after that it just went down hill.

Now that I think about it I'm not sure which interview would be my worst interview story :p

Welp. That was fun.

Just had an interview I wasn't even expecting. Basically the company emailed me saying that the role has been filled and as such the interview has been canceled.

And I'm like ok. Thanks for letting me know.

Then at literally the same time someone sent me a skype request asking me if I'm ready.

I get another email saying they're sorry about the inconvenience and hope my front end interview goes well... like. Wtf.

Why didn't they specify which? And why wait so long ffs.

I had two interviews with them. They stood me up on the last one and i emailed and never heard back.

So now I just had the most awkward interview in my life.

I was so rattled I forgot the answer to a simple af question. What's a JavaScript closure.

I wanna cry but it was so bad I wanna laugh

Question again about hosting web apps, has anyone using the paid bills for heroku? Since they gave 1000 hours uptime for their free version, is it possible to still use it for a web apps? And mix the bills for another web apps? Or is it better to host under vps?

try philosophy()
catch markAsSpam()
Do you ever think of organizations as people? People personify Google and stuff all the time, but I mean something deeper.
When I look at devRant threads, I feel like we're all part of a collective consciousness, growing and thinking and making decisions. Society is a living thing of its own, in the same way that living cells unknowingly make up an individual body. When a question is asked from one node, another node answers, and the result is a repository of questions, answers, opinions, and jokes on an app that might appear as the scrolling thoughts of a singular mind rife with pure, aggressively structured information.

As an interviewer, the toughest part is actually before the interviews, trying to convince recruiting teams that you are not looking for "anyone who works with computers".

Seriously, I've once heard a recruiter ask me "you want someone who knows the program language, right?", to what I answered "a couple, yes". The mouth breather looked at me astonished, askng "is there another?!?"
I'm not surprised that they shower me in piss-poor curriculums from anyone who had a Nintendo DS growing up.
Someone needs to come up with a way to hire more selective recruiters. But I guess we're back to square one when approaching this problem.

About being interviewed, the toughest part is when people do not know the salary that will be offered (usually those recruiter types) and evade the question as billionaires evade taxes.
I don't fucking care if your compensation "is so competitive it could have been an Olympian", I want to compare numbers. And if you do not have a number, I will assume the money is crap, period.

The feeling when random dudes downvote a question, because a guy who finally earned some points on SO dared to format the code with `<code>`<br> He pasted code, log, even explained a little bit and ~500 point guy even flags it like _unclear_ although there's clearly visible import error.

I mean... as an answerer or moderator, I'd be damn ashamed for such behavior! I have absolutely no problem kick a person with words + explanation in my answer or comment, so that (s)he remembers to ask better questions and feels bad about that, because nooby questions are already answered so many times there.

But to downvote because of formatting even if you have a permission to edit and a flag for low quality or because you can't read ~40 lines of log makes you just a retard and hurt the whole remaining community of guys like me who find time to sit there and answer questions to help another people.

My Boss, another employee and me were having discussion on a functionality on the website "How we will do it". After talking to us, my boss called his former employee and asked him the same question "How we will do this functionality".

After talking with the former employee, he comes back and tells us the same that we told him on "How we going to do it". Which pissed me off and I am angry on him, why the fuck does he has to call the former employee about this.

What do you guys think, should I be angry?

Junior engineer asking managers on Slack about prioritisation..

Junior eng: Hey managers, I have these tasks A & B lined up and some other type of work... Is it ok if I finish A by Weds and B by the end of week or should it be done sooner? Also, is the order fine or should I prio B first?

*silence for hours*

Random dev feeling bad for junior getting no response chips in: Hey, you are doing great, that order makes sense to me and let me know if you need any guidance or have questions!

Junior dev: Thaanks and will do!

*another hour goes by*

Manager: Hi team. I have asked other engineer X to do task B tomorrow.

what the fuck. at least answer the fucking question and say it needs to be done sooner. felt bad for poor junior here. :/

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

probably the one who sent me 3 mails within 10 minutes regarding 3 different positions, and all were addressed to someone else (Hello, Mr. Completely Different Name), so i replied telling him that's not me, and gave him the info to fix it in their db. he apologized profusely and said he fixed the error.

Next day I got two mails for another two positions, with the same incorrect name.

Or the one with whom I had half an hour phone "interview" for a specific position, they couldn't answer even the most basic technical question about the project, but invited me to an in-person interview and said my questions will be answered there, the phone interview was just to make sure they don't send completely offtopic people to the interview with the client (so far acceptable).

On the in-person interview, it was partially a repetition of the phone one, but okay, lady from the company is talking to me first time in her life. We get to the part where I can ask my questions, so I ask those basics about the project again, and her answer is:
"Oh, i don't know, i'm not a technical person, you'd have to ask that to the technical person from the company, I'm an hr person from the recruiting company."

"Wait... so... not only was this whole meeting a waste of my time, but you also lied about what it is, when you scheduled it with me on the end of the phone interview?"

"Well... it wasn't a waste of time, we like to meet the candidates in person before we forward them to actual interviews in the company, to make sure that they're not completely offtopic."

"... and how exactly do you think you'd be able to evaluate that, since you're not at all a technical person and know nothing about the project??"

" Well, i talk to programmers a lot, so i've picked up quite a bit of the terms."

...

I just learnt abt Stadia from Google!
They said “imagine a world where you don’t need expensive gaming hardware to play the next release.”

But my question is “will I need an expensive service to access that?”
Is it gonna be another Netflix thingy for game? For now I’m just thinking abt how much they’d charge for hosting the game on their server, wow.

This was a comment I made on another ranter's post.

* Tailor your resume (and cover letter if needed) according to the job. No generic resume.
* Research about the company and make sure you have the same interests as the company. Clearly let them know why they should hire you. One question you can expect is: Why should we hire you?
* Show them that you're passionate about the job.
* Be curious. Ask questions. That's how they'll know you're interested.
* Be open to opportunities. Let's say you're applying for Full Stack developer role. Be open to take up Front End or Back End developer role. You don't have to accept everything but at least roles tangent to your job (provided they match your interest).
* Be flexible but focused.
* You don't have to know every listed requirement but make sure to know the majority.
* Don't lie. "Fake it till you make it" doesn't work with dev roles.
* Be confident in telling them "you don't know" if you don't know. Also make sure to tell you're willing to learn that.

I find many of the peculiarities about our kind (developer) to be amusing.

Here is one I have seen too many times to count...

You ask a group of developer something like...

“We have a project built using X, Y and Z. We are looking at integrating the “example framework” to solve a specific problem. Do you have any experience with “example framework” or would you suggest another framework?”

Inevitably you get the same useless response of “Why are you using X, Y, and Z. It’s so <insert generic complaint here>!” Followed with no actual attempt to answer the question asked...

Listen, I know some of us a socially awkward (I can be) and I know we like to debate and argue.

But, if someone asks you a specific technical question about an existing product, either...

1. Answer the question with your experience
2. Declare that you do not have experience with it
3. Shut your fucking childish mouth

No one cares about how you feel about the size of the underlying technology in existing products! What do you expect?

“OMG, we didn’t realize X technology as 100mb large! Hold on while we go and reengineer our entire product base because of this fucking revelation you just told us!”

You may want to hear your own voice but the rest of us would prefer it if you would shut your mouth if you have nothing useful to add.

(Reads as: we would prefer is you fucked right off!)

Does anybody know how can someone post a "good" question on Stackoverflow without having these bunch of programmers that say YOUR QUESTION WAS ALREADY ANSWERED FROM SOMEBODY IN ANOTHER GALAXY

So, yet another "senior" web developer employed by my contractor who utterly fails to understand CORS.

I mean, easy enough to config their servers to provide the headers. A good and quick buck.

But I swear the level of idiocy I find in so called "seniors" infuriates me. I swear, he didn't even figure out that

A) you can't make the browser omit the Origin header.
(But it works on curl 😭😭😭)

B) it's the *server* who must include access-control-allow-origin in the response, not you in the request. Like, what use would that be? I don't even...

😞

I guess if I ever need to hire web devs again my only question during the interview will be "explain CORS to me".

rant & question

Last year I had to collaborate to a project written by an old man; let's call him Bob. Bob started working in the punch cards era, he worked as a sysadmin for ages and now he is being "recycled" as a web developer. He will retire in 2 years.

The boss (that is not a programmer) loves Bob and trusts him on everything he says.

Here my problems with Bob and his code:
- he refuses learning git (or any other kind of version control system);
- he knows only procedural PHP (not OO);
- he mixes the presentation layer with business logic;
- he writes layout using tables;
- he uses deprecated HTML tags;
- he uses a random indentation;
- most of the code is vulnerable to SQL injection;
- and, of course, there are no tests.
- Ah, yes, he develops directly on the server, through a SSH connection, using vi without syntax highlighting.

In the beginning I tried to be nice, pointing out just the vulnerabilities and insisting on using git, but he ignored all my suggestions.

So, since I would have managed the production server, I decided to cheat: I completely rewrote the whole application, keeping the same UI, and I said the boss that I created a little fork in order to adapt the code to our infrastructure. He doesn't imagine that the 95% of the code is completely different from the original.

Now it's time to do some changes and another colleague is helping. She noticed what I did and said that I've been disrespectful in throwing away the old man clusterfuck, because in any case the code was working. Moreover he will retire in 2 years and I shouldn't force him to learn new things [tbh, he missed at least last 15 years of web development].

What would you have done in my place?

How do you deal with someone like this?

I've got this dev at my workplace that is terrible to work with, he's 2 main reasons why I say this:
1. He has no clue about team work, every piece of code he writes is written as if he is the only person that has to ever touch that
2. He's overtly protective and opinionated on things that make no sense, they're non standard "rules" that he sets and enforces by replacing others code with his own (often times you see quite large PRs and after inspection you realize he rewrote parts of code to follow his style). These "rules" also take up a really long time to follow and would make any actually experienced developer question this guy's knowledge, one example of this is where he repeats the same code over multiple components for "encapsulation reasons" and God forbid you create a global helper of some sort, he'll straight up remove it the next chance he gets. Another example is that all his components or utilities live inside 1 base directory, so you have roughly 300+ components in a /components directory, all with non standard names so you can't tell which is related to which.

I hate working with this person, it's annoying and it also sucks because he's sort of a more "senior" Dev so managers take his side most of the time.

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

> I know right? Developers are bad at naming!

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

## Company A

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

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

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

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

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

## Company B

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

The question "are you busy" is the most loaded fucking BS question ever. If you answer and say you're busy you get told that you aren't that busy since you answeted the chat. If you don't answer the messenger blows up your shit asking many more times and possibly even fucking calls you.

If I don't answer, I'm busy go the fuck away. "But it was super important and I needed it fixed right away!" Ok, but when I answered your message just 4 minutes after your originally messaged me don't make me spend another 5 minutes asking for information you knew I was going to ask for and could have provided in one of your follow up messages (Client name, website, page with the problem, description of the problem). Also, don't tell me that it has to get fixed because I'm the one who made the mistake. It has to get fixed because it's wrong, it doesn't fucking matter who made the mistake.

I'll just start off with how I really feel. Fuck big corporations with their career robots and retarded practices!
Now for a story. So I work remotely for most of the time nowadays, since my company has as clients big corporations. Used to be embedded with said clients, but it became kind of painful to work with them all so I asked to be reassigned to a remote position.
Now for the retarded part: The fucking Klingons I'm working with have two tiers to their VPN, but won't let me have the full version because it would be too fucking expensive. I checked and it's fucking 50 bucks per year difference.
So for that the Klingons are making me code through a remote connection that has a "best effort" priority.
Fuck.
Anyway after 3 weeks of writing code at a 400-600ms latency I finally snap.
I try to use a proxy and it. I write one myself, gets balcklisted in 2 days.
After about another week of writing code through a fuck straw I start working on node socket with 2 clients and a server that encrypts the send data, and syncs 2 folders between my workstation and the remote one.
It's been a month now and it is still working. It's not perfect, but I can at least write code without lag.

Question for you peeps: What shenanigans have you pulled to bypass shit like this?

dev: “I want to start working on [feature]”

Me: “I already started to work on it, sorry for not mentioning it, we need specs from design team before I can go on, but I’d suggest going for another task meanwhile”

Manager: “noooo design is very very busy, [dev] will take care of it.”

Me: “[dev] still needs specs from the design team... and I am half done with it so no real point in re-writing the same code I wrote”

Manager: “just trust me, we do this and [dev] takes care of it.”

*me and [dev] look at each other perplexed and just nod to the manager cause it’s Thursday and the fucks to give are over*

... am I actually a patient in an asylum? I question my sanity after this exchange of words.

Worst thing I’ve seen another developer do?

Asking a simple question before trying to google the answer.

0 programming knowledge starting to learn C. write a chunk of code and go to another room to make coffee, friend changes all semicolons with greek question marks. I spent the rest of the day trying to fix the errors while my friends where laughing like maniacs.

Just had to renew my driving licence online. After completing the renewal I get the obligatory "how did we do" questionnaire. Last question:

"How likely are you to use the website again?"

Well pretty likely as it is the only fucking way to renew the licence, but at least not for another 10 years 🙄

Another oldie - apologies if it has been done before.
So there were these two developers in a light aircraft looking to land, but they were completely fog bound and had no clue where they were (I said it was an oldie - no GPS).
So they flew around for a while, getting lower and lower hoping to see a landmark, when they flew past this office building.
As they went by, they saw a single light on in one of the windows, so they flew around again and attracted the guy's attention.
On the next loop around, the pilot shouted "WHERE ARE WE?"
Then on the next loop around, the guy in the office shouted back "YOU'RE IN AN AIRPLANE".
They looped around again, and the pilot shouted "THANKS!" and set course south west for 15 miles and made a perfect touchdown at Seattle airport.
Hi passenger looked at him and said "How did you do that??"
He said "Quite simple really. I asked that guy a perfectly reasonable question, and got an answer that was 100% correct, but totally useless, so I deduced that must be Microsoft, and I knew that the airport is 15 miles to the south west"

new Post<question> {
Getting another Raspi 3 B soon! What should I do with it besides setting up a not-much-used webserver?
};

!rant

Been working on a custom html partial injector (js/jquery only) as both a personal challenge and utility to use for my website scaffold. Being a challenge, i decided not to look at any implementation from another JS framework. I won't lie, i had it 'working' at least 5 times now, but this time, after about 3-4 days, i think i got it for real. And the cool thing? It's a bit less code than my original implementation even with my generous whitespace and verbosity. And it even unwraps nicely so it looks like a regular html page in the dev tools.

I love when things finally work as they should--God knows i question my motives before then.

Well just blew up a coding interview.

Got an offer to be a Drupal dev and was expecting questions on Drupal API and module dev but got asked how to find the closest Enemy in an array and blah blah blah.

Interesting question but man. My mind got blank and got nervous. It's been a while since I've done a question like that and I've been coding for 10+ years.

I would've love to solve that in another language such as Python or C++ but got stuck on PHP because it was a Drupal position. But I only use PHP for Drupal modules and templates who are highly dependant on Drupal API. Or even WordPress plugins. But I try to avoid WordPress because is shit.

Guess the job market hasn't changed since I graduated back in 2014. So I feel a little bummed down. But I guess I'll just have to practice those type of problems as well. At least the problem solving method.

At least it will be an excuse to do those leetcode problems.

I just found a vulnerability in my companies software.
Anyone who can edit a specific config file could implant some SQL there, which would later be executed by another (unknowing) user from within the software.

The software in question is B2B and has a server-client model, but with the client directly connecting to the database for most operations - but what you can do should be regulated by the software. With this cute little exploit I managed to drop a table from my test environment - or worse: I could manipulate data, so when you realize it it's too late to simply restore a DB backup because there might have been small changes for who knows how long. If someone was to use this maliciously the damages could be easily several million Euros for some of our customers (think about a few hundred thousand orders per day being deleted/changed).

It could also potentially be used for data exfiltration by changing protection flags, though if we're talking industry espionage they would probably find other ways and exploit the OS or DB directly, given that this attack requires specific knowledge of the software. Also we don't promise to safely store your crabby patty recipe (or other super secret secrets).

The good thing is that an attack would only possible for someone with both write access to that file and insider knowledge (though that can be gained by user of the software fairly easily with some knowledge of SQL).

Well, so much for logging off early on Friday.

When you're developing it's very well advised to run your software locally in an environment as much as possible matching the real environment.

So for example, if you're running linux on production then you also run it locally to run your code.

Here's where people need to shut the fuck up:

No, mac is not good for linux development. Not unless portability is already a concern that you have and even then it might be counter productive. So many times when people say this, portability isn't not a concern. What runs on servers is up to them.

If your servers are going to be centos, then you develop with centos. Not with debian, gentoo, ubuntu, maxosx, etc.

Even different linux distros are a headache for portability when it's just to support a few desktops for development so don't think that macosx is going to cut it. It might not be as radical a difference as between windows and linux traditionally is but it's still not good for "linux" development. I don't think people making that statement really know what linux is now how different distributions work.

What you use for your graphical operating system doesn't matter to much but when you run your code then there's a simple solution.

Another thing people need to shut up about. It's not docker, unless you're already in Linux where docker is one of many options such as chroot or lxc.

This question always comes up, how do you developer for linux in windows? No it's not docker it's virtual machine.

It's that simple. You download the ISO for the distro you want and then install it on a VM. What does docker for windows do? It runs a linux VM that runs docker.

This may come as a great shock to developers around the world but it is possible to run linux in a VM and then any linux application your want including docker.

Another option is to shove a box in the corner, install what you need on it, share the file system and have people use that to run their code. It really is that easy.

I fucking hate corporate environment. We have a weekly meeting in our tech department where a team is chosen at random to present the project they're working on, architecture and such. You know what? We have fucking documents, for both product scope and technical architecture. If you're interested in our work, go fucking read our docs. If you have a question, slack us or send us a fucking email. Why the fuck do I have to attend a 1-hour meeting every week for this bullshit. Oh and some dude from upper management has a brilliant idea: from today they decide to host 2 such meetings per week, 1 within the tech department, and another within the whole company. So we had to attend the same fucking meeting twice in 1 week!!! Fucking genius!
I'm so fucking tired of these meaningless meetings, but attendance is recommended because "this is how you reach staff level" as they told me. Fucking bullshit. I may try a few more years for the sake of financial stability, and then find a small shop where people just leave me the fuck alone with my codes.

I just can't stress enough how fascinated I am by biology and biochemistry.

I mean, we, who call ourselves engineers, are no more but a gang of toddlers having a blast with jumbo legos on Aunt Lucy's dining room carpet on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Our solutions using "modern tools" and "modern engineering" are mere attempts to *very* remotely mimic what beautiful and elegant solutions are around us and inside of each of us.

IC/EC engines, solar batteries, computers and quantum computers, spaceships and ISSes, AI/ML, ... What are they? just the means to leverage what's been created all around us to create something that either entertains us, encourages our laziness or helps us to look at the other absolutely fascinating engineering solutions surrounding us so we could try and "replicate" their working principles to further embrace our laziness and entertain us.

Just look at the humble muscle - a myofibril made out of actin and myosin. The design is soooo simple and spot on, so elegant and efficient, the "battery" and signalling system are so universal and efficient.

Look at all those engineering miracles, small and big. Look how they work, how they leverage both big and small to create holistic, simplistic and absolutely efficient mechanisms. And then come back to me, and tell me again that all these brilliant solutions came out of nothing just by an accident we call "evolution".

How blinded by our narcissism are we to claim that there can't be a grand designer of any kind, that there's nothing smarter than us and that the next best thing than us is an incomprehensible series of accidental mutations over an unimaginable amount of time?

I mean.. could it be that someone/something greater than us created us and everything around us? naaaah.. we are the crown jewel of this universe. Everything else must be either magic or an accident. /s

Don't read this as yet another crazy-about-God person's ramblings. I'm not into religion fwiw. But science has taught me enough critical thinking to question its merit. Look at it all as engineers. Which is more probable: that everything around us happened by an accident or that someone/something preceding us had a say in the design?

I was in a good mood until I read this weeks dev-question. I'm now having an existential crisis. Why do I do this? What's the end goal here? I don't know what my biggest dev career dream is. Maybe I should get a dog and live in the mountains. I think, I need another moment...

Just started a new job three weeks ago. I was doing pair programming with another developer that has been there two years; I was assigned an issue and wanted his opinion on it. He implemented a fix that involved multiple complex if statements.

He was surprised after I went ahead and showed him that the variable in question could be used (it was either 0, null, or > 0) like a boolean. I brought it down to 3 lines; a single if statement. Felt like a boss.

Serious question for anybody who has dared to understand manager-speak: Do you know what a 'Task Rewind' is? We have it in our documentation, but google gives me no help as to what the hell it could mean.

...Or should I just take my original gut feeling and classify this as yet another word for the clown dictionaries?

Started new job almost two moths ago..

For almost 3 years I was developing custom themes, plugins, and widget for WordPress using PHP, jQuery/AJAX, and MySQL.

The new company that hired me brought me on as a backend developer to help rebuild their custom PHP Framework, and other web based software/products as their moving toward Google Cloud Platform.

When I started, MVC and OOP was new to me... took a couple weeks to get the hang of things, and understand their system.

Just when I was getting comfortable, I had a task assigned to me that was all NodeJS...

Had a 30 check-in the week I started the Node task, and was feeling pretty beat down because it was all new to me and I wasn’t making a lot of progress, and still not comfortable with Promises yet, and some other ES6 features but finding my way around slowly but surely.

Manager reassured me that I wasn’t going to be fired and it wasn’t unique to myself. Very encouraging to hear, but I’m my own worst critic so it’s frustrating not being able to make progress like I would with PHP projects.

Fast forward to this week, I started to review another task for a feed and found it’s all Ruby! Another language I have no familiarity with... and started to question if I’ll every get the hang of all these languages and be a solid team member...

Not only do I have to get a grasp on NodeJS and Ruby now, but then I’ll also have to get familiar with GCP and whatever else comes along with it...

Oh and I’m using Linux now instead of Windows/ OSX... so there’s that too.. plus the other command line tools the company built, and uses..

I was comfortable developing in PHP and know I needed to take a step and accept this job to move my career forward but it seems like I’m always behind the 8 ball...

Some days I wonder if it was worth staying a Wordpress developer and just focused on learning ReactJS and stay more Front-end than Backend..

I enjoy working with talented people but I don’t like being the low man on the totem pole knowing I don’t have the experience yet.

Does it feel like this for all devs?!?!

Considering mullvad is based in sweden (xkeyscore, 14 eyes, ..) and has never seemingly had any public court record proving its claims, is it really to be trusted, instead of e.g. BlackVPN/NordVPN? does the server location matter if they are based in sweden?

Is it just again an excuse like "even if that happens, I am only hiding from X, I have nothing to hide from Y"? so e.g. your neighbour can't snoop, but a court if they decide everybody that visited devrant is a criminal - is alright?

PIA is based in the US (no discussion level of bad), but atleast got tested twice already and each time could not return any logs, even though I like mullvads model and it is clearly better than being US based, it still makes one question if mullvad is not yet another PureVPN in fancier clothes?

I was looking at some info about how much ads pay, CPM and all that, came across a guy who answered a question related to this on quora (FUCK quora piece of shit content farm :/ but that's a story for another day) and put links to his apps on Google Play in it.

I always had low self esteem and think that I know nothing and I'm shit but seriously fact that people who make apps like this exist and are proud of their shit makes me feel better.

His entire collection of apps are garbage like this, like a "driving school" with images from Google Search and other games screenshots and "top 10 search engines" with just logos of search engines. 😂

EDIT: Typos

That one time I answered a question on a forum and another guy was like: "Damn son, I wish I had thought of that! Wanna hang at this code-LAN next weekend?" 😅

Serious question: If a highly intelligent being, better than humans, is about to code something, how would they probably do it?

Will they use the same concepts like control flow, iterations, types, operators, object inheritance, etc?

If they are quantum capable, how can they code with booleans when it can be both true and false at the same time? Will they code truthy and falsy with another dimension like time-space temporality?

Do their code simultaneously modify the hardware or bio-hardware as it iterates over the outcome of the code?

Does input and output even relevant to them?

How do they represent infinites?

Do they have similar github workflows or they telepathically update the source code?

Do they embed their program in their DNA? Then pass to offspring the codes they already created?

Do they code using a language or do they use some frequencies and material science that simultaneously show real world output?

And do they have their version of devRant?

Don't use your senior software engineer title or years of experience as reasons in a debate or argument about software

My manager was asking me what steps needs to be done to perform a disaster recovery for our cluster( on production). I will be honest here, I have not maintained this type of cluster(kubernetes) in production before. However, I have enough understand of the system to answer my boss question. I basically told him there are A, B, C you have to do.

My senior developer jumped in and said "No you should do A,C, B because C is more critical than B. " I then replied to him: "I understand your point, I notice that too, but .." Before I can even finish my sentence, this dude has already rolled his eyes and interrupted me very loudly: "Have you worked with these systems on production before? I did". The asshole knows I haven't maintained Kubernetes on production yet of course.

I got super pissed at him and pretty much shouted back to him and my manager: "Just because I haven't worked on this system on production yet, does not mean my argument is wrong" .

I then dragged my managers, that asshole, and other engineers in a room and settle this out. In the end, people agreed with my steps over that asshole senior engineer dude because I gave them rational reasons.

The conclusion is: Your senior title is given by the company, It doesn't mean anything to me. Also, it doesn't make you more right than another person just because he has a "lower" title than you.

I have been debugging for like hours trying to figure out the cause an unknown bug spoiling my UI by making my elements overlap.
I'm working on a Unit Converter that takes kWh and then converts to mWh. (Logical Conversion: 1000 kWh = 1 mWh).
Just an easy shit i thought, using Javascript I just passed the dynamically generated kWh value to a function that takes maximum of 6 chars and multiply it by 0.001 to get the required result but this was where my problem started. All values came out as expected until my App hits a particular value (8575) and outputs a very long set of String (8.575000000000001), i couldn't figure the cause of this until i checked my console log and found the culprit value, and then i change the calculation logic from multiply by 0.001 to divide by 1000 and it came out as expected (8.575)

My question is that;
Is my math logically wrong or is this another Javascript Calculation setback?

So, right now I'm 16 atm I know some basics of php,python but I love Python more than php. So my question it's:
Most of the universities in my country for computer science, are based on java, c++ and some another stuff.

What should I do? Should I start learning C++ / Java or continue using python?

people that answer a question with another fucking irrelevant question should have a special place in hell !!

why dont you just answer the fucking question when in the first place i asked you politely and nicely !!

the question doesn't even deserve a fucking follow up question in the first place !!

you've wasted both our time with your stupidity!!

When the intern blocks my pull request to ask another stupid question

Done and redone but it's been a long time coming and it's my turn : fuck you StackOverflow.

I've been a member for a few years, and I hate the elitist idiotic community. Some people are there to help, most of them are just there to wank on their reputation.

Whenever you ask a question that is tiny bit specific, you are almost certain to have a vote to close it because "it's too vague" -even though I spent 30mn writing it with comprehensive examples, clean formatting and other users understood it perfectly as demonstrated by their comments trying to help- or any other reason that scream "I didn't understand the question or don't have the answer therefore it's a bad question"

If you are "lucky", a power user will just mark it as duplicate of another question that barely uses the same stack as yours and has one keyword in common because this illiterate fuck couldn't bother to read the full question detailing why it's not a duplicate but, oh surprise, the question they referred yours too already has an accepted answer by themselves. Abusing their reputation-bestowed powers to reference themselves for some more reputation.

Now that I am over 1k in reputation and have all 3 colours of badges, it seems like it warrants a bit more attention from the swarm and it doesn't happen as often. Which is appalling in itself, basically if you don't have enough shinys, your are considered a worthless piece of crap barely tolerated to ask questions.

The fact that big reputation users have so much power and can absolutely not be held accountable for their abusive behaviour is a recipe for power abuse

Hiii devRanters, I have a TypeScript question for you...
How do I dynamically import classes?

I have a class like this:
export default class Foo implements Bar {
...
....public getName(): string {
........return this.name;
....}
}

and then I have another file with this:
import(`./class-cmd/${file}`).then((command) => {
....winston.debug(command);
....winston.debug(command.getName());
});

the first command spits out something like this:
debug: default=class Foo {
....constructor() {
........this.name = "foo";
....}
....getName() {
........return this.name;
....}
}

and I would expect that the second command will work, however it throws this:
UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: TypeError: command.getName is not a function

Any idea what I might be doing wrong?

Imagine going on quora and answering somebodies carbon offsetting question by pushing your own stupid fucking agenda with propaganda answers like

"oh we need rainforest money!"

"oh we need grassland!"

"oh support the cows"

jesus fucking christ, THIS is why we have a problem with people not accepting climate change, becuase every fucking liberal wants to pile on one another and have their 'most important' cause behind it

give me a break you fucking idiots, it won't be solved by acting this way

sorry this is in no way software related, but it's the only place left i have to rant (however in some ways it is somehow software related, due to being able to think about the real world without being an absolute idiot and pushing some stupid peer pressured political idea because your social identity and friends are more important than actual facts, but whatever)

(Part 2/2?)

THE RAT-RACE ARC:

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

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

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

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

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

WHY NOW:

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

THE CORRECTION ARC:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good bye and thank you for listening.

[DISCLAIMER : Potential Troll Topic here] I am self taught python and js (not considering myself as a real developer as I don't push much on github and work in a complete other field than anything related to CS right now) and would be interested to learn another language, with another paradigm. So, as I love you all, I would be interested In your highlights as I am currently considering either C, C++, Rust or Go.

with C, I know I could interface it with python. With C++ (despite Linus considering it evil) I know I could interface it with Node. I don't know currently what to do with Go, but some people seem really enthusiastic about it (not really relevant I know) and Rust seems like the C of today, with a bunch of new cool kid stuff. My main goal, after all, is to learn something new, to have another sight on programming. Either understanding more about hardware or learning another way of coding (like different from oop).

I know it sounds like a troll, but I promise it's not, just a serious genuine question (hopefully it won't be closed here like on SO)

So what do you think devranters ?

Being eternally grateful to all of you, I wish you a good night.

A post today made me think about this interview I had about a year ago... I shall tell you all about it.

Went to a hiring event for this company everyone was cool but this one guy (who would have been my boss) was a total arrogant, douchey, know it all.

So anyways cue interviewing with him a week later. He says if I give you task A, B, C and they need to be done by the end of the week in which order do you do them. (Note: he literally said abc not actual tasks)

Me: I don't really know how to answer that question without more information.

Him: Well I like to see how people answer it... So think about it for a second.

Me: Ok I guess if doing one task would help me do the next task faster I would do it in that order. Like I can use code or concepts from C to do B faster.

Him: What if A would take 2 days and B and C would take 1 day.

Me: I don't see how that would influence the order I do them in.

Him: Would you complete one task after another or switch between them or do see simultaneously.

Me: It would depend on my previous answer and what would be the fastest way to get them done but without more info I literally cannot give you an answer of like I would do B, C, A.

Him: Would you do the longest task first or the shorter tasks.

Me: I don't know I guess it depends on if it would help you or somebody else move forward with something if I got a particular task or the shorter tasks done first.

So cue more of this kind of back and forth about arbitrary details about undefined theoretical tasks for like 10 minutes.

Suffice is to say I didn't get the job and I'm glad.

TLDR; Default admin login on WEP encrypted WLAN router for getting free stuff at my hair stylist studio.

Free WLAN in my hair stylist studio: They had their WEP key laying around in the waiting area. Well, I am not very happy with WEP, thought that they never heard of security. Found the default GW address, typed it into my browser and pressed Enter, logged in with admin/1234 and voila, I was root on their ADSL router 😌 Even more annoyed now from such stupidity I decided to tell the manager. All I told him was: You use a default login on your router, you give the WiFi password for free, WEP is very very insecure and can be hacked in seconds, and do you know what criminals will do with your internet access? He really was shocked about that last question, blank horror, got very pale in just one sec. I felt a little bit sorry for my harsh statement, but I think he got the point 😉 Next problem was: he had no clue how to do a proper configuration (he even didn't knew the used ISP username or such things). Telled me that 'his brother' has installed it, and that he will call him as soon as possible. Told him about everything he should reconfigure now, and saw him writing down the stuff on a little post-it.

Well, he then asked me what he can pay me? Told him that I don't want anything, because I would be happy when he changes the security settings and that is pay enough. He still insisted for giving me something, so I agreed on one of a very good and expensive hairwax. Didn't used it once 😁

Some weeks later when I was coming back for another hair cut: Free WLAN, logged in with admin/1234, got access and repeated all I did the last time once more 😎

HOW CAN YOU NOT LEARN FROM FAILS??

Just asked a question on another stackexchange site. Funny how almost all questions and answers are being upvoted. Thats something that you are not used to experience on stackoverflow :P

At work one morning, I was asked in chat for a way to edit an xml file on a Mac. They couldn't open it due to permissions. I told them to open Terminal and run sudo vi /path/to/file.xml. Never got a message back about it, so I assumed everything was OK. Later that afternoon, I received another question: "I'm in, I've made the changes, now what? How do I get out?" It wasn't funny until I realized how many memes existed for this. I'd imagined they'd quickly opened and edited it and spent hours unable to exit it; though, realistically, it probably wasn't attempted until the afternoon. Truthfully, I was new to it, too, and have no idea why I suggested vi over something else.

I clearly don't understand how StackOverflow works. I posted a solution I came up with in a Q&A style, thinking it's a way for me to contribute to the community.

When I researched the challenge I needed to solve, I didn't find any elegant solutions that would have helped me achieve what I was aiming for.

One commentator said my post wasn't a real question about a real coding challenge, and wasn't compliant with SO guidelines.

Another commented that my search provider was clearly inadequate.

My submission was voted down so I just removed it with the intention of sharing it elsewhere.

It's almost as if StackOverflow resists contributions from newer users. Or, as I suggested at the outset, I clearly don't understand how to be a productive member of that community.

A few days ago our server was compromised due to an outdated Jenkins version. The malicious user installed a crypto miner on the server... The same day that it was found I told management that I'm interested in helping out with the server. Since then, nothing happened... No updates, no security measures, no nothing (except for the removed crypto miner and updated Jenkins software)

Oh well only a matter of time before another hack...

Question to some (who work way way way longer than me) med - seniors, should I make a big deal out of this? And keep pressure on it. Or should I just leave it be and wait for the next comprised server? I know devrant is not a Q&A service, but some dev to dev advice is much appreciated.

- incognito

I hadn’t intended to sound like I was scolding this person, but it came out that way in a meeting that had a lot of crosstalk and not a lot of opportunities for me to get a word in edgewise. I was new-ish at the company and she happened to be a superior about 4 levels above me in the hierarchy. My boss, who was also in the meeting, asked me, obliquely, how I thought the meeting went. I understood the subtext as, “Dude, you really went off on her. Are you sure that was the right move?”

I was already as embarrassed as I was gonna be prior to his question but now I was in total embarrassment hell. I couldn’t even bring myself to backpedal retroactively and apologize. I was totally mortified.

As it turned out, she had respected my assertiveness. In another meeting a couple years later, as I was strongly advocating a process change for something she was involved in, she actually said, and sincerely, “I really appreciate it when you hold me accountable.”

))| THE BEST AND WORST WAY|((
))| TO DELETE A LINE IN BASH |((

(Think you can do better? Vote
now on your phones!)

WORST: Hold backspace until satisfied
BEST: Using a pen or other pointing device capable of causing semi or permanent damage to your screen, count how many characters the line in question consists of. Write this down on a piece of paper (after all, your terminal is occupied) and using long division, or any other means, divide this number by two, rounding as you please. Press the "right arrow" key as many times as necessary to reach the end of the line. This might be 0 - if so, congratulations, you may skip this step! Once complete, refer to your piece of paper, and taking your newly calculated number, press the "left arrow" key exactly that many times. If you have a short attention span or are worried you will lose count, take a tally or use some other primitive count recording method. Once the key has been pressed the correct number of times, hold down either control key on your keyboard and take a deep breath - there's no going back now (!) - press the "k" key (you should still be holding a control key!) and take a sigh of relief. You're halfway there! If you need a break, take one. When you're ready to finish the task, hold a control key again and take another deep breath. When you are ready to complete the task (don't hold your breath too long!) press the "w" key. Congratulations!! Your line has been deleted!! Some may call you a fucking idiot for not just pressing ctrl-w at the start, but don't listen to those people! They probably delete stuff by accident all the time! Now, take a lie down, and give a moment's silence for the poor poor line you just brutally dissected and murdered.

Think you can do better? Vote now on your phones!

Dear devrant community, I have a question...

For perspective, a few years ago, we had an incident, where one dev was looking for other employment, he did not say anything, he was just looking, and ended up accepting an offer, handing in his resignation and all that. But there was another dev doing the same thing, but he informed management that he was thinking of leaving, and would be attending interviews... Personally I note difference in treatment of the dev that was honest, he was slightly getting phased out and getting the cold shoulder most of the time combined with weird kindness that was cearly not sincere, where the other dev was given a hard time for not saying anything about them looking for other opportunities, and treated as though they betrayed all the trust they had earned and no longer deserved to be trusted....

My question is, what, in your opinion, is the right thing to do when you are looking for a new opportunity? Do you tell management, or is it actually none of their business?

TL;DR: A new "process" for collaboration between teams was created in order to stonewall requests from my team.

A couple months ago, we created a new Dev team that specializes in writing internal tools. This team was staffed with internal developers, and got a separate manager. The whole point of this team was to collaborate with my dev team so we can both help each other develop tools that the company needs.

One of the developers that was on my team went over to this team while he and I were still working on a big application. For a few weeks, he still worked on this application as he normally would, and we'd sit with each other and work through features together whenever we needed a fresh set of eyes.

Well, eventually his new team got protective of him and created a new "process" for our teams to request assistance from one another. So now instead of just popping over to someone's desk to ask a quick question, you have to send an email to the team and request that you can borrow that particular developer for a question, and then the entire team sits down and discusses whether or not they're going to allow that person to answer your question. Then after a week of discussion, if they decide to allow it, they schedule a meeting for a week later, in which you will get the question answered.

So instead of just spending 2 minutes to ask and answer the question, you have to spend weeks in order to request assistance, and then schedule a meeting.

It's ridiculous, and it's all because his team got protective that he was working with another Dev team. Dev teams collaborate all the time, and work together. My team is constantly helping other teams, and we don't have this ridiculous process. We get asked a question, and we answer it. Simple as that.

Last week, I sent an email for assistance in completing a feature, and didn't hear back. I talked to the Product Owner for the team, and he said "Just send an email," to which I responded that I did and hadn't got a response. He said "Oh....." I then told my boss that this is an enormous bottleneck, and he seemed surprised hearing that this is a bottleneck.

A week passed and today I still hadn't got a response, so my boss reached out to the Product Owner to push him. Finally, I got a response and they scheduled a meeting to answer my question 3 days down the road. So it's going on 2 weeks to get this simple question answered.

Normally I'd just have the other developer come over and help, but apparently they yelled at him the last time he did that.

The issue is that the process was created with the assistance of our "senior" developers, who never work with this other team in this capacity, so they just nodded and smiled and let them put this ridiculous process in place.

Like, get off your high horses. You don't "own" him, he's allowed to collaborate with other teams. This question would've taken literally 10 minutes, but because of your new "process" you've turned it into a 2 week debacle and you've effectively delayed the app launch with your pettiness.

They say that this process isn't intended to prevent us from getting assistance, and that might not have been the original intention of the Product Owner/manager, but it's very clear that the developers on the other team are taking advantage of it and using it as a big stonewall so they can beat around the bush and avoid providing assistance when it's needed.

If this becomes a trend, I'm going to schedule a meeting (which apparently they love to do,) and we're going re-work this entire process, because it's extremely counterproductive and seems to only exist in order to create red tape.

I worked a whole year in a company for which I produced 30 software and none of them saw the publication even though they were completed. I was the most productive employee and had a productivity of 428% compared with the other employees. 
All because of the constant changes in business strategies. 
For a moment I believed to be a pirate ship during a storm. When I was tired of the way they were treating employees, months of backlog payments, unpaid leave or not granted, I quit and I was told to me that I was a bad employee and I was unproductive. 
In a month he is left only the designer working. At the moment the company in question is still looking for employees, after more than a year no one wanted to work again. Stupid me.
While I ras looking for another job I did freelance for a month, gaining about five times my earlier pay.

Not a rant... But I have a question guys...
I am currently a student in 2nd year of college.
I have been using and learning C++ since like 4 years now and it is my truely favorite language. It just is a joy to work with. Tried others but couldn't handle them (no offense. Just a personal preference) so here is the question:

What should I do in future? Like which field would be most enjoyable?

Currently, I feel game programming is it... I do enjoy whatever puny game like thing I make way more than anything...

I also specifically enjoy creating backend stuff...
(I always end up creating mechanics for working of game engine but never creating the actual game... Like creating an asset manager or something but not using it).

By backend stuff, I mean something which requires me to think a lot as to how can I implement something and then implement it (again, in C++). And then another developer could make use of it.

I heard game development has a very low scope for growth and is very very tedious... Is it true? What route should I go to?

Edit 1:
Btw, I enjoy building stuff from ground up, although ofc that doesn't happen haha...

My Gripe With Implicit Returns

In my experience I've found that wherever possible code should be WYSIWYG in terms of the effects per statement. Intent and the effects thereof should always be explicit per statement, not implicit, otherwise effects not intended will eventually slip in, and be missed.
It's hard to catch, and fix the effects of a statement intent where the statement in question is *implicit* because the effect is a *byproduct* of another statement.

Worse still, this sort of design encourages 'pyramid coding recursion hell', where some users will first decompose their program into respective scopes, and then return and compose them..atomically as possible, meaning execution flow becomes distorted, run time state becomes dependent not on obvious plain-at-sight code, but on the run time state itself. This I've found is a symptom of people who have spent too much time with LISP or other eye-stabbingly fucky abominations. Finally implicit returns encourage a form of thinking where programmers attempt to write code that 'just works' without thinking about how it *looks* or reads. The problem with opaque-programming is that while it may or may not be effortless, much more time is spent in reading, debugging, understanding, and maintaining code than is spent writing it--which is obviously problematic if we have a bunch of invisible returns everywhere, which requires new developers reading it to stop each and every time to decide whether to mentally 'insert' a return statement.

This really isn't a rant, as much as an old bitter gripe from the guy that got stuck with the job of debugging. And admittedly I've admired lisp from afar, but I didn't want to catch the "everything is functional, DOWN WITH THE STATE" fever, I'm no radical.

Just god damn, think of the future programmer who may have to read your code eventually.

The one that got me to my current employment. I was working as a sysadmin and was trying to switch to dev. I'd tried one interview in another company and failed it miserably. I was soooo nervous I was literally shaking. And I think I failed every possible dev question. Ffs I couldn't even remember how to swap 2 variables! Yes, I was THAT nervous. Bcz I needed that spot so much.

After that I decided to cool down for a few weeks. Then my current employer's hr reached out and asked to come over. I did. We had a chat with HR and they told me I'll be asked to do a homework task. Surely I was okay with it! They sent me the task via email, but smth [I don't recall what] happened at my sysadmin work and I was extremely short on time. I missed the homework due date ofc. A few days later they reached out to me and gave me another week. I missed that too. Again I got a call from them and I was asked what was the problem. I explained I don't have time atm and mentioned that it might be better to skip this oppurtunity for me. That it might be bettet for them to hire someone else.

To my surprise they did not back off. They kept talking, one thing led to another and somehow they made me commit to arrive to their office to do the homework task.

I was startled. I would have bailed on me if I were them... They didn't..

They didn't give up on me
they are amazing

tl:dr
i fucking hate that professor for whom i have to work on laboratory project right now.

reason#1
the project is using a stack full with java. JavaScript. react and some weird facebook api of which i have no clue about. not to mention the server side of this application which uses tomcat (ok its java after all) and sql.

well that wouldn't be not so bad if...

reason#2
we wouldn't have to fucking debug his mistakes he put into the fucking prepared code AND his fucking useless instructions how to set up the project for eclipse the first time. not to mention his fucking requirements which make no sense

oh yeah im a student. i can always go and ask him for help if i need any...

reason#3
i have another 70% mandatory course at the same time and that fucker refuses to upload hos sheets in moodle and answer even one fucking question via mail. not to mention no support if I am there unless i have eclipse setup. even through the projects should be build using gradle...

reason#4
oh. and have i mentioned that this course is only about design patterns? uts not like we could see several of them in a java only application. no we literally have to learn java itself. gradle. nodejs JavaScript Extended for react which i have no clue about at the moment... and yes i especially mentioned gradle and nodejs beccause we have to set shit up and not only use a script.

reason#5
and all that wont even give us a grade. no ita simply a pass or fail part of the module which the course is part of.

have i also mentioned that the whole shit should be done in 20 hours according to the schedule

saw this girl's post LinkedIn. a typical influencer like format post which had nothing of value and instead was a post asking for help with a question (basically it consisted of a android doc link for an android component followed by some hashtags like #6969daysofcode #day69 #xyz and "has anyone used it before?share resources")

then i noticed 2 things:
1. she works in my previous company in the same position that i did , and started a month after i left. so basically she is my replacement.
2. i and my senior (who also has left that org) had created the exact same component that she mentioned in the post, and we had created that component as an awesome plug and play component that would handle multiple usecases with decent documentation

now am having this urge to dm her the exact classname in the code to see and learn 😂😂

or i can play this uno reverse card and write a blog on that component writing another influencer like post: "in my previous company, we created this awesome component and here is how it works..." her boss (our TL) also follows me and what i know of him, he will be tagging her, pinging on slack, and discussing it in the DSA the next morning 😂

My Boss Abuses me, should I leave my job?

I overheard this tidbit on a bus recently. Okay I'm lying. But in the great spans of
time I've spent reading "dear annie" type articles, many involving how often my meth head step dads beat me while growing up, or in turn how often *I* beat me (oh yeah)..I've come across this in one form another, this, and other dumbfuck questions from the stuttering meek and halfhearted.

They say there are no dumb questions. Well, like that guy who smoked too much weed and
asked "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" (fap fap fap), there are in fact dumb questions.The world is overflowing with them, like a clogged shitter full of tacobell and glitter covered brown gutter wisdom. And it smells like roses, if roses smelled like shit.

Questions like "How do I make sure my cats don't feel lonely once I have my first child?"

I don't know, they're fucking cats. Did you even google this before asking?

Or

"How to make spaghetti?"

Really, is this question written by a bot?

"What is the best javascript framework in year x?"

All of them and none of them. Welcome to hell.

"Whats your favorite color?"

My answer: I'm not five years old any more. And obviously you are. Why are you on this site instead of eating crayons at daycare?

Yes indeed, this and many more dumbfuck questions await you and can be found on the preeminent quora, amongst other sites.
A place, which censored an eminently reasonable answer of mine (I was totally not being a shithead btw).
I responded in kind by removing a whole mess of long form answers of mine.

What I have learned from the experience is this: Humanity is greatly comprised of many people who, having no brains to speak of, wander aimlessly like beasts of the field, glass eyed and slack jawed, in search of a savior. But their savior came a long time ago, once, and many times before. An engineer, or programmer, or perhaps in another reincarnation a guy parting a sea of koolaid after the local ruler swindled his peeps out of another payment for moving some heavy ass stone blocks, but I digress.

And in response to peoples worries, anxieties, everyday problems and concerns, every one of these would be wiseman, every one of these saviors, leaders, and great men spoke these magic words which resonate now down through the ages like the voice of reason and providence:

"Read the FUCKING manual."

"And don't bother me again asshole." (well this last bit is all me, but I'm sure others said it too.)

The time that we dedicate to the things and people that we love/like, when it's enough?

The question is generic and for good reason.
Yesterday, semi-seriously, my gf asked me when we'll have a baby, I answered, seriously, that it's gonna be when I'll feel ready to share the daily time with someone as demanding as another family member growing up.
Now, between job time, hobbies time and girlfriend (gonna marry soon) time the time is already tight and because I'm self sufficient about happiness and kind of a loner I don't share really much time with her most of the days, and from this realisation from her side she broke into crying.
From that experience I understood that there might be need some adjustment on my side.
But on another side I'm puzzled of how other families deal with this, because though my life I've seen couples/married-people that had not really much interactions with each other on a daily basis and seemed fine with living like that.

So knowing this context, what's your experience about this phenomenon through your life time?

At the job interview to my current position I was asked the classic ”where do you see yourself in X years” question. I replied something along the lines of that I see myself staying if I feel good where I am and long as I have the opportunities for professional growth.

Now with recent developments it’s looking like those opportunities will be bygone pretty soon. I work on a massive legacy codebase, where with the scarcity of current dev resources and the apparent difficulties of procuring additional personnel to the dev dept, it does look like we’ll be limited to maintenance and simple small scale improvements with no room for meaningful projects. Theoretically I could ask to be moved to another product, but realistically that would both be a dick move well as unlikely to happen, as other projects are fully staffed (and made with technologies there’s easier to find personnel to).

As a consequence of this perceived imminent halt in opportunities for self-development at work, I’ve been starting to look for greener pastures. There are some intriguing ones out there. But then I come here, read some rants and comments, and it always becomes abundantly clear I’m good where I’m at right now. So what of it, if my position won’t enable growth out of the box for a while? I can always develop my skills and knowledge on my free time, and besides, the stagnation won’t last forever... right?

Update: for those of you who know cougar woman/ my self proclaimed "work mom" in my previous posts (bitch who keeps stealing my lunch), yesterday she really tipped me over the edge. So I'm fucking hauling ass on my sprint work because I had to take over another team member's tasks (because he "doesn't have time" for it being prod support but all I see him doing is shitposting at his desk) and someone from another team asked the cougar a question about something. she comes up to me all demanding like "HEY you, you got the worksapce open?"
I was like um... no I don't. I'm working on the other application.
and then she's like "Look at my laptop and show him". Okay bitch let me just drop everything I'm doing to help a random person. The fact that she commanded me instead of just asking me pissed me off. Not even a single sign of "please". I'm tired of her truly. She is a snake. Even to her friend on our team. Every time he's out she's like "hey where is _____? huh why isn't he here??? hmmm" in an instigating way to remind everyone that he might've taken off for no reason. When I was too sick to volunteer at an event she organized in the morning on Saturday, she asked me the following Monday, "oh did you drink too much? lmao. a spiteful, grudge holding bitch for sure

I was facing another if those problems (not bugs) that have the good solution barely outside if your reach.
I decided to pull my Ace in the sleeve and ask on stackoverflow. As I was half way through my well written question, where I had to illustrate stuff in great detail, and express clearly what is required, I realized how to solve it.

If I had written the question like many of the people who complain that SO is full of pricks who just downvote, nobody would have understood it, and I wouldn't have solved it myself. I would have been ignored and maybe even downvoted.

Write down your requirements explicitly, unambiguously, and you solve half of the problem by that. Do that on SO and you will never complain again.

So the universe is determined to fuck with me for no other reason than the fact that I exist.

I managed to get 2 dates with 2 different girls (obviously) for next weekend.

And now, Australia is going into lockdown: No restaurants and shit.

So far, I am still laughing about the whole situation but now I am faced with either calling it off (which sucks because this lockdown can go for 6 months) or find another way to meet up.

I'm tagging this as a question to see if you guys have any ideas.

As for this fucked up universe... if the parallel MrCSharp is somehow watching me from the parallel universe that has a good 2020 going on at the moment, can you please like take me to your 2020.. that'd be fab.

Oh.. and my office is now fucking closed and forced to work from home. No more gym too..

god fucking damn it...

So someone from another team in the company asked on our public Slack channel if they can send a field they're sending for one client, for all clients, so they don't have to have a branch for that one client that sends it.
We're talking about a string of up to 20 chars, typically much less even connected to each record, of which we have let's say a million per month and each of those records has at least 30 columns, some of them being longer strings even.

A dev from my team responded that they shouldn't send it because, while no one uses it so it's not going to break anything, it will require extra storage.

This was not 20 years ago, this was today, in 2021.

I responded asking what storage does he foresee to be the problem, because I can't see where so I'd like to get more details.

Guess who got ripped to shreds because it's a bad thing to question members of the team in public....

This is just one in a long line of similar brainless idiocies I've had to deal with from this asshole.

And no, I'm not a junior dev or something, I'm transitioning out of the Principal Engineer role for that team (for this reason exactly, otherwise I'd stay as PE). And no, I'm not the transitioning the role to that asshole.

At least 3 people who have left the team because of this asshole.

Managers not helping either, responses like "Yeah, you're right, but you're reasonable, he isn't, so let's appease him until we can find a way to deal with him"...

I used to love being a developer, this asshole made me want to vomit at any mention of anything remotely dev related...

Hope y'all are reasonably happy with your jobs and, more importantly, don't have such an asshole around you!

Failed another programming intervie. Didn't expect the 2D array question. Feel so bad. Just wanna cry and give up. I need to get better..fast.

How do you deal with a developer that constantly challenges your propositions in a rhetorical matter?

For example, say if we have a problem and I propose solution A (along with my reasons why), the developer would then shoot it down - not with another alternative solution or exploration path but instead a rhetorical question.

It has gotten *exhausting* working with this person because every interaction becomes almost a debate. This isn’t just particularly with development but even during casual discussions.

I’ve even tried asking “so what would you suggest?” in which they would answer with confidence in a rhetorical matter - but without any concrete decision making (but at the same time sounding like they did make one).

We work in a team and nobody has taken the reigns of leadership (he’s quiet most meetings), so I decided to take initiative and make the calls. All of a sudden, he has a voice that is mostly axed towards being argumentative than productive. It has come to a point where I’ve just stopped making propositions because I’ve become exhausted trying to defend myself and literally repeating something like 4-5 times, however this is a project that needs to be delivered and because we work closely together, I can’t just ignore him and do my own thing.

!rant just a question. Sorry in advance for the long post.

I've been working in IT in Windows infrastructure and networking side of things for my entire career (5years) and recently was hired for a role working with AWS.

We use Macs and we use *nix distros for days. I've only ever dabbled for 'funsies' before with Linux because every previous job I held was a Windows house and f*** all else.

I'm just wondering if anyone here might have some insights as to a great way to learn the Linux environment and to learn it the right way. I'm not the best Windows admin ever and will never claim to be, but I have seen stuff that other people have done that makes me want to swing a brick at someone's head. And I feel that with all of the setup wizards and the "We'll just do it for you." approach that Windows has used since forever it allowed enough wiggle room for people that didn't know what they were doing to f*** sh*t up royally. I'm not familiar enough with Linux to know if this is also a common problem. I know that having literal full-access to every file in your OS can cause a n00b like myself to mess up royal, thus the question about learning Linux the right way.

I vaguely understand the organization of the folders and file structure within Linux, and I know some very basic commands.

sudo rm -rf /*
Just kidding

But All of my co-workers at my new job are like mighty oaks of knowledge while I'm a tiny sapling. And at times I've been intimidated by how little I know, but equally motivated to try and play catch-up.

In addition to all of this, I really want to start learning how to program. I've tried learning multiple times from places like codecademy.com, YouTube tutorials, and codeschool.com but I feel like I'm missing the lesson that explains why to use a certain operation instead of another. Example: if/else in lieu of a switch.

I'm also failing to get the concept of syntax in certain languages I've tried before. Java comes to mind real fast.

The first language I tried teaching myself was C++ from YouTube. I ended up having a fever dream that night about coding and woke up in a cold sweat. Literally, like brain overload or something. I was watching tutorials for like 9 hours straight.

Does anyone know of a training resource that will explain, in terms a 5 year old would understand, what the code is doing and why? I really want to learn but I'm starting to lose steam cause I'm just not getting it.

Thank you in advance for any tips guys and gals. I really appreciate it. Sorry for the ridiculously long questions.

Question: Does using cookies for user session handling hinder the scalability of your backend because all the API's have to live on the same domain. Basically if one API starts to get a lot of request and you want to add another server to off balance the load you would have to add an entire webserver rather than just a small micro webserver with the API running on it mainly because cookies are used to authenticate user request and cookies don't survive CORS request. Am I right or don't know what the hell i'm talking about lol need some opinions I suggested we make all API's micro services and use JWT for user sessions

This rant can basically be boiled down to the name of the software in use/question:
FileMaker Pro 8.5

Please chime in if you have ever had the privelege of working with this gem of a database program, especially the scripting capabilities...

Trying to make it print/save/export an individual PDF file into a folder specified/created by one field with the filename set from another field. Will probably get it to work but the drag and drop scripting style reminds me of setting up an autoclicker for runescape; so fricken painful. Love to hear your comments.

Also happens to be running on an ancient PPC G5 iMac with 1 Gig of RAM running 10.4.11 hidden in the back room of an old warehouse with extra creepy flickering lights...

EFFF EMMM ELLL

So yeah thats my rainy Friday rant, hope you all are having this much fun.

The best motivational comment

I posted a rant in which I mentioned that "few" developers who don't want other to progress and are present to show off at every platform....
Got a comment, which I want to share...
Thanks to @MrCush

Ya, most of them tend to stalk the stack overflow and Arch Linux communities. On stack overflow they tend to refresh their browser nonstop to see who their next victim is on a new question and then spend an abnormal amount of time searching the site for a similar question and then downvote you and report as a duplicate. “Umm ya, the question you linked is similar to mine. I found that one as well but unfortunately it wasn’t in the same environment with the same conditions that I raised and didn’t help me. Oh btw, he posted that back in 2002 and HEY LOOK, he got reported for a duplicate as well. Seems like you reported him as well.” 
The issues of arrogance and being unhelpful on that site are so vast that nobody else that registers can get enough points to be able to be allowed to answer someone else’s question so you never get any new blood.

Arch Linux “elites” like to answer your question with a link that you’ve already been to as they always link the same site. “Dude! There’s a wiki for a fucking reason. Did you read this page?”
Yes I did read that page and it was helpful to a degree but since I’m absolutely new to Arch, a lot of the information on the wiki is a bit too descriptive and over my head. Not to mention every paragraph links you to another wiki page which then links you to another and so on that I have no idea where I left off....
“Dude! If you don’t understand everything on the wiki then you shouldn’t be using Arch Linux man! Gtfo scrub.”
Took me a long time to get comfortable with Arch because of these assholes. You got to start somewhere and doing is the best way to learn.
Reading the wiki on how to install Arch now seems so simple to me because I know what to ignore and what is required but back when I first started it was absolutely confusing.

Quick question, is it bad to quit from a job when the project is not finished yet, especially in a startup company?

My reasoning for quitting, boss doesn’t really understand how game development usually works and mostly assuming every project will be same.

Following is my rant of background story for my question.

The incident triggered me wanting to leave is as below.
G = another guy from incubating center
B = boss

G: hey B, do u know this game studio is releasing this title soon. It’s a local company. Sounds cool.

Then they went to check the company profile. Found that the company has abt 40 staffs in total.

B: hey lunadev, do u know them? They have 40 people to make 2 titles. I think we’re the smallest company in the world that developing mobile games. Ha ha ha.

Me: oh, may be their project scope is complex. But I don’t think ours is the smallest company in the world making game. (We have 5 in total including him) there are others with only 2 ppl making games. (My sarcastic side took over me and said) I think we’re the only company in the world that has such small manpower with shortest deadline.

B: then how long do u think our timeline should be?

Me: abt 2 yrs? (Me considering all the artworks, features, testing time that we have to do)

B: urmmm I don’t think it’s that long. May be abt 6 months or a year at most?

G: ya, abt 6 months. Mobile games are not like desktop games or others so should be abt 6 months. Shouldn’t take that long.

Me: ... :)

Then I packed up my stuffs and left for the day. As for side note, boss designed the game himself and it took him 5 years to add complex features. And sometimes he will still come up to us and ask us to add that feature just cuz he was just inspired by another game he just played. Now can they tell us, this game can finish in 6 months? On what ground?

And another thing that he does gets on my nerve is that he plays game during office hours while the rest of us rushing for his project and campaign.

So, if I quit now, they’d still be in the middle of development. Oh and I’m the main programmer developing the game. So, erm.. Is it wrong?

tl;dr Why Linux?

So yeah, another Linux question. I love C# and been doing some WPF and Xamarin stuff and planning to learn ASP.NET, but why do I hear that Linux is better than Windows for web dev. Why should I learn it especially if I want to specialize in .Net? Sorry just a student and I heard Microsoft is bringing a lot of Linux goodness to Windows and I wonder why.

Now then... where do I begin 😐

TLDR - fuck charity

A bit of backstory first, I was in my first year of college when I started this project for this charity.

It started in December of last year, my tutor approached me and asked if I’d like a project to work on, for my portfolio and what not, I agreed as I thought it would be a great opportunity. Saying yes to that question is my biggest regret so far. Oh boy the pain it has caused me.

The projected started a few days after I agreed. The stack and stuff was already agreed upon by my tutors higher ups. The stack was Wordpress and a theme called ‘X theme’ I understand the use for Wordpress, they are a non tech savvy client, it will be easy for them to manage.

The project was to basically modernise the current site the charity had, simple task you might think... ohhhh no. We agreed upon a deadline, January of 2017 (spoiler, we didn’t make that headline). However the charity wanted change, after change, after change, after change, after fucking change. Every time I’d show them the new revision it was never right, they’d always want another change.

Once we hit the deadline I asked my tutor if we could just drop it. His higher ups said we had to keep going (I could of abandoned my tutor and left him to do it but I’m not a prick). Anyway, we are now in November of 2017, a whole fucking year later and the site has only just been handed off. A WHOLE FUCKING YEAR OF THIS MOTHER FUCKING COCK SUCKING PRICK WHO WOULDN’T TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER.

Please may god be with me as we have to provide support for this site 😥😥

If anyone’s really curious as to which charity it is or the site. I’ll post it in the comments if you ask nicely enough

Question about google crawler (?)

So, got a question, hopefully you have an answer.

I have a personal website that went up about 2 months ago that has a contact form.

Today I got two emails sent to me. This is the way I have coded it up.

But take a look at the name and message fields. I wonder if this is a google crawler submitting the form by any chance. I also got another email around the same time where the message and name field are reversed.

Anyone else experience this?

Hey Guys
So... I Have a question / rant / frustrated commenting to do...
WHY THA FUCK DO FIRMWARE TAKE SO LONG TO UPDATE!!!
been configuring my webserver and 2 p2p cameras to access from the outside, and for each click or change can take 1 to 5 minutes to implement...
And then, like 6 or 7 hours latter I notice that everytime the port wasn't associated, a small label in like size8 text shows that port is already in use...
And... Da FUCK??
I'm associating the ports myself... how can port 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, ... be In use?
I have my server in 80, WebDav e another non relevant port, and trying to find open ports for the p2p cams...
Fuck I'll just delete all that services that no one uses and are pre configured, like, emule? napster? FifaPC? WTF? I never played Fifa, don't like socker. KaZaA SERVER? WTF why does this shit comes pre-configured?
Btw I'm writing this while I wait for the router to finish every time :p

So after 3 months of working ( which implies a 2h trip from home to get to the office ), going to college ( another 1h from home to get there ) and making a thesis to get a fucking Bachelor degree. I'm kind of done with everything except the job. I mean, I can't focus seriously in anything besides coding. So my question for you guys is, How do you get the important stuff done even if you don't wanna do it ?

I wanted to update my previous rant in the comment but what happened is such a fucking nonsense I think it deserves its own.

For those who don't want to look what it is, just another C++ noob (aka me) complaining about how the language was a bitch to him by throwing a random SEGFAULT on release while it didn't show up on debug. Welp.

Half an hour and a ton of std::cout later (thought I would try to read a disassembly ? Think again) I figured out what was the problematic section of code. And guess what ? It was a section I didn't even modify and I never had problems with. Something completely unrelated to what I was rightly imagining causing the issue.

To identify which exact subsection was throwing the error to my face I added more tag code.
Rubbing my hands and ready to fix the fuck out of this damn shit, I built it, launched it…

And all of a sudden the code worked.

All I did. Was to add more cout to know which line fucked up. And now it works.

So. Serious question now: is it a clear sign from heaven I should stop working with such languages and should go back in my shitty high level languages kindergarten ?

I've been away a couple of months.

I finished uni. I got a job at a startup. My mental health improved. Current boss is nice, during december I was going towards another burnout due to huge task assignments. When I expressed this concern, he understood and reduced the sprint task number.
I hope I'll stay here as much as possible.

I've been living with my gf for over a year now. Pretty exciting, although intimacy is kinda fucked. We haven't had sex for over a while now.

I'll start hit the gym soon. I need some kind of workout or sport.

I hate my city at this point. Too big, public transport suck and going out for anything that's not a pub requires at least 30 minutes by car in the traffic. Parking is plain hell. Cabs are out of the question, too expensive. Yet I need to go out. Can't stay this much inside the house or around the neighborhood.

Since I'm working remotely I'm thinking to travel with my laptop. I need a better one and more money, but I'm starting to work on an external project. Still have to discuss my hourly rate but it won't be much given my limited experience.

I want to start studying again. Not for university or anything, just to keep myself in training, but I feel like I don't have time. Probably it's because I'm an unorganized person. Will figure this out.

So this was my answer to an unasked "how are you?".
Did I miss anything? How are y'all?

Recently I've been considering switching to another job. I've been at my current employer my entire working carreer, and a switch might be a healthy choice soon. My current working environment is changing (and not for the best in my opnion), and I have never really looked over the fence. I've also felt that my current job lacks some real meaning.

I currently work on software for logistical purposes, but I don’t feel that my work aligns with my values, or that it tries to solve issues that are important to me.

I have received many job offers with higher pay and benefits, but again, none that really work on issues that I find important.

My question to you is wether (and if so: how much) you let your values and ethics weigh in your choice of an employer/project. And are you willing to offer up (financial) benefits for a job that aligns better with your values?

Backstory: my father used to work in software development and IT support in companies with medium to large sized networks. I decided to catch up with him a few weeks ago and he asked me thus almighty question

"So if I installed another router in our house, does that mean I can double the amount of traffic going from my computer to the fibre modem?"

All respect has been lost, I was ashamed.

#Question

I never worked directly developing. All my experience is by myself: I try things, they can work or not. So when I am writing a new site/app, I always have millions of doubts of how should I proceed with X or Y.

EXAMPLE: I am dealing of data from a mySQL in a PHP website right now, so I never know how should I treat it. Should I use a function to get data from database and return an array with all fields? Is there a better way?

So my question is: where can I learn that kind of thing? Is there any specific book you recommend? Is there a website? Another way to learn this?

It is easy to me to learn about commands and the programming language itself. There are plenty of books and websites, but I could never find an answer to these questions I have.

Thank you so much in advance!

Any Symfony expert here? I've got quite a tricky question, that I'd love to disqus with another dev.

It's about twig within symfony. I'd like to add a custom node parser, but not for an own tag, but to set some value on each template if it's not set (which can't be done with globals in this case!). I've thought about using a visitor, but from my understanding it gets executed to late, as it requires (probably) to modify the twig AST at compile/parse time.

More network/hardware than dev but anyway: I use OPNsense as a firewall at home on an embedded system. Had everything set up nicely and appearing to be working fine, quite a lot of things set up (static leases, VLANs with various firewall rules etc. - a fair bit of stuff involved). I noticed my remote system was failing to back up to my local one. Turned out port forwarding wasn't fully working (initial packet got through but nothing else). I noticed this at midnight.

Ran an update to see if that helped - nope. Reboot time then! It made its shutdown noises and I waited 15 minutes before giving up (no noises, no ping response). Took SD card out. Copied a fresh install onto it, thus wiping all settings. Booted up fine, set up my internet connection, all good. Proceeded to configure it. Noticed I couldn't access the internet from my PC, but could from the firewall itself. Rebooted the firewall. It didn't come back up. Argh!

Reinstalled AGAIN. Attached a serial cable and it was complaining about something which sounded like it couldn't read the SD card. Tried another. Nope. Looked online (using phone): known issue to do with boot delays.

Gave up and went to bed at this point (4am).

Next day: Installed it in a VM instead. Still no internet from my PC! Another known issue to do with default gateway not being the PPPoE interface. Got into shell, manually changed the default route. Was then able to update to the latest version which fixes the gateway issue. Rebooted the VM. All good.

Put all my settings back in, this time taking a backup afterward.

Only to discover....

....port forwarding wasn't working properly. Back to square 1.

Poked around with some NAT settings (outbound ones), made no difference, undid those changes and suddenly it started working.

WTF? /waves arms in the air

OPNsense folk were very helpful, producing a new build for me to try within a couple of hours of me asking about the problem.

But days like that, I start to question whether I really enjoy technology as much as I thought I did...

Stopped studying DSA and for coding interviews, they legit rejected me even tho I did all questions right. Wtf is wrong with hiring.

I remember this another bastard asked me only DSA for a frontend job. :) he didn't ask me to give an intro even a straightaway question.

Today I spent 9 hours trying to resolve an issue with .net core integration testing a project with soap services created using a third party soap library since .net core doesn't support soap anymore. And WCF is before my time.

The tests run in-process so that we can override services like the database, file storage, basically io settings but not code.

This morning I write the first test by creating a connected service reference to generate a service client. That way I don't need to worry about generating soap messages and keeping them in sync with the code.

I sent my first request and... Can't find endpoint.

3 hours later I learn via fiddler that a real request is being made. It's not using the virtual in-process server and http client, it's sending an actual network request that fiddler picks up, and of course that needs a real server accepting requests... Which I don't have.

So I start on MSDN. Please God help me. Nope. Nothing. Makes sense since soap is dead on .net core.

Now what? Nothing on the internet because above. Nothing in the third party soap library. Nothing. At this point I question of I have hit my wall as a developer.

Another 4 hours later I have reverse engineered the Microsoft code on GitHub and figured out that I am fucked. It's so hard to understand.

2 more hours later I have figured out a solution. It's pure filth..I hide it away in another tooling project and move all the filth to internal classes :D the equivalent of tidying your room as a kid by shoving it all under the bed. But fuck it.

My soap tests now use the correct http client with the virtual server. I am a magician.

Just posted this in another thread, but i think you'll all like it too:

I once had a dev who was allowing his site elements to be embedded everywhere in the world (intentional) and it was vulnerable to clickjacking (not intentional). I told him to restrict frame origin and then implement a whitelist.

My man comes back a month later with this issue of someone in google sites not being able to embed the element. GOOGLE FUCKING SITES!!!!! I didnt even know that shit existed! So natually i go through all the extremely in depth and nuanced explanations first: we start looking at web traffic logs and find out that its not the google site name thats trying to access the element, but one of google's web crawler-type things. Whatever. Whitelist that url. Nothing.

Another weird thing was the way that google sites referenced the iframe was a copy of it stored in a google subsite???? Something like "googleusercontent.com" instead of the actual site we were referencing. Whatever. Whitelisted it. Nothing.

We even looked at other solutions like opening the whitelist completely for a span of time to test to see if we could get it to work without the whitelist, as the dev was convinced that the whitelist was the issue. It STILL didnt work!

Because of this development i got more frustrated because this wasnt tested beforehand, and finally asked the question: do other web template sites have this issue like squarespace or wix?

Nope. Just google sites.

We concluded its not an issue with the whitelist, but merely an issue with either google sites or the way the webapp is designed, but considering it works on LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE i am unsure that the latter is the answer.

They keep training bigger language models (GPT et al). All the resear4chers appear to be doing this as a first step, and then running self-learning. The way they do this is train a smaller network, using the bigger network as a teacher. Another way of doing this is dropping some parameters and nodes and testing the performance of the network to see if the smaller version performs roughly the same, on the theory that there are some initialization and configurations that start out, just by happenstance, to be efficient (like finding a "winning lottery ticket").

My question is why aren't they running these two procedures *during* training and validation?

If [x] is a good initialization or larger network and [y] is a smaller network, then
after each training and validation, we run it against a potential [y]. If the result is acceptable and [y] is a good substitute, y becomes x, and we repeat the entire procedure.

The idea is not to look to optimize mere training and validation loss, but to bootstrap a sort of meta-loss that exists across the whole span of training, amortizing the loss function.

Anyone seen this in the wild yet?

I work as part of a small international team in a big corp , we work product quality of sorts but work closer to dev than qa , last week we found several giant issues and reported them in . Dev and Qa teams of said project are Indians . Meeting starts , two of my colleagues are indian as well , so dev , qa and all the other involved parties from india decided they should join in from the same conference room . My manager(he's a brit) presents the issues . Dev manager starts talking , qa manager talks over him , they start to formally yell at one another . One of them (couldn't figure out which one) started asking my two colleagues which one of them found these issues . At this point I had already passed a headphone to my ex-colleague who still sits next to me , he looks at me when he hears the question . I panic . Colleagues say they don't know (*phu* I didn't CC them in emails and my manager didn't tell them ) . My manager tells them to calm down , take responsibility and find solutions else he'll veto the product back into fullblown development . Other managers start growling and fighting again (more than 10 people were in the same room arguing) me and my ex-colleague decide to go take a coffee since I didn't have a saying in the meeting . We get back 10 minutes later , indians are still arguing over my manager trying to explain the issues a 4th time . I IM my manager and ask to drop the meeting , he gave me the ok and I dropped out, my head was hurting after an hour long meeting of angry indians arguing in a conference room and it kept hurting the whole day...yeah...meetings...fun time...