D: “Did the attackers exfiltrate any data?”

M: “I can’t say for sure, but most likely based on—”

D: “—but did you find any undeniable evidence of it?”

M: “Keep in mind that the absence of evidence isn’t necessarily evidence of absence. There was very limited logging to begin with and the attacker erased artifacts and logs.”

D: “If there’s no evidence, then there was no exfiltration.”

M: “If a business doesn’t have cameras on its front door and then gets robbed, it can’t claim there was no robbery just because they didn’t video-record it.”

D: “That’s a poor analogy. Nothing’s missing here. I couldn’t care less if a robber made a *copy* of my money. That isn’t robbery.”

M: “... If the Titanic really hit an iceberg, then how come no pieces of an iceberg were ever found in the wreckage?”

This is my river baby, a laptop that was broken by its previous owner. It came to me with many dents (I covered those with stickers) and in a not booting state for about $300 after the guy dropped it in a river in South America.

- There is river sediment inside the screen, as well as the motherboard.
- If I put two sticks of RAM in it, the display artifacts all over the place and the computer crashes randomly. One slot must be empty.
- The ODD was filled with literal garbage. There is now a hard drive in its place.
- Running Windows through a VM would cause the WiFi to fail in a confusing manner. No one had ever seen that type of error before. I had to reseat the AirPort card.
- At one point, the power button stopped working, so I removed the keyboard and would start the computer by shorting two pads on the motherboard with a screwdriver.
- I’ve had all sorts of strange issues with it because of the water damage.
- I colored the keyboard with cellophane... 😅

After taking it apart for the 100th time, it’s now completely stable. I’ve had it for about 4 years, but it’s getting slow. I’m not sure what will come after the beloved river baby...

Apple you drove of delusional suckers! When will your retarded fashion devices finally support WEBP?!

A gallery page with images, and thanks to WEBP, it's 408 kB. Because Google made WEBP and handed out a well documented CLI FOSS compression tool that even can convert the source PNGs to lossy WEBP with bloody transparency. Well done, Google!

Except that Apple's shitty management can't take it that Google actually made something nice, so no WEBP. Instead, JPEG-2000 that enjoys nearly no fucking tool support. The free tools that even can deal with that mostly don't support transparency, and the encoder sucks donkeys so that JPEG still fucks JPEG-2000 big time.

So it's JPEG with matching background for iOS. Fine, but since JPEG's blocky artifacts are much more visible, the compression can't be that high, and it's 769 kB. That's 88% more image data for Shittari than for non-retarded browsers and even Edge! EDGE!!

Oh and if the user changes light/dark system mode according to surrounding light conditions, guess what happens? Yep, since JPEG doesn't support transparency, now it's different JPEGs with dark background via the media query in the "picture" element, and it's another 754 kB download. Bloody 1523 kB instead of 408 kB, that's a factor of 3.7!

Fuck your ass Crapple, with an electric eel!

CI/CD is probably the best thing that I ever learned about in the software engineering field.

Whenever I merge into master, my code automatically builds and the artifacts are uploaded to a new release on github.

Beautiful.

Me: We need to allow the team in the newly acquired subsidiary to access our docker image repositories.
Sec Guy: Why?
Me: So they can run our very expensive AI models that we have prepared onto container images.
Sec Guy: There is a ban on sharing cloud resources with the acquired companies.
Me: So how we're supposed to share artifacts?!?
Sec Guy: Can't you just email them the docker files?
Me: Those images contain expensively trained AI models. You can't rebuild it from the docker files.
Sec Guy: Can't you email the images themselves?
Me: Those are a few gigabytes each. Won't fit in an email and won't even fit the Google drive / onedrive / Dropbox single file size limit.
Sec Guy: Can't you store them in a object storage like S3/GCS/Azure storage?
Me: Sure
Proceed to do that.
Can't give access to the storage for shit.
Call the sec guy
Me: I need to share this cloud storage directory.
Sec Guy (with aparent amnesia): Why?
Me: I just told you! So they can access our AI docker images!
Sec Guy: There is a ban on sharing cloud resources with the acquired companies.
Me: Goes insane

Is there a law or something that you must attempt several alternative methods before the sec people will realize that they are the problem?!?! I mean, frankly, one can get an executable artifact by fucking email and run it but can't pull it from a private docker registry? Why the fuck would their call it "security"?

WHY THE FUCK ARE WE ONLY KEEPING THE LAST 10 BUILD ARTIFACTS IN ARTIFACTORY?!

THAT IS LITERALLY THE OPPOSITE OF HOW YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO USE IT

NOW I CAN'T ROLL BACK PROD CHANGES TO A WORKING VERSION BECAUSE IT LITERALLY DOESN'T EXIST ANYMORE

FUCK YOU, IT'S YOUR FIRE NOW

I've discovered that working with artists on a videogame is the equivalent of the chapter when Homer asks for a wish to a monkey arm on the Simpsons.

- I want a png image of the player on idle position. And I dont want a 30000 x 30000 image, neither an image which half of it are transparent pixels, neither the image not to be centered or any strange thing ok?

*They send the image*

- Normal resolution, well drawn, no visual artifacts centered on the image...

*Tries to import it on the game engine*

+ Can't import .jpg format images

- FFFFFFFF#@€&£$$}•{^÷|CK!

This happened after a year working on the same project on the same engine with the same image format specifications.

Does anyone get the feeling that as they become more senior, they care less about meeting "best practices" and more of just "good enough"?

Best practices being everything in those books about TDD, unit testing, design patterns, design artifacts.

Good enough: enough so it won't blow up in prod, some tests but not 80-90%, some docs. Basically not like those public docs, open source projects/frameworks where function is covered

When I first started professionally, I was all about efficiency, good design, reducing technical debt, clean code.

But now, I look at problems and instinctively I may make these decisions but I don't really think about it much. First goal is to just get something working, clean it up later... Maybe.

oh microsoft...

you used to put the artifacts in

bin/Release/net6.0/publish

now you just put them in

bin/Release/net6.0

fucking garbage thanks for the heads up

it's golang from here on out

go run main.go && echo 'byebye fucksticks'

My laptop is screwed. The laptop's monitor doesn't light up at all. An external monitor works with heavy artifacts.

Our team - if ever existed - is falling apart. Pressure raising. Release deadline probably failing. No release ready for Big Sur.

Almost seemed we were getting somewhere: More focus on code quality, unit tests, proper design, smaller classes. But somehow we now ended up in "microservice" hell; a gazillion classes, mostly tested in isolation, but together they just fail to do their job. A cheap and dirty proof of concept from March is still more capable than this pile. I really start to doubt all that "Clean code", TDD, Agility rhetorics. What does it help you, if nobody cares for the end result? It's like a month I try to hammer down that message: we have to have testable artifacts, we have to ensure code signing works, our artifact is packaged and installable, we have to give QA something they can test - but time just passes and this piece of shit software is still being killed or does nothing.

Now my knee is broken and can do no sports and are tied to my chair even more. To top it all my coffee machine broke and my internet connection was abysmal this week. Not the usual small disconnects, after which it would recover, but more annoying and enduring: often being throttled to 1.7 MB/s (ranking my connection in the slowest 7% even in Germany). My RDP sessions had compression artifacts all over the screen and a mouse click would only take effect 5 sec later.

But my Esspresso machine was just repaired. Not all hope is lost.

Install 18.04 they said. It will be fine they said...
Well.
Apperently it hates my intel graphics card. It was giving me artifacts already during installation. It didnt boot after installation and got stuck on a purple screen with the mouse on it.
Got past that with recovery mode. Googled the solution snd they said "move mouse while booting" yeah that doesn't help.
It also didn't recognize the other monitors connected to it and since it comes without unity now everything was not where I'm used to look for it.
3 hours of grub mangleing, driver installing and a unity installation later, it finally works.
Installed terminator and oh, look, one of the most used short cuts is overwritten by some emoji pick bs.
Ffs.
Longest ubuntu installtion ever and it almost fked up the 16.04 aswell which is in dual boot atm.
And before someone says use Arch: ubuntu is a project requirement and Arch is not supported by the tools we need to use.

Well... I can think of several bugs that I found on a previous project, but one of the worst (if not the worst, because the damage scope) it's one bug that only appears for a couple of days at the end of every month.

What happens is the following: this bug occurs in a submodule designed (heh) to control the monthly production according the client requirements (client says "I want 1000 thoot picks", that submodule calculates the daily production requirements in order to full fill the order).

Ideally, that programming need to be done once a week (for the current month), because the quantities are updated by client on the same schedule, and one of the edge cases is that when the current date is >= 16th of the month, the user can start programming the production of the following month.

So, according to this specific case, there's an unidentified, elusive, and nasty bug that only shows up on the two last days of every month, when it doesn't allow to modify/create anything for the following month. I mean, normally, whenever you try to edit/create new data, the application shows either an estimated of the quantities to produce, or the previous saved data. But on those specific days it doesn't show any information at all, disregarding of there's something saved or not.

The worst thing is that such process involves both a very overcomplicated stored procedure, and an overcomplicated functionality on the client side (did I mentioned that it dynamically generates a pseudo-spreadsheet with the procedure dataset? Cell by cell), that absolutely no one really fully understands, and the dude that made those artifacts is no longer available (and by now, I'm not so sure that he even remember what he done there).

One of the worst thing is that at this point, it's easier to handle with that error rather to redesign all of that (not because technical limitations, but for bureaucratic and management issues).

The another worst thing (the most important none) is that this specific bug can create a HUGE mess as it prevents the programming of the production to be done the next day (you know, people tends to procrastinate and start doing things at the very end of the day/week/month)... And considering that the company could lose a huge amount of money by every minute without production, you can guess the damage scope of this single bug.

Anyway, this bug has existed since, I don't know, 2015 (Q4?) and we have tried so many things trying to solve it, but that spaghettis refuse to be understood (specially the stored procedure, as it has dynamically generated queries). During my tenure (that ended last year) I spent a good amount of time (considering what I mentioned on the last rant, about the toxic environment) trying to solve that, just giving up after the first couple of weeks.

Anyway... I'm guessing that this particular bug will survive another 4-ish years, or even outlive the current full development team... But, who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ?

Authors of this textbook that I'm holding should replace their GPU because that graphical glitches are bad

So today I got fucked by myself. And it hurts.

In my Company, we started thinking how we could organize some kind of think tank for the next 5/ years goals.

As CTO I got designated to be in these workshops... And stupid me, I started to organize the "workshops". Using " agile" and "facilitator" artifacts (serious games, ideation sessions, open space sessions, etc).

Today we finished the roadmap and proto processes to make bottom to top inclusive process, and co-create with everyone what should be the Company roadmap.

We went to dinner. And I was happily talking with my smartphone when they decided that I should preside the committee in charge of the roadmap creation!!!!!

Useless mother fuckers!!!!! Go kill yourselves!!!! I have some interesting stuff to do!!!

Why didn't I just shut it!!! Now I'll have to make sure the old cluster fuck part of the Company do real shit!!! They are fucking useless and don't give a shit about the future!!!!

FUCK THEM!!!!!
FUCK ME!!!!!!

So I was rejected by the management today for promotion to Senior 2 although I have done several major feature developments + infra design and basically end to end ownership.

Reason for no promotion? That's the best fucking part, according to the feedback, the work I performed on the service I created is well-designed,
and the code quality is commendable. However, they pointed out a notable difference in code quality between the micro-service
I built and the rest of the project developed by others. This, apparently, suggests that I lack a strong sense of ownership over the broader product.

First of all, we have super tight deadlines (almost 996), and I burned midnight oil to make sure the service I am in-charge of is designed really well.
Also, how in the flying fuck the other how the inability of others to maintain good code quality elsewhere in the product is being used as evidence against my sense of ownership
and initiative in ensuring high engineering quality for the repository I wasn't even working on

What a delusional management, the entire feedback feels like just an excuse to fuck off, we are not promoting you...
May be instead of doing actual engineering work, I should have just do minimal work and write more design docs / technical artifacts

It is very demoralizing after I worked hard for so many months, product went out really well.. yet when performance review comes, rejected with a petty reason

Client complains constantly over image quality.
Then continues to upload diagrams as jpg not as png and then is bothered about compression artifacts...
It also doesnt help he works on a retina screen and we had to migrate his tiny thumbnail images from his old website.

Maybe I should buy a microscope... Or maybe send him the imagemagick documentation and he can choose the parameters to his liking?

To me this is one of the most interesting topics. I always dream about creating the perfect programming class (not aimed at absolute beginners though, in the end there should be some usable software artifact), because I had to teach myself at least half of the skills I need everyday.

The goal of the class, which has at least to be a semester long, is to be able to create industry-ready software projects with a distributed architecture (i.e. client-server).

The important thing is to have a central theme over the whole class. Which means you should go through the software lifecycle at least once.

Let's say the class consists of 10 Units à ~3 hours (with breaks ofc) and takes place once a week, because that is the absolute minimum time to enable the students to do their homework.

1. Project setup, explanation of the whole toolchain. Init repositories, create SSH keys for github/bitbucket, git crash course (provide a cheat sheet).
Create a hello world web app with $framework. Run the web server, let the students poke around with it. Let them push their projects to their repositories.
The remainder of the lesson is for Q&A, technical problems and so on.

Homework: Read the docs of $framework. Do some commits, just alter the HTML & CSS a bit, give them your personal touch.
For the homework, provide a $chat channel/forum/mailing list or whatever for questions where not only the the teacher should help, but also the students help each other.

2. Setup of CI/Build automation. This is one of the hardest parts for the teacher/uni because the university must provide the necessary hardware for it, which costs money. But the students faces when they see that a push to master automatically triggers a build and deploys it to the right place where they can reach it from the web is priceless.
This is one recurring point over the whole course, as there will be more software artifacts beside the web app, which need to be added to the build process. I do not want to go deeper here, whether you use Jenkins, or Travis or whatev and Ansible or Puppet or whatev for automation. You probably have some docker container set up for this, because this is a very tedious task for initial setup, probably way out of proportion. But in the end there needs to be a running web service for every student which they can reach over a personal URL. Depending on the students interest on the topic it may be also better to setup this already before the first class starts and only introduce them to all the concepts in a theory block and do some more coding in the second half.

Homework: Use $framework to extend your web app. Make it a bit more user interactive with buttons, forms or the like. As we still have no backend here, you can output to alert or something.

3. Create a minimal backend with $backendFramework. Only to have something which speaks with the frontend so you can create API calls going back and forth. Also create a DB, relational or not. Discuss DB schema/model and answer student questions.

Homework: Create a form which gets transformed into JSON and sent to the backend, backend stores the user information in the DB and should also provide a query to view the entry.

4. Introduce mobile apps. As it would probably too much to introduce them both to iOS and Android, something like React Native (or whatever the most popular platform-agnostic framework is then) may come in handy. Do the same as with the minimal web app and add the build artifacts to CI. Also talk about getting software to the app/play store (a common question) and signing apps.

Homework: Use the view API call from the backend to show the data on the mobile. Play around with the mobile project to display it in a nice way.

5. Introduction to refactoring (yes, really), if we are really talking about JS here, mention things like typescript, flow, elm, reason and everything with types which compiles to JS. Types make it so much easier to refactor growing codebases and imho everybody should use it.
Flowtype would make it probably easier to get gradually introduced in the already existing codebase (and it plays nice with react native) but I want to be abstract here, so that is just a suggestion (and 100% typed languages such as ELM or Reason have so much nicer errors).
Also discuss other helpful tools like linters, formatters.

Homework: Introduce types to all your API calls and some important functions.

6. Introduction to (unit) tests. Similar as above.
Homework: Write a unit test for your form.

(TBC)

Extremely frustrated with the release process and versioning system at my current company. Don't know if this is same everywhere or the half ass release managers can't think of a better way here.

Basically for any client raised issue that can't wait for next release are built as a hotfix. However hotfixes are never bundled togather or shiped to other clients. This is causing a vicious chain, two clients raise two separate issues on same version. Instead of fixing them as single hotfix (however minor the issues) we create two hotfix versions for each with only their issue. A week later same clients come back with the issue the other raised. Once again instead of bundling what is now effectively same code we build hotfixes on top of the clients respective branches. We now have two branches to maintain with same codebase. No matter how serious issue, the hotfix is never made generally available and always created on client's specific hotfix version.

Now that was an example for only two clients, in reality we have released five patch versions of a product in last 2 years. Each product version contains about a dozen artifacts (webapps, thick clients, etc) with its own version. Each product version being shipped to various clients. Clients being big banks never take a patch of product even if it fixes their issues and continues requesting hotfix. We continue building hotfixes on client branch and creat ever increasing tech debt. There is never a chance to clean up or new development. Just keep doing hotfix after hotfix of same things.

To top if all off, old branches are still in svn while new in git. Old branches still compile with ant new with maven. Old still build with java 5,6,7 while current with 8. Old still build from old jenkins serve pipelines while new has different build server. Old branches had hardcoded integration db details which no longer exists so if tou forget to change before releasing it doesn't work.

Please tell me this is not normal and that there are better ways to do this? Apologies I think I rambled on for too long 😅

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

# The detailed version #

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People are like a stable set of database artifacts blah blah
Repeat this repost that

Did anyone ever figure out why it is that trained human detection models don’t work better ?

All you’d think they’d have to do is run an animation renderer to create data representing a human figure in every conceivable position imaginable with limbs moving into positions that were within certain tolerances in different positions with different textures

I don’t personally think the full capability is being represented

You know what I fucking LOVE? Cross platform. I love working with shitty JavaScript CRAP that not only is interpreted (i.e. parsed and processed for EVERY user for EVERY execution) but is also just so fucking easy to debug. I love the fact that management is making not only architecture but technology decisions in the name of initial development time, forgetting that they are exponentially increasing maintenance time. I can't get over my affection for waiting for the bloody CI to build both platforms and because some fucker commits his shite straight to master blocks the generation of BOTH platforms artifacts.

Week ago, leader of the artifacts/packages storage and mirroring with animal in Logo, fucked up our testing enabling new feature on theirs SaaS.

We created a ticket, they managed to fix that, although it took them long time to do so, probably due to timezones as fix was simple click on their Admin area.

Today they forwarded us email that there will be some changes that can impact prod ...

Great timing, great ..

Theorem 2.71 All software is shit.

Corollary 3.14 So stop the braindead OS wars. All OS are shit, too.

Proof. The only software that can stay beautiful and clean is software that is never used. Maybe if you are Dijkstra or live in a Haskellian world, you might come away with it, but for the rest of us our artifacts have to interact with other artifacts or are build upon strange historically grown systems, they have to deal with users who will put it to creative use.. and in the process we also actually might have to alter some state.
Or put another way: code is a social construct. Like science are the beliefs and superstitions grown by a scientific community, software is the montainous dunghill produced by our laborious efforts to make shit even work. Of course this only piles the stack higher and higher until you can already smell it from the moon.

Ok, let's do the opposite (reference to a previous rant).
Should a frontend developer know about:
- Data structures and algorithms?
- User interface design patterns and usability?
- User experience heuristics?
- Accessibility?
- Design tools?
- How websites work on the browser after the frameworks have done their job?
- Data flow, and artifacts like user stories?

OMF you motherfucking Eclipse developers. All I want is to build an application with SWT. WHY THE FUCKING FUCK is that near impossible.
1) why are there no SWT maven artifacts= only 3 year old ones on a custom github repo?
2) why is is fucking rocket science to even find a guide on how to build this fucking piece of shit yourself
3) WHY THE FRIGGIN FUCKING FUCK OF FUCKS is it so hard to build it your self - outdated docs .... nice, dead links and repos, nicer .... referenced maven artifacts from a non-existing, none-documented repo, ... wow you're really kickin it here.

All I want is to fix this nullpointer in this fucking piece of shit you call framework ...
Have you actually tried to read your docs (can we really call that shit docs?) from a none-100years-swt dev's point of view?
Noone understands shit!

Why is there no standard build system, like maven, grade or for fuck's sake even ant?
It almost feels if you devs don't want anyone use your abomination, so it can die in peace.

Arg, I could puke ...

So yes, I know that I should have more paid more attention when I cleared the production artifacts instead of my test artifacts. But no access control and the last backup is from september? Sorry, but I don't think that this isn't your fault, too.

I discovered in a project that Maven artifacts have a new type:

<dependency>
<groupId>com.idontexist</groupId>
<artifactId>idontexist</artifactId>
<version>2.5.1</version>
<type>pom.lastUpdated</pom>
</dependency>

It's amazing, because with this special type you can set a dependency that doesn't exist in any repository AND THE COMPILATION WORKS ANYWAY!!! It's very useful!!!!

“Please don't use Google docs in the [redacted] env--it is not allowed at all and we will get dinged. You should all have MS Office so please save important artifacts in an approved format.” —Said someone being bribed by Microsoft

stop including your vendors and build artifacts in git!!!!

I am looking at you JS guys...

Anyone ever passed docker builds between stages in gitlab ci?

I'm googleing my ass off and doing it via caching atm but it's unreliable. Artifacts are no option either for 2gigs of image.
It'd be nice to drop this `docker save --output image.tar` solution altogether..

Am I the only one trying to have seperate build, test and deploy stages for their docker builds?

Soo, after reading a post about Fedora Workstation I figured, why not try it out. It has some awesome productivity tools!

I donwloaded the ISO, made a bootable USB stick and started my PC into Fedora live.

At first it looked awesome! I really looked forward to working with it. I installed it and restarted my PC. It booted up I choose Fedora and I saw a login prompt.

Everything's fine until now. I logged in, no problem. But after that the screen just turned black and only my mouse was visible. I thought, maybe it's because it's loading something.

I waited a couple of minutes but then i got really frustrated because nothing, literally nothing happened. So I forced a shutdown and restarted. I logged in again.. and... Well at least the screen wasn't black anymore. But it was not good either. Artifacts everywhere. I could not read what the screen said.

So I reinstalled it and couple of times, black screen after artifact screen.

I don't really know who's to blame here. Nvidia or Linux/Fedora or something else (I highly think it's Nvidia tho, fuck Nvidia and their anti Linux mood ).

I will try Fedora on a laptop somewhere in the Future again but for now I've had enough of that shit combined with the aftermath of resetting everything back to normal (removing grub etc).

If anyone has some advice concerning the Nvidia problem I'd highly appreciate that.
It's a GeForce 650ti

What the fuck is happenning with android? Latest AS 3.4.1 and SDK 29(Q+) does not allow normal app compat artifcats for a new project and whole project needs to be developed with androidx.* artifacts.

And their androidx.* artifacts are fucking incomplete: i wanna test recycler view clicks and here i am , fucking myself on how to do so, coz The espresso RecyclerViewActions api is in android.espresso...* package and not androidx.espresso...*
FUCK FUCK FUCK YOU ANDROID WHY DO THIS TO ME WHY WHYWHY!!!!!

So I start today lovely Monday with a typo SNAPHOT instead of SNAPSHOT that made my artifacts always deployed to release repo

you want to build a database dump with bamboo.
the job works, everything is green AF - but there are no build artifacts. you check the buildconfig 5 times and then you realize, there are blanks after the copy pattern of the frak'n build artifact.

dafuq is this..?

It very hard to manage artifacts on gocd and it's fucking 16 gb and i am having hard time to manage this.

I thought documentation will help but it says you have to manually manage artifacts.