This is more just a note for younger and less experienced devs out there...

I've been doing this for around 25 years professionally, and about 15 years more generally beyond that. I've seen a lot and done a lot, many things most developers never will: built my own OS (nothing especially amazing, but still), created my own language and compiler for it, created multiple web frameworks and UI toolkits from scratch before those things were common like they are today. I've had eleven technical books published, along with some articles. I've done interviews and speaking engagements at various user groups, meetups and conferences. I've taught classes on programming. On the job, I'm the guy that others often come to when they have a difficult problem they are having trouble solving because I seem to them to usually have the answer, or at least a gut feel that gets them on the right track. To be blunt, I've probably forgotten more about CS than a lot of devs will ever know and it's all just a natural consequence of doing this for so long.

I don't say any of this to try and impress anyone, I really don't... I say it only so that there's some weight behind what I say next:

Almost every day I feel like I'm not good enough. Sometimes, I face a challenge that feels like it might be the one that finally breaks me. I often feel like I don't have a clue what to do next. My head bangs against the wall as much as anyone and I do my fair share of yelling and screaming out of frustration. I beat myself up for every little mistake, and I make plenty.

Imposter syndrome is very real and it never truly goes away no matter what successes you've had and you have to fight the urge to feel shame when things aren't going well because you're not alone in those feelings and they can destroy even the best of us. I suppose the Torvald's and Carmack's of the world possibly don't experience it, but us mere mortals do and we probably always will - at least, I'm still waiting for it to go away!

Remember that what we do is intrinsically hard. What we do is something not everyone can do, contrary to all the "anyone can code" things people do. In some ways, it's unnatural even! Therefore, we shouldn't expect to not face tough days, and being human, the stress of those days gets to us all and causes us to doubt ourselves in a very insidious way.

But, it's okay. You're not alone. Hang in there and go easy on yourself! You'll only ever truly fail if you give up.

#thread
Any Home Assistant fans out there? Got myself a RPi3 a few months ago and got hooked on HA, because of the huge product support and great community. Didn't find any dashboards that I liked so created my own, written in JS, fully customisable and support for most if not all kinds of gadgets. The purpose was to have something easy to use for the whole family, on a wall-mounted tablet. What do you guys think?

Anyways, has anyone done some cool home automations/scripting? Would love to hear about it!

A lot of the people are complaining about working in inhumane conditions. I want to debunk some bullshit that I think is causing this.

Devs are hard to find. That makes you valuable. A good dev that actually works for 30-40 hours per week is extremely hard to find.
The relationship with your employer / client should be simple: you work, they pay. What you do NOT:
1. Do not take responsibility for other people's decisions
2. Do not internalize other people's problems (you've got your own, better stick to them)
3. Do not let ANYONE guilt trip you into anything that you're not indeed guilty of.
4. Do NOT work for an effective rate that's significantly lower than you know you can get elsewhere.

There are indeed some utterly evil assholes out there that will try to manipulate you, into thinking that you're "part of the project", or that "you're all a team". Yeah, you are, but when it comes to making money, you'll only get the salary, regardless of how successful your work will be. THEY have a motivation to stay up late, to work extra hours, etc. You DO NOT. If you do that, and don't get paid extra, you're working for free, which means that you're not a professional.

Are you a professional? Then have respect for yourself, and bill for every fucking second of your time. Don't let the assholes think they own you.

As a professional, you MUST do EXACTLY what you're paid to do. No more, no less. Well, if you're feeling good about it, then you can do slightly more. And anyone that's demanding more, basically has no respect for you, and doesn't consider you a professional. That is the plain truth. See it as it is, and handle those scumbags accordingly.

Does anyone else experience the excess knowledge crisis? Wherein you realise that there is so much knowledge out there that you don't know where to start, and the moment you start, you realise there is something new to learn and you instantly get distracted.

So, there was this person I met on the internet who was preaching about how the success of games depends primarily on luck.
His argument was that even though he made a great game(his opinion) and uploaded it to the appstore his game failed to gain popularity.
He stated that there are about 500 games uploaded daily and it is only the matter of luck whether or not a game gets noticed and that he ran out of luck.
Now, his game was a pretty ripped off copy of the overused tile matching games. I pointed out to him that the reason his game didn't do well was probably because he made a ripoff(I actually used 'a copy's but 'ripoff' sounds more rant like) and that he priced it fairly high, while there were free games with more features and better graphics and mechanics(based on the description of the game and screenshots).
He then began to rage(all caps obviously) about how I am talking out of my ass and that I probably haven't even made a game yet.
I politely(the only reason I was polite was because the account was known to my Twitter followers. Sometimes one has to protect one's name) told him that I am an indie game developer and that I have made a decent amount of games.
He then proceeded to mock me and dared me to name a few.
So I posted four links to my 48 hour competition games and one to an official game.
He then began to call me an imposter, so I did a shout-out to him through my Twitter account.
Instead of continuing on Twitter, he ran back to the forum, and began to shit talk about how anyone can do it if they have a team with them.
I corrected him on that, stating how I was alone at the time and these particular games were the results of me working hard and striving to improve myself.
Then the guy finally starts spamming on different threads about how I am an arrogant bastard and other explicit forms of abuses before finally getting banned.
Sometimes I don't even know why I bother.
When I was starting out, there was this developer who would point out the faults in my games so that I could work on them. That was a great help and probably accelerated my growth. He was a great mentor and is now a good friend and is now in my team.
I guess some people are so hung up on their pride that they will refuse to accept their mistakes and make any efforts to improve.

Hey devRanters! A tiny update regarding the privacy tips etc site.

So as ewpratten doesn't have much time right now, I'm doing frontend as well for now.

Since some people also offered to contribute content, which I did not expect, I am also writing an invite/registration (based on invites) as we speak. So, this way, I can invite anyone (based on email address) into the CMS so that they can contribute content as well!

Regarding frontend, I'm introducing a system with icons. Icons? Yes, icons, let me explain:

Every application/service will get a couple of default filtering thingies. (not like clicking something and it'll filter anything out, yet) It'll enable users to see what an application does or does not. What the FUCK do you mean? Alright, so, as example, lets say open source. next to each application (read application/service) listed, there will be an open source icon. If the application is open source, this icon will be green, otherwise it will be red.

This will allow for a quick way of filtering stuff out.

For example, if you're only looking for open source stuff, you can quickly filter stuff out where the open source icon is red!

This will apply to things as open sourceness, metadata saving, usage of good crypto technology and so on. So you'll be able to quickly filter out the stuff you want to use (by eyes) through those filters!

Please let me know what you think and if you have ideas, I'll be glad to hear them!

!!rant

When I worked at a previous job, they only gave out decent titles (and salaries) to upper management. Everyone else... well... I was the Domain/Sysadmin, responsible for the domain and both DCs, upgrading the physical network (plus recabling it: the MDF was a *disaster*), as well as all backups, migrations, printers, servers, and workstations/lappys in the building, plus pushing software, antivirus, updates, security policies, etc. I had complete access to everything, and ofc was responsible for everything. Nothing on my network caused anyone (else) any trouble except one particular printer I wasn't able to replace. Also, nothing new appeared on my network without me noticing and tracking it down.

But my official title? "IT Assistant".
I made $11/hr.

Worth it? Take a flying leap into an overflowing outhouse during the height of a Vegas summer if you even begin to think so.

I eventually managed to switch to a developer position, and (after several attempts) got a ~$5/hr raise. The girl they replaced me with in IT with some ditz who had never installed an OS before, didn't know what the BIOS was, and couldn't figure out why a monitor... plugged into itself... wasn't working. Things went downhill from there.

I code, watch Big Bang Theory, sip coffee, and code again. I never leave the doorsteps except for my classes. Some say my life is sad.

Is it? Anyone out there like this?

Anyone else out there embedding an artificial delay in a splashscreen, just to shorten it in a future release so you can add to the changelog: "optimized startup time"?
#muahahaha

So today was shite. I get done with classes for today after going to work in the morning( college student) and I get a phone call. SURPRISE! We have a client meeting in twenty minutes.

My class runs from 5-9 and the meeting was scheduled at 7:30. I was let out early thank god. Then made sure that we had deliverables for the project running and ready to go.

Meeting with the client went well and he was pleased with my progress.

Now I have been the only one developing any sort of deliverable for this website. It originally started out with three people. The main developer will call him Cunt and a front-end dev that isn't on the project anymore.

FUCKING CUNT DECIDED TO COME AT ME FOR SAYING THAT THERE WAS A MISCOMMUNICATION ERROR AND ONE OF THE TASKS WASNT FINISHED. THEN CUNT ASKED IF I HAD ALL OF THE FRONT DEVS PAGES TO WHICH I SIGHED YES. CUNT FUCKFACE PROCEEDED TO EDUCATE ME ON HOW TO TALK TO OTHER DEVS AND NOT MAKE CRITICIZE HER CODE. UM CUNT YOU HAVENT COMMUNICATED WITH HER FOR THE THREE MONTHS IVE BEEN ON THIS PROJECT. AND YOUVE CONSTANTLY AVOIDED BEING IN THE OFFICE WHEN ANYONE IS PRESENT AND EVEN SHOOED HER AWAY. THE FACT THAT CUNT ISNT FIRED IS BECAUSE I TOOK LEAD ON HIS PROJECT AND HAVE MAKING EVERY DEADLINE FOR THIS AND OTHER PROJECTS.

*breaths*

Moral of this. Don't be a CUNT!

Does anyone else fantasize about giving up programming and go live in a jungle or doing other things that require more physical effort?

I've been learning carpentry, farming, DIY power generation etc. The goal is to be self-sufficient and go live in a fucking jungle someday. Or legally buy some cheap land far from the city and automate the shit out of it. No wait, I'll just live there as a normal farmer and write code if I feel nostalgic or something.

I think anyone other than me could have expressed that better.

Our web department was deploying a fairly large sales campaign (equivalent to a ‘Black Friday’ for us), and the day before, at 4:00PM, one of the devs emails us and asks “Hey, just a heads up, the main sales page takes almost 30 seconds to load. Any chance you could find out why? Thanks!”
We click the URL they sent, and sure enough, 30 seconds on the dot.
Our department manager almost fell out of his chair (a few ‘F’ bombs were thrown).
DBAs sit next door, so he shouts…
Mgr: ”Hey, did you know the new sales page is taking 30 seconds to open!?”
DBA: “Yea, but it’s not the database. Are you just now hearing about this? They have had performance problems for over week now. Our traces show it’s something on their end.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no!”
Mgr tries to get a hold of anyone …no one is answering the phone..so he leaves to find someone…anyone with authority.
4:15 he comes back..
Mgr: “-beep- All the web managers were in a meeting. I had to interrupt and ask if they knew about the performance problem.”
Me: “Oh crap. I assume they didn’t know or they wouldn’t be in a meeting.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no! No one knew. Apparently the only ones who knew were the 3 developers and the DBA!”
Me: “Uh…what exactly do they want us to do?”
Mgr: “The –bleep- if I know!”
Me: “Are there any load tests we could use for the staging servers? Maybe it’s only the developer servers.”
DBA: “No, just those 3 developers testing. They could reproduce the slowness on staging, so no need for the load tests.”
Mgr: “Oh my –bleep-ing God!”
4:30 ..one of the vice presidents comes into our area…
VP: “So, do we know what the problem is? John tells me you guys are fixing the problem.”
Mgr: “No, we just heard about the problem half hour ago. DBAs said the database side is fine and the traces look like the bottleneck is on web side of things.”
VP: “Hmm, no, John said the problem is the caching. Aren’t you responsible for that?”
Mgr: “Uh…um…yea, but I don’t think anyone knows what the problem is yet.”
VP: “Well, get the caching problem fixed as soon as possible. Our sales numbers this year hinge on the deployment tomorrow.”
- VP leaves -
Me: “I looked at the cache, it’s fine. Their traffic is barely a blip. How much do you want to bet they have a bug or a mistyped url in their javascript? A consistent 30 second load time is suspiciously indicative of a timeout somewhere.”
Mgr: “I was thinking the same thing. I’ll have networking run a trace.”

4:45 Networking run their trace, and sure enough, there was some relative path of ‘something’ pointing to a local resource not on development, it was waiting/timing out after 30 seconds. Fixed the path and page loaded instantaneously. Network admin walks over..
NetworkAdmin: “We had no idea they were having problems. If they told us last week, we could have identified the issue. Did anyone else think 30 second load time was a bit suspicious?”
4:50 VP walks in (“John” is the web team manager)..
VP: “John said the caching issue is fixed. Great job everyone.”
Mgr: “It wasn’t the caching, it was a mistyped resource or something in a javascript file.”
VP: “But the caching is fixed? Right? John said it was caching. Anyway, great job everyone. We’re going to have a great day tomorrow!”
VP leaves
NetworkAdmin: “Ouch…you feel that?”
Me: “Feel what?”
NetworkAdmin: “That bus John just threw us under.”
Mgr: “Yea, but I think John just saved 3 jobs. Remember that.”

How does the new MacBook pro outsell Microsoft surface and dell XPS 😖 are there so many "sheep" out there who buy a 1300+ machine with 2 (max 4 ports) not including the 17 dongles you'll need?

Sorry if I offended anyone but I just think the new MBP is ridiculous and is definitely not "Pro"

Okay so even at my advance 52 years of age, I still pull all nighters to handle emergency remediation projects, and clean up other peoples messes. I don't mind, I'm a geek, I get high on the challenge of fixing shit that is broken all to hell.

But tonight was different. Tonight has me raging.

I am tasked with renovating a website, and building a sister site to that main site as well. no bother, I haven't done any web dev in 15 years but I'll power through pulling 18 to 20 hours a day for a couple of weeks to get in the groove...

Little did I know... CSS is a pain in the ass to be sure, but FLEXBOX is total and complete bullshit.

I don't give to shits about all the fancy shit it can do, it can't do simple shit worth a damn. Fuck Flexbox, and anyone involved in producing that useless layout model.

The sheer number of idiots promoting that hunk of shit a solution that is to be applied to any task other than wiping my ass is astounding.

Fuck all you jerk offs out there posting your shitty mark up turds as if they are gold, when you know better than anyone it works, sometimes, then doesn't, and is so easy to break it may as well be called "Web Design Jenga".

I'm still tired as hell, and tomorrow I will go back to slogging through CSS as the layout method, but at least I feel a little better now.

Oh and before I forget FUCK YOU FLEXBOX you piece of shit.

First they came for the atheists, and I didn't speak out - because I'm not an atheist

Then they came for the university teachers, and I didn't speak out - because I don't like universities

Then they came for the gamers, and I didn't speak out - because I don't play videogames

Then they came for Open Source and I didn't speak out - because "anyone can fork it"

Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak out for me

I know I butchered the poem and I'm not comparing our social situation to the Holocaust (obviously), but I think it kind of illustrates that silence and gradually giving up ideals like justice and meritocracy can end up badly.

I also encourage you to read the actual poem it's pretty nice and food for thought.

So I looked at our dashboard and noticed a banner mentioning scheduled maintenance set for 7:00 AM. And I thought to myself, "I never released an update, and even if I had, the maintenance would be performed 15 minutes after the build finished, not at 7:00 AM." So I emailed my coworkers, asking if they had put up the banner, no, no. I started pulling my hair out trying to figure out what caused this banner to be created. Was there some old job that was just now running? I combed through the server logs, thousands of entries later, and I found the banner was installed by some user with the IP 172.18.0.1...which was the local machine. I went through all the users on the system, running atq to see if anyone had jobs scheduled. And there was one job scheduled, under the root user. At that moment, I legit thought to myself, "have we been hacked? How is that possible?" It's wasn't! Then I looked under /var/spool/atjobs to see what the job actually was. And then I saw it. My weekly updater cron job had installed updates and had scheduled a maintenance window to reboot the system. And I smiled, realizing that my code was now sentient.

Warning: long read....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

# 3 weeks ago
customer informed us that the app will get quite some load since the beginning of July

# this monday
last spare hdd on database's SAN died.
I told everyone another hdd is to follow it very soon eithet whether nothing is done at all or if anyone attempts to touch the san array [cuz that's what redundant raids do...]. No fucks given by anyone, no attempts to have maintenance and planned outage within 24 hrs....

# this morning
another hdd has failed and now 1tb of data is lost. No way to restore backups cuz there is no database to restore them to....

# 20 minutes later I head out to get some popcorn. It's gonna be a fun week!

So... The planned heavy load [and revenue along with it] is not gonna happen... I guess they are gonna ha a week long outage.

That's what happens when you ignore warning shots fired at your face.

!dev

This is the one thing about Spotify that annoys the living hell out of me (yes, I use spotify, if anyone knows a good/working self hosted alternative, let me know! I've tried quite a few including funkwhale but they all failed for me).

I'm a raw hardstyle/rawstyle lover and listen to the raw duo Malice a lot. Now, what would the problem be here? Sometimes, there are several artists in different scenes with the same name. This is completely fine.

Spotify, however, mixes up music of the raw duo Malice and the rock/metal band Malice. I keep getting release notifications/news regarding new music/events from Malice but 90 percent of the time this is about the rock/metal band and NOT the raw duo.
It's also very weird to suddenly hear rock music while listening to my daily mix; the wrong malice is mixed in once again.

Yesterday I got an email saying "Check out Malice's newest release on Spotify!"

*OH FUCK YEAH*
*opens Spotify release radar*
*YAAA....FUCK*
That's the other malice 😡

Is it so hard, Spotify? Entirely hiding the artist results in the right one being hidden as well for me 😞

Today I got a standing aviation by panel in my final year projects presentation. It was such an emotional moment and I went numb. I don't have an impressive grades so it meant a lot to me. I just wanted to share this somewhere please bear with me.
And to anyone out there who think that they can't make it, please just keep going. I just want to say, make your journey beautiful. If you love doing it, you won't care to reach some destination.

Story of onboarding in the age of Corona!

Monday:
Office is big but almost empty, people are working from home. Guy welcoming me says he is not the one supposed to help me(he is sick I'm told) and the rest of the team is not there. The man I'm talking to is this other guys boss. It's OK I think it will work out.

Turns out this guy helping me is actually the CTO so he does not have that much time on his hands. He shows me were to get my computer and desk and hands me documentation to setup some software.

I spend the time before lunch installing linux, setting up git and some other software. CTO checks up on me once.

Then after lunch nothing...I look for him but he is in some meeting. I find some videos by myself labled "onboarding" on the company website. They are OK. I ask my deskmate if he heard what team I will be in. He doesn't know. I sneak out a little early since I have nothing left to do.

Tuesday:
The CTO is now also sick I see in an email when I arrive at the office. Still don't know what team I am in.

I spend the morning reading coding blogs and websites. After lunch I have a meeting. The only one in my calendar. It's about the product software architecture for all new employees. It's good but still no news about what team. I aimlessly read up on some software architecture untill I go home.

Wednesday:
I arrive at the office first, only the receptionist is there. I listen to podcasts until a few more people show up. I ask another guy if he knows what team I'm supposed to be in. He doesn't but laughs and says it was the same when he started last year.

I send out messages on slack looking for anyone that knows...still no one knows. I guess Im in limbo now. Perhaps i should just start making coffee for people or something...

So I've decided if I am invited to a school career day the what I'll do is this.

1. Start by handing out one of those logic puzzles that are like Sally lives 2 houses down from Bill, Bill is 3 houses away from Maggie where does Jerry live type of thing. Then I'll tell the kids they have 10 minutes to figure it out.

2. After about three minutes I'll tell them that they also need to figure out where Jerry lives and not give them enough information to figure that out.

3. 5 minutes in I'll start asking them why it is taking so long, and it shouldn't be that hard. I'll also ask about where Phil lives who was never mentioned before.

4. At 7 minutes I'll look for anyone who might be figuring it out and tell them there is a much more important high priority problem I need them to solve and give them a new puzzle and tell them I expect them both to be done on time.

5. At nine minutes I'll start yelling at them that they must not be that good and why they haven't finished yet if any of them complain I'll tell them they are just dumb.

6. At ten minutes I'll ask them to turn it in and then immediately throw it in the trash and tell them that wasn't what they were supposed to be doing, and tell them they did it wrong.

I figure that is a pretty good representation of what working in software engineering is like.

Today is sprint demo day. As usual I'm only half paying attention since being a Platform Engineer, my work is always technically being "demoed" (shit's running ain't it? There you go, enjoy the EC2 instances.)

One team presents a new thing they built. I'm still half paying attention, half playing Rocket League on another monitor.

Then someone says

"We're storing in prod-db-3"

They have my curiosity.

"Storing x amount of data at y rate"

They now have my attention. I speak up "Do you have a plan to drop data after a certain period of time?"

They don't. I reply "Okay, then your new feature only has about 2 months to live before you exhaust the disk on prod-db-3 and we need to add more storage"

I am asked if we can add more storage preemptively.

"Sure, I say." I then direct my attention to the VP "{VP} I'll make the change request to approve the spend for additional volume on prod-db-3"

VP immediately balks and asks why this wasn't considered before. I calmly reply "I'm not sure. This is the first time I'm learning of this new feature even coming to life. Had anyone consulted with the Platform team we'd have made sure the storage availability was there."

VP asks product guy what happened.

"We didn't think we'd need platform resources for this so we never reached out for anything".

I calmly mute myself, turn my camera back off and go back to Rocket League as the VP goes off about planning and collaboration.

"CT we'll reach out to you next week about getting this all done"

*unmute, camera stays off* "Sounds good" *clears ball*

Ok so a very quick background: I didn't get a job until I needed one after my phone broke and I didn't have the money to buy another one. (I'm a student still for those who don't know lol.)

>> Phone randomly breaks.
>> Don't have the money for a new one
>> Searches for low skill jobs (ie cashier) that would work with me in terms of how many hours I work and whenever those hours are.
>> Apply to like 15 (not even exaggerating either lol) jobs
>> Wait for responses
>> One day goes by. Nothing
>> Two days go by. Nothing
>> Three days go by. Nothing
>> Fourth day rolls around and I get a call about one. I answer, tell him I'm available starting that Monday.
>> (Keep in mind I'm on an old temporary phone)
>> Next day I buy a new phone (didn't have to pay anything up front aside from the taxes on it, as it's on a payment plan)
>> Reset old phone after usage
>> Monday rolls around and I drive to the location of the job, and walk in the door asking for x.
>> "I'm sorry sir, who? We don't have anyone here by that name."
>> I panic and hop in my car, and try to find the address of the store I applied to. I find out it's different than where I went.
>> Start driving there and call that phone number. I ask to speak to x.
>> "I'm sorry sir, there's nobody here by that name."
>> Call literally every other location in the city and ask for x, but nothing.
>> Since I'm already on the way, I drive to the location of the store I had applied to. Whenever I get there, the manager spends half an hour on the phone trying to figure out where I belong. Nothing.
>> By this point, it's well over an hour past whenever I was supposed to show up, so I gave up because I figured they probably wouldn't have hired me anyways.
>> I get home determined af to figure out who the hell called me.
>> I remembered that Verizon has call logs you can look at online.
>> I go back through it and find the number. Google it.

Here's where the story gets a lil funny now.

>> Number shows up for a store that I applied to who's name sounds a LOT like the first store.
>> Called them and explained what happened, and told them I'd be there asap if they still wanted me.
>> That was like 6 months ago and I'm still here lol

I was on vacation when my employer’s new fiscal year started. My manager let me take vacation because it’s not like anything critical was going to happen. Well, joke was on us because we didn’t foresee the stupidity of others…

I had to update a few product codes in the website’s web config and deploy those changes. I was only going to be logged in for 30 minutes to complete that.

I get messaged by one of our database admins. He was doing testing and was unable to complete a payment on the website. That was strange. There was a change pushed by our offsite dev agency, but that was all frontend changes (just updating text) and wouldn’t affect payments.

We don’t want to enlist the dev agency for debugging work, especially when it’s not likely that it’s a code issue. But I was on vacation and I couldn’t stay online past the time I had budgeted for. So my employer enlists the dev agency for help. It’s going to be costly because the agency is in Lithuania, it was past their business hours, and it was emergency support.

Dev agency looks at error logs. There are Apple Pay errors, but that doesn’t explain why non Apple Pay transactions aren’t going through. They roll back my deployment and theirs, but no change. They tell my employer to contact our payment processor.

My manager and the Product Manager contact Payroll, who is the stakeholder for our payment gateways. Payroll contacts our payment gateway and finds out a service called Decision Manager was recently configured for our account. Decision Manager was declining all payments. Payroll was not the person who had Decision Manager installed and our account using this service was news to her.

Payroll works with our payment processor to get payments working again. The damage is pretty severe. Online payments were down for at least 12 hours. Our call center had logged reports from customers the night before.

At our post mortem, we had to find out who ok’d Decision Manager without telling anyone. Luckily, it was quick work. The first stakeholder up was for the Fundraising Dept. She said it wasn’t her or anyone on her team. Our VP of Analytics broke it to her that our payment processor gave us the name of the person who ok’d Decision Manager and it was someone on the Fundraising team. Fundraising then starts backtracking and says that oh yes she knew about it but transactions were still working after the Decision Manager had been configured. WTAF.

Everyone is dumbfounded by this. How could you make a big change to our payment processor and not tell anyone? How did our payment processor allow you to make this change when you’re not the account admin (you’re just a user)?

Our company head had to give an awkward speech about communication and how it’s important. The web team can’t figure out issues if you don’t tell us what you did. The company head was pissed because it was a shitty way to start off the new fiscal year. Our bill for the dev agency must have been over $1000 for debugging work that wasn’t helpful.

Amazingly, no one was fired.

>Be me
>At company party
>Doesnt now anyone since I only see >around 20 people
>Everyone in Fancy suits
>except me since i just got there from >school
>Looks up bluetooth devices
>Sees all the Speakers are linked to 1 >command center
>Looks up playing song
>Connect to Command center via >bluetooth
>Instantly play song so that no one notices
>thisiswherethefunbegins.jpg
>goes to bathroom
>Plays another song
>Hear waitresses talking about the song >randomly changing
>Get out of Party room
>Still connected
>Fucks party up
>Plays random songs that have nothing in >with Theme of party
>*Suddenly Earrape*
>*Runs*

I've tried to stay out of the fray regarding replacing long-standing terminology to use "safe" inclusive wording instead because it doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me to just use the new wording. If the old wording wasn't hurting people (this is an argument that a of a lot of people use regarding this mass naming change movement) then the new wording shouldn't hurt anyone either...

that was just my 2 cents on the topic, until today!

Some dumb motherfuckers are trying to replace the word 'execute' with 'start'/'run'.

That's just some fucking ignorant plebian shit right there. The literal definition of execute is:

"The act or process to carry out fully or put completely into effect"

"to do what is provided or required by..."

"to perform what is required to give validity to..."

start and run don't grammatically encapsulate what execute does. And now I sound like a fucking grammar nazi because this shit is getting under my skin more than it should.

Execute's primary definition is grammatically correct for the context in which it is used.

Change Master/Slave for databases and I couldn't give a single solitary fuck about it. Primary/Secondary works just fine too. The grammatical context isn't blown away here.

But take away my execute and sudden I get all hot and bothered with the desire to punch a nun over how stupid this "offensive words" crusade is.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.

Once had a manager who would refuse to review anything on the basis he "didn't have enough time". Not just code reviews, but also customer comms, support messages, documentation etc. - anything that it's good to get more than 1 set of eyes on. This was a small startup so me working pretty much solo - it wasn't like there was anyone else able to review anything like this.

Fair enough, you might say. He trusts me. Just put it out there.

...but then *as soon as* it was published / sent / committed / whatever, he'd then magically find 5 minutes to glance through it and point out how rubbish / unhelpful / ridiculous the work was, and how it should have never gone out in the first place, and why didn't I read through it before sending as I'd clearly realise how stupid this was.

After a few rounds of this I actually flipped out on him in the office, called him out on his BS and told him to think for 2 seconds about how ridiculous this situation was. In fairness to the guy he did back down, take note and it didn't happen again, but damn, those times were some of the most frustrating of my career to date.

Has anyone noticed how much waffle there is in online content. You watch a 8 minute video to find out a something that could have been explained in 30 seconds.
When I was at uni one of my lecturers had a great motto. Always keep your signal to noise ratio high

"Yeah I code, I've created like tons of games and I bet I'm better than pretty much anyone out there"
Oh really? What languages do you know?
"Scratch"
*anger rising*

That awkward moment when you're out and there are so many people around and you have nothing to do. So you take out your phone and browse through the app list and settings... Just browsing and doing nothing. I do that so much. Anyone else like me? 🙈

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

Joined a new company...
It's been a week since I joined.I feel like shit.
There are over 20 employees, however I didn't had a chance to chat with a single person for more than a minute or two. Not a single meaningful or even a shitty but personal conversation. I'm trying to strike up conversations whenever I can, but there are no possibilities to do so. I think they have a few chat groups where I'm not added. At lunch time they suddenly start running to a guy that gathers the money to buy lunch, i saw that and joined, but I'm 99% sure they are communicating/speaking on some kind of chat.

I joined as a front-end developer, however I'm not sure if I'm a junior or whatever here. On the first day they showed me the system, they are using PHP and jquery + es6, the structure is messy and I'm not used to it It should be MVC-like, but messier, but it's not like anything I have seen. I usually work with opencart / cakePHP style systems. There are js files with a lot of custom funcions and sometimes there are functions that have mixed jquery and es6 inside script tags top or bottom of the view files. There are a lot of code that I don't understand, on the third day they gave me a task - to remodel a view (basically one page in the cms) I did it, but they didn't check up on me untill the next day, I gave them some notes on the task I finished, and I started making some of the code easier to read for myself after I was done. They didn't really gave me a new task, and I don't know what to do, don't have anyone to ask about what to do, because there are only 2 developers here, and the other guy is on vacation. The boss is also a coder, but he's never here and I feel like I shouldn't be asking him stupid coding questions, because you know.. He's a boss. I understand a lot more of their PHP code then their js/jquery. I feel like I'm stupid and I don't know what I am doing here and what I will be doing here in the future. I did move across the country to join this company, and if this won't work out i have a rent contract signed for a year. Today I was looking at the clock for the last 2 hours of the work day and waiting untill I could get out of there. To say that I feeling like shit would be an understatement.

I don't have anyone whom I could ask for coding advice outside of the company. Fuck.I have worked in a few companies before, but there was always an introduction to the staff, and or the working environment and usually there was a person that I could ask questions on the regular. This company is bigger however and I'm not an emotional guy whatsoever, but I feel like I will start crying.

So, a few weeks ago I asked you guys what would you do if you were to quit your current job. I attempted a start-up with an old "friend" of mine.

He was very enthusiastic and hardworking at the beginning. However he received a job offer from somewhere and told me that he would work there just until we found the company officially and then quit and work full time on the project.

Well... I put around 300 hours into the project and developed the system, did most of my part according to the plan but the guy didn't deliver anything.

Turned out he had another secret partner whom he first introduced me as his mentor. I had my suspicions and suddenly shut down API servers, project management domain and mail server. Suddenly the quiet guy called me asking if I was alright and everything was fine.

Then, nothing happened. He went radio silence until I called him last night and he picked up the phone drunk and mumbled something like "I'm aware of you being a victim" then went to "you're passive aggresive" or something like that and I said nothing, just hung up.

I think you can figure out what went down on the other side and I'd like to hear your scenarios.

PS: now I have another start-up idea: I'm gonna pick up a flamethrower and burn the world while laughing histerically. Anyone who'd like to join is welcome.

I just spent 2 hours helping a fellow Sr Dev format an “if block” in code. Then helped show them how to step through the code. This is what passes as a senior at my company? I no joke have stayed at this job for 6 more months than I wanted to out of pure pity for my team. I want to quit so bad, but the team is in such terrible shape and can’t hire anyone new that is willing to stay. All good people personally, but gosh this job is just brain dead and eats my weekends when I should be focusing on family. Back to helping through the 500 line if block. There are worse things in life, but this just feels terrible.

Holy fucking cockgoblin!

If you interview for a senior position, please, for the sanity of your interviewer (me), make sure you know how to declare variables and how to iterate over an array in the language which the shitgoblin (you) "love and use all the time".

Of course the interviewer (me) is gonna be polite and let the shitgoblin (you) code out your 50-line solution for a 3-line problem, but after 2 hours watching the shitgoblin contemplate solutions that anyone who ever opened a fucking beginners tutorial by accident could answer, the interviewer might prefer to have been on a Justin Bieber concert or have sucked huge sweaty ballsacks for those two hours.

I know that interviews can be hard and stressful - I've been there, am there, and at some point will be there again - but please, for the love of nonexistent gods, don't be a time-wasting shitnugget but prepare yourself!

First, they came for those who Open Source'd code.
And I did not speak out, because my code could never be used by anyone out of the company, anyway.

Then, they came for the Trade Unionists.
And I did not speak out, because I was not in a union.

Then, they came for those who worked from home.
And I did not speak out, because I was granted an exception.

Then, they came for Scrum Masters and other Agile practitioners.
And I did not speak out, because fuck those spreadsheet jockeys productivity thespians.

Then, they came for in-house Data Analysts and Data Engineers.
And there was no one left to speak out for us.

Yeah, folks. The day finally came. I'm officially updating my LinkedIn and putting a ridiculous sash under my picture, "open to work". The Layoffs came for me, too.

Recently started at a new job. Things were going fine, getting along with everyone, everything seems good and running smoothly, a few odd things here and there but for the most part fine.

Then I decided to take a look at our (public facing) website... What's this? Outdated plugins from 2013? Okay, that's an easy fix I guess? All of these are free and the way we're using them wouldn't require a lot of refactoring...

Apparently not. Apparently, we can't even update them ourselves, we have to request that an external company does it (which we pay, by the way, SHITELOADS of money to). A week goes past, and we finally get a response.

No, we won't update it, you'll have to pay for it. Doesn't matter that there's a CVE list a bloody mile long and straight up no input validation in several areas, doesn't matter that tens of thousands of users are at risk, pay us or it stays broken. Boggles the fuckin' mind.

I dug into it a bit more than I probably should have (didn't break no laws though I'm not a complete dumbass, I just work for em) and it turns out it's not just us getting fucked over, it's literally EVERYONE using their service which is the vast majority of people within the industry in my country. It also turns out that the entirety of our region is running off a single bloody IP which if you do a quick search on shodan for, you guessed it, also has a CVE list pop up a fuckin' mile long. Don't get me started on password security (there is none). I hate this, there's fucking nothing I can do and everyone else is just fine sitting on their hands because "nobody would target us because we're not a bank!!", as if it bloody matters and as if peoples names, addresses, phone numbers and assuming someone got into our actual database, which wouldn't be a fuckin' stretch of the imagination let me tell you, far more personal details, that these aren't enticing to anyone.

What would you do in my situation?
What can I even do?
I don't want to piss anyone senior off but honestly, I'm thinkin' they might deserve it. I mean yeah there's nothing we can do but at least make a fuss 'cause they ain't gunna listen to my green ass.

I just got e-mail:

"Sunsetting Mercurial support in Bitbucket

After much consideration, we've decided to remove Mercurial support bla bla bla crocodile tears bla bla..."

So basically, Bitbucket started out as a Mercurial repository hosting platform. After GitHub's rise in popularity, they decided "hey, everyone's welcome, both Hg and Git!" Then it became Git and "okay Hg too, but shhh don't tell anyone". Now they FINALLY completed running it into the ground: "Only 1% of repositories are Mercurial" - yeah no shit sherlock, after actively hiding the fact you support it, people don't find out you support it! Surprised Pikachu! Oh congrats, Atlassian. You're so smart.

Mercurial support was the sole reason I had repositories there. I mean, for Git we already have GitHub, GitLab and others. So what's their unique selling point again? What's that, the sound of crickets? Thought so.

So after that, hopefully they change the name to "Gitbucket". Or preferably "Bitfuckit".

I just can't remember the last time I typed
www.
in the browser URL bar.

There were times when a webpage spits out a 404 error when we didn't typed www.

Can anyone explain this?
Is the web standard changed, or is the browser doing it for me secretly?

And do you guys/gals still type that www?

Are developers working at Google really this incompetent?
Seriously, during the years I've been working deeply and for long time with many software products developed by Google, like the Android SDK or TensorFlow for instance, I can't find a single feature in them that isn't foundamentally wrong and badly designed starting form the basis, clearly due to an evident lack of the most basic programming knowledges... Am I missing something? Are they secretly making anyone out there think they are dumb on purpose for some occult reason? Or is it truly a dumbness matter? I don't understand.. :(

So I need some advice from some fellow devs here...

I recently accepted a job offer at a new company and I'll be leaving my place of work for the last 11 years. I'm a senior level dev who comes from a place where software is more of a secondary function and the skills of my peers are very... Atypical of most software developers.

My interview was ok, but I passed the mark barely - in that they recognize I'm rusty and have some gaps to shore up, but have decided to give me an offer anyway. I'm taking a "step down" to enter in as a level below senior to get my foot in the door of a real tech company.

I've got myself convinced I'm setting myself up to fail, despite being told by people that work there that they encourage mistakes and that they wouldn't be offering me a position if they didn't think I'd be successful.

Is it typical to feel inadequate and worried you'll be fired prematurely for underperformance? I've had little to no experience in a fast paced tech job so I have little to refer to. I was a very high performer where I'm coming from, but that's hard to equate to where I'm going. It seems like classic "impostor syndrome".

I've not even started there yet but I'm terrified my anxiety will get the better of me before I even have my first day there. Anyone out there have any advice?

I'm excited for this new opportunity but I can't seem to shake the fear of the unknown.

I lost one of my idols, there are few people I have that much respect for. I literally can not think of anyone else infact.

Ive just been taking a second.🙁 I mean you live your life thinking there's time or that you can wait to do things , like I'll just do that one thing a little later. But it's not true. The reality is there's so little time.

There are few truly great people. It's going to take me a little while to get over it properly.

But when I do I hope I don't switch back into old patterns.

I want to be just like him, his work was amazing. He worked all the time not because of fame or money but because he just wanted to make cool shit for people to enjoy. Because he enjoyed it himself and he liked seeing people amazed and happy due to his work.

The best people are the types of people who bring a smile to your face by just being who they are.

It was enough to know he was out there doing his thing being that incredible, it never occured to me he could just be gone. The world needs more people like him especially now with everything so fucked up. He died far to young. 33 isn't old it's not even middle aged

All I want is to be like him, I hope I will be one day 😞 and I'm going to start trying right now.

And I will try harder.

Making electronics more difficult to repair with security fasteners and ultrasonically welded plastic nightmares and what have you.. what's the point? The argument from manufacturers is that "users don't want to get in there anyway". But, it's not like even if they could, they'd want to, right? Which type of person that doesn't know electronics very well and has an interest in repairing it would go and look at a board, and say "this is how it works, this and that is broken and this is how it should be repaired"? Not many users can repair their own devices regardless. So why? To preserve IP? Not like the Chinese bootleggers care about that. To preserve sales? Users can't repair their stuff anyway. To keep those who want to peek inside out, just for the hell of it? Anyone determined enough will be willing to break it in the process anyway.

I love beer. I like trying things out of my comfort zone. German and Belgian beers are absolutely delish, them mfkers know how to make a good brew. I also like my Japanese and Mexican beers, and even though europeans shit on them all the time, there are tons of American brands I love.

But......for the life of me.....every IPA I take tastes like fucking dishwater soap. From artisanal to regular market brands, everything in between. Fuck me man I can't stand the taste.

Anyone feels the same?

!rant I pity anyone who may have overheard my interaction with a gecko that managed to sneak inside my house when I went to get a package on my doorstep last night around midnight

“Hey little guy, let’s try to get you to go back outside, okay? Nonononooo not that way, fella. Down the wall. DOWN. DO NOT CLIMB BACK UP. Okay. Yeah, see, there you go. Good job. OH MY GOD DO NOT DO THAT. Listen, I think you’re fucking cute, okay? BUT IF YOU CHARGE AT ME LIKE THAT, YOU TRIGGER MY FEAR RESPONSE AND YOU MAKE IT REALLY HARD FOR ME NOT TO KILL YOU. Hooooooly shit, little dude. You were so almost dead. Okay. Okay, yeah, go out the door. Door. Yesssss.”

closes door, only to realize little dude’s tail is still on this side

“OMG LITTLE DUDE, are you okay?!!” opens door, little dude sneaks back inside

“Noooooo you need to go outside. Come on, you know you want to go outside”

Finally managed coax him out the door and confirmed he’d cleared the doorway before closing and locking it.

1 year and a half ago, I quit the job where I spent almost 6 years; My first job after that was as a freelancer for certain company here in colombia, but after sometime I learned that freelancing for local companies is not well payed at all, so I decided to try to work with toptal(a pre-vetted freelancer platform)

So the process included a first interview with a HR person, it was a british lady that mopped the floor with me(she wasn't rude at all but I felt horrible) 'cuz I couldn't speak english good enough, and then I was rejected... Some time down the line I created a rant for anyone that were willing to speak sometime to practice english conversations. @jesustricks and @orhun answered and in fact I got to speak with them.

@amyshackles spoke with me too, I reached her out over linkedin 😊

Just wanted to say thank you, finally I got a job offer with a nearshore company, you helped me a lot there, speaking with you people gave confidence and more knowledge. Again thank you, love you guys.

PS: you don't have to love me back

Anyone else make the weirdest workarounds ever to trivial framework problems. Then read documentation to find out that there was a function for that...

Question to all you web developers out there: how do you survive long term in this job without going nuts? I have been working in this industry for almost 7 years and feelings of frustration have accumulated, to the point where I honestly feel like laying g bricks as a job would be more rewarding. Here are the main reasons why:

1) The fact that your job is never "finished" and it looks like and endless stream of tasks. Either the project has money being rolled in or is pretty much dead. Ever changing requirements ensure that most of what you do will be rewritten in 6 months or so. This is ok for the most part, but overtime it does give you the feeling that most of your effort was wasted, and you have the same website/app to show for it, slightly different...

2) The never ending churn of tech, particularly in the Javascript/node ecosystem. Sure, there is a good side of learning new approaches of doing things and it brings variety, but there is the dark side that you never feel you are getting better at doing your job, as every new project does not look anything like the previous. Even if all the stack pieces are the same (never happens), everyone sets it up and organises the project differently enough that you have to spend loads of time solving things you have done before. This makes it difficult to get a sense that you are mastering something...

So, if autonomy, purpose, and mastery are the keys to fulfilling work, I find this career lacking in mastery and purpose...does anyone feels/felt the same? How did you counter it?

Step 1. Learn to code .
Step 2. Exchange code for money.
Step 3. Exchange money for car, soap & a clean shirt.
Step 4. Profit.
[GOTO: Step #1]

Lol. OK on a serious note coding improved my love life, it drastically reduced the frequency of dates - but dramatically improved the quality and duration of my relationships.
I used to believe that anyone/thing had the potential to be great - and (like me) all they needed was a little time to seize an opportunity.
This essentially meant there were no deal breakers and I spent a lot of time giving people benefit of the doubt and investing a lot of time & effort supporting and trying to build on aspirations that would turn out to simply be fantasies I was indulging.

I still idealistically believe that everything/one has infinite potential - only now I know which problems are worth solving, which are purely for fun or a thought experiment and which should immediately be thrown out and refactored.

All the ambition in the world is void without drive.

Any one else out there self-taught and employed? I taught myself to code starting when I was in middle school and my code shows it lol. But I've finally found a job where I can ise my knowledge even though i lack a degree. Anyone else out there with similar stories?

need advice on integrating .t3d file support in c++ engine
hey, been stuck trying to figure out how to get .t3d file support working in our custom game engine, which is all written in c++. it's turning out to be a lot trickier than expected and i'm kinda hitting a wall here. the documentation on .t3d itself is pretty much nonexistent and what's out there is either outdated or too vague to be of any real use. i've tried a few things based on general file parsing logic in c++ but keep running into issues with either reading the files correctly or integrating the data into the engine in a way that actually works. it feels like i'm missing something fundamental but can't pin down what it is. has anyone here gone through this process before or has any experience with .t3d files? i could really use some advice on how to approach this, or even just some resources that explain the format in detail. also, if there are any common pitfalls or things to watch out for when adding new file format support to a game engine, i'd appreciate the heads up. thanks in advance for any help, feeling pretty stuck and any guidance would be a huge help.

Had an internet/network outage and the web site started logging thousands of errors and I see they purposely created a custom exception class just to avoid/get around our standard logging+data gathering (on SqlExceptions, we gather+log all the necessary details to Splunk so our DBAs can troubleshoot the problem).

If we didn't already know what the problem was, WTF would anyone do with 'There was a SQL exception, Query'? OK, what was the exception? A timeout? A syntax error? Value out of range? What was the target server? Which database? Our web developers live in a different world. I don't understand em.

I tought I'll buy a new laptop last week.

Went to the mediamarkt. I've choosen one with hdd. That was cheaper and I have a nice ssd at home, so I tought I'm gonna change that so I've asked the salesman about the hdd. I mean if I take it out and replace it with an ssd, it'll invalidate my warranty? Said yes. But they gladly change it to me if I bring my ssd in for a dirt-cheap €79. I said you are defenetly lost your mind. It takes 5 screws and around 5 minutes.

Anyway. I've choose an another one with ssd. But there was a sticker on it too, means it is prepared to use out of the box. It means as always, the windows is full with advertises, demos and annoying settings. And I don't use windows anyway. Ohh and it costs €29. I wanted one without this thing. Said ok, he'll check it. Comes back and said these modells are all prepared with this. I've asked him to show me a product which is 'clean'. He replied "actually all our laptops came prepared".

So I went mad and left them. This whole procedure takes more than an hour with one lesson: never go there again to buy a computer.

But at the end I've found a solution. Configurable laptops with 2 year warranty even if you upgrade it. Thats what I'll buy soon. I've had enough of big brands bullshits about unnecessary features and other bullshit. I'll buy what I need, not more, not less.

I'll write down the brand if anyone interested.

How lawyers fuck up technology!

I rented a car today, given that I don't want to go by train currently. That was some VW Golf, and it had a lane assist which can't decide whether to be helpful or obnoxious:

Either I kept the steering wheel and still steered myself, in which case the lane assist's actions made the steering feel somewhat wobbly. Initially, I suspected a worn out control arm bearing, but that's a long term damage in aging cars, not in new ones.

Or I just rested my hands on my upper legs, as I usually do (palms facing upwards and holding the wheel lightly), then the lane assist worked by itself. It was even smart enough to deactivate itself upon blinking before changing lanes.

However, it complained after about 15 seconds that I didn't steer. I said, shut up and do your job. The warning intensified, and I said, fuck you. Then it initiated some stutter braking to wake me up. Annoying like a reincarnation of Clippy.

I ended up giving the steering wheel a slight tip to the right every 15, 20 seconds just to let the lane assist know I was still there, relying on the lane assist to correct it again. On a long trip, I would have had to deactivate that crap.

Obviously, the VW engineers did their job, but the legal department feared law suits should anything go wrong and ruined the feature!

What was also annoying is that there is no real hand brake anymore in many modern cars. Sucks when pulling off against a hill. Plus that at red traffic lights, I usually put the gear out (manual transmission) and pull the hand brake instead of keeping my foot on the clutch. That's not the same with this pseudo hand brake!

(In case you wonder why anyone would do that:
it's an anachronism that avoids lengthening the clutch wires, decades after cars switched to hydraulics.)

My coleague's story

- before leaving after long day at the office final look at support cases (after official support hours)
- sev1 ticket logged an hour ago, noone called us (although should have; after support hours)
- angry manager calls and demands to get in touch with the client immediately (we're already after support hours, FTS should pick the case, not us)
- we reach out. Customer has business-impacting case
- after initial info gathering: some cert got expired, they got a new one and placed it in the app's directory. The app still does not work
- the first question we ask: "are you sure you have placed it in the right directory?"
- "yes, we are sure. No problems there" - answers a voice with indian accent
- noone finds the root cause for hours.
- It's already 1am
- someone from client's specialists comes up with an idea: "are we sure the cert is in the right place? Let's try to move it to the same directory the old one was in the first place"
- .................................................
- production is working again
- "Why didn't anyone from support suggest this?!?!"
- .................................................
- 2am. Case solved, manager is informed everything's allright now.
- In the morning we get yelled at by the manager bcz we supposedly missed a sev1 ticket and were incompetent during the conf. call

This reminds me why I stay away from support. And why I started hating people. And why I do not work with indians (our ways are too different for me to stay sane and not to kill anyone).

Anyone else here with anxieties, depression or what-not? I feel this could get heavy, but I feel this is the only place I could write this. So...

My 18-month-long programming course is slowly coming to an end. Time has come for us to be sent out to job interviews at various companies.
Every single time an interview comes up, I feel the exact same mix of my inconfidence, constant anxiety, "I'm gonna throw up", impatience and whatever else is there in my head. I figured it would get easier with each consecutive interview but it hasn't.
The questions they ask make me sick. The atmosphere is unfathomable. Robots are more humane.

- Why do you want to work with us?
I need money for my meds and something to down them with? I willingly put myself through this shit to become a corporate slave, what else is there to say? I can only hope I'll be writing any code here.

- Where do you see yourself in 2-3 years?
Far away from anything remotely related to an HR department of any sort?

- Had you been a fruit, which one would you be? Whatever would come out of my tears blended with semen? What the fuck is even that question?

Of course those aren't my actual responses, but conjuring the IRL ones to finish the process is a serious burden. And those are only some HR ones. After this barrage of questions they want my lifeless, flaccid body to write code. I mean ok, it's a software dev gig, but I already gave all I had on self-clairvoyance.

We'll be in touch!

Is there a strategy you guys have when you go to an interview? Any tips for taming the acrid beast running around in your brain? Is it too much to talk with a human in a humane language without "15 buzzwords to make the recruiter moist"?

I'm an embedded devices dev. As part of my job I take off the shelf devices and write libraries so that our JavaScript team can interface with them. If I have to deal with one more custom implementation of a standard protocol I'm going to freak the fuck out. Like fuck there are only 5 or so major communication protocols at the hardware level there is no fucking reason to reinvent some shittier protocol over a well documented, widely used protocol that has been around for 30 years. (Modbus for anyone who cares)

Hello there fellow developers, I've a noob question to ask you.
I saw a software logo a few days ago on a tech talk. I haven't been able to figure out what it belongs to.

A red fish and it's sort of curved in a manner that its head and tail are close. I know it represents some open source software. Can anyone help?

Google search is not helping.

Does anyone else here hate people who use numpy panda and tensorflow and call themselves data scientists ??
Cuz I hate 'em. There are so many researchers who work day and night to figure out the math and algos which go into these libraries. These researchers are real data scientists.
If computerss sciemce would have been a religion, then just using these stupid libraries and claiming you are a data scientist would be blasphemy.

Looking for some advice....

So I'm a web dev that works remotely full time from home which I love, I'm expecting my first child in late march which is really exciting but I'm starting to think about how it's all going to work with the missus home for at least 12 months and of course a baby that (without sounding horrible) is going to be a big distraction to me when I'm trying to work.

So just wanted to know if there was anyone else out there in a similar position or that has gone through the same thing and how you did it? Is there any advice you can give me?

Appreciate any thoughts.

http requests

literally the bread and butter of any software engineer building applications, you would ASSUME they know what they are doing...

and you're gonna write a seperate http get and post function for every type you have?

apparently stuff like this that is written by "senior" developers? you don't even have a basic understanding of software...

i'm won't do it that way, becuase i'm an adult, not a child

what i'm going to do is write a HTTP request util function that can be used for any type and HTTP verb. DRY, single responsibility, etc.

imagine making the http request itself a responsibility coupled to the type 😂😂😂😂

get a clue and come back later

i can't tell anymore if my thoughts are so outlandish compared to everyone else that no one understands them, or if i've been doing this so long that i just immediately understand what needs to be done and don't know how to explain it to anyone else anymore (or take the mental effort to)

peace out

oh P.S.: imagine thinking the SOLID principles are only applicable to OOP

stay safe out there folks, its getting more painful every day

Is it so hard to comment your code?

I work on collab projects here and there and both the comments and documentation are both awful, nearly always, there are some exceptions.

This is a plea to all those who teach anyone to program. "This performs a loop" is not a helpful comment, nor is "This sets variable x to 1" where the line below is "let x = 1".

The last piece of code brings me on to my next point meaningful variable names. If x is a variable that stores the age of a machine call it ageOfMachine or age_of_machine. Not aom, not x but what it actually is, modern IDEs and text editors will fill this out for you.

Finally documentation, a good friend of mine sent me this quote a while back, I can't find the image but "Documentation is like sex, when it's good, it's great. But when it's bad it's better than nothing." Your documentation should be good, a good pattern to follow is the Node.js documentation, it tells the function, what it does and what parameters it takes.

Anyway rant over; and I'm sure that this applies to people outside of this community only.

Welp. My mental health is down the drain.

I don't want to talk to anyone about it, but I am well aware of the situation. I can't even bring myself to sleep on a proper time frame, and depression is crawling back like an abusive ex.

There. Complete failure. Where do I sign out for this life?

Footnote:This is not fishing for attention, more like ranting in the void. (or trying to) Apologies to the one who I should've probably talked to about this, but never did.

Story Time.

I was hanging around at a friend's place when she informed me that her roommate is throwing a really lavish party 50kms away from the city. I got invited by said roommate and I agreed to go.

When we arrived at the venue, there were like 100+ people at this place, all smoking weed drinking and dancing in loud music. I was also stoned at that point.

So at one point, my friend abandoned me and I found myself talking to 10 complete strangers. I realized that I was on my own and thought about seeing how much rizz I got.

Mind you that everyone was drunk and there was loud music everywhere so there was no way anyone else knew that I was getting shot down lol.

After couple rejections, I straight up went to a girl and said "You want to smoke weed and make out in the bathroom?" And to my surprise, she said yes. So, we both already high and drunk slipped into the bathroom and made out for like 10 mins and I smoked all my weed with her.

Then, at some other point, my friend showed up and we went home. The one thing I missed, was asking for her number, which I kicked myself later for. I guess stoners don't realize they have phones.

Making an ssh connection:

No....

No this one.

Not that one.

Not that one, either.

*starts typing*

*Typo 1*

*Typo 2*

Yay. Connected to server.

... Okay. Wrong environment.

*Exiting*

*trying again*

*Typo 1*

*Typo 2*

*finally connected*

Okay. I'm here...

Why did I connect to this machine again?!

------

Migrations are fun. Your bash history is an obsessive lier, your brain completely fried and when you finally managed to achieve something... You either forget what it was - or even worse - you get reminded of all the stuff you still have to do.

I'm literally amazed that I currently manage to go to the toilet, don't forget to make coffee and eat stuff at least once a day.

Before anyone thinks... Haha joke.

Nope I'm dead serious.

I am amazed that I didn't forget to go to the toilet, aka sitting in my own piss and wonder why it's so warm and wet down there.

I'm glad that the migration is going to end soon, otherwise I might opt in out of paranoia for adult diapers.

*My brain is really fried*

Subject: a rant for devRant

Hello,

Not entirely sure why or when exactly it happened, but after I joined mailing lists I have a pet peeve for people who don't use a proper subject line, or don't use email when I literally made a mail server for that purpose (some organizations really prefer calling apparently). Is it really that hard to summarize a message in one sentence? Hell half the time even the message itself is just a few sentences.

Also the greeting and salutation at the beginning and end of email messages. I find them so redundant. Has anyone ever gotten any meaningful information out of "Hello", "Greetings", "Dear", or something like that? Or "Best regards" or whatever. I get that it's just being polite but it's so meaningless! I really don't like using them anymore. Just a message block and who it came from, that's all it needs to me. Instead pour some effort into the damn subject, the title of whatever drivel you're putting out there! Or replying to an email *only* when the subject matter is still related! Or actually replying to the damn email if it's still that subject matter...

I probably sound like an old man, but seriously.. email isn't a hard concept once you "get it". Anyone can write a halfway decent letter, why isn't that the case for email?

Best regards,
Condor

Anyone out there like agile but find that project managers make it horrible. It is kind of like when you are having an interesting conversation then a bore comes around and overtakes the cool conversation.

I used to think my first relationship was awful. I went through so much and rather it served as a trigger for my childhood trauma as well.

Little did I know that it would be the best the thing that could happen to me. I grew so much and every next woman I met, I realised how fucking amazing my ex is. God I miss her terribly.

But what happened with my recent fuck up, I am devastated. This toxic women brought out the worst in me. I have never been so hateful against myself or anyone else in the world.

I was love bombed and walked into a trap. I quit as soon as I realised what it was.

My values were comprised. My integrity was put to test. My trust was intentionally broken. During the initial days, she tactically identified my vulnerabilities and insecurities. Then used to sadistically trigger me as often as she can and sit there and watch me in suffer pain.

It led me to self harm and being suicidal.

I am so badly wounded that even after few weeks, I am still discovering all the wounds. It will surely take some time along with external support to build a healing environment for myself and overcome this damage.

I am very angry, terribly hurt, lost and confused. This shit developed a phobia in me. I cannot trust anyone anymore. I constantly live in fear of being hurt (physical, mental, and emotional). I am paranoid of that stalker.

I don't think I'll ever be able to start and build a healthy relationship with anyone. I used to be sooooo fucking strong emotionally and mentally. But now not only my trauma relapsed but I got more issues within me.

I really want to live a free, healthy, happy and a fulfilled life. I don't know when time will heal this but right now, I am in terrible pain and hate myself a lot.

On Tuesday my client states she will get me one more piece of info I need to launch the site.

On Wednesday, nothing.

On Thursday, nothing.

On Friday she berates me that the site is overdue and demands it be launched before Saturday so she can send the announcement email.

I remind her that I was waiting for the information.

She responds, testily, that the info wasn't mission critical after all and to just insert something as a placeholder. Oh, and that there had been a religious holiday and so nobody would have been available to respond to the information request anyways. Like I'm just supposed to know all that without anyone telling me.

I'm now trying to get the attention of our overseas developer, who is the only person who can pull this off, but he's likely clocked out for the weekend.

I'm so mad right now I'm about ready to burn the whole site to the ground, cut my losses, and just walk away. But that would damage my reputation.

When my mom died in 2014, I was shocked to find that her profile on Facebook was suddenly changed to “memorial” mode and therefore I was no longer able to log into it. (If you’re tempted to tell me I’m dumb for using it, I don’t disagree, but save it for another thread...she and I kept in touch over FB because it was easier for her to manage.)

I think it was triggered by their monitoring of things and seeing keywords like “funeral” and “passed away” associated with her account, then having a person on their end change its status. Or something like that.

What I hadn’t known about (or I would have used it) was the legacy contact setting where she could have set me as the contact so I’d have at least a little access and control. But because of their strict policies, I’m forever locked out.

I get why they need to do this (to avoid fraud and impersonations) but the fact that there are zero documents or proofs I, as the executor of her estate, can provide that Facebook will accept to make an exception seems unnecessarily severe.

Anyone else experience this? Known workarounds?

Send out some platform accounts. A few days later VIP Support writes me:

VIP: What did you think by writing to our client. He never used the platform or worked with anyone on there. Do you see any deeper sense behind that?!

Inner Me: I HAVE NO IDEA WHO YOU ARE OR WHAT YOU DO AND I DON'T CARE. If your name is on the list, I have to write you your account!!!
Me: Sorry about that. Someone put it on the distributor list. If you want we can delete it, but maybe he needs it in the future to collaborate.
Sorry for any inconvenience

VIP: ...

Here's an excerpt from GitHub's mission statement -
"Code is about the people writing it. The tools we create help individuals and companies, public and private, to write better code, faster."

And yet, is there anyone else who goes - "What a load of crap! You came up with Atom and Teletype, but couldn't make your Search feature even a tad less annoying?!"

Only me?
.
.
I'll see myself out.

So... The scrapyard man who I gave my scrap gave me this beauties he had there for years...
Anyone knows how I can test the screens and maybe build a desktop screen out of them?

The only type of client I like being, is a hostile one.

That's why I intend to answer every question of the dev team, with a question.

"So would you like this banner to be blue, or green?"

Does green evoke the same emotions as blue?

"Probably not, but we're asking you so we know how to finish the design..."

Does a design have a will of its own?

"Ok... What do you think about the new e-mail feature?"

Does anyone use e-mail nowadays?

"There are plenty of people who use e-mail professionally."

Are you a professional?

"I don't think this collaboration is going to work out"

Are we done?

(Parody of Ron Swanson)

Follow up on a previous rant:

I visited a customer to talk about the reporting discrepancy between two applications.

It turns out the applications were custom built by outsourced developers from Russia, that communicate with each other through a byzantine (and completely undocumented) series of web services, excel import/export tasks, and a customized SSRS environment.

These are spread across at least half a dozen servers, some on-premise and some cloud based, there are at least 3 SQL servers (2 running 2005, one running 2000), a 10 year old local install of TFS (which no one knows a username/password for), and who-knows-what-else.

They laid off their entire IT team years ago, and they have no backups.

I'm not certain anyone there even understands what the software is supposed to be doing beyond the most general terms.

No one knows if they even have source code.

Biggest case of "nope!" I've encountered in more than 20 years of IT experience.

Any embedded systems software engineers out there with practical experience in writing/designing safety critical applications? (think DO-178B/C) I've got a few years embedded experience under my belt between internships, my projects, and now my relatively new job at a major aviation company, but I feel like I'm behind on this topic of safety and code that can't fail. It's simply not taught and I really want to learn more. Partially it is out of personal pride because I want to make a great product, but more importantly, what I work on is protecting a human life. I really really really want to feel confident in what I build. Is there anyone out there who's got some years under their belt that can point me to some good references? Or maybe some helpful tips? Much appreciated. If it helps, all my work is in C.

when there was a client who was complaining about something and my co-worker told him that we'll fix the issues. my co-worker wrote it down and decided to fix it later. he never told us about it. he never even mentioned about that encounter. then one day, i was at work alone. the cliente went in and said, "is it fixed already?" and of course, i asked what was fixed. i checked it out and found out the issue was not fixed and it has already been a month. the client was so pissed off and started yelling at me like im the one who was at fault. in fact, the client stayed there for over an hour just to watch me fix it.

i didnt talk to my co-worker for a week because of that. everything he does just pisses me off from that moment on. he arrives late most of the time and he takes more breaks than anyone else. he fixes issues less than anyone else. i swear to god, if the company wasnt his family's, he wouldnt be able to find a decent job with how he acts.

So hanging out with my in-laws tonight. It apparently is super bowl Sunday. I don't know a damn thing about football and could care less about it.

Them: who do you think is going to win?
Me: I guess the better team?

Them: yes but who are you rooting for?
Me: don't know who's playing?

Ahhhhhhhggg I can't stand sports people.

And there they are yelling at a TV like someone on the other side will actually hear them.

Does anyone else have a similar situation?

In 2015 I sent an email to Google labs describing how pareidolia could be implemented algorithmically.
The basis is that a noise function put through a discriminator, could be used to train a generative function.
And now we have transformers.

I also told them if they looked back at the research they would very likely discover that dendrites were analog hubs, not just individual switches. Thats turned out to be true to.

I wrote to them in an email as far back as 2009 that attention was an under-researched topic. In 2017 someone finally got around to writing "attention is all you need."

I wrote that there were very likely basic correlates in the human brain for things like numbers, and simple concepts like color, shape, and basic relationships, that the brain used to bootstrap learning. We found out years later based on research, that this is the case.

I wrote almost a decade ago that personality systems were a means that genes could use to value-seek for efficient behaviors in unknowable environments, a form of adaption. We later found out that is probably true as well.

I came up with the "winning lottery ticket" hypothesis back in 2011, for why certain subgraphs of networks seemed to naturally learn faster than others. I didn't call it that though, it was just a question that arose because of all the "architecture thrashing" I saw in the research, why there were apparent large or marginal gains in slightly different architectures, when we had an explosion of different approaches. It seemed to me the most important difference between countless architectures, was initialization.

This thinking flowed naturally from some ideas about network sparsity (namely that it made no sense that networks should be fully connected, and we could probably train networks by intentionally dropping connections).

All the way back in 2007 I thought this was comparable to masking inputs in training, or a bottleneck architecture, though I didn't think to put an encoder and decoder back to back.

Nevertheless it goes to show, if you follow research real closely, how much low hanging fruit is actually out there to be discovered and worked on.

And to this day, google never fucking once got back to me.

I wonder if anyone ever actually read those emails...

Wait till they figure out "attention is all you need" isn't actually all you need.

p.s. something I read recently got me thinking. Decoders can also be viewed as resolving a manifold closer to an ideal form for some joint distribution. Think of it like your data as points on a balloon (the output of the bottleneck), and decoding as the process of expanding the balloon. In absolute terms, as the balloon expands, your points grow apart, but as long as the datapoints are not uniformly distributed, then *some* points will grow closer together *relatively* even as the surface expands and pushes points apart in the absolute.

In other words, for some symmetry, the encoder and bottleneck introduces an isotropy, and this step also happens to tease out anisotropy, information that was missed or produced by the encoder, which is distortions introduced by the architecture/approach, features of the data that got passed on through the bottleneck, or essentially hidden features.

Does anyone else have that project that they work on in there spare time? Well mine was a Pokemon MMO because I'm not a games developer and found it a really nice challenge/break from normal work. It's almost ready to be played but it's sad that it'll never be released. I mean I could recreate all of the sprites and game mechanics but that wasn't what I originally set out to do.

Win 11 has made my computer use MISERABLE!!!
The sound keeps going out. The shit won't print right, no detail, no light and dark, always too light or too dark and Nothing like I edited it in GIMP. Fucking Shit!!!!! I want these designers to have permanent scabies. It won't print the objects the size Ichose. It keeps having to reinstall printers after every update. There are 5 clicks for what used to be 1 click. Did people magically stop getting carpel tunnel!??? The copy/paste and other icons are thin, same color almost as background and anyone over 50 can't SEE them!

I turned down another women who was absolutely, 100% flirting with me, because, from what I can gather, she was trying to get out of a relationship with her current boyfriend, a military veteran.

I outright ignored her and then when that failed, I made our work relationship 100% about that, work.
Even though I'm friendly with everyone else.

I'm an absolute shit, aren't I? I feel genuinely bad.
I'm not sure if I did it out of a misplaced sense of honor for a dude who obviously has some ptsd, or because I don't feel like I'm able to connect with anyone anymore.

I feel like I'm alone in this world. Not, like, sexually or anything, but more like I don't want to burden anyone with the shit I'm going through. Like a man on a mission on a sinking ship, and it would be wrong to let anyone else on board.
Like a one-man shit-show, all singing, all dancing, driven to one end, with one purpose. And it'd be wrong to let anyone get attached, or invite anyone else in.

Fuck I got so many irons in the fire. I have an ARG in the works, a full game, a social platform that the code and marketing plan is laid out and I'm saving money for, two more games already planned, plus spending an in-ordinate amount of time with my father and sister and mother as they deal with the loss of my sister, plus volunteering to help the homeless, plus working, plus studying.

I barely sleep.

It's just me. I'm like a cruise missile heading to one destination, to some final destination, I just don't know what. And I don't let anyone in, because then they might see how fucking crazy I am, and how crazy my life is, and how crazy my goals are. Thats not a humblebrag. Thats more of a "wholly shit, I'm so in over my head, I'm fucking drowning" type thing. But I'm not giving up, I'm just going deeper.

And it feels like drowning but somehow I'm okay with it. Like I've passed the crux of loneliness, and settled for going for it all, alone, shooting out of orbit, and saying "fuck it all' to everything and everyone. They say "if you got everything you wanted, everything you wished for, you'd wish you hadn't, which is why god isn't a genie". And lately I've been thinking god doesn't exist, or doesn't care, because he's left it all up to me, and I've fucked it up good and proper, and am on my way to either nothing, or everything I've ever wanted.

Is this what happiness feels like? Or suicide?

I don't know. I mean I really don't. I don't want to die. I think I could stop existing and be okay with it. Having achieved at least a modicum of understanding the universe, at least accomplished something small but meaningful.
Or maybe I'm delusional, driven mad with the full comprehension of human floundering against a meandering existence.

I don't fucking know.

I feel like I'm spinning my wheels, so much, that even two weeks feels like a fucking eternity. I don't sleep anymore. When I do, I escape into my dreams, where I can fly, or float, and the people in my dreams tell me I'm living in the matrix and I believe them..in my dreams. Feel it even.

And when I wake up, the feeling persists. Leaves me in wonderland, for hours after waking.

And I have visions, of going homeless, like some buddha, all the time, and then I say "wake up J, you're fucking crazy! You want to go be some couch surfing homeless bum living off other's good graces? get the fuck outa here! While others suffer, schlep it at whatever job they work, day in day out, toil. In this economy? In this inflation? What a dishonest way of thinking. What a dishonest way of dreaming."

And yet I daydream. Because its the only escape there is from all the world has become.

And I bring joy to others, earnestly, vicariously, because its the closest joy I can feel, when I've become numb.

It is this quasi-permanent sense of alienation that permeates my whole world, a sort of invisible force field that separates me from others, even as I reach out to understand them, to comfort them, to smooth the corners off their world, so that they don't become like I have, something not entirely human, but...other.

Often when we meditate, long and hard enough,
at the center that emerges, at the center of ourselves, we find an abyss, a whole universe, devoid of anything, a perfect silence, mirroring back the cosmos, and other people. Observing, silent, irreducible, implacable.

Sometimes I feel like I don't exist. Sometimes I think others don't exist.

Very often I feel like nothing is real. And that I am playing some sort of game. Not like a video game per se, but that there is a bigger pattern, a hidden pattern to it all, just out of reach, and I'm reaching for it but understanding eludes me.

Not that the universe has made me for some special purpose, but merely that the universe observes me specifically, for no special purpose, other than that it can, whatever trivialities may impede or push forward my life.

As if the universe were bored.

Is it just me or is it really fuckin amazing when ur teacher tells you after a year that you are a better programmer than he is 😒 even tho ur just a beginner?

I just started learning to code and i was already better at it than the person who is supposed to teach me... which is great if you ask me #sarcasm

And when we finish a simple task on if statements - which he thought was gonna take us a whole hour - in like 5 minutes, he doesnt let us work on our own programs: "Can you close that? Its not related to the lesson"
Ffs man! 😤 Am i supposed to sit here for an hour just staring into the void, doing fuck all, while i could actually improve my skills?

Then you go home and learn more in two hours than you'll ever do throughout the following 3 years in school.... 😧

If this is not a complete waste of time then i have no fucking clue what is.

GCSE Computer Science sucks (at least in my school). Is there anyone out there with similar issues or is it just our lucky bunch?

My advice to young/beginner programmers:
If you really want to learn, please just google what ur interested in and use stackoverflow

Well, I've been reading 'rants' in this community, and I'm amazed at how people discuss various softwares, languages, and sometimes even hardware!
I'd say I'm a noob. Can't even compare my 'coding knowledge' with what people know in this community, and I don't want to. I like that I'm now a part of this community. But I feel intimidated at times by the amount of things there are to learn! And I don't know how to start. I mean, we had a course on C for a semester, and I tried to build up on that myself. Other than that, I've been trying to learn web-dev, made a browser based game and tried to learn some back end. But I don't know exactly how to build up my proficiency with code, and solving problems, from here on out. So I would really appreciate if this golden community could help me out.(Not trying to flatter anyone. I don't express much, but all this is what I genuinely feel, and am grateful about.) I want to know how to go on about learning knew things in the realm of programming, and how I can apply it to solve actual problems. What language should I learn first? What will be valuable in this rapid-paced time? And some courses to help out?

I stumbled upon devRant one day out of nowhere, and I'm glad I did.

HELP ME OUT BRUTHA AND SISTUR..

I've finally finished my website - now's the time to do the tedious thing and get a decent hosting for as little money as possible.

Does anyone know a hosting that has:
- High privacy ethics (not that I'm gonna store porn there, just my screenshots posted via ShareX)
- VPS-based hosting I can put a nice Linux on.
- Unlimited or 'really high' bandwidth.
- Located in Europe (UK included lol).

I would be most thankful :P

Been made redundant today.

Get some tissues cause imma spill my tea across your keyboards.

It was my first job. I was a UX designer.(I guess I have to use past tense?) I was there for 6 months. It was enjoyable and rewarding,slightly stressful because I worked for two companies under an umbrella company and was split 50-50.
I was told to come to work and I went and I saw one of my bosses in the room aswell ( I have two bosses btw - 2 companies)
The head of IT comes in and tells us we both have been made redundant as our company is not doing well ( its a travel company)...
I was shocked and I cried. I felt sorry for my boss he was there for ten yrs. And he has kids. I was told I could go home but I went to bathroom and cried. I came out and I didn't know if I was supposed to finish the day ( I had 3 meetings) or go home.... So I went to the meeting like a dumb dumb.
Most awk meeting because the other company didn't even know I was made redundant. The meeting was about how even though its a difficult time for us we r United and we aren't firing u guys just take unpaid holidays etc. Btw IT head was in that meeting was shocked to see me there ... I don't even know why I went. Anyways I found out they got rid of 174 employees across the umbrella company. I had to awkwardly tell my other boss I've been made redundant. He was shocked... I don't even know what to do. How to do. Sigh. I asked him if we wanted me to finish work off he's like do whatever u want to do.... I mean whattt.

Also does anyone know what a redudancy consultantion meeting is? It's my first job I have no idea what happens. Anyone here made redundant? How did u cope with it? Do u think I'm gonna get another job in this pandemic? Sorry I'm just a bit lost

Anyone out there been fired because their project manager had a personal problem with them and made them unable to complete their work?

Anyone here making big bucks working for a small company? I've interned at startups and worked full time for fortune 500's, but I'm considering looking at smaller companies in the future just because the corporate environment kind of burns me out. What's it like being a senior level developer for a smaller company? Is the money typically there? And in your experience, what about quality and expectation of work? I would love to have some more say and passion into what I'm building and take home a big chunk of what a business earns but I don't know how realistic that is.

I'd also like to start my own e-commerce company but as a web developer with 0 business / marketing experience that seems far off lol

Any JavaScript developers out there willing to help me out with something?

I have an interview question that I like to ask candidates that no one ever seems to get right. But, to me, it seems pretty basic, so I expect MOST JavaScript developers at almost any level of expertise to get it, and I like it generally because it demonstrates some core knowledge of JavaScript concepts and syntax.

But I want to verify that my feelings about it are reasonable, because give how few ever seem to get it right (and I'm talking across literally hundreds of interviews, MAYBE 2 people have ever gotten it right), I'm starting to wonder if I'm right or not.

Look at this code, and then answer the question after. Please do so off the top of your head and without testing anything since that's normally the experience a candidate would have. I'll give the answer after some time for anyone who gets it wrong but is curious.

But this isn't about YOU getting it right or not, and it's not about whether it's the best way to do something in JavaScript or anything like that, it's just about whether it's a reasonable question and whether my expectation that MOST JavaScript developers should get it right is fair.

const O = {
sayHello : function() { alert("Hello"); }
};
const S = "sayHello";

Question: using ONLY the variables O and S (and you MUST use both), write code that executes the sayHello function.

Thanks!

Does anyone know how in Movies and TV shows do all those computer sites/software are done?
Like when we see a cia mission room for example, and there after agents running a face recognising and get 50 popups with information, or location some secret hide out place and super cool screen with 10 widgets show us location..
That can't be real.. But i have no idea how it's done.. is it green screen replaced later with fake video, or something similar? Please help, I MUST KNOW THE TRUTH!!!!!!!

By the way, for anyone that gets a "lol" from me, I really mean I'm laughing out loud. I don't like being dishonest with these stuff.

Like when I'm in classes and message something funny to a classmate and he replies "rofl", I really expect him to be rolling on the floor laughing but fuck, he's there sitting with a perfect pose without even a smirk on his face. Next time you rofl at me, motherfucker, I expect you to be rolling in the floor. ROLLING ON THE FLOOR LAUGHING.

So appreciate my lols please. I mean them. I lol in the subway, my car, in classes and the bathroom. I'm sincere with them.

Three days ago my focus was shifted from a development role to a support role. I was shifted to replace another support guy who had used fraud to get the position. I have no experience with this role but there was decent KT and I'm catching on fine. During onboarding and KT I'm serving as the first contact for new tickets and whatnot...

Today I got a ticket with an error on our production instance that no one had ever seen before. It prevented the guy from using our service entirely. I tried to reproduce it and... I couldn't use the service either. No one could. Everything was down. I could see the sweat building on my manager's forehead.

Thankfully another member on my team has done a bit of support before, so we collaborated with each other and other teams throughout the day to figure out what's wrong and how to fix it. I'm listening to them chat remotely as we speak - so far I've been working on it 9 hours straight.

This service is used by everyone - it's a business critical service with due dates on actions and escalations to managers... Imagine if the support ticketing service for your company crashed. That means a lot of people are asking what's wrong, requiring extensions, etc. I've been answering to managers and seniors in the business throughout the day.

The best part? We figured out why the server went down, and the reason is fantastic: someone updated the server's code without telling anyone, and all they had done was remove critical parsing code. Just took it right out, pushed, redeployed. We don't know who did it or who even has access to do that. I guess I have some detective work cut out for me after we've fixed everything that was broken by that.

I miss coding already.

Just wondering if anyone out there has had any experience with writing a window manager for x11? I have decided that would be a good project to kinda work on my c++ and so I can learn how x-server works. Any tips, tricks or references you guys have? The project is on my github called zwm.

My manager asks for help because they can't suddenly edit their shortcuts in Jira. I can't fix it, and it turns out that it's a bug in Jira which was there since last November.

Nobody has even been assigned to the issue for nearly half a year according to Atlassian's own issues page.

Why would anyone even bother to use Jira at this point?

I swear to fucking god the itch.io desktop app is one of the worst design and programming piles of shit out there...

Deisgn is inconsistent and ugly, stability is up shit creek and simple performance is just shit even for an electron app.

If anyone has to do anything with downloading stuff from itch, just do it manually and ignore the app all together

Can anyone recommend some android alternatives?

I'm not looking to move away from android permanently but I'm just curious, I enjoyed my time with UBports (fuck QT) and seeing projects like the PinePhone and Librem 3 just get me curious what is actually out there.

Currently rocking a pixel 2 XL but not shy on buying new hardware to test stuff out as long as it's within reason.

Currently had a look at PureOS (not available) and Sailfish, any others to give a whirl?

I have an idea but no time to build it. So I'll throw it out there and see if anyone does it.

How many times have you had an idea that just couldn't get off the ground without a little assistance. Where do you go? How to "pay" them for their work? Etc.

The development community needs a place where you can volunteer to help with side projects and get paid in karma... which you can then later use to "pay" other developers to assist on a side project of your own.

We are already a community that loves to give back, and collecting fake internet points. Why not put those to good use?

so they are really out there...

people who beleive C# is just the one source of truth and all other languages are just garbage

🤡

sad to be so ignorant - though i guess ignorance is bliss

to be clear: I use C# like anyone else, but it's just a tool in the toolkit, that's all

Anyone else out there feel useless as a programmer? By that I mean you have always struggled to solve problems quickly and effectively. Or to fully understand the language and typical patterns and algorithms. Or to retain in memory all the things you need to “just know” on a daily basis to avoid having to look them up regularly and look foolish or incompetent? It seems I can’t keep my mind focused on learning, whether by tutorials or hands-on practice. I should probably just switch careers, but I’m so close to retirement that it seems stupid to attempt such a thing. Am I alone?

As my friend @AlexDeLarge found my last rant less detailed and idiotic so I deleted that rant and am writing this new rant giving all the possible details.

I am currently doing my graduation in computer science(in 3rd year). I love to code problems and have an experience of working in various languages like c, c++, java, javascript, html, css, python, swift. When I came into this field, I had a dream of becoming an iOS developer but now seeing all those streams out there(android, machine learning and etc etc), I am really confused. I know that I want to do programming but choosing a career is getting on my nerves and taking the hell outta me. So if anyone of you following devRanters could guide me and help me on this point, I would be highly grateful.

P.S- please don't judge me cause i know i am not good at expressing myself.

Hello,

Wondering if anyone can give me some advice regarding stress management.
I am a sys admin of a continually amount of growing servers (now at over 130) and I do coding when I am not busy being screamed at by users. The stress is coming from the workload, but also the way that the workplace is running. The manager left, and now I am handling all his shit, and my own shit as well, and all his accounts have been handed over to me (accounts being clients here). The other IT guy who is supposed to help out with the server admin just finds other work to occupy himself, and I am losing my mind. There is literally an insurmountable amount of work that needs to be done, and it just cannot be done in the time that is allocated in the working hours. I am working overtime, unpaid overtime by the way, until 9/10PM at night to try and get through everything (*cannot apply updates and work on the app server while the users are live) and I am just starting to lose grip. I am taking my stress home with me (not taking it out on anyone), but I am not sleeping, not eating properly and even starting to dream about possible ideas to fault resolution when I sleep. I find that I am constantly tired, and it feels like a world is about to cave in on me. There is literally too much work to be done in too little time, and although I am more than capable of doing it (and will get it done, or the director will physically assualt me and accuse me of being useless, again) I feel that the struggle is just a bit too much.

Can anyone give me some advice on how to "wind down" or to "let go" just for a few minutes a day at least, so that I don't feel like I am on the job 24/7.

Thanks.

!Long Rant!!
Got inspired by Ewin Tang's paper on figuring out a classical computer algorithm for recommendation systems inspired by quantum computers and started to write up an email to a professor in some Quantum research I'm interested in doing. As a high school student, it's VERY daunting to start. Been researching the prof and I'm super excited but it's nerve racking! Like what if she doesn't even open her research projects to high school students and I'm wasting my time? In case, I am planning on asking if there is anyone else I should contact. I'm focused on doing this research with McMaster since it's nearby but I'm really doubting myself. People my age who do this stuff are phenomenal and I feel like I wouldn't live up to that. You guys are probably a lot more experienced in this so if you've got any advice or tips, let me know.
>.<

I used to be at a company where it was kind of expected that you worked long days, which made it quite difficult to balance work and private life. It got so out of control that I was even called to work while I was on my holiday. At first I started with shutting off my phone after work hours, but the real solution I found was moving away from that company.

Pretty much everyone at my new company just stops working when the clock hits 4 or 5 pm unless there is something critical that needs to be done. Seeing that also discourages me (and everyone else) from working long days. We are also quite open about our workload so if anyone thinks they’re overwhelmed they can find a relevant person to talk to and eventually a solution is found. The salary isn’t incredible, but the work/life balance and the benefits I get are just way better than getting paid more and living to work.

I think a lot of people go for the high salaries, most of the time disregarding the other part of the equation. If the company has a meh work culture with low regard to employees’ work/life balance, there isn’t much the employee can do besides finding a place to work with better wlb. I’d pick a great work/life balance and peace of mind to a high salary any day.

Coding is not the solution to unemployment or gender inequality... This what the MF don't understand.... Until you create a better Sys and population is controlled and there is cultural evaluation. - you MF are just running a circus show.

Every MF want to jump into the bandwagon of cheap CSR - "hey we are empowering people by teaching people how to develop a website , aren't we good peopLE 😊"
Lol like programming is fucking open source, you don't need to teach people, anyone interested can learn it , and they are billion FREE RESOURCES out here for them to learn, so why not just fucking focus on doing something significant than clowning around "become a dev ".
Fuck havard, fuck Google fuck KMPG fuck the fucking dumb Government fuck youth empowerment📌

I can see the love for VS Code as a whole, or Codium (my main in that side)

But dear me, any moderately big project will make this bad boy choke the fuck out even on a powerful workstation. Atom is also out of the question for that, and does anyone even uses brackets? Elektron based apps tend to choke like this.

Thus, for simple editing tasks I have preferred Sublime, Notepad++ and Vim, Vim is always there for me.

But I am wondering about one more:
Anyone here with experience on using Emacs on large as fuck projects? how was the experience?
I have only used Emacs on small shit and it works fine.

!dev && !rant
so in my native language (slovak), basically any noun has a neutral (default), diminutive, and augmentative form.

including (first) names.
for literally decade and a half, SOME names sounded weird to me, as if there was something... unnatural about them, but I had no idea what, or why.

and then one day i finally gave it a proper thought, and realized:
those names don't have all three forms, only two.
because they basically lack the neutral form, and their default form is simultaneously their diminutive.

so i was happy to have figured it out, finally. but then i noticed that some names still sound weird, unnatural.

and then i realized, there's another cathegory - those which only have two forms, because their default is simultaneously their augmentative.

and so I finally had all the name cathegories figured out.

funny thing though, even though i now know this, and even though i've reminded myself of this many times...
...every time i think about it, I have huge trouble remembering even a single name for either of the two special cathegories, precisely as I have this time.

except right now i can't be bothered.
if anyone is curious, poke me in the comments and i'll come up with examples later.

Does anyone find the laravel documentation just lacking? It seems like it the twitter feed of documentation leaving out very important information that leaves me banging my head for hours. I really like laravel and much better than working with raw php but I wish there was an option in the drop down for additional a more flushed out version with more code examples. I understand experts don't want to parse through tons of text just to find the correct artisan command but c'mon.

So we thought we did something wrong and caused our AdX revenue to plunge. But after 'fixing' yesterday, we broke it further. Then we realised there were alot of illogical numbers on AdX report. We are suddenly making 1/3 of our ad revenue! I am running out of ideas. Anyone else is facing same issue?

Can't wait until I'm done at my current workplace (about a month left). I've had enough of this fucking shitty ass ancient ASP.Net ERP-system and employer.

For the system:
1. The build times are horrendous and eats up all CPU power.
2. The "classic" UI and UX is absolute garbage. If I was an accountant, I would go nuts trying to invoice someone. Companies pay millions to use this garbage.
3. Besides the "classic UI", there is a mishmash of different JS frameworks plastered on top.
4. Absolute no fucking technical documentation whatsoever
5. The in-house relational database is a mess, no relations, entirely denormalized, no documentation.
6. The frontend is structured in HTML tables with iframes inside <td>

The company:
1. If you're a implementation consultant and you quit your job, you get stripped off all your projects, you won't get to join anything social and you're placed on 1st line support for three months. They might as well force them out.
2. Anyone can work from home anytime they feel like it without any valid reasons, and believe me they do.
3. The senior devs are overworked as all hell. By the end of the year, some of them have hundreds of flextime hours and won't get anything in return.
4. The CEO seems like a jolly guy, but when you quit, he doesn't like you at all. He also acts like a bigshot, always getting driven around meetings when there is literally a very good metro network in this city.

I opened my laptop every day this holiday, always with the intention of learning something, contributing somewhere, doing something. I think the closest I got was to start a VM and open my editor and read some comments (I opened and closed some files too!).

I have done nothing the holiday except bing Netflix and put another 100 or so hours on Steam. Oh and Christmas dinner sandwiches, which as I right this reminds me the oh thing was worth it just for those...

Long and short of it is I think I'm in a slump, my output over the last couple months started dwindling and I thought a couple of weeks (16 days to be more accurate) would help, but it didn't. I'm back at work tomorrow and I'm just not feeling it.

I don't think there is anyone answer but has anyone got any experience of getting out of this feeling of "being done"? I already tried watching Rocky... Just made me see Dulph Lundgren every time my screen wakes up! Wallpaper of the dude probably doesn't help...

First, I want to say don't look this company up if you've never heard of them. I really don't want to be a reason to drive more traffic to this company, because I really don't trust them.

So someone gifted me some coffee called Javy Microdose Coffee.

The reviews online are obvious plants and there was a hard social media promo going on for the last few months, so I'm already not interested in even trying it.

The packaging and colors scare the shit out of me, and the bottle itself doesn't seem to have a break seal on it. Besides that the bottle itself reminds me of the bottles of poison that were around when I was a kid.

My questions; has anyone on here ever consumed this terrifying bottle of liquid? Is it worth it?

So my worst experience with a project manager was this:

New changes to the system came in, and i was the developer of android frontend back then
So he's shouting at me like 'why is dis so slow, why deez delayed, why those render misaligned on the orbitrary tablet, etc.'
So we finish in like an hour, he walk away back to his office, I went to smoke, came back, oh hey, I wanna go to the toilet
And back then at that place we had a small one person WC, so when someone was there, anyone else would have to stand outside the cabin
So I come next to it, oh, fuck, occupied, and I hear ridiculously loud and echo-y splashes of pure solid shit hitting the water surface)
A min later the thunderstorm was over, the door opens, and my PM rushes out, sees me, stops (I was in his way) and gives me a deathstare for a quick second. Awkward moment's over, he walks around me, but I just could not keep my mouth shut, so I said aloud

"Well, no wonder"

So, even as a long-time Apple user, overall there really wasn't too much exciting in the announcement last week.

That said, seeing the Mini get a spec bump caused the ears to prick up a bit. My 2014 is running fine, so it'd be a bit capricious to upgrade, but it does have one very annoying limitation:

It *will* *not* allow me to run 3 monitors at once.

Found this out for certain when I first got it and plugged one into each Thunderbolt port, and then another into HDMI, producing a courteous notice that I needed to remove one of them due to GPU limitations.

Anyone who knows more about hardware than me able to speculate if the new one might be able to support said extra monitor?

I hate to offer some unsolicited critique of something I happily use for free... but I have to say this somewhere to just get it out. That's what this place is for, right?

The new MDN visual design fucking sucks.

It's like a purposeful example I might make for my students - of "what not to do." There were a few things they could have done to improve MDN for sure. Instead, they didn't improve it. They just "changed it." That is always a bad move. Now everything just has less contrast and is floating around with nothing to anchor it. Didn't they show it to anyone and get feedback along the way? "So, we made all the fonts closer to the same size, removed any differentiation in weight so that everything will look the same and just kinda blur out and put people to sleep, and just in general dulled everything out as much as possible - and also here's this logo thing too."

i have realised that a major portion of a human's life involves interaction with other people and most of the time, our happiness depends upon that situation.
so in a way having a group of people who you love and who loves you are important for you to be happy.

i recently realised there are not a single non blood related person in my contact list that i now feel for , even a bit. i recently went for a trip with friends which turned out to be very toxic, and i just realised, that those were my most trusted friends with the highest level of love and trust among my other 900 contacts.

now i don't wanna be with anyone. in a few days i will be 24, and i can't help but feel helpless and alone. Helpless, because people become toxic around me and alone coz i can't have non toxic people. this year started on a very high note for me since i got travelling a lot, got a good paying role that required less work and more relaxing time and , i started focusing on my body too.

so i got more carefree, started hanging out with people more, got more socially active. but then life gave me a slap on the face for enjoying it too much.

i don't know what i want now. i want happiness, but what will make me happy? i have no idea

I've been developing an application off and on over the past year and a half for fun. Was a good excuse to learn something new.

It is to the point now that it has potential (still needs tons of work) to be much better than several existing applications out there doing the same thing.

I am feeling overwhelmed because I either need to a) seriously invest time into it to make it a fully fledged tool and try to sell it b) open source it and see if other people find it worth working on or c) just abandon it and move on.

Has anyone else been in this type of situation knowing there is potential but honestly may be more than you can do as a single person?

I have a question for the women on here: how do you deal with a hands-y coworker? I realize, especially now, that there will be men who have dealt with this too.

He will touch my hair and arms, will come up behind me and put both hands on my shoulders, and generally seems to go out of his way to get into my personal space. Needless to say i am uncomfortable. He's been out of the office the last couple days, and my relief at not having him around has made me realize how much of a problem this is.

Have you confronted anyone like this in your line of work, or spoken to a manager? Asked to move desks away from the guy in question? What happened?

Anyone in here have experience with UML in the real entreprise world?

As a student I've learned a lot about documentation and software architectural design, I've worked 3 different places and worked with customers that were developers and all of them seemed to not really do architecture and documentation that well. Personally I find having an overview/guideline for bigger project really helpful

how come you don't see better software documentation and UML out there?

Maybe I just haven't found the right place yet

Anyone else test there program or website every like 10 minutes to make sure it works, just to avoid spending half and hour or more coding and finding out loads of things don't work?

IT admins of devRant, explain my dumbass the following:

Why would an IT department put servers in a VPN without TLS.

They presume they don't need because muh-VPN.

And then they don't want to hand out VPN connections to anyone and force me to use Citrix RDP 🤡

I know there are security reasons, but is there not a better way? Like goteleport.com ?

Asking for a friend (or several)

Is there anyone here that's been doing the job 15+ years and has hit the I can't be arsed stage? The only way stuff seems to be getting done at the moment is when I hand it over to someone else. I think it's due to not really being pushed with learning new things etc. Also 3 kids in the mix might be doing it as well. Anyone know how to dig my way out of this?

Not sure about anyone else, but as a non-supporter, I'd be fully willing to view video ads to help dev rant! Hear me out: Under More->Supporters, there should be an option to watch video ads so that non supporters can help support in their own way (without advertisements flooding the UI of the app). This was just a spontaneous idea and apologize in advance if it's stupid 😂

Chrome has failed me. At least, I was disappointed.
So, I have been working with an animation studio to make some changes to their Website, typical WordPress website.
Nothing wrong there, I have a copy of their WP site running on a localhost so I can make changes & tests before pushing to bitbucket (then to be deployed). Now, a lot of the changes I have been making are minor css, html & js changes. Mostly FrontEnd changes.
The frustration came when working on a couple JS sheets; I would change some CSS and JS, save the files then go over to Chrome to test them out.
Open the localhost and test the changes, CSS changes worked! Looks good, but for what ever reason the JS functionality would not change. 2 ish hours of frustration, seeing only half of these changes working I decide to step out for a coffee break. Then I remembered; Chrome has a nasty habit of caching files it has used before for later use. Turns out it was using some older versions of the files that it had cached.
Thankfully I remembered this; only ended up being 2 hours of frustration. For anyone else using Chrome for development; keep this in mind.

man I really feel down as a dev that that develops privacy software.And man it sucks with your school telling you your desires of privacy are evil and having under appreciated skills.if there is anyone out there like me I want you to know your not alone

!rant
First post...starting a new job today, and I will be working as a JavaScript developer (Node, angular). I only worked with Java before this job and my only JS experience is with little side projects. I am super excited to get start working with new technologies. Anyone out there have a similar experience?

This happened about 2 years ago. My colleague at work, who's a kind and smart soul was actually yelling at the phone. Before that nobody had heard her yell at anyone, let alone a client.

The history was that she found out that the client sent her falsified official documents and she confronted him about that, so the idiot client started laughing then yelling that she had to be 'on his side' since he hired us as consultants. That's when she started yelling.

How can anyone be so cynical?
This is also our job to save your moron ass from your own stupidity.
If she didn't found out and the documents sent to the government there would be a lot of trouble for everyone especially the client.

After that we all comforted her and told her she did right. Unfortunately the client wasn't fired (a friend of the boss) but of course we all declined to work with that client again.

So, the internet is over. Just in case you didn’t notice. If you post a link to anything that involves you: an article, a podcast, a thing you built, a video you made - then mods and admins and trolls get their pitchforks and ban you or roast you or delete you.

This is not the way.

Not only are the walled gardens of apple, Twitter, Facebook/Instagram, breaking the web into little areas - and marketing is buying your time - but we’re doing it to ourselves too.

I can’t post a video about some of my favorite programming books in
/learnprogramming or I’m immediately banned!? Every link that takes people away from your ad dollars is ‘spam?’ Without any useful discourse and content - then why would anyone be there in the first place.

One time I posted a link HERE about how people could get CSS help in the CSS discord and I got fire-stormed for self-promotion. Really? Hundreds of hours helping people learn programming - for free... is my self promotion? Is everyone so insecure that they can’t allow anyone else to talk about their work? It’s super scary.

This is how you control people. This is Nazi shit. It’s a slippery Slope. Watch out.

And whatever you do... don’t share links to your things. That is NOT what the internet was made for.

I just can't get over the fact that the .com domain I have been eyeing for is still out of my reach. This name popped to my brain after brain storming over a week when I started making sites when i was a teen.

The domain has been sitting there unused with a basic webpage containing some ugly web design from 90s era.

I have been eyeing it for over 6 years now and just found out he renewed it for yet another 3 years!

I don't want to approach him about it either, I'm not that desperate for it that I'd pay millions for it.

The wait continues...

Anyone been in a similar situation?

!rant

Today is the day, i'll finish up all the contract work that sits on my desk, cash in the money and finish up the free website i made for a befriended gamedev.

I've been sooo angry about other humans over the week but escaping into development and helping the few friendly humans out there is making me calm again.

If anyone of you feels down, grab a tee, clean your desk, take a bath and just start coding silly things, or try to help a mate in need. :-)

Anyone with a realistic roadmap on how to go about Freelancing?
What should I look out for?
What your advise ( please no generic popular BS)?
What platform should I use ( it’s seem there are hundreds of platform already).
A roadmap is needed please.
Thank you in advance.

I have found a DVD with a Windows XP backup file with my late mother's photos on it. However, nothing seems to open the file. I, of course, did a lot of Google searches on how to do this and what it seems to come down to is a need to run the restore on an XP, Windows 7, or Server 2008 machine. There are several legacy ntbackup restore programs out there, and Microsoft seems to still have a page for downloading that, but it relies on the long-deprecated Removable Storage Service that no longer exists on Windows 10. So, a) Microsoft are a bunch of jerks for not supporting restores of legacy backups and b) does anyone have a successful method you've used to get a BKF file to restore? All the things I've tried say the BKF file is corrupted, but how to know for sure when Removable Storage Service isn't present?

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?

Once upon a time, I'm in the process of going to a new job. But in the middle of the recruitment process, it turns out I don't like that company, for reasons I didn't know before.

Anyone have a good idea how to escape this pit?

*My CV has been thrown there

I'm in a dilemma.

I started this job about 9 months ago and it's really not what I expected. I'm the sole developer in my department that handles applications built around our customer database.

Well it's pretty boring and there is a lot of technical debt with the source code since usually 1-2 people are taking care of it so they never had proper conventions. And we have super old applications running on legacy solutions like cold fusion 🤢

I also receive a lot of problem tickets that never contain enough information to actually do anything and the people don't realize I have no idea what they do or what their business processes are.

The upside is I'm paid very very well for this job > 100 in a place where cost of living is cheap. And when there's no work to do I can work on side projects.

It's really not fulfilling work and idk if I should stick it out. I also don't know where I would head next. There's not very many companies working on cool stuff. Maybe remote work?

Anyone else have a similar story?

Happy new years! I hope you are able to take steps towards or end up accomplishing your dreams this year. You all have the best genitals and are very attractive. If you run into anyone IRL very less fortunate than you, consider letting them rant to you and maybe lending them a helping hand. Theres lots of unfortunate voices unheard out there. Keep being the best and don’t let the world get you down!

Does anyone knows a Syncing / Self Hosted Cloud Solution that has native Integration for Windows and Ubuntu?
I want some shared storage between my Laptop and my PC. Save a project on one side, grab the laptop goes to a friend and work there with the data, without uploading / downloading the files manually or using some web interface for that.

I have also a root server with stroage and internet. So if it happens automagicly in background it would be fine.

Is there a good solution out there? Or some ideas / frameworks to programm it by myself?

Diff and merges are not needed. I never will work on both systems at the same time.

Researching a new communication platform (Twilio, Vonage, etc), I started with Plivo. Created an account, they offer from free credits to try out the platform, so I set up a phone number and attempt to use their API, didn't quite work. I contact their support through their online portal (being very detailed about what I'm trying to do and the issue I'm having)
A day later they reply asking "Could you tell us how you are using Plivo and the issue you are having?"
That would be OK, but my question from the online portal was in the body of the email message. My first reply started with "You not reading the <bleep>ing message is my issue right now.", but I copied and pasted the same message. I even included a screenshot of the API I was having a problem with (so they could see what I see).
Next day I'm trying out a different area of their API and there is a banner "Incoming and Outgoing phone calls are disabled on this account. Contact Support blah blah blah"
I thought, OK, its a trial account, they probably want some additional validation before allowing anyone to make phone calls. I jump thru the hoops, next day I receive an email "Thanks for sharing the details with us. I have reached out to the Product Team to assist us with this and I'll share more details with you as soon as they revert."
Revert what? The block? Waited until next day, banner still there, so I replied again. Not another reply until the next day.
"Our internal team analyzed the account details and unfortunately, we would not be able to remove the restrictions from your account."
WTF!? Plivo, we are going to give you *money* and you can't answer my question! I'm not asking for free stuff, not asking for help finding the 'any key', your API is supposed to support XYZ feature and it's not working...OK. We're done.
I try to close the account (has too much of my personal info I don't want these clowns to have) and I get an error 'Unable to close the account'. WTF!

Does anyone watch the movie The Mack (1973)?

Today I am working with some legacy code written by a shitty developer who isn't with us anymore. Every time I make a change the code screams at me with problems.

Every error makes me feel like saying this quote from Goldie the pimp...

"List to me and listen good. I don't give a shit what happened to you!.......get back out there and get me my money!"

Did I ever tell you guys about that time I got a whole monitor for 1 Zar?

Probably but I shall again.

"twas the same auction at work where I got the R100 laptop. There was an LG Flatron W2243S listed with no reserve price. It had description "Faint line down middle of screen"

Figured what the hell, bid R1, mostly to see kif anyone else would. I won it. Literally just swapped out the vga cable and did a factory reset. All happy now. Only downside is that it's vga only but hey, what else are you gonna do with R1?

Anyone else out there got any QlikView Certs? Got mine this summer for a summer job. they paid for the training and everything.

Not a rant but I kinda wanted to see if anyone else feels the same way and might have advice on how to overcome this:

So I work as a student in research. Meaning there is not much documentation and things are chaneging fast, some things are also fairly complicated.
I have a really good supervisor.

However. I am super scared of asking about how things work. Whenever we discuss things and she notices I'm insecure about how something works, she explains it to me patiently. No probs. But insead of asking I just try out random stuff for hours. Having no clue about how things work and what I'm doing. In the end she is able to explain the issue to me within a minute.

The thing is, I think that trying to figure stuff out on my own, is the right approach. Not daring to ask questions or express my theories is really bad. I get super anxcious. Most of the time my theories and assumptions are correct. I just never dare to voice them.
The irony is, that I'm perfectly fine whenever I talk about or hold presentations which are not CS related. But if I have to do that on a CS topic I just die. I freezze, stutter, everything.... T_T
Like come on. They can't do anything to me except correct me... jeez.

I'm currently doing project in Java using JavaFX for GUI and after like 6 months I found out we can bind textfields to variables(yea,dumb me) and I got more than 20 forms so of course, binding is useful than that getText method. So I think there are many things like this which will help me to optimize my code but I dont know, so can anyone tell me more stuff like this?
I'm using MongoDb so I'm currently finding easiest way to make Bson document from textfield values. Any suggestions?
(Sorry, for my bad English)

There are so many viruses out there that claim to be automatic windows driver updaters that I'm beginning to wonder if legit ones exist at all! Anyone have any experience with the real deal?

We're finishing some projects for uni. I've done mine, and am just helping out with others.

There was a friend who is doing her write-up. My other buddy was just just troubling her for fun. He threatened to press the power button on the laptop, thus sending it to hibernate. Minor nuisance; she just need to turn it back on after all.

She pleaded to leave her & let her complete the write-up. So I asked her if I could quickly re-configure the power button. You know, go to the windows power settings, and tell it to do nothing upon pressing the button.

She said no. But the way she said it struck me odd. As in "No, why would anyone do that!?". Debatable. Just to make sure, I asked whether she understood what I requested. She made a quick hand gesture of plucking the power button off!! 😐

Me & my buddy just stare at each other. "Yeah you're right, you're right, what a stupid idea...". We just slowly scoot from there. 🏃

No idea how she reached this far...

Apologies if this has been asked here before, but I wanted an open feedback on a query: Is there such a thing as overdocumenting?

I take pride in being a very articulate developer, being as descriptive as possible in my emails, internal communications, PR review comments, JIRA etc.

A product guy from the company today mentioned: "Though I understand your good intent behind being as descriptive as possible, it is possible that some of the junior engineers might get overwhelmed/ intimidated looking at those comments/ emails and it might stop them reaching out to you with your doubts."

I was not able to wrap my head around this, because I don't understand how a descriptive explanation might overwhelm anyone. It's a skill I picked up going through my career and I personally have always respected peers who documented things properly.

Open to feedback. Thank you in advance.

Honestly guys, I don't like to go to meetups and I'll tell you why:

You just sit there listening to a badly explained piece of the puzzle by some guys who care more about networking credit than the technology itself.
I know there are meetups with real enthusiasts but even then, I find the level of depth very unsatisfactory because they barely scratch the surface on the topic.
You end up leaving the event having wasted your time and your evening, while you could have been out doing something much more fun.

Here's what I do: I look up the meeting details and I see what they're going to talk about. Then, I look up information about that and I study it on my own.

Advantages:

* I get a lot more information than a mere one or two vague words about the topic combined with some silly demo that doesn't really teach anyone anything at all

* I get to digest the information at my processing speed

* I don't have to deal with the stress of trying to make small talk with people I don't know

I'm sure someone has felt like this at one point or another, especially in corporate.

Long post, TLDR: Given a large team building large enterprise apps with many parts (mini-projects/processes), how do you reduce the bus-factor and the # of Brent's (Phoenix Project)?

# The detailed version #

We have a lot of people making changes, building in new processes to support new flows or changes in the requirements and data.

But we also have to support these except when it gets into Production there is little information to quickly understand:
- how it works
- what it does/supposed to do
- what the inputs and dependencies are

So often times, if there's an issue, I have to reverse engineer whatever logic I can find out of a huge mess.

I guess the saying goes: the only people that know how it works is whoever wrote it and God.

I'm a senior dev but i spend a lot of time digging thru source code and PROD issues to figure out why ... is broken and how to maybe fix it.

I think in Agile there's supposed to be artifacts during development but never seen em.

Personally whenever i work on a new project, I write down notes and create design diagrams so i can confirm things and have easy to use references while working.

I don't think anyone else does that. And afterwards, I don't have anywhere to put it/share it. There is no central repo for this stuff other than our Wiki but for the most part, is like a dumping ground. You have to dig for information and hoping there's something useful.

And when people leave, information is lost forever and well... we hire a lot of monkeys... so again I feel a lot of times i m trying to recover information from a corrupted hard drive...

The only way real information is transferred is thru word of mouth, special knowledge transfer sessions.

Ideally I would like anything that goes into PROD to have design docs as well as usage instructions in order for anyone to be able to quickly pick it up as needed but I'm not sure if that's realistic.

Even unit tests don't seem to help much as they just test specific functions but don't give much detail about how a whole process is supposed to work.

Rant!!!
Recently, there has been this issue on StackOverflow not been friendly to beginners. I don't fully agree with that. SO is strict and rightly so because if not that, we will be flooded with repeated questions and low value answers. As a programmer, I believe when I go to SO, I want an answer quickly and fast because most at times, I'm programming and the problem I have is preventing me from moving forward. To be flooded by repeated and low quality questions and answers wouldn't help anyone. Also, on most beginner programming tutorials, were people are advised to check sites like SO when they have problems, most of them tell their listeners or readers to check if the question has been asked before, before going ahead to ask. Even SO assists you when typing your question with similar questions just to make sure you don't ask repeated questions. I rarely downvote but I understand those who do. Also, there is this talk about 'inclusivity' and some relating it to gender. It looks like people tend to slap gender and race on everything these days. To make this clear, I'm not a white male so that one wouldn't say the system favors me so I don't see the problem. The fact SO collects data about developers and it comes out that, most of the partakers are males doesn't mean SO is favoring males. SO doesn't show your gender when you ask a question. It doesn't even show your gender in your profile so what's the issue here? It will be better to get to the root of why there are few females in computer engineering and solve it there rather than blaming a site because of data collected. To know where this rant is coming from, just search StackOverflow on twitter and read the recent tweets.

Disclaimer: I should know what I'm doing but I don't. 😢

I'm a very experienced full stack dev (15+ years), but I don't know the more modern JS frameworks. I'm trying to learn React and I have a little project I'd like to do.

I have database (in both SQLite form and JSON form). I'd like to read from it, parse it and run various displays in a shared hosting environment (that doesn't have node). So webpack. And either an API to get the data or a React compatible SQL component.

But dagnamit, I cannot find a tutorial or example with this kind of set up and I can't figure it out. What packages do I need and what kind of config?

I genuinely thought this would be a traditional and simple architecture but I'm obviously mistaken. And I'm about to turn in my developer card because I'm clearly a stupid twonk.

Has anyone done this? Do you know of any tutorials or examples of this kind of thing? Is there somewhere else I should ask this question? Thanks anyway...

Anyone out of Los Angeles? Just seems like most of the community is in Europe 😂

Has anyone ever tried to send a message to a rep at PNC on their online banking?

-you can't write any 'special characters' in the message. This includes dashes, slashes, and even apostrophes ("don't" is not allowed!) among others. I guess they just pipe the message right into the SQL queries!

-I had to type a long message there, and I was tired and forgot to do my usual CTRL+A/CTRL+C ritual - BIG MISTAKE!! After clicking submit, I get a JS alert() come up saying that my session timed out after 15 minutes of inactivity (writing a large rant to PNC ofc). Back button does not bring up the filled out form to copy from, as like the whole site seems to be on the same URL. There was no way to exit the alert without losing the message. Thankfully I did not close the tab, and I was able to recover and piece together some of the text snippets using $ gcore / $ strings | less.

Overall this has to have been the worst web app I have dealt with for quite a while.

anyone from the York/Lancaster, PA area? I'm moving out there in two weeks for my first full time software engineering job!

Just about to get ready to import all of the hair sprites for my game and calculated it to be 1260 sprite strips to import... Fan-Fucking-Tastic!

To anyone out there thinking about making a 2.5D RPG, don't managing sprites is the worst thing known to man -.-

Does anyone else out there fucking Love PluralSight?!?

So i was given two issues to be fixed, and upon analysis i found out that those issues were no longer there..😅 btw can anyone tell me some resources to follow to improve your debugging skills (I am currently working on spring technology).Would be really helpful 😀

Does anyone else feels that LinkedIn is a kind of professional trash? Majority of users there are just for posting out their certificates and to but buzz words in their bio.