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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of our web developers reported a bug with my image api that shrunk large images to a thumbnail size. Basically looked like this img = ResizeImage(largeImage, 50); // shrink the image by 50%
The 'bug' was when he was passed in the thumbnail image and requesting a 300% increase, and the image was too pixelated.
I tried to explain that if you need the larger image, use the image from disk (since the images were already sized optimally for display) and the api was just for resizing downward.
Thinking I was done, the next day I was called into a large conference room with the company vice-president, two of the web-dev managers, and several of the web developers.
VP: "I received an alarming email saying you refused to fix that bug in your code. Is that correct?"
Me: "Bug? No, there is no bug. The image api is executing just as it is supposed to."
MGR1: "Uh...no it isn't. Images using *your* code is pixelated and unfit for our site and our customers."
MGR2: "Yes, I looked at your code and don't understand what the big deal is. Looks like a simple fix."
<web developers nodding their heads>
Me: "OK, I'll bite. What is the simple fix?"
<MGR2 looks over at one of the devs>
Dev1: "Well, for example, if we request an image resize of 300, and the image is only 50x50, only increase the size by 10. Maybe 15."
Me: "Wow..OK. So what if the image is, for example, 640x480?"
MGR1: "75. Maybe 80 if it's a picture of boots."
VP: "Oh yes, boots. We need good pictures of boots."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how to break this to you, but my code doesn't do 'maybe'. I mean, you have the image from disk.
You obviously used the api to create the thumbnail, but are trying to use the thumbnail to go back to the regular size. Why not use the original image?"
<Web-Dev managers look awkwardly towards the web devs>
Dev3: "Yea, well uh...um...that would require us to create a variable or something to store the original image. The place in the code where we need the regular image, it's easier to call your method."
Me: "Um, not really. You still have to resolve the product name from the URL path. Deriving the original file name is what you are doing already. Just do the same thing in your part of the code."
Dev2: "But we'd have to change our code"
Mgr2: "I know..I know. How about if we, for example, send you 12345.jpg and request a resize greater than 100, you go to disk and look for that image?"
<VP, mgrs, and devs nod happily>
Me: "Um, no that won't work. All I see is the image stream. I have no idea what file is and the api shouldn't be guessing, going to disk or anything like that."
Dev1: "What if we pass you the file name?"
<VP, mgrs, and devs nod happily again>
Me: "No, that would break the API contract and ...uh..wait...I'm familiar with your code. How about I make the change? I'm pretty sure I'll only have to change one method"
VP: "What! No...it’s gotta be more than that. Our site is huge."
<Mgrs and devs grumble and shift around in their chairs>
Me: "I'm done talking about this. I can change your code for you or you can do it. There is no bug and I'm not changing the api because you can't use it correctly."

Later I discovered they stopped using the resize api and wrote dynamic html to 'resize' the images on the client (download the 5+ meg images, and use the length and width properties)

Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...

<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>

Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.

So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:

- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole

So lets look at some example of their work:

- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"

- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"

- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"

- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.

- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"

Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them

Thats all the time we have for today,

Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:

- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

Funny. Drunk, standing here waiting for my fries and thinking about rest api implementations. I'm weird.

I started a nee personal project few weeks ago. I named it SelfVPN. Its simply a VPN client that lets you create DigitalOcean droplets and install vpn server without opening DigitalOcean panel. You just need to add your api key in application.

It takes like 5 min to create new server and deploy vpn server. So I am paying hourly usage of vpn! Even if I don't destroy droplet it wont cost more than 5$ a month.

I am thinking to open source it. But code is too messy 😅 Here is the first look of it

M: Me
FAC : Fucking annoying colleague
1.
FAC: Hey how did you set up your microservices?
M: I used docke...
FAC: But docker is hard to setup, i want an easier option
2.
FAC: Which services do you have?
M: I have one service for the api, one with redi..
FAC: Redis is not a service
3.
FAC: Do you use AWS API gateway?
M: No, in set up my ow..
FAC: why would you set up your own? I just use the one from AWS.
4.
FAC: How many instances are you have running
M: I have 5 replic...
FAC: 5 replicas? That's why i hate microservices,they are costly
5.
FAC: How did you divide up your app?
M: Since I am starting, its better to run the monolithic and then break it up lat...
FAC: I knew it,you don't actually use microservices
6.
M:(thinking)* Fucker, if you know it well why are you fucking disturbing me?? *

I've had my share of incompetent coworkers. In order of appearance:

1. A full stack dev. This one guy never, and I mean NEVER uses relationships in their tables. No indexing, no keys, nada. Couple of months later he was baffled why his page took ten seconds to load.

2. The same dev as (1). Requirement was to create some sort of "theme" feature for a web app. Hacked it by putting !important all over the place.

3. The same dev again. He creates several functions that if the data exists returns a view, and if it doesn't, "echo '0'". No, not return 0 or return false or anything, but fucking echo. This was PHP. If posted a rant about this a few months ago.

4. Same dev, has no idea what clean code is. No, not just reusable functions, he doesn't even get indenting right. Some functions have 4 spaces, some 2 tabs, some 6 tabs! And this is inside the same function. God wait until he tries Python...

5. Same dev now suggests that he become the PM. GM approves (very small company). Assigns me to travel to a client since they needed "technical assistance about the API". Was actually there to lead a UAT session.

Intermezzo, that guy went from fullstack dev to PM to sales (yes, one who calls clients to offer products) to business development, to product analyst in the span of two years.

After a year and a half there, I quit.

6. New company, a "QA engineer" who also assumes the role as the product owner. Does absolutely no tests other than "functional tests" in which he NEVER produces any form of documentation. Not even a set of test cases. He goes by "intuition".

7. Same guy as (6), hands me requirements for a feature. By "hands me" I mean he did that verbally. No spec documents, no slack chat, no Trello card. I ended up writing it as a card in Trello. Fast forward to the due date, he flips out because that wasn't what he wanted. Showed him the card. He walked away, without thinking of a solution how this mess should be handled.

Despite all this, I really don't want him (6&7) to leave the company. The devs get really stressed out at this job and he does make a really good person to laugh with/at.

A programmer once explained Nietzsche like this:
A long time ago, god created the world, but forgot to leave a developer documentation, thus the whole world was like legacy code...
And humans are like the end user of this world, and some among them spent time studying it, using the Moral API, hoping to get a result of "http 200 ok" from our world for the peace of mind. But the true operation of this world is still yet unknown...
As time passes, humans begin to find that in Moral API, good and evil are two base classes, and all the other moral properties (like ethic, justice and stuff) are just other classes based on those two classes through multiple inheritance.
One day, when programmer Nietzsche was observing the world's runtime behavior, he came up with a question:
"Did god really use good and evil as base classes? Could it be that they are actually derived classes?"
Most of the world is currently in the favor of mankind, and god must've wrote individual user cases for it's end users, he thought.
This made Nietzsche thinking: if end users are considered into two cases: the strong and the weak, how would the world be designed base on its user story?
Let's think about the strong, they can bully the weak as they please, and there's nothing the weak can do to stop them. In this case whether the Moral API exists or not doesn't fulfill the need of the strong.
But when it comes to the weak, Nietzsche thinks that because the weak cannot fight the strong, they need to belittle bullying and praise the strong for being nice. When the weak does this, it covers their powerless state to some extent, making them look somehow equal to the strong by being capable of commenting.
God might have coded the Moral API to fit the weak's requirement, also adding some public methods for the weak to comment on the strong. If the strong takes care of the weak, they call him nice and good, if the strong bullies people, they call him bad and evil.
That's when Nietzsche realized, that good and evil are both derived classes from the weak, and the base class should be the strong and the weak.
Then he started a series of studies about the Moral API, and got some thesis that persuaded lots of other end users...

I had to open the desktop app to write this because I could never write a rant this long on the app.

This will be a well-informed rebuttal to the "arrays start at 1 in Lua" complaint. If you have ever said or thought that, I guarantee you will learn a lot from this rant and probably enjoy it quite a bit as well.

Just a tiny bit of background information on me: I have a very intimate understanding of Lua and its c API. I have used this language for years and love it dearly.

[START RANT]

"arrays start at 1 in Lua" is factually incorrect because Lua does not have arrays. From their documentation, section 11.1 ("Arrays"), "We implement arrays in Lua simply by indexing tables with integers."

From chapter 2 of the Lua docs, we know there are only 8 types of data in Lua: nil, boolean, number, string, userdata, function, thread, and table

The only unfamiliar thing here might be userdata. "A userdatum offers a raw memory area with no predefined operations in Lua" (section 26.1). Essentially, it's for the API to interact with Lua scripts. The point is, this isn't a fancy term for array.

The misinformation comes from the table type. Let's first explore, at a low level, what an array is. An array, in programming, is a collection of data items all in a line in memory (The OS may not actually put them in a line, but they act as if they are). In most syntaxes, you access an array element similar to:

array[index]

Let's look at c, so we have some solid reference. "array" would be the name of the array, but what it really does is keep track of the starting location in memory of the array. Memory in computers acts like a number. In a very basic sense, the first sector of your RAM is memory location (referred to as an address) 0. "array" would be, for example, address 543745. This is where your data starts. Arrays can only be made up of one type, this is so that each element in that array is EXACTLY the same size. So, this is how indexing an array works. If you know where your array starts, and you know how large each element is, you can find the 6th element by starting at the start of they array and adding 6 times the size of the data in that array.

Tables are incredibly different. The elements of a table are NOT in a line in memory; they're all over the place depending on when you created them (and a lot of other things). Therefore, an array-style index is useless, because you cannot apply the above formula. In the case of a table, you need to perform a lookup: search through all of the elements in the table to find the right one. In Lua, you can do:

a = {1, 5, 9};
a["hello_world"] = "whatever";

a is a table with the length of 4 (the 4th element is "hello_world" with value "whatever"), but a[4] is nil because even though there are 4 items in the table, it looks for something "named" 4, not the 4th element of the table.

This is the difference between indexing and lookups. But you may say,

"Algo! If I do this:

a = {"first", "second", "third"};
print(a[1]);

...then "first" appears in my console!"

Yes, that's correct, in terms of computer science. Lua, because it is a nice language, makes keys in tables optional by automatically giving them an integer value key. This starts at 1. Why? Lets look at that formula for arrays again:

Given array "arr", size of data type "sz", and index "i", find the desired element ("el"):

el = arr + (sz * i)

This NEEDS to start at 0 and not 1 because otherwise, "sz" would always be added to the start address of the array and the first element would ALWAYS be skipped. But in tables, this is not the case, because tables do not have a defined data type size, and this formula is never used. This is why actual arrays are incredibly performant no matter the size, and the larger a table gets, the slower it is.

That felt good to get off my chest. Yes, Lua could start the auto-key at 0, but that might confuse people into thinking tables are arrays... well, I guess there's no avoiding that either way.

Currently working on the privacy site CMS REST API.

For the curious ones, building a custom thingy on top of the Slim framework.

As for the ones wondering about security, I'm thinking out a content filtering (as in, security/database compatibility) right now.

Once data enters the API, it will first go through the filtering system which will check filter based on data type, string length and so on and so on.

If that all checks out, it will be send into the data handling library which basically performs all database interactions.

If everything goes like I want it to go (very highly unlikely), I'll have some of the api actions done by tonight.

But I've got the whole weekend reserved for the privacy site!

It fucking staggers me how many backend/devops-y people don't understand what a client side "request timeout" is, versus a server side one.

What does it mean:

The client was fed up with the servers bullshit, and decided to piss off and not wait around for the server to take forever to respond, because life's too short.

How not to solve/debug this issue:

- "I've checked the API request in tool xyz, and it works fine for me"

Congratulations, you've figured out how to call an API once, in isolation to the rest of the application, and without any excessive load. And using a different client to me, with a different configuration. Lets get back to actually looking at the issue shall we?

- "I only see HTTP 200's in the logs"

Yep, you probably will in most circumstances, because its the client complaining about it taking too long, not the server. If the server was telepathetic and knew what the client was thinking/doing at all times, we wouldn't have half of the errors we do.

- "Ah ok, I understand ... so how do I solve this?"

Your asking me? I don't fucking know, I didn't build the server! Put better logging in place and figure out why sometimes it takes forever.

Jesus fucking christ

I'm thinking about doing a live coding stream on twitch this saturday, late afternoon or evening (CET).
I've never done a live stream before.

Do you have any suggestions or interests?
I'm thinking about something like a small RESTful API with Angular4/TypeScript (frontend, single page application) and CraftCMS/PHP (backend) with somebasic theory about HTTP requests / response, redirecting, data transfer and interfaces et cetera...

The duration will be around 2-4 hours, maybe longer if I have enough Mate & Beer.

But it's all just an idea at the moment. 😉

I will create an empty project for the stream on my Github and push to it during streaming, so you can pull it live or later.

Friend: Can you write me a discord bot?
Me: Sure, I guess.
Me: *thinking* I can probably do it in 2 hours or less*
Me: *2 hours later* why does this API work like that and why the fuck is my node module folder so big???

I had a coworker that was an Air Force pilot (99% certain he was telling the truth as I was working for a government contractor and he had security clearance so I'd be a little surprised if he fooled HR and our whole team). Thing is... He genuinely believed the earth is flat. Whenever anybody would ask "haven't you seen the curvature of the earth? Like... More than once?" He'd respond with "yes I have, what's your point?". Uh.... Okay.

Didn't help that he also was convinced cpp is the only language you ever need for any project. Like, "what if instead of building a web API and two separate native mobile app frontends (Swift/Java)... We instead build our own proprietary C++ framework that somehow runs on IOS and Android and we can also use it for our Backend instead of .Net?"

I'm not saying I love Java or Swift or that at some point I haven't thought about why we can't just use cpp in both, but you're supposed to grow out of that kind of thinking. I think every noobie or college students thinks "oh there's got to be a way". But at some point in your career you realize even if you could, it wouldn't be any easier to use and the performance gain would crazy small compared to amount of effort and you'd be playing catch up with both IOS/Android forever.

But no matter how many times we'd shoot it down, he'd keep bringing it up. And he wasn't straight out of school or something. He had like 20 years of programming experience.

I don't have a lot of memorable co-workers that were positive but honestly I think that's because usually if they're good at what they do I don't have to interact with them a bunch or spend time thinking "Jesus what am I going to have to fix next from this guy". I definitely have worked with good/great programmers, they just don't stand out as much as the shitty ones.

TL;DR age != competence

My boss is a fucking computer illiterate self taught programmer.

Don't get me wrong, he can do shit, pretty shitty but it gets done...

But the dude has 38 fucking years old and somehow still searches for keys on the fucking keyboard and struggles to touch type anything...

I sometimes crying the fuck out when I have to help him with something...

I'm having a mini fucking panic attack right now just thinking of it... Fuck

He is our "manager" but doesn't even have the fucking balls to confront his own subordinates when they need to be confronted... Everyone is aware of this and everyone is fucking around... And no one sees any consequences... I wonder why deadlines are always missed...

He is so passive that every fucking thing someone asks he goes and says it is OK...

I was studying same psychology about ignorance and I think he lacks the understanding that shit is hard to do...

We literary had a conversation the other day something like that:

Boss: so, what do you think? One call to the api for it to return all data or multiple calls to return smaller ones?

Me: well... It takes ~180ms just for latency to the server for one call, if you have 10 calls it will take 180*10ms, it is better if we have one call and cache it if necessary on the backend.

( he has no fucking clue wtf caching is, besides browser cache)

Boss: (looking confuse AS FUCK!!) Well, I don't get it... Maybe I'll test it later.

Me thinking: test how you dumb motherfucker? On you fucking workstation with no fucking latency?
There is no fucking test. I'm stating it. IT IS A FUCKING FACT!

Me: well, it takes that for the call to go to the api and come back , its simple math. 1 == 180, 10 == 1800.
Suit yourself.

So we ordered a piece of software from external software house becouse I was low on time and we needed it asap.

So. Long story short, their software was bugged as hell, they deny all the bugs and they have their BDD that they done and anything we say about it like "feature XYZ is broken on firefox" they will deny it "becouse it wasn't on BDD" or "let's get on call" (in which +- 6-7 people participate from their side and we of course have to pay them for this...)

So they fixed like 20% of bugs (mostly trivials/minors) Application is fairly small scope. You have integration with like 3 endpoints on arbitary API, user registration/login, few things to do in database (mainly math running from cron).

They done it in ASP so I don't know the language and enviroment so can't just fix it myself.

2 days ago (monday) they annoyed me to point where I just started to break things. For starters I found that every numeric input is vunrable to integer overflow (which is blocker). I figured most of fields are purefect opportunity to XSS (but I didn't bother to do JS... anything but not JS...). I figured I can embed into my name/surname/phone (none validated) anything in HTML...

So for now we have around 25 bugs, around 15 of them are blockers.

They figured it's somehow our fault that it's bugged and decided to do demo with us to show off how perfectly it works. I'm happy to break their demos. I figured I will register bunch users that have name - image with fixed/absolute position top:0;left:0 width/height 100% - this will effectively brick admin panel

Also I figured I can do some addotional sounds in background becouse why not. And I just dont know what to put in. It links to my server for now so I can freely change content of bricked admin panel.

I have curl's ready to execute in case they reset database.

I can put in GIFs or heck, even videos, dosen't really matter. Framework escapes some things for them so at least that. But audio/image/video works.

Now I have 2 questions:
- what image + audio combo will work the best (of course we need to keep it civil). Im thinking finding some meme with bugs or maybe nuclear logo image with some siren sound
- am I evil person?

Edit:

I havent stated this clearly:

"There is no BDD that describes that if user inserts malicious input server should deny it" - that's almost literally what we get from them....

Arrived at office then almost immediately the boss, who's also a developer, tells me he changed something on the protocol/api.

Me thinking: u just broke the api without thinking on consequences but hey... Ur the boss...

Later, he says: look, our app crashes!

Me: obviously...

:/ what the f**k was he thinking... :/

I've recently received another invitation to Google's Foobar challenges.

A while ago someone here on devRant (which I believe works at Google, and whose support I deeply appreciate) sent me a couple of links to it too. Unfortunately back then I didn't take the time to learn the programming languages (Python or Java) that Google requires for these challenges. This time I'm putting everything on Python, as it's the easiest language to learn when coming from Bash.

But at the end of the day.. I am a sysadmin, not a developer. I don't know a single thing about either of these languages. Yet I can't take these challenges as the sysadmin I am. Instead, I have to learn a new language which chances are I'll never need again outside of some HR dickhead's interview with lateral thinking questions and whiteboard programming, probably prohibited from using Google search like every sane programmer and/or sysadmin would for practical challenges that actually occur in real life.

I don't want to do that. Google is a once in a lifetime opportunity, I get that. Many people would probably even steal that foobar link from me if they could. But I don't think that for me it's the right thing to do. Google has made a serious difference by actually challenging developers with practical scenarios, and that's vastly superior to whatever a HR person at any other company could cobble together for an interview. But there's one thing that they don't seem to realize. A company like Google consists of more than just developers. Not only that, it probably consists - even within their developer circles - of more than just Python and Java developers. If any company would know about languages that are more optimized such as C, it would be Google that has to leverage this performance in order to be able to deliver their services.

I'll be frank here. Foobar has its own issues that I don't like. But if Google were a nice company, I'd go for it all the way nonetheless - after all, they are arguably the single biggest tech company in the world, and the tech industry itself is one of the biggest ones in the world nowadays. It's safe to say that there's likely no opportunity like working at Google. But I don't think it's the right thing. Even if I did know Python or Java... Even if I did. I don't like Google's business decisions.

I've recently flashed my OnePlus 6T with LineageOS. It's now completely Google-free, except for a stock Yalp account (that I'm too afraid to replace with my actual Google account because oh dear, third-party app stores, oh dear that could damage our business and has to be made highly illegal!1!). My contacts on that phone are are all gone. They're all stored on a Google server somewhere (except for some like @linuxxx' that I consciously stored on device storage and thus lost a while back), waiting for me to log back in and sync them back. I've never asked for this. If Google explicitly told me that they'd sync all my contacts to my Google account and offer feasible alternatives, I'd probably given more priority to building a CalDAV and CardDAV server of my own. Because I do have the skills and desire to maintain that myself. I don't want Google to do this for me.

Move fast and break things. I've even got a special Termux script on my home screen, aptly named Unfuck-Google-Play. Every other day I have to use it. Google Search. When I open it on my Nexus 6P, which was Google's foray into hardware and in which they failed quite spectacularly - I've even almost bent and killed it tonight, after cursing at that piece of shit every goddamn day - the Google app opens, I type some text into it.. and then it just jumps back to the beginning of whatever I was typing. A preloader of sorts. The app is a fucking web page parser, or heck probably even just an API parser. How does that in any way justify such shitty preloaders? How does that in any way justify such crappy performance on anything but the most recent flagships? I could go on about this all day... I used to run modern Linux on a 15 year old laptop, smoothly. So don't you Google tell me that a - probably trillion dollar - company can't do that shit right. When there's (commercialized) community projects like DuckDuckGo that do things a million times better than you do - yet they can't compete with you due to your shit being preloaded on every phone and tablet and impossible to remove without rooting - that you Google can't do that and a lot more. You've got fucking Google Assistant for fucks sake! Yet you can't make a decent search app - the goddamn thing that your company started with in the first place!?

I'm sorry. I'd love to work at Google and taste the diversity that this company has to offer. But there's *a lot* wrong with it at the business end too. That is something that - in that state - I don't think I want to contribute to, despite it being pretty much a lottery ticket that I've been fortunate enough to draw twice.

Maybe I should just start my own company.

We are a small size product based company. There was a change in management a year back and the new management decided to fire the entire engineering team one by one. I was hired as full time back-end developer (C++). Just after I joined they removed the last 2 engineers from the previous regime and handed over devops and Python API development to me as well.
There was no documentation for the main product which was a sophisticated piece of software. There were no comments in the code as well. I had to go through line by line (roughly 100,000 lines of code).
Then they decide to hire more devs.Turned out to be false hope. They hired interns who had no programming knowledge.
Now they got two clients who are interested in using the service. They lured them using empty promises. The product is not stable. The cloud infrastructure is not at all ready. The APIs are a mess. I don't know which one to work on.
Worst part is that there is no other technical person in the office.

I'm thinking about quitting now. I don't know why I haven't already.😖😖

That moment when you work the whole day to write a discord bot from scratch. No discord.py and other wrappers. Pure websockets, oauth2, https, json loads here and there. Understanding how the discord API works was a real challenge, but I did it :).
Most of my time was spent on discord's gateway connection and identification system.

The bot can renew its token, get all the guilds it is part of, all the channels and users of these guilds, send message and communicate with the gateway.

Tomorrow I will start connecting it to a voice channel and let it "speak". Thinking of combining text-to-speech with it, but I am not sure how well they are going to harmonize together.

So we have an API that my team is supposed send messages to in a fire and forget kind of style.

We are dependent on it. If it fails there is some annoying manual labor involved to clean that mess up. (If it even can be cleaned up, as sometimes it is also time-sensitive.)

Yet once in a while, that endpoint just crashes by letting the request vanish. No response, no error, nothing, it is just gone.

Digging through the log files of that API nothing pops up. Yet then I realize the size of the log files. About ~30GB on good old plain text log files.

It turns out that that API has taken the LOG EVERYTHING approach so much too heart that it logs to the point of its own death.

Is circular logging such a bleeding edge technology? It's not like there are external solutions for it like loggly or kibana. But oh, one might have to pay for them. Just dump it to the disk :/

This is again a combination of developers thinking "I don't need to care about space! It's cheap!" and managers thinking "100 GB should be enough for that server cluster. Let's restrict its HDD to 100GB, save some money!"

And then, here I stand trying to keep my sanity :/

Why the fuck does your API have to send 401 when the server is down.

Just spent an hour thinking something was wrong with my auth wrapper.

Disclaimer: This is not a Windows hate rant as this problem has been solved by Microsoft(partially).

I went to a hackathon last year at an engineering college. It was not such grand hackathon as people have in USA or Europe. So I entered in this competition trying to develop a medical app which asks the user detail about his/her problems then asks questions to match the symptoms of diseases. So me and a guy(who isn't a coder) tried to develop that app. He provided the data of diseases, I tried to develop kind of AI app with those data but found that job too hard for one day hackathon. So I wrote an email for api medic for their api which I was going to use. I then coded continuously for 4 hours in Android studio for the android app. The event manager told us late in the day that repo had been made for the hackathon and we must push our codes before 12 that night. The event manager provided the repo very late that day maybe around 6. I did a big mistake not creating my own repo on github to save every code I had written from time to time.(After this e vent whatever I code I save it in a repo). I was running Windows 10 on one of my laptop and ubuntu on my another. Due to some divine badluck I was using my Windows 10 laptop on that hackathon. So around maybe 10 I was about to wrap up the day push the code to repo. I went to getself a cup of coffee and returned to find lo and behold fucking BSOD. I was fucked, it was my first hackathon so made another misatake of using emulator rather than my android phone. My Android phone was not responding good that day so I used the android emulator.

From that day on I do three things:
1. Always push my projects to github repo.
2. Use android phone after running some minor tests on emulator.
3. Never use windows(Happy arch user till eternity.)

You might be thinking even though BSOD, it can be recovered. But didn't happen in my case, the windows revert back to the time I had just upgraded from Windows 8.1 to 10.

Tries to use SoundCloud API for a client

Docs say you need a client key

Wants to create one by signing up clients application

Signup-Form says:applicazion registration currently not available

Goes to soundcloud dev forums

Raging devs rage about that soundcloud has terminated their api registration for about 13 months now

Me thinking: That's probably the best way to make a conpany grow!

Gave the marketing team access to JIRA and gave them permissions to create tickets. Don’t know if that was a management’s design or what. Tickets were poorly written and I had to make frequent follow ups to figure out what the heck was actually being requested. I did get accused of “questioning the request” at least once. It was a big WTF because I think marketing thought they managed dev team but they didn’t.

Marketing also didn’t give a damn about agile processes despite being told some simple rules, such as don’t change your ticket details after a dev has already begun work on it. I would pick up a ticket thinking it’s just html and css updates, then it would change to include an api update. No no no. You’ve just turned a 1 day ticket into a 1 week ticket. I don’t have time for these shenanigans.

I would also submit tickets for code review and marketing would say it’s not ready for review. Then why was that ticket in the to do column for the past two days?! They couldn’t make a decision and would submit revisions every single day.

And they would think devs could do everything. No, never assume the front end dev can pick up back end tasks.

No one on dev team really cared because we were all looking for new jobs anyway. The company was planning to lay us off in a year. Every month a dev gave notice and left.

Not sure if it was 2016 or late 2015, but it's a fun story anyway (and if it's not you'll at least learn something from it).

Back at the time I was quite new to unit testing (weird how it has become second nature in a years time). I was writing some software that was supposed to send out some SMS to customers. Of course this had to be tested. However, it was a bit difficult to test (or so I thought) without actually receiving an SMS to know if it was sent. So I decided to use the live API key to make sure the sending of SMS was actually working correctly. I tried it a few times but didn't receive an SMS. So I kept working on it and running tests.

The testing setup I had at the time was just a continues loop that went through all tests to make sure it all still worked (I've moved to only checking on file changes now, but that is besides the point). Keep in mind I was still running these tests, in a loop, with the _live_ API key.

So the end of the working day arrives and I go home and sit in the train. All of the sudden I receive some test SMS. I was thinking "hey nice, it did work". Then I started receiving more. It soon turned out to be an alarmingly big amount of SMS. It stopped around 100, but don't think that was the end of it. Oh no. I had changed the number to send the SMS to from my own number to a different number (+31612345678 to be exact, which I found out later isn't an actual phone number. I really hope I was right about that). I was beginning to become nervous, but there wasn't much I could do.

The next day I returned to work and checked the API for sent SMS. Turns out I had sent a couple of thousand (I think between two and three thousand) SMS in a couple of hours. Most of them to the test number I had supplied.

This probably cost the company a couple of hundred euros. Luckily my colleagues and team leader all thought it was pretty funny, but did tell me not to do it again. And I haven't of course.

Lesson learned: don't use live API keys during testing (among other things :)).

So yeah that was probably my worst dev experience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

it also seems kinda slow for responses,

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

While I work on my devRant client, I always end up thinking, "how would dfox do it for the backend".

Some of the functions I have include:
-fetching new rants, 250 at a time
-remembering the ones I've read and filtering those out (kinda similar to Algo)
-checking for updates from followed users and new notifications

My implementions are kinda spammy though part of it is because I need to use the existing API.

But even so, how would/does he implement these so all the users' requests don't end up bringing down the server, and efficiently store and retrieve everyone's view history?

My problems are small compared to his... How do you think and deal with problems at that scale though?

People are so obsessed with apis nowadays that I was thinking about writing a rest api to get the amount of fucks that i want to give to the client whenever they ask for some change requests or improvements..

I can't stop myself from thinking like a computer when I'm sick.

The OS that runs my body is kinda fucked up right now. It was very vulnerable and now it got infected by viral executables sent out by an agent which happens to be on same work network that I'm connected to. Well, it executed and populated feelings of infatuation and crush in my heart drive. ( pun intended )

As a precaution, I patched the vulnerabilities by masking response of my Emotions API.

To further secure my system, I'll be executing memory intensive tasks that will also put my hardware to it's limits. According to my estimates, this will stall further execution of this infection and eventually kill them while rewarding me with upgraded hardware.

Guys what I want to know is how do you secure your code so that they pay you after you deliver the code to them?
So recently I was in this internship that I secured with an over-the-phone interview and the guy who was contacting me was the CEO of the company (I'm going to refer to him as "the fucking cunt" from now on). He asked me to do some OCR and translations and I managed to write a few scripts that automate the entire process. The fucking cunt made me login remotely to his desktop which was connected to the server (who the fuck does that) and I had to operate on the server from his system. I helped him with the installation and taught him how to use the scripts by altering the parameters and stuff, and you know what the fucking cunt did from the next day onward? Dropped contact. Like completely. I kept bombing emails upon emails and tried calling him day after day, the fucking cunt either picked up and cut the call immediately on recognising its me or didn't pick up at all. And the reason he wasn't able to pay me was, and I quote, "I am in US right now, will pay you when I get back to India." I was like "The fuck was PayPal invented for?" Being the naive fool that I was, I believed him (it was my first time) and waited patiently till the date he mentioned and then lodged a complain in the portal itself where he had posted the job initially. They raised a concern with the employer and you know what the fucking cunt replied? "He has not been able to achieve enough accuracy on the translations". Doesn't even know good translation systems don't exist till date ( BTW I used a client for the google translate API). It has been weeks now and still the bitch has not yet resolved the issue.And the worst part of it was I got a signed contract and gave him a copy of my ID for verification purposes.
I'm thinking of making a mail bomb and nagging him every single day for the rest of his life. What do you guys think?

Discovered pro tip of my life :
Never trust your code

Achievements unlocked :
Successfully running C++ GPU accelerated offscreen rendering engine with texture loading code having faulty validation bug over a year on production for more than 1.5M daily Android active users without any issues.

History : Recently I was writing a new rendering engineering that uses our GPU pipeline engine.. and our prototype android app benchmark test always fails with black rendering frame detection assertion.

Practice:
Spend more than a month to debug a GPU pipeline system based on directed acyclic graph based rendering algorithm.

New abilities added :
Able to debug OpenGL ES code on Android using print statement placed in source code using binary search.

But why?
I was aware of the issue over a month and just ignored it thinking it's a driver bug in my android device.. but when the api was used by one of Android dev, he reported the same issue. In the same day at night 2:59AM ....

Satan came to me and told me that " ok listen man, here is what I am gonna do with you today, your new code will be going production in a week, and the renderer will give you just one black frame after random time, and after today 3AM, your code will not show GL Errors if you debug or trace. Buhahahaha ahhaha haahha..... Puffff"

And he was gone..
Thanks satan for not killing me.. I will not trust stable production code anymore enevn though every line is documented and peer reviewed.

Customer: I want to be included in any and all design and development meeting in the future.

Me: OK, I mean, I'm just one person so there's not formal meetings as such...

Customer: Nevertheless, I wish to be included and ensure my needs are met.

Some time passes.

Me: So, I'm thinking of swapping out the old Beanshell interface, cos, really... Interpreted, scriptable Java isn't great and most users don't want to write Java just to run some jobs. Could you help me with creating an API that fits you and your departments needs?

Customer: No, I'm way to busy to deal with this right now!

Me: And when would be convenient for you?

Customer: I don't know, just not now.

To this day, despite successfully integrating the rhino js engine into the app, part of the software I develop has a bean shell interface rather than js, Python or lua.

-_- I hate bean shell...

{ “dow”: “10000001,10000002” }

Me: So what does this mean in the JSON response and why isn’t it a JSON collection?
Dynamics guys: that represents the days of the week. Because that is how it comes out of Microsoft Dynamics.

I’m thinking that they are either bad rest API programmers MS is bad at JSON. I can’t see the code so I don’t know which. No fixes because budget.

I just thought "oh! some of the response.subscribers_list.title are missing" after seeing this on YouTube, anyone think like this or backend development has really got to me ?

!rant, but kinda

My new director wants to buy a solution for a portal environment that my institution currently has. I have no qualms over it. My only issue was the company that sells it to be known to provide close to 0 fucking support when shit arises.

During a presentation we were told that they were using state of the art JAVA technology to render items on the page and that their ApI was easy for devs to grasp. This caught my attention since I know of very few and obscure Java frameworks that work with frontend tech (as in, your frontend logic is legit in Java)

The sales people proceed to show us React. Obviously thinking that no one knows what REact was. The dude continues with "This is new Java tech" all proud and shit prompting me to interject that it is "Javascript" the dude brushes it away saying "same thing" to which I reply with "Negative, please make sure that you properly discern Java from Javascript since Java is to Javascript as car is to carpet, completely different environments" the dude sarcastically says that "oh well, didn't know one of the people here was more aware of our own technology than we are" to which I say "and not only that, but the final say in us adopting your tech is mine, so I would rather you keep the sarcasm and the attitude to yourself, bring in a tech person if need be and learn these distinctions since we don't work with Java"

My new director later on went to talk to me since he apparently thought that Java and JS were related in some way. I can't really fault it, last time the dude touched programming was in the early 2000s, previous boss was a C and COBOL developer, but the previous dude would ALWAYS take my word no questions ask, this dude was there asking me if I was sure that Javascript and Java were really completely different environments asking me to show him.

I do not like to be questioned. I shoot the shit here and don't really involve myself with more technical aspects under this platform unless it involves concrete architecture discussions and even there I really don't care with engaging on a forum concerning that. But concerning my job I really.......really do not like to be questioned by people that know way the fuck less than me. I started coding when I was 17, I am 30 now, with a degree and years of experience. I really hate to be questioned by this dude.

I've been using the Square REST API and I spent one hour thinking there was something wrong in my code until I f** found that THEY were not following OAuth 2 guidelines, which made their workflow incompatible with the OAuth lib I was using, so I had to mark an exception for Square's OAuth from the rest of my OAuths. Specifically, RFC 6749 Section 4.2.2 and 5.1.

However, after reading OAuth 2 guidelines, I became angry at THEM instead. The parameter `expires_in` should be the "lifetime in seconds" after the response. This will always be innevitably inaccurate, since we are not taking into account the latency of the response. This is, however, not a huge problem, since the shortest token lifetimes are of an hour (like f** Microsoft Active Directory, who my cron jobs have to check every ten minutes for new access tokens). Many workflows (like Microsoft, Square, and Python's oauthlib) have opted to add the `expires_at` parameter to be more precise, which marks the time in UTC. However, there's no convention about this. oauthlib and Microsoft send the time in Unix seconds, but Square does this in ISO 8601. At this point, ISO 8601 is less ambigious. Sending a raw integer seems ambiguous. For example, JavaScript interprets integer time as Unix _milliseconds_, but Python's time library interprets it as _seconds_. It's just a matter of convention, a convention that is not there yet.

Hope this all gets solved in OAuth 2.1 pleeeaasseee

Been writing some Python apps for the last weeks and I really enjoy the language. I got all the basic stuff down but not sure how to progress to learn the more advanced stuff. What even is advanced stuff in Python and where can I find information about it?

I'm thinking about creating an API, any advanced techniques I could benefit or use for that?

That's it, where do I send the bill, to Microsoft? Orange highlight in image is my own. As in ownly way to see that something wasn't right. Oh but - Wait, I am on Linux, so I guess I will assume that I need to be on internet explorer to use anything on microsoft.com - is that on the site somewhere maybe? Cause it looks like hell when rendered from Chrome on Ubuntu. Yes I use Ubuntu while developing, eat it haters. FUCK.

This is ridiculous - I actually WANT to use Bing Web Search API. I actually TRIED giving up my email address and phone number to MS. If you fail the I'm not a robot, or if you pass it, who knows, it disappears and says something about being human. I'm human. Give me free API Key. Or shit, I'll pay. Client wants to use Bing so I am using BING GODDAMN YOU.

Why am I so mad? BECAUSE THIS. Oauth through github, great alternative since apparently I am not human according to microsoft. Common theme w them, amiright?

So yeah. Let them see all my githubs. Whatever. Just GO so I can RELAX. Rate limit fuck shit workaround dumb client requirements google can eat me. Whats this, I need to show my email publicly? Verification? Sure just go. But really MS, this looks terrible. If I boot up IE will it look any better? I doubt it but who knows I am not looking at MS CSS. I am going into my github, making it public. Then trying again. Then waiting. Then verifying my email is shown. Great it is hello everyone. COME ON MS. Send me an email. Do something.

I am trying to be patient, but after a few minutes, I revoke access. Must have been a glitch. Go through it again, with public email. Same ugly almost invisible message. Approaching a billable hour in which I made 0 progress. So, lets just see, NO EMAIL from MS, Yes it appears in my GitHub, but I have no way to log into MS. Email doesnt work. OAuth isn't picking it up I guess, I don't even care to think this through.

The whole point is, the error message was hard to discover, seems to be inaccurate, and I can't believe the IRONY or the STUPIDITY (me, me stupid. Me stupid thinking I could get working doing same dumb thing over and over like caveman and rock).

Longer rant made shorter, I cant come up with a single fucking way to get a free BING API Key. So forget it MS. Maybe you'll email me tomorrow. Maybe Github was pretending to be Gitlab for a few minutes.

Maybe I will send this image to my client and tell him "If we use Bing, get used to seeing hard to read error messages like this one". I mean that's why this is so frustrating anyhow - I thought the Google CSE worked FINE for us :/

I was talking to a friend about the current state of machine learning through tensorflow and commented about the use of Javascript as a language.

He discarded the idea as he views Javascript as something that should only be used as a frontend technology rather than something to build backends or deep learning models.

I am thorn. I have always liked Javascript but will admit that I have used it mostly in the area of front end with very few backend instances(i did create a full stack intranet app in Express once, major success for the application it was hosting, it was a very basic api which had its own nosql db with no need to interact with the company's relational data, it was perfect for the occasion and still help maintaining it from time to time)

My boi states that node's biggest issue has always been npm and the quality of packages. I always contradict those statements by saying that if one uses community standards and the best packages then one does not need to worry about the quality(i.e mongoose over some unmaintained mongo wrapper etc)

I sometimes catch myself finding that my way of thinking adapts better to JS than it even does Python (which is his preference for deep learning) and whilst there are some beastly packages for python in terms of quality and usefulness such as matplotlib etc that one can do great things with the equivalent JS.

I mean, tensorflow.js came from the same wizards that did tensorflow (obviously) and i find the functional approach of JS to be more on par with how we develop solutions.

I am no deep learning expert, and sadly I have no professional experience with machine learning. But I venture to say that we should not cast aside the great strides that the JS community has done to the language in terms of evolution and tooling. Today's Js is not your grandaddy's Js and thinking that the language is crippled because of early iterations of the language would be severely biased.

What do you guys(maybe someone with professional experience) think of Js as a language for machine learning?

Do you think the language poses something worth considering in terms of tooling and power for ml?

OK semi rant... Would like suggestions

Boss wants me to figure out someway to find the maximum load/users our servers/API/database can handle before it freezes or crashes **under normal usage**.

HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO THAT WITH 1 PC? The question seems to me to mean how big a DDoS can it handle?

I'm not sure if this is vague requirements, don't know what they're talking about, or they think I can shit gold... for nothing... or I'm missing something (I'm thinking how many concurrent requests and a single Neville melee even with 4 CPUs)

"Oh just doing up some cloud servers"

Uh well I'm a developer, I've never used Chef or Puppet and or cloud sucks, it's like a web GUI, not only do I have to create the instances manually and would have to upload the testing programs to each manually... And set up the envs needed to run it.

Docker you say? There's no Docker here... Prebuilt VM images? Not supported.

And it's due in 2 weeks...

So I was messing with mitmproxy in my phone and for some reason all Google services are blocked on it.

Apps hang when I suppose they're requesting to Google api, though chrome works for some reason.

I just realised Google even tracks the links you share with your contacts via chrome's address bar.

I'm thinking of going no-Google, any rom recommendations?

Thanks

I am writing an api to get data from another api, mix it with some data from a database and then send it back.
I am using nodejs (javascript) to write it but I would like to learn something new. Can you recommend me any languages that I could use for my backend? I was thinking maybe go but I am open for ideas.

It is time for my own dumbass's favorite pastime: not letting go on retro tech.

I am gonna build a small and complete RESTful web API with Vbscript and Classic ASP with errrthing thrown in this mfker including JWT authentication and i am gonna see how the idea of an ORM goes. I know that COM interop was a thing, dunno if it still is.

I am fucking bored. The graduate degree is killing me and I need a distraction.

Thinking about being a purist and keeping the COM libraries to be made with VB.NET :P

Fuck yeah for being a masochistic retard.

I legit love vb net tho

Fuck you apache server...
Why did your dumb ass developers decide it was a good idea to not support "expect 100 continue headers". I seriously suspect that the devs were high smoking dragon dildo ashes like they were getting ready to get a whole chair shoved up their asses.
I wasted alot of time thinking i was getting a 417 http code because i fucked up my API implementation... No, it was the dumb apache server that decided to give me the finger.

Also, whoever built the HttpClient for .net framework 4... Fuck you too for automatically adding that dumb header to PUT requests and not properly documenting this or allowing for it to be disabled in a non hacky way.

I appreciate and enjoy solving coding problems... I, however, can't stand dumb decisions like the two above.

To be honest I forgot completely about the ducks and was kind of disappointed to see them, don't understand me wrong, its a great addition to the shop (especially to support devrant more when buying them and I will probably do too) and trogus (wow it's pronounced t-rogus) deserves a lot of respect for going through the very hard process of developing it, getting somebody to do a decent quality result etc. but I was hoping for the new site that got hyped up some time ago or some update to the app that fixes design issues on phones that have 2k resolution and no statusbar and more. ("just open a github issue" - I don't have one right now and it didn't get much attention anyway, since I am in the niche of people with those kind of setups, most people it seems have phones that can even barely run the app lol). The login still pops up each time you visit the site (basically just click it away, but it's rather annoying to have it pop up), it's nowhere near to the original app (although the native app is written in some sort of wrapper anyway?) - especially what comes to options, customizing, deactivating things, posting into categories (newest feature), getting notifications etc

There is some community builds that try to recreate a better desktop experience, but sadly fail to do so (sorry to devrantron and others, but what the fuck were you thinking when you rounded only the top right and left corner?) - since they always have something that is just thrown out to "be there" or design fails (which devrant just lacks and looks good across the board), that makes me rather cautious if that program doesn't send my credentials to some african prince. ("just look at the sourcecode", yes I have better things to do, thanks)

I could just create my own build, having to reverse engineer the whole website and app (granted, most of it are just api calls), but I simply lack the time (so I understand why my mentioned problems aren't getting really any attention or can't be implemented that fast, yet still its somewhat bugging)

I have listened to the Q&A and I know you guys are working full time at for example adobe (amazing that you both have time to be putting it towards devrant), so its not as much of a rant, just wanted to get out my disappointment about the event I felt personally. Still nice to have seen you and talk with the community a bit (although the time I feel was picked more towards your US audience rather than EU?).

First of all sorry for the bad picture. Let's move on...
Deleting this method like:
Who the hell did this nonsense?
I just took a picture of it so I could post it here and rant about it.
Sure felt stupid after deleting it for not thinking about a protected method in the parent class that is part of an API.
So... Yeah....
I was feeling too confident in my skills lately anyway

¡rant|rant

Nice to do some refactoring of the whole data access layer of our core logistics software, let me tell an story.

The project is around 80k lines of code, with a lot of integrations with an ERP system and an sql database.

The ERP system is old, shitty api for it also, only static methods through an wrapper to an c++ library

imagine an order table.

To access an order, you would first need to open the database by calling Api.Open(...file paths) (yes, it's an fucking flat file type database)

Now the database is open, now you would open the orders table with method Api.Table(int tableId) and in return you would get an integer value, the pointer.

Now for the actual order. first you need to search for it by setting the search parameter to the column ID of the order number while checking all calls for some BS error code

Api.SetInt(int pointer, int column, int query Value)
Then call the find method.

Api.Find(int pointer)

Then to top this shitcake of an api of: if it doesn't find your shit it will use the "close enough" method of search.

And now to read a singe string 😑

First you will look in the outdated and incorrect documentation given to you from the devil himself and look for the column ID to find the length of the column.

Then you create a string variable with ALL FUCKING SPACES.

Now you call the Api.GetStr(int pointer, int column, ref string emptyString, int length)

Now you have passed your poor string to the api's demon orgy by reference.

Then some more BS error code checking.

Now you have read an string value 😀

Now keep in mind to repeat these steps for all 300+ columns in the order table.

News from the creators: SQL server? yes, sql is good so everything will be better?

Now imagine the poor developers that got tasked to convert this shitcake to use a MS SQL server, that they did.

Now I can honestly say that I found the best SQL server benchmark tool. This sucker creams out just above ~105K sql statements per second on peak and ~15K per second for 1.5 second to read an order. 1.5 second to read less than 4 fucking kilobytes!

Right at that moment I released that our software would grind to an fucking halt before even thinking about starting it. And that me & myself and I would be tasked to fix it.

4 months later and two weeks until functional beta, here I am. We created our own api with the SQL server 😀

And the outcome of all this...

Fixes bugs older than a year, Forces rewriting part of code base. Forces removal of dirty fixes. allows proper unit and integration testing and even database testing with snapshot feature.

The whole ERP system could be replaced with ~10 lines of code (provided same relational structure) on the application while adding it to our own API library.

Best part is probably the performance improvements 😀. Up to 4500 times faster and 60 times less memory usage also with only managed memory.

The Zen Of Ripping Off Airtable:
(patterned after The Zen Of Python. For all those shamelessly copying airtables basic functionality)

*Columns can be *reordered* for visual priority and ease of use.

* Rows are purely presentational, and mostly for grouping and formatting.

* Data cells are objects in their own right, so they can control their own rendering, and formatting.

* Columns (as objects) are where linkages and other column specific data are stored.

* Rows (as objects) are where row specific data (full-row formatting) are stored.

* Rows are views or references *into* columns which hold references to the actual data cells

* Tables are meant for managing and structuring *small* amounts of data (less than 10k rows) per table.

* Just as you might do "=A1:A5" to reference a cell range in google or excel, you might do "opt(table1:columnN)" in a column header to create a 'type' for the cells in that column.

* An enumeration is a table with a single column, useful for doing the equivalent of airtables options and tags. You will never be able to decide if it should be stored on a specific column, on a specific table for ease of reuse, or separately where it and its brothers will visually clutter your list of tables. Take a shot if you are here.

* Typing or linking a column should be accomplishable first through a command-driven type language, held in column headers and cells as text.

* Take a shot if you somehow ended up creating any of the following: an FSM, a custom regex parser, a new programming language.

* A good structuring system gives us options or tags (multiple select), selections (single select), and many other datatypes and should be first, programmatically available through a simple command-driven language like how commands are done in datacells in excel or google sheets.

* Columns are a means to organize data cells, and set constraints and formatting on an entire range.

* Row height, can be overridden by the settings of a cell. If a cell overrides the row and column render/graphics settings, then it must be drawn last--drawing over the default grid.

* The header of a column is itself a datacell.

* Columns have no order among themselves. Order is purely presentational, and stored on the table itself.

* The last statement is because this allows us to pluck individual columns out of tables for specialized views.

*Very* fast scrolling on large datasets, with row and cell height variability is complicated. Thinking about it makes me want to drink. You should drink too before you embark on implementing it.

* Wherever possible, don't use a database.
If you're thinking about using a database, see the previous koan.

* If you use a database, expect to pick and choose among column-oriented stores, and json, while factoring for platform support, api support, whether you want your front-end users to be forced to install and setup a full database,
and if not, what file-based .so or .dll database engine is out there that also supports video, audio, images, and custom types.

* For each time you ignore one of these nuggets of wisdom, take a shot, question your sanity, quit halfway, and then write another koan about what you learned.

* If you do not have liquor on hand, for each time you would take a shot, spank yourself on the ass. For those who think this is a reward, for each time you would spank yourself on the ass, instead *don't* spank yourself on the ass.

* Take a sip if you *definitely* wildly misused terms from OOP, MVP, and spreadsheets.

I need you guys' help.
As mentioned earlier in one of my rants, I trade stocks part time, make a little money. But I am too tired from my full time work. So it is badly affecting my health. My broker is providing us with an API and docs at a monthly fee to develop software to automate trades.
I posted a job on Upwork, a few freelancers bid but their price was way beyond my budget.
Hence I decided to take up programming.

I was initially inclined towards C#, but seeing as how complex it is, I was thinking of going for python. Do you think it is a reasonable decision?

What is it with non-technical managers, especially those in sales, thinking that the solution to all problems is to "just pick up the phone and ring them?" This was *always* his opinion, whether the web service we were using wasn't accepting a valid request (apparently this was best "explained over the phone", I kid you not - have you ever tried speaking JSON?!) or whether we just needed a simple request going in to increase the API limit. I mean I could send an email or log a ticket in a few minutes tops, but you want me to spend 2 hours on hold to a support department only to be told "ah we don't take those requests over the phone, here's the URL, log a ticket."

Then it's always a case of "I don't understand why they're like that, all the guys I speak to are happy to help on the phone". Yeah, beacuse you're in sales & marketing you muppet. Blathering on to each other so you can stroke the egos of yourselves and your companies is kinda in the job description.

Grr. This was all a while ago, but I thought of it just now and the pure concept just annoyed me, so here it is. I really hope he's not doing the same thing to guys under him now (but let's be honest, he probably is.)

Agile is stupid.

You’re trying to build an application based on data that doesn’t exist yet, and that changes weekly; surely it makes more sense for the API to be built and in place before someone tries to create a front end?

The client decides they want an extra feature 1/2 way through which changes the way it should work yet again.

What you end up with is some rigid and poorly structured architecture, that might work - but how you have no time to refactor it to make it good, an account manager that doesn’t understand what the problem is, and a team of developers wondering wtf you were thinking when you wrote this pos

Today I wrote a python messenger bot which listens to only one command;
get ip
It then replies with its public IP address. I figured this would be the easiest hotfix until I fix my dynamic DNS client.

Now thinking of it I could also make an "update domain" command for doing the API call, and then link the two with a loop and minute delay. Marvelous.

This started as an update to my cover story for my Linked In profile, but as I got into a groove writing it, it turned into something more, but I’m not really sure what exactly. It maybe gets a little preachy towards the end so I’m not sure if I want to use it on LI but I figure it might be appreciated here:

In my IT career of nearly 20 years, I have worked on a very wide range of projects. I have worked on everything from mobile apps (both Adroid and iOS) to eCommerce to document management to CMS. I have such a broad technical background that if I am unfamiliar with any technology, there is a very good chance I can pick it up and run with it in a very short timespan.

If you think of the value that team members add to the team as a whole in mathematical terms, you have adders and you have subtractors. I am neither. I am a multiplier. I enjoy coaching, leading and architecture, but I don’t ever want to get out of the code entirely.

For the last 9 years, I have functioned as a technical team lead on a variety of highly successful and highly productive teams. As far as team leads go, I tend to be a bit more hands on. Generally, I manage to actively develop code about 25% of the time to keep my skills sharp and have a clear understanding of my team’s codebase.

Beyond that I also like to review as much of the code coming into the codebase as practical. I do this for 3 reasons. I do this because as a team lead, I am ultimately the one responsible for the quality and stability of the codebase. This also allows me to keep a finger on the pulse of the team, so that I have a better idea of who is struggling and who is outperforming. Finally, I recognize that my way may not necessarily be the best way to do something and I am perfectly willing to admit the same. I have learned just as much if not more by reviewing the work of others than having someone else review my own.

It has been said that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. This describes my relationship with software development perfectly. I have known that I would be writing software in some capacity for a living since I wrote my first “hello world” program in BASIC in the third grade.

I don’t like the term programmer because it has a sense of impersonality to it. I tolerate the title Software Developer, because it’s the industry standard. Personally, I prefer Software Craftsman to any other current vernacular for those that sling code for a living.

All too often is our work compiled into binary form, both literally and figuratively. Our users take for granted the fact that an app “just works”, without thinking about the proper use of layers of abstraction and separation of concerns, Gang of Four design patterns or why an abstract class was used instead of an interface. Take a look at any mediocre app’s review distribution in the App Store. You will inevitably see an inverse bell curve. Lot’s of 4’s and 5’s and lots of (but hopefully not as many) 1’s and not much in the middle. This leads one to believe that even given the subjective nature of a 5 star scale, users still look at things in terms of either “this app works for me” or “this one doesn’t”. It’s all still 1’s and 0’s.

Even as a contributor to many open source projects myself, I’ll be the first to admit that have never sat down and cracked open the Spring Framework to truly appreciate the work that has been poured into it. Yet, when I’m in backend mode, I’m working with Spring nearly every single day.

The moniker Software Craftsman helps to convey the fact that I put my heart and soul into every line of code that I or a member of my team write. An API contract isn’t just well designed or not. Some are better designed than others. Some are better documented than others. Despite the fact that the end result of our work is literally just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, computer science is not an exact science at all. Anyone who has ever taken 200 lines of Java code and reduced it to less than 50 lines of reactive Kotlin, anyone who has ever hit that Utopia of 100% unit test coverage in a class, or anyone who can actually read that 2-line Perl implementation of the RSA algorithm understands this simple truth. Software development is an art form. I am a Software Craftsman.

#wk171

A few weeks back we ported our PHP Rest API into a couple of Go micro-services.

Incredibly _satisfying_ job.

Requests went from 20+ seconds to ~100-300ms.

There was still one bottle-neck, though, because we had to use most of the old cluster-fork of a database (because no way I'll be able to fix all that in a week).

And ooh, next we're thinking of switching to gRPC. Man, we have the best jobs.

Today our so called "architects" chose the most complicated, most unmaintainable, prehistoric way to handle a simple, really easy REST problem...they stood around the white board, marveling at the alleged brilliancy of their imbecile drawings and tried to show us low life devs how we should implement this or that idiotic aspect of their crazy solution. We looked at each other desperately, raising our eyebrows at each new wave of insanity. No one spoke up...that includes me. I feel shit right now. Implementation sprint starts tomorrow. Thinking of grabbing a life vest and jumping overboard right now. Our customer will strangle us for this wannabe crap and I am already scared having to show the resulting API to them.

Alright got an idea I have for my game engine that I'd love some input on...

So the engine has emphasis on user made content and openness to that content (EG. open source dev tools and no licencing of art) but I also want to try and build a basic ecosystem with the engine and one way I'm doing it is with cross game mods (Take a mod from one game and drop it in another and it just works... Famous last words) but something I want to try is a companion app for the engine itself...

So it'll have a custom written save system baked in engine to make progress saving and the like simpler for the end user, thinking about building an app for smart watches and phones that would connect to the engine and actually back up and sync local saves to the app and vice versa as long as they have a connection (Hotspot your phone, bluetooth or wifi) but allow you to manage some data within the app by building a basic API to let devs show the user information about the save and the game by adding description, thumbnails to distinguish games and the like...

Just want opinions if it may be a good idea to invest some time into and if anyone has idea's that could make it better.

So, it's been a while since I've been working on my current project and I've never had the "luck" to touch the legacy project wrote in PHP, until this week when I got my first issue.

And damn, this goddamn issue. It was a bug, a very strange bug, that only happens in production and that nobody has any idea what was happening, so yeah, I didn't have anyone to ask and I got less time than usual ( because Thanksgiving ).

And thus, I have no starting point, no previous knowledge on PHP and less time! I expected a very fun week 😀 and it was beyond my expectations.

First I tried to understand what might be causing the issue, but there wasn't any real clue to star with, so no choice, time to read the flow on the code and see what are they're doing and using ( 1k line files, yay, legacy ). Luckily I got some clues, we're using a cookie and a php session variable for the session, ok, let's star with the session variable. Where it's that been initialize ? Well, spoiler alert, I shouldn't start with that, because my search end up in the login method of the API that set a that variable and for some reason in the front end app it was always false and that lead me to think that some of the new backend functions were failing, but after checking the logs I got no luck.

Ok, maybe the cookie it's the issue, I should try open the previous website on the brow...redirect to new project login, What? Why ? I ask around and it's a new feature push on Monday, ok I got Chrome Dev tools I can see which value of the cookie it's been set and THERE IT WAS it has a wrong domain! After 2 days ( I resume a lot of my pain ) I got what I've been looking for, so now I should be able to fix the bug. Then where is the cookie initialized ? In the first file the server hits whenever you tried to enter any page of the app, ok, I found the method, but it's using a function that process the domain and sets it correctly? wtf ? Then how in heaven do I get the incorrect domain ? Hello? Ok, relax, you still have one more day to fix this, let's take it easy.

Then, at the end of the Wednesday, nope I still have no clue how this is happening. I talked with the Devops guy and he explain me how this redirection happens and with what it depends on, I followed the PHP code through and nothing, everything should works fine, sigh. Ok I still have 2 days, because I'm not from US and I'm not in US, so I still have time, but the Sprint is messed up already, so whatever I'm gonna had done this bug anyhow.

Thursday ! I got sick, yay, what else could happen this week. Somehow I managed to work a little and star thinking in what external issue could affect the processing, maybe the redirection was bringing a wrong direction, let's talk with the Devops guy again, and he answer me that the redirection it was being made by PHP code, IN A FILE THAT DOESN'T EXIST IN THE REPOSITORY, amazing, it's just amazing. Then he explained me why this file might be missing and how it's the deployment of this app ( btw the Devops guy it's really cool and I will invite him a beer ) . After that I checked the file and I see a random session_star in the first line of the code, without any configuration, eureka ! There was the cause and I only need to ask someone If that line it's necessary anymore, but oh they're on holiday, damn, well I'll wait till Monday to ask them. But once and for all that bug was done for ! 🎉

What do I learn ? PHP and that I don't want any more tickets of PHP 😆.

For some reason I keep over engineering stuff to the point I spend 2 hours thinking the best way to do something. I'm making the backend for a project of mine and I wanted somewhat decent error handling and useful error responses. I won't go into detail here but let's say that in any other (oo) language it would be a no-brainer to do this with OOP inheritance, but Rust does OOP by composition (and there's no way to upcast traits and downcasting is hard). I ended up wasting so much time thinking of how to do something generic enough, easily extendable and that doesn't involve any boilerplate or repeated code with no success. What I didn't realize is that my API will not be public (in the sense that the API is not the service I offer), I'm the only one who needs to figure out why I got a 400 or a 403. There's no need to return a response stating exactly which field had a wrong value or exactly what resource had it's access denied to the user. I can just look at the error code, my documentation and the request I made to infer what caused the error. If that does not work I can always take a quick look at the source code of the server to see what went wrong. So In short I ended up thrashing all the refactoring I had done and stayed with my current solution for error-handling. I have found a few places that could use some improvement, but it's nothing compared to the whole revamp I was doing of the whole thing.

This is not the first time I over engineer stuff (and probably won't be the last). I think I do it in order to be future-proof. I make my code generic enough so in case any requirements change in the future I don't have to rewrite everything, but that adds no real value to my stuff since I'm always working solo, the projects aren't super big and a rewrite wouldn't take too long. In the end I just end up wasting time, sanity and keystrokes on stuff that will just slow down my development speed further down the road without generating any benefits.

Why am I like this? Oh well, I'm just glad I figured out this wasn't necessary before putting many hours of work into it.

I hate web development
I mean why it has to be everywhere and so important.
I joined college my friend calls 4 days before my quantum physics test. Asks if I wanted to do internship. My reply sure.
( Level of knowledge at that time no idea what API is, what react is but it's just making webpages ) made a nice homepage within 4 hours of YouTube 2 tutorials and 2 developing that. Friend appreciated his manager also liked.
But failed to deliver the complete e-commerce website's frontend.

Comes next, hackathon nothing related to Android specific( I like coding for Android) need webdev in one way or other. One senior asks if want to go together sees my GitHub and rejects politely by my skills ( I would have too).
Went on with my 2 more friends with thought of making an all Android app guys team, next week team breaks. I then got offer from a friend to join with them in web development I agreed now prepare for web development.
Team was rejected internal politics of organizers ( would take no all fresher's team).

Dropped learning webd.
Now started flutter and it feels good and comfortable but stability isn't permanent.

Now seeing GSoC
Sigh...Most requirements are for web , hacktober fest also had things related to web maybe I don't recall. Still thinking about it sigh...

Got selected for college app development team. The head had to be one with excellent webd skills.

Now college provides funding for projects and ideas, prototype requires making prototype. Most easiest thing to work on
.
.
.
.
.
web development.

Today, I have installed/uninstalled a combination of [windows 7, arch linux, dual-boot] a total of 9 times...

I wouldn't be surprised if my 120G SSD fails next week

It all started when I had to whip up a GUI-wrapped youtube-dl based program for a windows machine.

Thinking a handy GUI python library will get it done in no time, I started right away with the Kivy quick-start page in front of me.

Everything seemed to be going fine, until I decided it would be "wise" to first check if I can run Kivy on said windows machine.

Here I spent what felt like a day (5 hours) trying to install core pip modules for kivy.. only before realizing my innocent cygwin64 setup was the reason everything was failing, and that sys.platform was NOT set to "win32" (a requirement later discovered when unpacking .whl files)

"Okay.. you know what? Fuck........ This."
In a haze of frustration, I decided it was my fault for ever deciding to do Python on windows, and that "none of this would've happened if I were installing pip modules on a Linux terminal"...

I then had the "brilliant" idea of "Why don't I just use Linux, and make windows a virtual machine within, for testing."

And so I spent the next hour getting everything set up correctly for me get back to programming.... And so I did.

But uh... you're doing GUI stuff, right? -> Yeah...

And you uh.. Kivy uses OpenGL on windows, doesn't it? -> Yeah..?

OpenGL... 2.

-> Fuck.

That's when I realized my "brilliant" idea, was actually a really bad prank. Turns out.. I needed a native windows environment with up-to-date non-virtual graphics drivers that supported at least OpenGL2 for Kivy GUI programs!

Something I already had from square 1.

And at this point, it hurts to even sigh knowing I wasted hours just... making... poor decisions, my very first one being cygwin64 as a substitution for windows cmd.

But persistent as any programmer should be in order to succeed, I dragged my sorry ass back to the computer to reinstall windows on the actual hardware... again.

While the windows installer was busy jacking off all over my precious gigabytes (why does it need that much spaaace for a base install??? fuck.). I had "yet another brilliant idea" YABI™

Why not just do a dual-boot? That way, you have the best of both worlds, you do python stuff in Linux, and when it's time to build and test on the target OS, you have a native windows environment!

This synthetic harmony sounded amazing to the desperate, exhausted, shell of a man that I had become after such a back-breaking experience with cygwin

Now that my windows platter with a side of linux was all set-up and ready-to-go, I once again booted up windows to test if Kivy even worked.

And... It did!

And just as I began raising my victory flags, I suddenly realized there was one more thing I had to do, something trivial, should take me "no time" to do, being in a native windows environment and all.................... -.- (sigh)

I had to make sure it compiles to a traditional exe...

Not a biggy, right? Just find one of those py2exe—sounding modules or something, and surprisingly enough, there was indeed a py2exe—sounding module, conveniently named... py2exe.

Not a second thought given, I thought surely this was a good enough way of doing it, just gonna look up the py2exe guide and...

-> 3 hours later + 1 extra coffee

What do you meeeeean "module not found"? Do I need to install more dependencies? Why doesn't it say so in the DAMN guide? Wait I don't? Why are you showing me that error message then????

-------------------------------

No. I'm not doing this.
I shut off my computer and took a long... long.. break.

Only to return sometime the next day and end up making no progress, beating my SSD with more OS installs (sometimes with no obvious reason to do so).

Wondering whether I should give up Kivy itself as it didn't seem compatible with py2exe.. I discovered pyInstaller, which seemed to be the way Kivy wants exe's to be made on windows..

Awesome! I should've looked up how Kivy developers make exe's instead of jumping straight into py2exe land, (I guess "py2exe" just sounded more effective to me then)

More hours pass, and you'd think I'd have eliminated all of my build environment problems by now... but oh, how wrong you'd be...

pyInstaller was failing, and half the solutions I found online were to download some windows update KB32946..whatever...

The other half telling me to downgrade from Python 3.8.1 to Python 3.8.0000.009 (exaggeration! But you get the point)

At the end of all that mess, I decided it wasn't worth some of my lifespan, and that maybe.. just maybe.. it would've been better to create WINDOWS GUI with the mother fuc*ing WINDOWS API.

Alright, step 1: Get Visual Studio..
Step 2: kys
Step 3: kys again.

So there is this project of my firm that is comepletly dependant on Facebook api, I've actually told it many times to managers at first but they've just waved their hands over it.

Now what didn't happen. Facebook data leak and the api being taking down ..juust a week before the project going public.

Our app is still not reviewed and not able to access the so vital api and there are actually many similar projects getting published (even Facebook Local greatly rivals to our app, actually killing it because they have native data... And we don't have any. )

I told them again. "Nah we will have this and this feature that makes it soo exceptionall."

And you are sitting here thinking if the salary you have asked for is still good enough to stay or to run away.

(Well, I am still getting some coding experience from this so that's why I stay, and oh yeah I have the backend repo only for myslef because except the frontend dev no managers knows what git is. This is how freedom feels. )

Devs: How should we design the UI?
Design & Marketing: We were thinking something like the Ferrari website (or app that has nothing to do with our industry)

Devs: How about we add <feature that all of our competitors have>? We're falling quite behind on that and its hindering us from connecting with their REST API.
Marketing: Nah that's too complicated, and our customers haven't requested it. How about we add some animal animations over there instead?

rant/!rant

So I just started working at the beginning of January and I have no fucking clue about anything especially Web development.
But now I have a week to figure out how in the world I am going set up a workflow for some secretaries so that the higher ups get a printed coupon with a password on it, so they can log into our WLAN via a captive portal that I also need to set up.
I am thinking about a website that takes a list of names and settings (probably excel or smt) passes them to the WiFi management softwares API and then generates some PDF file for download that just needs to get printed.
Did I mention that I have no Dev tools (I have notepad, yeah the one without ++), no test environment, no prior experience and no clue how to do it?
But somehow I love this challenge and am glad that my colleagues don't send me to get coffee but let me work.
Am I insane?

Suggest a good back end language to a junior Android developer? I am thinking of learning a back end language ( I'm leaning towards RubyOnRails) for making API and some server side code . What would you guys suggest?

Fucking google maps JS api. One should think that a company as large as google should be capable of providing a reliable api. But this fucking api just decided for the second time in two weeks just to stop working.

After the api failed for the first time i found out that the provided url actually fetches the experimental version of the api (yes you read that correctly a fucking unstable version is the default version). To get the stable version of the api one has to add v=3 to the request. But even after adding the version the api just broke again today!

Fuck it! Google get your shit together!

Just thinking about switching to OSM...

From today, I'm gonna post infrequent-devLogs of the project i am currently doing, I have been thinking about it the past couple of months, and I am finally moving it into action!

I wish writing devLogs will make me to finish the project, at least a working prototype.

It is a C# block coding application that is made in 100% C# that generates human-readable C# code for C# begineers.

If you want to follow me along, make sure to subscribe to my rants by going to my Profile (cozyplanes) > More icon in top right > Subscribe

All devLogs posted directly via devRant API integration from CZedit, a simple edit program for geeks

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

devLog #0 - Block coding in C#

Done:
- Made the console output to redirect to textbox
- Ability to save output to external storage

WIP:
Compile C# code directly at runtime with Roslyn

Notes:
open-source??

Earlier i posted i felt like a fraud in this internship ,
But turns out my code was correct the damn API was broken i kept thinking in fing up
Ugh

XML and JSON endpoints while forcing Content-Type Text/Plain instead of allowing Web API to handle the serialisation. The f were these devs thinking.

Can anyone give me links to any Devrant API? Thinking of starting work on creating a Native Android Devrant app as a side-project.

Thinking back, it’s pretty terrible how long it took to create my first real development project.

When I was the ages of 13-18 I built websites on and off but I would never consider them good enough. I would literally design a bunch of images and then, using just HTML, put all the images together like a puzzle using exact pixel locations. Might be fine and dandy now but back then it would look great on my monitor but on others it would be an absolute mess.

Anyways, after that I got in college and started learning C++ and did assignments but I don’t count those as my own either. Not until I was 29 (my current age) did I finally develop a program assigned by my internship. Prior to that I always just re-learned C++ over and over again off and on because I had no clue where to go after that.

Apologies for the long intro. So the first development project that I feel is legit at my internship I had to use my companies API to track the amount of time it took for them to encrypt a packet and then decrypt it as well as grabbing the packet and seeing how long the hash was, the letters used in which position and so on. Essentially grab a whole bunch of statistics from their software and then output it to an excel document. It had a menu, and I had to make it work on Windows, Ubuntu, Raspbian, and some other systems on different devices.

I was actually really proud of what I ended up with and they use it to test their new versions and compare and so forth.

"Code"

And the website says "Lonely geeky people do need apply"
So I put my on my glasses and I went in to ask him why
He said you look like a fine outstanding young man, I think you'll do
So I shook his hand and, I said "I am glad I will be working for you."

Code, code, everywhere there's code
Neo vision, tweakin' my mind
Do code this, and API that, can't you read the fucking manual

And the sign says "If you want to use this site you must accept our cookies"
So I found the CEOs address and doxxed him all night!
To put up a dialog and block content from my sight.
If Todd was here, he'd tell it to your face, man, "it just works"

Code, code, everywhere there's code
Neo vision, tweakin' my mind
Do code this, and API that, can't you read the fucking manual

Oh, say now mister, can't you code
You got to have a laptop and a hoodie to get a job
You can't work, no you can't standup, you ain't supposed to be here

And the website says "You got to have an employee ID to get inside" - yo!

And the website says "Everybody welcome, come in, code and share"
But then they passed around a git pull at the end of it all
And I didn't have a character to code
So I got me laptop and I made up my own fuckin' code
I typed, "Thank you OSS for thinking 'bout me, I'm alive and doing fine", yeah

Code, code, everywhere there's code
Neo vision, tweakin' my mind
Do code this, and API that, can't you read the fucking manual

Code, code, everywhere there's code
Neo vision, tweakin' my mind
Do code this, and API that, can't you read the fucking manual

Yes! Some old song, called "Code code", I wish we did write that one, but
We didn't - git blame!

Hello World!

I have to develop a simple Rest API in python. Any suggestions how to make it possible. I was thinking in traditional direction to setup Django. However, I think there must be a simple way to do this.
thanks.

SCADA looks like something really interesting to learn.

Anyone familiar with it, what packages to get started with?

I was thinking of building a simulator api, maybe to flex and train what I'm learning in postgres, but I don't know where to begin yet. Seems like a big topic.

!rant

When a very last minute change is required and you panic a bit, thinking it will take days to fix... but you manage to fix it before lunchtime because the API is well made.

I am the responsible for the atlassian Suite at work, as I maintain the systems, set them up, and stuff.

One day, our crowd (the authentication and authorization application) just went crazy. At like lunch time it could not connect to the AD anymore. No reasons. Throwing XSRF errors (cross site scripting), because http would connect to https. "won't do it, fuck you" it told me. Out of the blue. Noone changed anything. And yea, seriously. Noone did.
It just refused to connect (as connecting to AD is connecting yourself with you own api. And refusing yourself talking to yourself). It runs behind a proxy. Therefore http/https. Well, this worked for years. But out of sudden not anymore.

Yea. Fuck you.

It was reported some hours later, at like 3pm, as people could not login to the applications using crowd as authentication and authorization server.

Tried to debug the system, where nothing was did, to make it work. At best time to fail.

First workaround: if you are logged into one of the other applications of atlassian, just refresh the site, so your SSO token gets a refresh and you are signed on again.

Then I searched more and more. And more.
But nothing worked, nothing helped.

So I addressed an emergency maintenance, take down the whole Suite, restart crowd, to apply some changes to it's settings, not knowing what happening then, because all connections of SSO will then be released. Sent out the mail like 30 minutes beforehands.

While waiting for the window, I just typed my credentials... And redid, and redid, so to type and being bored.
Three minutes before the window...

It just worked again.

Well. Wtf. Serioudl
Just came back.

No Intrusion, no changes at all. Just came back, as nothing has happened.

Kind of best part of this story... A headhunter messaged me on my way home to offer me a job as an Atlassian Suite SysAdmin for a company, at kinda the double of my salary.

At first I was thinking to go there, and when someone then asked me sth about Atlassian just start to laugh and then leave still laughing...

But then I very nicely respond that I dont want to cry at work. And wished him best luck.

I am doing some bad upgrades now on our Suite. Very painful.
And I looked into the start scripts. Some Look like the untalented intern tells another one to write scripts. Seriously wtf.

Today I followed the guide to Update a confluence and change database to Postgres. Didnt work, Postgres error.
Try it again, jquery won't load. Next try, tomcat not starting anymore. Did same thing. Every fucking time.

Yea. Maintenance window to get a nice new export soon. Will only take an hour.

To switch database in confluence, you need to set it up very fresh. And then Import your export.
Export takes an hour at our system.
Importing maybe the same time. Hope it will work (hint: Nope).

Oh, can be nice also. Just tell the Bitbucket to migrate databases, there is a fucking setting for it. Enter new database, ready, go, finished.

At least they don't raise costs very much every kinda year.
Oh sorry, yes, they do.

Thinking of making a project using the Blockchain to get better understanding of it.

Confused whether to use Ethereum Blockchain (Solidity) or Bitcoin Blockchain (bcoin API). Any help!

Started messing around a bit with @LucaScorpion JavaRant API thinking I might make a command line app. Well I have about 50 lines of code later and it's working to get a random rant and all the comments. The trouble is now instead of working on it I'm just back to reading rants... No way I'll ever be able to work on this without getting distracted.

Hi there!

I've been worrying about the following problem for months now and I don't find any solution. Maybe anybody of you can lead me the way.

We are developing a software suite which consists of a number of desktop applications:

* 12 applications written in C++; all over 20 years old; further development by 5 or 6 guys (one man armys) - mainly bugfixing, changes of law implementations, small features
* 2 applications we are currently writing in C#; completely new developments of existing C++ applications; scrum teams with at least 5 guys; this is, where we put our focus in

These applications (C++ and C#) are sharing some core assemblies and are interacting with each other. So they are not independent.

We organize them in a mono repository in one huge solution, which consists currently of about 500 projects.

Advantages:

* With all projects in one solution and through project references, Visual Studio takes care of the right build order
* Code navigation is superb - every single line of code is accessible - this makes refactoring easy
* Every developer can map the branch and build the whole suite locally
* Debugging on the local machine is easy
* DevOps pipeline is straight forward - it just have to build a single solution

Disadvantages:

* The huge solution is extremely slow.
* If you want to build the solution or you want to debug (which does essentially the same as a pre step) Visual Studio is building a lot of projects, although they haven't been changed. Their detection is buggy. So sometimes you wait 2 minutes until it starts the app. That slows us down a lot.
* Full builds need about an hour, because its building the same projects (even if they haven't been changed) over and over again (with ready made nuget packages this could be improved a lot I think)
* If a core team member changes some core apis, he is changing the calling code too, although he doesn't know the calling code, because another team has written it. I don't think, that's best practice and it doesn't scale.
* Often, a C# developer has to mess around with C++ building problems, because the C++ projects are in the same solution
* It gets more and more confusing and frustrating, because there is no clear organizational seperation between apps and nobody can't just focus on his app alone.

Idea:

I was thinking about putting the whole framework and core projects in a new solution (around 100 projects). Then we could take all old C++ projects and put them also in a new solution (around 200 projects). This would leave the newer projects (new applications - C#) in the existing solution.

This should speed up things, and would be a first step to better seperation, BUT:

How should the integration process look like?

Scenario: Core team is changing an API in our framework

Current process: Because all projects are in the same solution, they change the calling code too. So it's immediately integrated and the app developers just have to do "get latest".

New process (?): Core team is providing the changes through a nuget package (new version). So does every developer now has to keep track of if there is a new package version and if yes, do the integration? And how can we coordinate the different teams, so they are upgrading all at the same time? Because we ship our applications as a suite, all apps has to use the same versions. Or should we automate the integration process? Is there a best practice?

I have to add, that our core team is making changes very frequently, so the integration process will have to happen often.

Any ideas/feedback/inspiration?

Thank you so much in advance!

TL;DR I just recently started my apprenticeship, it's horrible so far, I want to quit, but don't know what to do next...

Okay, first of all, hey there! My name is Cave and I haven't been on here for a while, so I hope the majority of you is doing rather okay. I'm programming for 6 years now, have some work experience already, since I used to volunteer for a company for half a year, in which I discovered my love for integrations and stuff. These background information will probably be necessary to understand my agony in full extend.

So, okay, this is about my apprenticeship. Generally speaking, I was expecting to work, and to learn something, gaining experience. So far, it only involved me, reading through horrible code, fixing and replacing stuff for them, I didn't learn a thing yet, and we are already a month in.

When I said the code is horrible, well, it is the worst I have ever seen since I started programming. Little documentation - if any -, everywhere you look there is deprecated code, which may or may not been commented out, often loops or simply methods seem to be foreign for them, as the code is cluttered with copy paste code everywhere and on top of that all, the code is slow as heck, like wtf.

I spent my past month with reading their code, trying to understand what most of this nonsense is for, and then just deleting and rewriting it entirely. My code suddenly is only 5% or their size and about 1000 times faster. Did I mention I am new to this programming language yet? That I have absolutely no experience in that programming language? Because well I am new and don't have any experience, yet, I have little to no struggle doing it better.

Okay, so, imagine, you started programming like 20 years ago, you were able to found your own business, you are getting paid a decent amount of money, sounds alright, right? Here comes the twist: you have been neglecting every advancement made in developing software for the past 20 years, yup, that's what it feels like to work here.

At this point I don't even know, like is this normal? Did git, VSCode and co. spoil me? Am I supposed to use ancient software with ancient programming languages to make my life hell? Is programming supposed to be like this? I have no clue, you tell me, I always thought I was doing stuff right.

Well, this company is not using git, infact, they have every of their project in a single folder and deleting it by accident is not that hard, I almost did once, that was scary. I started out working locally, just copying files, so shit like that won't happen, they told me to work directly in the source. They said it's fine, that's why you can see 20 copies of the folder, in the same folder... Yes, right, whatever.

I work using a remote desktop, the server I work on is Windows server 2008, you want to make icons using gimp? Too bad, Gimp doesn't support windows server 2008, I don't think anything does anymore, at least I haven't found anything, lol.

They asked me to integrate Google Maps into their projects, I thought it is gonna be fun, well, turns out their software uses internet explorer 9.. and Google maps api does not support internet explorer 9... I ended up somehow installing CEF3 on that shit and wrote an API for it in JS. Writing the API was actually kind of fun, but integrating it in their software sucked and they told me I will never integrate stuff ever again, since they usually don't do that. I mean, they don't have a Backend as far as I can tell, it looks like stuff directly connects with their database, so I believe them, but you know... I love integrating stuff..

So at this point you might be thinking, then why don't you just quit? Well I would, definitely. I'm lucky that till December I can quit without prior notice, just need a resignation as far as I can tell, but when I quit, what do I do next? Like, I volunteered for a company for half a year and I'd argue I did a good job, but with this apprenticeship it only adds up to about 7 months of actual work experience. Would anybody hire somebody with this much actual work experience? I also consider doing freelancing, making a living out of just integrating stuff, but would people pay for that? And then again, would they hire somebody with this much experience? I don't want to quit without a plan on what to do next, but I have no clue.

Am I just spoiled, is programming really just like that, using ancient tools and stuff? Let me know. Advice is welcomed as well, because I'm at a loss. Thanks for reading.

Alright so this is just me throwing my thoughts down from today cause I need some outlet.

Gonna start programming a lot more than I do now cause I want to improve and I enjoy it.

I started my JavaScript course and that's going well so far. I need to figure out a way to make the info stick. I'm gonna def use the projects from each day as resources though.

I need to practice python (which I'm good with) occasionally so I dont lose my magic touch. I was thinking of doing a project on a raspberry pi that uses a camera for object/facial recognition and picking projects like that and occasional small ones I do in js.

Although theres still a lot I have to learn on the DOM side of js. I dont want to be a front end dev cause I dont have that artistic eye so I'm mostly gonna use it for node and small front end stuff

But mostly I need to be able to grasp more from tutorials, examples, courses, etc. And understand how and when and why I should use whatever it is.

Also I wanna use someones code to learn but it's never documented well enough for me to know what's happening I'm mostly referring to when theres a library or api I'm unfamiliar with.

Also JS is getting a little boring so hopefully python will help dull that feel

I need advice. I'm to create a web application with an interactive map (lots of polygons to put on it, with markers and other map things) with a large amount of data and it is expected to have frequent changes to the said data. I have no idea of the tech stack to be used and the performance of the app is the biggest concern. (I'm thinking maybe to create an API, use MongoDB, then create a web client for it but I'm not that sure). Please give me your insights.

Someone from QA just randomly started asking me about API requests and responses today. For our backend which is not actually an API and changes all the time without notice. They just like, casually wanna know the contract of every endpoint on that.

So after having a heart attack thinking my coworker got spear phished I find out QA has decided to start testing our backend without telling us let alone asking us if it's a good idea.

I'm starting to look at how to get devices to send data to an endpoint for storage and analysis. I'm looking at AWS iot stuff like core and green grass but then I'm thinking that a REST API could also do the job. I don't need to connect devices to each other (in first iteration). Dont think I need any edge stuff either. Anybody have any experience with this?

Doing some SendGrid integration with suppressions via their API. I changed around a bit of my own code today because what I had before wasn't working well. Something I didn't touch suddenly stopped working. The response body from their one API endpoint no longer matches what their docs say and I swear it did yesterday. So I've been swearing thinking I broke something for the last four hours.

[ WEBDEV frontend QUESTION ]
I will need to build a new admin dashboard for representing a lot of data from the api. the API is written in PHP and this won't change. We are currently using jquery to make the data interactive (choose date ranges, different filters and so on). Were currently using morris.js for charts. I'm thinking this would be a good opportunity to learn and use a new js framework to make the data more easily bindable on buttons and selects (not so many listeners on buttons and shit like that).I will be developing the front end on my own, alone, so i mostly have freedom here. I need something that has implementations of chart rendering, and which I could learn in a week or two in the evenings after work (starting to work on this in the next week probably). What are your guys recommendation? Whats the best option for dashboards js wise? I was thinking vue, won't I shoot myself in the foot for using a new technology(for me anyway) right from the bat?

So I've been fiddling around a bit with Minecraft mod packs lately, and I've noticed two things. A. there seems to be no good mod pack launcher/manager and B. Curse Forge sucks and has no public API. Corporate bullshit with FTB and Overwolf... So I've been thinking about building a modding platform and making it open source and accessible for everyone. So a few questions for the ones of you who have done modding, or are just interested:

- Is there already a good platform?
- Would it be feasible with mod pack licences and what not
- Would the modding community welcome another platform?
- Is there a good launcher to integrate with?

So i am at an MNC as a summer internship, me along with 18 other students from my university cleared this hackathon and got selected for this internship,
Few things you should know
1. Amongst all the other candidates i had the most work experience
2. I had worked with a lot of python and JavaScript
3. I legit have more skills then almost everyone working in my team

So, I don't know how but the HR decided i should go to this team, where there are no developers and are people of age 30 who have no idea what django is,

I was fucking frustrated but i let it go, thinking i will just solve this problem and will change my team, calm down

They told me about the project. I said okay give me access i will just finish it.

5 days no signs of access anyhow, so, i sucked it up and tracked all the network request and made my own api,

Then I was happy i get rid of this project,
But then they had bigger plans they ask me to add features on this project but there is a catch you have no access to any accounts, do it on your own,

Like What the Fuck, before giving an intern any project don't you have the responsibility to check weather the fucking project is possible i am just wasting my summer internship. I thought I got a big company it will help me grow i will get job security, but noo wtf, i am hell of frustrated

Some background:

About 2 months ago, my company wanted to build a micro service that will be used to integrate 3 of our products with external ticketing systems.

So, I was asked to take on this task. Design the service, ensure extendability and universality between our products (all have very different use cases, data models and their own sets of services).

Two weeks of meetings with multiple stakeholders and tech leads. Got the okay by 4-6 people. Built the thing with one other guy in a manner of a week. Stress tested it against one ticketing service that is used in a product my team is developing.

Everyone is happy.

Fast forward to last Thursday night.

“Email from human X”: hey, I extended the shared micro service for ticketing to add support for one of clients ghetto ticketing systems. Review my PR please. P.S. release date is Monday and I am on a personal day on Friday.

I’m thinking. Cool I know this guy. He helped me design this API. He must’ve done good. . . *looks at code* . . . work..... it’s due... Monday? Huh? Personal day? Huh?

So not to shit on the day. He did add much needed support for bear tokens and generalized some of the environment variables. Cleaned up some code. But.... big no no no...

The original code was written with a factory pattern in mind. The solution is supposed to handle communication to multiple 3rd parties, but using the same interfaces.

What did this guy do wrong? Well other than the fact that he basically put me in a spot where if I reject his code, it will look like I’m blocking progress on his code...

His “implementation” is literally copy-paste the entire class. Add 3 be urls to his specific implementation of the API.

Now we have

POST /ticket
PUT /ticket
POST /ticket-scripted
PUT /ticket-scripted
POST /callback

The latter 3 are his additions... only the last one should have been added in reality... why not just add a type to the payload of the post/put? Is he expecting us to write new endpoints for every damn integration? At this rate we might as well not have this component...

But seriously this cheeses me... especially since Monday is my day off! So not only do I have to reject this code. I also have to have a call now with him on my fucking day off!!!!

Arghhhhhh

!Rant

So guys , there is no other place to ask this question.

I'm thinking about making a Python wrapper for the devrant API . There isn't much info on the web.

I'm really stuck guys , how do I go about doing it .

Thanks

I have a question. If a hiring manager wants details on some of your projects, is that normal? (I've had some ask, but never this deep and over the phone)

Example: UI/API/ALGO how they were implemented, which parts you implemented, what was accomplished, pacific tools, why are you proud of those?

Looking for diversity in projects.

It's for a job interview. I thought it was weird, but Maybe I'm over thinking. Before I email them back, I wanna see what u guys/gals think.

BTW this email is from the HR Manager, not hiring manager, so I'm just going off her word. "She said, He said" sort of thing.

Thanks!

Another follow up. All these apps I m using to analyze the logs now, I apparently built years ago when I had 20% time or slack.

Even I don't remember that I already built some of them...

I was actually thinking ", wouldn't it be great if we could download all the logs at once for a specific API and date?" and then I open my AiO WPF app and it has button titles Logs Downloader... and it's located next to another that I found a few days ago, Logs Analyzer.

This stuff is going in a blog post I hope.... So guess you can just think of these as keynotes.

Long time no see!

I'm thinking about creating a Youtube channel to create some funny dev projects.

The first one is going to be: "Creating the DevOps nightmare", where I'll create a server health-checker to run on my raspberry-pi, and if the checked fails it'll trigger an API to call him with the voice of my boss, saying that if he doesn't fix that, he will be fired.

What do you guys think?

Yeah... I spent way too much fucking time thinking my multi threading was fucked up. When in actuality I had a parameter in a JSON payload for an API call I neglected to check for changes.

A fucking form id! Just one parameter had me frustrated for 2 hours.

Want to write a webapp to practice my Nodejs and Vuejs skills. Any ideas, you were wondering about (no to-do list)?
I was thinking about to involve some external API.

Anyone worked with WordPress + React?

I'm trying to think how I can host WP as my back-end and React as my front-end.

Currently I'm thinking of hosting them separately as two different domains as the back-end can be called as an API by the front-end.

I want to make a fancy 3D game for an assignment. Would it make sense to separate the game content completely from the engine? The way I imagined it, there would be a game folder with all the content in it (textures, shaders, scenes, scripts etc...) and the engine would "load" this folder, construct the scene and run the game. I was even thinking of using a lightweight scripting language for the game logic, like javascript, so I don't have to make an api and compile DLLs, and the engine (written in c++) would communicate with these scripts.

Is this a good design, or should I just put everything in one project so both the engine and the game logic compile to a single exe?

Going to begin an intranet web application. Confused between choosing Angular, Vue or React.

I have worked with Angular but this application will be managed by some junior developers with me overlooking it. And Angular seems overkill regarding this, it is too over engineered and then there is TypeScript. So I am thinking from the perspective of those junior developers so that they don't face a huge learning curve and become productive very fast.

Then there is the bullshit that usually goes around in every corporate intranet application where management becomes too nosy. That's why I decided that back end API should be done with Laravel which is stable not some kiddie framework of Node.js

Guys I need to deploy a very simple authentication API service.

You register with a username (actually an ID with a determined format), a password and uuid. You login with your username and password and if credentials are correct you get back the uuid as a response (JSON or whatever the fuck).

If you forget your password, you can use your uuid (which is confidential, very long string) in some POST request to set a new password. If you forget your username, you use the uuid again in a GET request to get back your username.

I've been looking at a bunch of solutions online and I don't think they suit my purpose exactly and all require emails (Like Firebase, AUth0, etc.) So, let me get this straight: NO FUCKING EMAILS INVOLVED PLEASE.

The above are the EXACT requirements I need for my work (for a good cause too). I fucking hate 0-requirement exploratory research tasks and I'm plagued with those. Those requirements are the only way it should work. So again, NO EMAILS INVOLVED PLEASE.

Also, please note that I have never developed an API in my life. I feel like StackOverflow will be assholes about this so I am asking this here.

I know it is very easy to do and there are probably dozens of ways to do this. I just do not know how, documentations are vague and overwhelming (or I'm just a little stupid lately). Another thing is that I am not sure of how can I do this in the most secure way. Bonus if this can be dockerized.

I know I sound a little rude,so I am sorry. It is just my frustration and depressing times I am going through that's preventing from thinking straight.

So recently I've been feeling like I fooled myself into thinking I'm any good at anything regarding development.

Today I tried to deploy a Console Application that would run nightly. The production systems are much more guarded, as it should be, but I should still be able to schedule a windows task (yeah yeah, windows servers, not the time Linux fanboys and not my choice :P) no problem.

Except I didn't expect that network users can't run jobs, because of a Group Policy about saving passwords on network accounts.

I expected a local administrator account to be available, and it wasn't.

Also a web API isn't available, even though I could telnet to the address on port 443 (HTTPS). A proxy apparently accepts all HTTP/HTTPS traffic and so on.

All this I feel like I should have known....

So am I in my own head, or am I right in thinking maybe I'm not "pro" development yet? Maybe I don't deserve to be "pro".

Thoughts?

Well.... Bad documented API, ehmm... thinking to fast, not noticing an id that is sent with the 'get' function... 5 hours later, 2 minute fix because I had an EUREKA moment. Fucking shitting heck, these are the fucking moments in life you want to scream your body out and kill yourself.

I'm thinking of making a email validation api that can check if an email address is temporary disposable email, tld domain, from a free email provider, mx detals, delivery availability etc.

Is this even a good API idea?

I'm trying out some stuff I read. I have rich domain models with private fields. In order to create EF core entities my domain models create snapshots with public properties.

So 3 models - domain, snapshot, entity.

Now I am thinking about introducing a fourth for the API.

This seems mental and that I have misunderstood something. Automapper might help clean this up.

Thought that it might be a good idea to ask this question here.

Im looking for a nice logging events service for a side project that is a b2b (so my clients got their own users). My targets are tracking users behavior/events/actions in the app while been able to shred the data that belongs to each customer. A great benefit would be having a solution that would allow me to export part of the data (in sql like way) so i could provide the users the option to download their users data as well.

Was thinking about mixpanel but i dont think they have any option to export the data via api. Heap analytics is also an interesting one, but their nice features are limited to corporates..

Any suggestions? Thanks!

Does anyone have experience with geographical routing? I need to find road distances between multiple locations and my total permutations for that are more than 100,000 so using Google distance matrix API is going to get really expensive I think. I am thinking about setting up an OSRM server. Any suggestions? Any alternatives or comments on the relative difference in the accuracy of results from Google and OSRM.

'CTO': We need this application to be desktop, client-server and self-installable(like a multiplayer game. Counter-Strike for example. Only here we are talking about a business application)
Me: (20 min explanation of the complications and limitations of the architecture).
'CTO': Don't worry. We're gonna explain all that on the user manual.

****Later****
'CTO': I got an idea. What if we deploy the client separately. It will be a dumb client. It will contain just views. That way you don't have to code an API.

The guy was thinking that a dumb client is like a remote desktop window where all is happening on the other side.🤦

I just thought of a potential webapp ideas while talking a shower. Still need to give it some thought but wondering how best to built it out? Sorta like a message board/kiva/change.org

I'm thinking #1 is backend + REST api. Then just create a webapp using React Native so it can be used mobile and browser?

Probably will build the first prototype though using either C# just to test the APIs...

But I guess how do you break a project up. Do you build backend first or do it feature by feature (both backend and frontend)?

And well what about hosting? Do need to decide now like AWS/Heroku... Or can I just build on local? Need a db though...

Need help with selecting a proper backend and website frameworks. After trying out a couple identity verification service providers we were dissapointed with their lack of support (takes weeks to do minimal changes).

So now we are having discussions about building in-house id verification system. We already have libraries for ios/android apps (ZOOM lib for face recognition and another lib for data extraction via OCR from document picture). So what we need is a proper backend and then a decent web framework with proper ux/ui design for our web/ios/android apps.

Currently thinking what kind of backend framework should we choose? Backend's main responsibility is for each client registered from website to assign an api key and to create a database/storage where his users would authenticate via clients app and upload a picture and a video.

Also wondering what kind of framework for website apps (main web app, dashboard app where we display pending verifications, and of course verification app) to choose. Should be go for angular?

I got my first developer job three years ago. I’ve always had a great eye for detail, and getting things done while following best practices. I learned that a few years ago from typography, which I think is a fascinating subject, which has a lot of shared ideas with software development.

In my first job, I immediately took a lot more responsibility than what I was assigned to. This job was as a React Developer, but I quickly got into backend development and set up kubernetes clusters, CI/CD.

Looking back, this was to me quite an achievement, considering I had never done anything even remotely close to it.

I did however, work my ass off. 18 hours work days without telling my boss, so only getting paid for 8. Plus I worked weekends.

I did love it. After a while, I got promotes to Senior Developer, and got responsibility for everything technical. I tried asking for help, but everybody else was either a student, or working purely front-end or app-development. Meanwhile, I was Devops, API-design, backend, Ci/CD, handling remote installations (all our customers are Airgapped), customer support, front-end and occasionally app-development when the app-developers could not handle their shit. Basically, I was the goto-guy for every problem, every feature, every fix. I don’t say this to brag.

I recently quit my job, started working as a consultant, because I almost doubled my pay. However the new job is boring as shit. I’m now an overpaid React Developer. And I really hate React. Not because it is shit, but simply because it is boring.

I’m thinking of going back to my old job. It was a lot of work, but it was really interesting. However, after I quit, they have changed their whole stack. No more Golang, Containers, Kubernetes, webRTC and other fun new technologies. Now, it is just plain, PHP without any dependecies. It is both boring, and idiotic. So I’m thinking of just quitting. Either doing some personal projects like game-development. I dont know.