Boss: "Could you join the new DevOps team for a week or two, for some coaching?"

Me: "I'd rather watch you masturbate furiously in a corner of the office while you cry over your ex boyfriend"

Boss: "Yeah... that's why I ask you. You are the only one brave enough to watch"

Me: *Sigh* "But I don't know shit about what DevOps does, I'm a DBA. I've told you the difference a million times. Can't we just douse it in gasoline and set it on fire?"

Boss: "What?"

Me: "Not the team, the servers..."

Boss, imitating Gimli: "And my ex!"

Me: "I get why he left you"

Boss: "It's funny, he was actually better with computers than me, maybe even better than you. He hated me for starting this company, told me I was just chasing money instead of ideals. He just isn't grown up enough to see that there is more to the world than computer games, brewing beer, maker festivals and gay bars, that you need to take responsibility... Maybe it just never works out between managers and geeks..."

Me: "Indeed. The difference in competence is too large"

Boss: "Ugh. You are like straight version of him... but will you at least take a look?"

Me: "Fine, unzip your pants..."

Boss: "No, not that... you need to teach DevOps this docking thing, with the parallel stuff, and the horizontal growth"

Me: "Damn I really hope we're talking about servers now... Do you mean Docker?"

Boss: "That's it. They want to learn how to dock on the Windows servers. They reserved two 4xlarge on AWS. Is that enough for docking?"

Me: ...

Me: ...

Me: "You know what. I'm going back to hug my DB designs, and wash my brain with some queries. Then I'll return here to burn everything to the ground. There is no hope for you left"

Boss: "That's what he said"

Me: "You're using that meme wrong"

Boss: "OK. So what if you just stay on DB management, and I'll just give you the budget to recruit a new DevOps lead and pay for training?"

Me: "That would work"

Boss: "Why are you grinning?"

Me: "Because I have your ex's phone number"

When a customer gets pissed because something doesn't work and you give a bullshit suggestion because you want to reply something at least and you get a reply like 'oh thanks it works now!'

o_O

Linux sucks.

Now now, chill. I'm using it as my main OS for a few years now. I know what I'm talking and this title is a bit click-baity, but this just has to go out there:

1. It's usable as a Windows replacement just fine - FALSE. XFCE4 is years old and buggy as hell especially on multi-monitor set-up, Gnome3 gets stuck more often than my Windows 98 machine used to, KDE is like a rich kid on meth. Plug in Bluetooth headphones? Well no, sorry, you have to research that online, since you'll probably need to install some packages for it to work. Did I say "work"? Well no, because after more research you realize that Debian on Gnome3 on gdm3 launches pulseaudio on its own, so you have 2 instances of pulseaudio, and one of them is stealing your headphones sometimes and you either have no sound or shitty sound. How do I know that you ask? The same way I know everything else - every time you try to do something new on any Linux, it involves a ton of research. Exciting research, don't get me wrong, but at this point it looks more like a toy than a reliable desktop computer operating system.

2. And why am I using pulseaudio? Why not alsa? years ago people were discussing on forums that pulseaudio is old and dead, yet here we are with new LTS release of Ubuntu still shining with Pulseaudio. How about several different service management systems being deprecated by new ones, each having different configurations and calling methods? Apparently systemd is old and lame now. It's a mix of 10 year old software that works badly, with a 5 year old replacement that works worse, somehow trying to live under the same roof. Does it work? Ask my headphones who sound like a fucking dial-up modem.

3. Let's talk about displays, shall we? xorg is old and deprecated, right? We got Wayland that's mostly stable. Don't know what that is? That's just basic knowledge for Linux. And when you try to install network-manager, it also tries to install Mir toolkits. Because why the fuck not install 3 display managers when you want a network manager, of which one is old and dying, one is young and stupid, and another is an infant that died of cancer?

4. Want to integrate with Google Drive? Yeah, there's a tool that mounts the drive as a local directory. Yeah only for Ubuntu. Want it on Debian? You need to compile it. Oh wait, it's on Ocaml, because fuck mainstream languages, we're hipsters. How do you compile Ocaml? Well you need to have Ocaml on your system, dummy. How do you do that? Well you need to compile Ocaml. Ok, how do I do that? Well, git clone, download and install some dependencies, configure, make... oh sorry, you're using libssl1.0.2g when you need libssl1.0.1f, nope, sorry, won't work. Want to install libssl1.0.1f? Why? You already have the "g", stupid! Want to remove libssl1.0.2g? Bye-bye literally everything that you have on your PC. But at least you got the "f". Does it work now? Well no, because you need libssl1.0.2g for another dependency to work.
And all I ever wanted was to get a fucking document from google drive (not nudes, I promise).

5. Want to watch a movie? Let me tear that screen in half and make the bottom half late by a couple of frames, because who needs vertical sync, right? Oh you do? Well install the native drivers maybe. Oh you have? Welcome to eternal Boot to Recovery mode, motherfucka!

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

Yeah, most of the times things work just fine. But the reason I know what those things are and how they work is not curiosity. The reason that I know the inner workings of Linux much better than the inner workings of Windows, is because in those few years that I've been using it full time, it has caused me 10 times more headache than I have ever experienced with other systems. And it's not the usual annoyances like "OMG it rebooted when I didn't ask it to", but more like "Oh, it won't work and I need 2 days to find out why" kind of stuff, because even if you experience the same thing again, it's always caused by some new shit and the old solution won't work any more.

I still love it, and will continue to use it. I don't know why really. Maybe because I'm not afraid of fucking it up any more? Maybe because I can do what I want in it and recovering will be easier than on Windows?
It's a toy for me, after all these years. And I also use it for professional reasons.

But whenever someone presents it as a better alternative to Windows, I just want to puke.

So my Girlfriend bought a new iPhone at Verizon today. Cool story, I know, but here's where it's gone from there.

Firstly her debit wouldn't run as credit, so we used mine but that's the least of it (but began it).

So she has 16,000 photos... Alot, sure, but not the issue. Obviously with that amount of data she wasn't about to reasonably use iCloud to back it up (understandable only by me) so she was confronted both by me and the Verizon employee about this issue to where we both (the Verizon employee and I) agreed that an iTunes backup/restore was the only way to preserve her data. She was confused. No worry, told her I had it handled and the Verizon employee agreed. Great. Yet we get home and begin the process. My girlfriend was not on the latest iOS (understandable given the battery scenario and she was on an iPhone 6) and this was ridiculous to her because she had to update in order to do the iTunes back up. Whatever, I brushed it off. Her phone was updated, and backed up... Which took a while but we are talking 30gb (of which she had no understanding of how much that was). After the back up we discovered her new phone wasn't working due to a bad sim, great, no problem we have the old one... But oh no. "I don't want that shitty old sim" she said. Uhmm what... I say, and say let me get an earring (to switch the Sims) and she gave one to me and as soon as I went to pop the tray, she had a fucking heart attack as if I was demolishing her phone. I talk her down, get it switched, get the phone to restore (slow process as she's complaining... 30gb mind you) and it works. She goes to bed. Comes back, texts aren't working. I say imessages or texts (now she has no idea) I troubleshoot, seems nothing's working, and that's okay Verizon must of reinstated the new sim and deactivated the old (fine). I switch them and it works. She proceeds to berate me about the SIM cards because she didn't want the 'old shitty one' (the one that got us to the place of a functioning phone).

Now everything works and she claims a Genius bar employee would of done this in minutes.

I (obviously) lose my shit, now I'm sleeping on the couch.

Im an IT professional / programmer..... this shit really ticked me off.

My most awkward recruiter interaction?

Just graduated college and got 'suckered' by an programming position ad that turned out to be a recruiting company. It was fine since they charge the company for their services and not me.
After a couple of weeks of waiting (they initially promised I would/could have at least 3 interviews a week, which hadn't happened.) I decided to start looking again on my own, found a position, and I was hired.

About two months later I get a phone call:

<skipping the pleasantries>
R: "I see you are working for D, congratulations. I've started the paperwork for our reimbursement."
Me: "Reimburse for what? I found that job on my own."
R: "D is one of the companies we work with and when we submitted your resume, they told us you were already hired."
Me: "And?"
R: "And you signed a contract and now its time to pay. The fees only start at $500"
Me: "Not me. I have the contract, it states, in the second paragraph, I am not responsible for any hiring fees."
<couple of seconds of silence>
R: "Yes, but that is only if we negotiated the contact. Since you went behind our back, we couldn't start the process"
Me: "And?"
R: "And its a breach of contract."
Me: "I'm not a lawyer, I don't understand what you're saying. It says right here on the contract I signed, I don't pay any fees. No where does it say I'm not allowed to look for a job on my own. Right?"
R: "Um..yea..right..right...but you were hired by one of our contracted companies."
Me: "No way I would have known that. Maybe you should have set up an interview long before now."
<R is getting pretty angry at this point>
R: "I'm sure we gave you list of companies we work with. Contacting those companies is a breach of contract. Unless you want our lawyers to get involved, the fee is only $500. Failing to honor your side of the agreement and we'll be forced to contact your employer and begin garnishing your wage until the fee is paid. You don't want that, do you?"
Me: "There was no list and I am allowed to find a job on my own. Again, I'm not responsible for you not setting up an interview so do whatever you think you can do. Have a good night"
<I hang up>

About a week later..

Boss: "Got a phone call from XYZ Recruiting requesting a wage garnishment. Do you know anything about that?"
<I explain the situation>
Boss: "Oh good grief. We've worked with them a couple of times and we contact them on an individual basis for new hires. You're fine"
Me: "You're not going to garnish my paycheck?"
Boss: "No no no, that's not how this works. He was probably trying to scare you into paying their crazy fees."
Me: "What if they get their lawyers involved? I don't want to cause any trouble"
Boss: "Ha ha...XYZ Recruiting is a couple of guys in an office and we have lawyers on the 3rd floor who eat and breath this shit. They know that and you won't hearing from them again."

!dev !rant - only very sad

I have been through the worst and saddest week of my life.
Sadly, it's getting worse every day.

I've been travelling around the world in my RV for years and haven't seen my parents for several years. Since I recently successfully completed a huge project and now have some spare time, I thought it would be nice to visit my parents. Everything went well. We were glad to see each other after a long time and had a nice day together. My father works as a security guard and had to go to work early in the evening. So I stayed alone with my mother.

In the evening my mother went to bed earlier than usual because she didn't feel well. I wished her a good night and wanted to surf the internet. But somehow I had a strange feeling (maybe a premonition) and after 5 minutes I went into her bedroom to bring her a glass of water and at this very moment she suffered a heart attack. I threw it all away and called 911 immediately. I shouted the address into the phone, screamed emergency, heart failure, unconscious while trying to start resuscitation at the same time. Fortunately, the ambulance was nearby, arrived in just a few minutes, pushed me aside and started the resuscitation procedure. It took more than an hour and dozens of electric shocks to even get a pulse.

The ambulance took her to the hospital for further medical treatment. I was in the hospital all night until at least she had a stable pulse.

As soon as I returned to my parents' house (the car was still warm, hardly 3 minutes have passed), my father, who had returned from work a few minutes earlier, suddenly suffered a thrombosis in his leg. The whole leg was slowly turning black. I immediately dragged him into the car and drove him as fast as I could to the hospital.

It's Sunday now. I haven't slept since Thursday and I've been in the hospital all the time. Both are in a coma, fighting for their lives. I thought it couldn't get any worse, my mother got sepsis and pneumonia today.

Now I have returned to my parents' house and pray that both of them will survive. Can't sleep even though I'm tired to death. Can't work, try to distract me somehow. Maybe I'll be able to sleep at least two hours. Then I'll go back to the hospital.

What a damn fuckin' week.

Apple has a real problem.

Their hardware has always been overpriced, but at least before it had defenders pointing out that it was at least capable and well made.

I know, I used to be one of them.

Past tense.

They have jumped the shark.

They now make pretentious hipster crap that is massively overpriced and doesn't have the basic features (like hardware ports) to enable you to do your job.

I mean, who needs an ESC key? What is wrong with learning to type CTRL-[ instead? Muscle memory? What's that?

They have gone from "It just works" to "It just doesn't work" in no time at all.

And it is Developers who are most pissed off. A tiny demographic who won't be visible on the financial bottom line until their newly absent software suddenly makes itself known two, three years down the line.

By which time it is too late to do anything.

But hey! Look how thin (and thermally throttled) my new laptop is!

I am bloody sick of being on my own.

I was the sole dev at the last few jobs I've held, with the exception of API Guy -- who didn't really help much, and who got fired / quit six months after I started. Every other job I've either been the only dev, or the only web dev. (Exception:My boss at my previous job was a Rails dev, but he has zero time to code, and was significantly less experiened so he could only rarely help anyway.)

But now I'm in a company with a bunch of other devs, and they're all ostensibly senior devs, so you'd think I should be able to ask questions, right? And get answers? that actually help? like "Hey, you built this; how does it work?" No bloody way.

So far every time I've asked someone for help, they've been incompetent. I asked about what a few flags did, and got an answer that basically said "you just gotta know. oh, and the labels aren't up to date, so don't trust what they say." I asked the head of the "product team" about a ticket that he wrote, and he changed what it meant four times within two days. I asked about another, and he said "oh, that isn't reproduceable." Thanks. I asked about mailers, and got two very different, very incompete walkthroughs from the more senior devs (9+ years on this codebase) that didn't help. I asked two people about how users and roles work, and still have no idea what kind of user (there are like twelve?) is what, what roles even exist, or how to check for permissions. `@current_user` is a thing, but idfk what it holds since that can change considerably, and there's an impersonation feature that changes how it works, too. I ask the product guy again about where to link something, and he has no idea. I ask said product guy about what this feature needs to do, and he doesn't know. I ask what the legal team needs, and i get nothing. I ask the designer where the goddamn CSS lives, and he doesn't know; he apparently just puts it wherever he feels like, even if it's a completely unrelated stylesheet. As long as it works, right?

I ask very simple and straighforward questions, and it takes them forever to get back to me saying what amounts to "idk, ask someone else."

This feels like the same crap all over again, except now there are a bunch of devs I can ask that give me basically the same answers as the sales people always did. Always "idk" or a confusing mess of an 'answer' that skips most/all of the important bits. At least these people don't [usually] contradict themselves.

So, @Root is all alone, again.
And currounded by incompetence.
Again.

For fuck's sake.
Can't I catch a break?

For people who think/find that open source solutions are always better than commercial/paid/proprietary ones, you are not going to like this rant.

I'm starting to get really fucking fed up with people always, whenever I see someone (including myself) mentioning that an open source solution which is an alternative to a closed source one, saying that it's shit.
I've had countless encounters on here (also irl) where someone mentions that an open source solution (GIMP or Libre Office for example) is shit by default while they've maybe (or probably?) not even used it themselves.
Also people going "you can't even compare those two as for what they can do/features/functions". I'm definitely not saying that those open solutions are perfect. But to call them worthless or shit and/or to say that you literally 'cannot compare them' or that the open solution just doesn't work as a *FACT* is fucking bullshit.

Let's take GIMP for example, the use case of a friend of mine:

- He works both with macOS and Linux Mint, he *needs* a design/photo editing tool which is cross platform. (or at least one which works on macOS+Linux)
- He does not mind paying for software but he prefers to use software which is free as in freedom because he also likes to tinker with the software (a lot of people find this argument bullshit, I noticed on here. Why is that? It's a valid reason. Maybe not for you but we're not talking about you right now).
- He likes Photoshop but due to Linux incompatibility and the fact that he can't tinker around with the code, it's not an option for him.
- He'd gladly go for paid software but GIMP fills all his design/photo editing needs (also the more advanced ones but don't ask them to me because I have no fucking clue how that shit works)
- GIMP *just works* for him, he never has trouble with it.

Let's take Libre Office, my own use case:

- It *NEEDS* to work on Linux, which Libre does.
- It *HAS* to be open source, ethic/moral thingy; Libre Office is open source.
- It doesn't need to work complete magic but it needs proper basic document and 'excel' sheet functionalities which is the case with Libre and it works *for me*.
- I don't mind paying for it, will probably donate in the future (seeding the macOS+windows+linux versions fulltime at the moment)

See, for our use cases, it works very well. So why go into "it's no match for proprietary alternatives" mode right away? It actually is, as you see in the examples above.

Please stop saying that those solutions *don't work* or *are shit* because they do work and are useful for me and loads of people around the world.
Do they have *ALL* the features which their proprietary alternatives have? Maybe, maybe not, maybe they're missing some and maybe they even have some features which the proprietary alternatives don't have, I haven't checked out every feature.

I'm not saying that it works for you, for the record, I'm just saying that just because for you it is a fact that they're bad/shit/hardly working, doesn't mean they are for others.

Progression in mindset of a developer trough professional life:

1. I'm going to make my code so efficient and beautiful that everyone will envy it!

2. I'm going to make sure I keep separation of concern.

3. I'm going to make my code at least maintainable for other developers.

4. Well shit. At least it works, for now.

My second job. I've been hired as a research specialist, not a developer, but they found out I could code during the interview.

Boss: hey, so we have our main product line that shares the control panel for all the models, right?
Me: unh, yeah
B: well, we need to know how it works.
M: sorry?
B: yeah, I mean, we should have a manual with all the tech documentation so we know how everything works
M: ...and didn't you handle the tech docs to the developers?
B: uh...no, actually we requests feature to the devs (note: external company) with a phone call, or email...now we need the specs.
Me: omg

...

The other company (which is part of the same group) handles me the source code.
It is a huge, 25k lines of spaghetti written by at least 7 people, one at a time, uncommented.
After a month I produce a 50page doc with how everything works, after actually compiling my resignation letter 3 times.

M: boss, here the docs
B: fine, I'll take a look
15 mins later
B: this is not what we need! You cannot describe those algorithm like this!
( I described the algorithms with their block flow, with a punctual verbal description)
M: umh.. So how do you need it?
B: we need an excel table, with all the entering conditions on the rows and all the exit conditions in columns, and the description of the condition of work in the crossing cells!
M: are you even serious?

So there is this girl who joined the company as a trainee.

The company developed a 1 year project to train 25 trainees and she joined saying that she already had some experience making websites. (remember this)

They started in the beginning of January and stayed for about 3 months just studying the platform (Salesforce) and receiving some classes from Senior Devs, on subjects like OOP basics, loops, conditions and features of the platform.

After this time they joined the teams, 2 joined my team, a guy with 32 years that worked 10 years in a bank and wanted to go for a IT job and the girl of 22.

We gave her a really small task, just to make a code to copy info from one field to the other on a list of objects.

After 3 days of saying she was working on it we asked her to show us the code, she had written the "code" directly in the class, VS Code was going crazy with errors. When we asked her "But where is the method?", she answered "What is a method?"

After it we had other experiences trying to teach her some things. The team was formed by me (mid level dev), another mid level dev, a senior and a architect (who was self taught and one of the best teachers I've ever seen).

We tried for about 3 months to teach her how to do basic stuff, like a for loop, and every time we learned that she was missing some "foundations" of this basic stuff, so we would come back and explain the foundation, and a couple times she needed to use this knowledge like a week later and didn't remember shit.

So after this the team talked with our leader that we wanted to let her go and focus on the other guy who was going really well and some other junior devs who had joined the team.

But the HR found out that she had sued her last company, we don't know the reason, but HR guys were afraid of firing her without a careful firing process.

So now we're stuck with her in the team, and everything we ask her to do need to be remade, not because the code is bad, but because it NEVER works

And after all this I still ask myself, how did she finish college? Every person that i know that studied CS or CS like courses had a lot of OOP or at least knew what a class and a method were supposed to be.

Friend of mine killed his MacBook with some Softdrink.

Just poured it all over his poor a1502.

He let it dry for a few days, it starts to work again.
Except the battery.

Goes on Amazon and buys a new battery.

New battery doesn't work either and so he tells me about it and I as stupid as I am couldn't resist the temptation to finally work on a MacBook like my "hero" Lois Rossmann does.

So turns out the board is good.
Cleaned it up and basically nothing happened to it.

So what's the deal with "los batlerias"?

The first got hit by liquid, the second had a broken connection to a cell.
That could have happened through my friend, installing it without testing it first, or at the seller, so it being a DOA battery.

Now away from the stupidity of my friend and the situation to the actual source for this rant.

Once something happens to a modern Managed battery, the Battery Management System (BMS) disconnects the voltage from the system and goes into an error state, staying there and not powering anything ever again.
For noobs, it's dead. Buy a new one.

But It can be reset, depending you know how to, and which passwords were set at the factory.
Yes, the common Texas instruments BQ20Zxx chips have default passwords, and apple seems to leav them at default.

The Usb to SMBus adaptors arrived a few days ago and I went to prod the BMS.

There is a very nice available for Windows called BE2works, that I used the demo of to go in and figure out stuff. The full version supports password cracking, the demo not.

After some time figuring out how Smart Battery Systems (SBS) "API" works, I got to actually enter the passwords into the battery to try get into manufacturer and full access mode.

Just to realise, they don't unlock the BMS.

So, to conclude, my friend bought a "new" battery that was most likely cut out of a used / dead macbook, which reports 3000mah as fully charged instead of the 6xxx mah that it should have, with 0 cycles and 0hours used.
And non default access.

This screams after those motherfuckers scaming the shit out of people on Amazon, with refurb, reset, and locked fucken batteries.

I could kill those people right now.

Last but not least,
My friend theoretically can't send it back because I opened the battery to fix the broken connection.
Though maybe, it'll get send back anyway, with some suprise in the package.

Fuck code.org. Fuck code. Not code code, but "code" (the word "code"). I hate it. At least for teaching. Devs can use it as much as they want, they know what it means and know you can't hack facebook with 10 seconds of furiously typing "code" into a terminal. What the fuck are you thinking when you want me to hack facebook? No, when I program, it's not opening terminal, changing to green text and typing "hack <insert website name here, if none is given, this will result to facebook.com>" Can you just shut the fuck up about how you think that because you can change the font in google fucking docs you have the right to tell me what code can and can't do? No, fuck you. Now to my main point, fuck "code" (the string). It's an overused word, and it's nothing but a buzzword (to non devs, you guys know what you're talking about. how many times have you seen someone think they are a genius when they here the word "code"?) People who don't know shit don't call themselves programmers or devs, they call themselves coders. Why? It fucking sounds cool, and I won't deny that, but the way it's talked about in movies, by people, (fucking) code.org, etc, just makes people too much of a bitch for me to handle. I want everyone reading this rant who has friends who respect the fact that YOU know code (I truly believe everyone on devRant does), how it works, and it's/your limitations, AND that it takes hard work and effort, to thank god right now. If you're stuck with some people like me, I feel you. Never say "code" near them again. Say "program." I really hate people who think they know what an HTML tag is and go around calling themselves coders. Now onto my main point, code.org. FUCK IT. CAN YOU STOP RUINING MY FUCKING AP CS CLASS. NO CODE.ORG, I DON'T NEED TO WATCH YOUR TEN GODDAMN VIDEOS ON HOW TECHNOLOGY IS IMPORTANT, <sarcasm>I'VE BEEN LIVING UNDER A ROCK FOR THIRTY YEARS</sarcasm>. DO I REALLY NEED ANOTHER COPY OF SCRATCH? WAIT, NO, SCRATCH WAS BETTER. YOU HAD FUCKING MICROSOFT, GOOGLE, AND OTHER TECHNOLOGICAL GIANTS AND YOU FUCKED UP SO BAD YOU MADE IT WORSE THAT SCRATCH. JUST LETMECODE (yes I said that) AND STOP TALKING ABOUT HOW SOME IRRELEVANT ROBOT ARM DEVELOPED BY MIT IS USING AI AND MACHINE LEARNING TO MAKE SOME ROBOT EVOLVE?! IF YOU SPEND ONE MORE SECOND SAYING "INNOVATION" I'LL SHOVE THAT PRINT STATEMENT YOU HAVE A SYNTAX ERROR UP YOUR ASS. DON'T GET ME FUCKING STARTED ON HOW ITS IMPOSSIBLE TO DO ANYTHING FOR YOURSELF WHEN YOUR GETTING ALL THE ANSWERS WITHOUT DOING ANY WORK AND THE FACT THAT JAVASCRIPT IS YOUR FUCKING LANGUAGE. <sarcasm>GREAT IDEA, LETS GET THESE NEW PROGRAMMERS INTO A PROFESSIONAL ENVOIRMENT BY ADDING A DRAG AND DROP CODE (obviously we can say it) EDITOR</sarcasm> MAYBE IF YOU GOT THIS SHIT UP YOUR ASS AND TO YOUR BRAIN YOU'D ACTUALLY GET TO PRPGRAMMING IN YOUR ADVANCED AP COURSE. ITS CALLED FUCKING CODE.ORG FOR A REASON

3 rants for the price of 1, isn't that a great deal!

1. HP, you braindead fucking morons!!!

So recently I disassembled this HP laptop of mine to unfuck it at the hardware level. Some issues with the hinge that I had to solve. So I had to disassemble not only the bottom of the laptop but also the display panel itself. Turns out that HP - being the certified enganeers they are - made the following fuckups, with probably many more that I didn't even notice yet.

- They used fucking glue to ensure that the bottom of the display frame stays connected to the panel. Cheap solution to what should've been "MAKE A FUCKING DECENT FRAME?!" but a royal pain in the ass to disassemble. Luckily I was careful and didn't damage the panel, but the chance of that happening was most certainly nonzero.
- They connected the ribbon cables for the keyboard in such a way that you have to reach all the way into the spacing between the keyboard and the motherboard to connect the bloody things. And some extra spacing on the ribbon cables to enable servicing with some room for actually connecting the bloody things easily.. as Carlos Mantos would say it - M-m-M, nonoNO!!!
- Oh and let's not forget an old flaw that I noticed ages ago in this turd. The CPU goes straight to 70°C during boot-up but turning on the fan.. again, M-m-M, nonoNO!!! Let's just get the bloody thing to overheat, freeze completely and force the user to power cycle the machine, right? That's gonna be a great way to make them satisfied, RIGHT?! NO MOTHERFUCKERS, AND I WILL DISCONNECT THE DATA LINES OF THIS FUCKING THING TO MAKE IT SPIN ALL THE TIME, AS IT SHOULD!!! Certified fucking braindead abominations of engineers!!!

Oh and not only that, this laptop is outperformed by a Raspberry Pi 3B in performance, thermals, price and product quality.. A FUCKING SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER!!! Isn't that a great joke. Someone here mentioned earlier that HP and Acer seem to have been competing for a long time to make the shittiest products possible, and boy they fucking do. If there's anything that makes both of those shitcompanies remarkable, that'd be it.

2. If I want to conduct a pentest, I don't want to have to relearn the bloody tool!

Recently I did a Burp Suite test to see how the devRant web app logs in, but due to my Burp Suite being the community edition, I couldn't save it. Fucking amazing, thanks PortSwigger! And I couldn't recreate the results anymore due to what I think is a change in the web app. But I'll get back to that later.

So I fired up bettercap (which works at lower network layers and can conduct ARP poisoning and DNS cache poisoning) with the intent to ARP poison my phone and get the results straight from the devRant Android app. I haven't used this tool since around 2017 due to the fact that I kinda lost interest in offensive security. When I fired it up again a few days ago in my PTbox (which is a VM somewhere else on the network) and today again in my newly recovered HP laptop, I noticed that both hosts now have an updated version of bettercap, in which the options completely changed. It's now got different command-line switches and some interactive mode. Needless to say, I have no idea how to use this bloody thing anymore and don't feel like learning it all over again for a single test. Maybe this is why users often dislike changes to the UI, and why some sysadmins refrain from updating their servers? When you have users of any kind, you should at all times honor their installations, give them time to change their individual configurations - tell them that they should! - in other words give them a grace time, and allow for backwards compatibility for as long as feasible.

3. devRant web app!!

As mentioned earlier I tried to scrape the web app's login flow with Burp Suite but every time that I try to log in with its proxy enabled, it doesn't open the login form but instead just makes a GET request to /feed/top/month?login=1 without ever allowing me to actually log in. This happens in both Chromium and Firefox, in Windows and Arch Linux. Clearly this is a change to the web app, and a very undesirable one. Especially considering that the login flow for the API isn't documented anywhere as far as I know.

So, can this update to the web app be rolled back, merged back to an older version of that login flow or can I at least know how I'm supposed to log in to this API in order to be able to start developing my own client?

Just the other day I got back from getting an extra monitor.. and just when I came back home, some older lady that also lives in this residence came to me, all panicked because her left car lights wouldn't turn off. So she asked me whether I could fix it, because I'm a man and therefore technical... Yeah.

Told her I don't know anything about cars (I don't even have a driver's license), and she should ask someone else.. but she kept clinging on to me and eventually I figured.. screw it, how hard can it be?

Got to her car, yada yada yada.. lady opens the door, and it's full of fucking buttons everywhere! No fucking way that I'm gonna dabble with those. So, do the easiest thing first.

"Ma'm, could you please turn on the car?"
*Turns car on, all lights light up*
🤔 Fair enough...
"Hmm.. and what happens if you turn it off now?"
*Turns car off, all lights go off*

Lady: "I've got no idea how you've done it but thank you so much, you're an angel!! 😊"
Me: "Well.. 😅 let's just say that turning it on, off and back on again works at least 90% of the time..."

preface: swearing.
because anger.

So. I'm trying to use Material Design with Material UI. The components and UI look *great*.

It's from google, though, which really pisses me off. but I like what I can do with the UI.

HOWEVER.
I really want a grid system for responsiveness. because obviously. besides, i really hate doing all the responsive shit myself. it sucks and i hate it.

Material Design does not include a grid system. okay, it includes a grid component, but it's not for site layout. it's for making a grid of images. or something.

What it does include is a lot of very lengthy documentation on what you should do, complete with fancy graphics saying "THIS IS HOW YOU MUST DO IT OR YOU'RE DOING IT ALL WRONG" -- but they don't actually support it! you must do it all yourself.

Why oh why would they tell you how you must do things if they don't provide the tools to make it possible? fucking google.

You might decide it's a grand idea to interject at this moment and say: "there are plenty of tools out there that allow you to do this!" And sure, you'd be right. however -- and i think this might just barely might be worth mentioning -- THEY REALLY FUCKING SUCK. Hey, let's look at some of the classes! So clear and semantic! This one was nice and simple: "xs4" -- but wtf does that mean? okay, it apparently means 4 columns as they'd appear on an extra-small layout. How does that work on a large layout? Who knows. Now, how about "c12"? okay, maybe 12 columns? but how does that display on a phone with a layout small enough to only have 4 columns? i don't know! they don't know! nobody knows!

oh oh oh oh. and my particular favorite: "mdc-layout-grid__cell mdc-layout-grid__cell--align-bottom" WHAT. THE. FUCK. I'm not writing a goddamn novel! and that one claims to be from google itself. either they've gone insane or someone's totally lying. either way, fuck them.

SO. TERRIBLENESS ASIDE.

Instead of using Material Design v0.fuckoff that lacks any semblance of a grid layout, I figure I'll try v1.0 alpha that actually has one supported natively. It's new and supports everything I need. There's no way this can't be a good idea.

The problem is, while it's out and basically usable, none of the React component libraries fucking work with it. Redux-Form doesn't work with it either because it doesn't understand nested compound controls, and hacking it to work at least triples the boilerplate. So, instead, I have to use some other person's "hey, it's shitty but it works for me" alpha version of someone else's project that works as a wrapper on top of Redux-Form that makes all of this work. yeah, you totally followed that. Kind of like a second-cousin-twice-removed sort of project adding in the necessary features and support all the way down. and ofc it doesn't quite work. because why would things ever be easy?

like seriously, come on.
What i'm trying to do isn't even that bloody hard.

Do I really have to use bootstrap instead?
fuck that.

then again, fuck this significantly more.

UGH.

Once it really hit me hard. The father of my brothers wife once told me that I'm not fit for IT in general. He thinks that I have pseudo knowledge of IT and Programming.

He just works parttime at home as "computer scientist" and sells routers, pc and such stuff to some private customers. Before he used Filemaker and sayd that he already coded his own CRM with it.

When he said that it really made me sad. But after we talked I looked back what I already achieved:

1. I build for me and friends custom PC's with Case mods and Hard Tube watercooling
2. I can programm in HTML5, CSS3 and PHP
3. I raised a Community with over 60 people in it. We got 2 dedicated Linux Roots (I7-6700K, 64GB RAM, SSD)
4. I manage the Linux Servers on my own with VoIP, Mail-, Web-, MySQL- and Gameservers
5. I built up a complete Community Solution with Game Groups, Forum, Tournament System and a lot of custom scripts.
6. Now Im almost finished learning the C++ Basics to code and manage to learn the beginning of GUI/UX programming.
7. Next thing Im gonna learn is Javascript (Browser) and Java, so I can complete my Web Skills and also can code Java Desktop Apps and Java game plugins (don't rant, Javascript is not the same as Java, I know 😉)

So I thought to myself "maybe in the eyes of others Im not a computer scientist, but then Im on the way to be one at least"

But please dont be a douche (the father) and prejudice me, before you don't know what I already can and achieved.

Just because you're are selling computer parts and installing them doesn't mean, that you are a computer scientist and telling me that I'm not 😉

In IT you're the smith of your own merit!

I've just disassembled this LED floodlight that I bought a while ago. It's some stupid little cheapie from a dollar store, so I figured that there'd be shit inside. But I wanted that LED cob.. a power LED :3

Well, shit wasn't too far off from the truth. The component choice is reasonable, but the design of the bloody thing.. batshit insane. The LED floodlight is powered by 4 AAA batteries, connected in series. So 6VDC. That then goes into this little tactile pushbutton, into the LED cob and then a 4.7 ohm resistor.

Well that's a pretty easy circuit.. let's remove the batteries and the casement, and put it on the lab bench power supply. Probes connected to the circuit with only the resistor and the LED cob in between (I didn't want to deal with the switch). Power supply set to 6V, current limiting to 500mA, contact!! And it works, amazing! So I let it run for a while to see that nothing gets too hot.. hah. After a minute or so, smoke would come out.. LED cob was a bit warm to the touch but nothing too bad. But the resistor.. I could cook water on it if I wanted to! 100 fucking °C, and rising. What the F yo?!

So I figured that I didn't want to put the resistor in between there. Just the LED cob now, which apparently has a forward voltage somewhere between 3.2V and 3.3V depending on how I set the current (500mA and 600mA respectively). Needed a bigger heatsink though, so I jammed one of my aluminium heatsinks on there. And it worked great! Very bright too, as it takes between 1.6 and 2W of power. Just for a comparison, the lighting in my living room is 4x5W and the ones on top of my dining table are 2x3W (along with some TL bar that my landlord put there.. fluorescent I think). So yeah, 2W is quite a lot for an LED, especially when it's all concentrated into one tiny spot.

That said, back to the original design with the resistor. 2 questions I have for that moron that designed this crap. First, why use a resistor for a power LED?! They needlessly waste power, and aren't good choices for anything that consumes more than 100mA. You should use PWM for these purposes, or tune your voltage on the supply side. Second, why go with 6V when your forward voltage is 3.3 at most? Wouldn't it make more sense to use 3 batteries with 4.5V? Ah, but I know the answer to the second one. AAA cells aren't rated for high loads like this. So that's likely why the alkaline cells that I had in there before have started leaking. Thanks, certified piece of shit!

Honestly, consumer electronics are such a joke... At least there's some components that I can salvage from this crap. Mainly the LED cob, but also the resistor and the tactile pushbutton perhaps.

One last remark that I'd like to make. This floodlight was cheap garbage. But considering that you can't do it well at that price, you just shouldn't do it. You know why? Because consumers always go for the cheapest. Makes a lot of money to build at rock bottom prices and make shit, but it damages the whole industry, since now the good designs will go out of business. That's why consumer electronics is so full of crap nowadays. Some unethical profiteering gluttons saw money, and they replaced the whole assortment with nothing but garbage. I'm sure that there's a special place in hell for that kind of people.

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

But tonight was different. Tonight has me raging.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HELL. YES.

I wrote a complex grid rendering system in c++!

It accepts pixel values and * values (Grid values)

Works very similar to WPF grid, which I LOVE.

The few lines of code needed (On the front end, at least) to do this are in the comments. VERY FUCKING HAPPY RIGHT NOW.

Call me old-fashioned, but... I kinda liked it back in the day, when Microsoft made proprietary software, the Community made free software and everyone's "cui bono" was quite easy to answer - even those corporations involved in FLOSS did have a clear way to finance themselves.

Now, we have Microsoft coming into open source, seemingly making projects better and offering more and more "free" stuff.

You know.

"Free" Windows 10.
"Free" SaaS Office.
"Free" "Private" Repos on Github.

In general - what happened to clear and concise "I give you money, you give me stuff" capitalism like we had it in the 2000s?

I'd rather pay 20 bucks for a game on Steam than get it "free" and with ads or microtransactions - yet, many games, especially mobile, don't even offer me that option. It wouldn't be that hard now, would it?

The same goes for software. That Canonical would need to fuck their users over after Ubuntu One went to shit was obvious - they didn't offer the kind of commercial/enterprise OS'es that Redhat or SuSE sell.

What people seem to forget is that everyone needs to make a profit somehow. You don't get "free" stuff. Even the volunteers in the Open Source Community get something out of it - an opportunity to pad their CV at least, if nothing else.

Nowadays, software manufacturers have the same legitimacy as the "free" financial "advisors" you find at banks - and who could be dumb enough to trust them? Oh yeah: Almost the entire fucking society is who.

But then again, sell something and noone will want it - because they all want it for free, with annoying, privacy-invading ads or with equally annoying microtransactions, or financing based on commission - so you don't only pay ONCE, you pay until you realize you got fucked over and quit.

Capitalism used to work until all those idiots stepped in. How the fuck don't people realize that there's no free lunch in life? When have we stopped being functional people and turned into idiots.

Even worse: Those idiots think that they're entitled to something! They, who volunteered to become merchandise instead of customers, think that they have rights! Do cattle have rights? Nope. They get their "free" hay everyday and I get to buy beef, that's how it works. Moo!

Hell, they are surprised when they get fucked over by bank salespeople or their data stolen by corporations, intelligence agencies or something... What did they expect, goodwill?

Can we please make Adam Smith mandatory reading in school?! I mean, give people a chance to understand capitalism? The nonexistent "goodwill" of traders in general?

Linux... Is shitty... Ok it just is. I've tried all kinds of variations and they all just... Urgh

Now I know... I know devs are meant to love it ... But compare it to windows

(Yes windows fucks up more) but when it works it works.

... Windows isn't perfect... But it doesn't try to be.

Linux has that feel of... Clearly made by a dev... It works consistently but doesn't take into account how people want to use something...

Linux is something you have to learn to love. And I'm sure I could.
But with windows it's intuitive it's straight forward

I feel like if I was to pick up windows having never used it... I would know how it works. I could at least use it go online and watch videos do the basics... In Linux ... No it's not as easy, sometimes not possible

An os you should just know how to do everything you want to do, and not have to download tonnes of shit to get it that way

It is, the future... But holy fuck get your act together Linux

Finally got a new job, but it's already a horror story not even 2 hours in (making this while on break)

Everyone here is an Intern, IT? Interns, Designers? Interns, HR? Interns.

The Person who I should've worked with got fired yesterday, and now I have to work all of his shit up from 0, Documentation? Fragmental, a few things here and there, but nothing really.

IT security also doesn't exist in the slightest, there is an Excel sheet called "Master_Passwords" and every single password is in Plaintext, written out for everyone to see. (at least they used "strong" passwords)

And the place also looks run down, theres PC's, Laptops, Mics, Cables etc. lying literally everywhere no-one knows what works and what doesn't (since everyone is an intern)

Not to mention the "Server Room" is an absolute mess itself, cables hanging from literally anywhere, powerstrips are ontop of servers, each rack has like 2 or 3 2U Servers, (in a 40u Rack) and there are 10 of them!

Help.

I'm a hardware guy. If I do software, it's bare-metal (almost always). I need to fully understand my build system and tweak it exactly to my needs. I'm the sorta guy that needs memory alignment and bitwise operations on a daily basis. I'm always cautious about processor cycles, memory allocation, and power consumption. I think twice if I really need to use a float there and I consider exactly what cost the abstraction layers I build come at.

I had done some web design and development, but that was back in the day when you knew all the workarounds for IE 5-7 by heart and when people were disappointed there wasn't going to be a XHTML 2.0. I didn't build anything large until recently.

Since that time, a lot has happened. Web development has evolved in a way I didn't really fancy, to say the least. Client-side rendering for everything the server could easily do? Of course. Wasting precious energy on mobile devices because it works well enough? Naturally. Solving the simplest problems with a gigantic mess of dependencies you don't even bother to inspect? Well, how else are you going to handle all your sensitive data?

I was going to compare this to the Arduino culture of using modules you don't understand in code you don't understand. But then again, you don't see consumer products or customer-specific electronics powered by an Arduino (at least not that I'm aware of).

I'm just not fit for that shooting-drills-at-walls methodology for getting holes. I'm not against neither easy nor pretty-to-look-at solutions, but it just comes across as wasteful for me nowadays.

So, after my hiatus from web development, I've now been in a sort of internet platform project for a few months. I'm now directly confronted with all that you guys love and hate, frontend frameworks and Node for the backend and whatever. I deliberately didn't voice my opinion when the stack was chosen, because I didn't want to interfere with the modern ways and instead get some experience out of it (and I am).

And now, I'm slowly starting to feel like it was OKAY to work like this.

!!oracle

I'm trying to install a minecraft modpack to play with a friend, and I'm super psyced about it. According to the modpack instructions, the first step is to download the java8 jre. Not sure if I actually need it or not, but it can download while I'm doing everything else, so I dutifully go to the download page and find the appropriate version. The download link does point to the file, but redirects to a login page instead. Apparently I need an oracle account to download anything on their site. stupid.

So I make an account. It requires my life story, or at least full name and address and phone number. stupid. So my name is now "fuck off" and I live in Hell, Michigan. My email is also "gofuckyourself" because I'm feeling spiteful. Also, for some reason every character takes about 3/4ths of a second to type, so it's very slow going. Passwords also cannot contain spaces, which makes me think they're doing some stupid "security" shenanigans like custom reversible encryption with some 5th grade math. or they're just stupid. Whatever, I make the stupid account.

Afterwards, I try to log in, but apparently my browser-saved credentials are wrong? I try a few more times, try enabling all of the javascripts, etc. No beans. Okay, maybe I can't use it until I verify the email? That actually makes some sense. Fine, I go check the throwaway inbox. No verification email. It's been like five minutes, but it's oracle so they probably just failed at it like everything else, so I try to have them resend the email. I find the resend link, and try it. Every time I enter my email address, though, it either gives me a validation error or a server error. I try a few mores times, and give up. I try to log in again; no dice. Giving up, I go do something else for awhile.

On a whim later, I check for the verification email again. Apparently it just takes bloody forever, but it did show up. Except instead of the first name "Fuck" I entered, I'm now "Andrew", apparently. okay.... whatever. I click the verify button anyway, and to my surprise it actually works, and says that I'm now allowed to use my account. Yay!

So, I go back to the login page (from the download link) and enter my credentials. A new error appears! I cannot use redirects, apparently, and "must type in the page address I want to visit manually." huh? okay, i go to the page directly, and see the same bloody error because of course i do because oracle fucking sucks. So I close the page, go back to the download list, click the link, wait for the login page redirect (which is so totally not allowed, apparently, except it works and manual navigation does not. yay backwards!), and try to log in.

Instead of being presented with an error because of the redirect, it lets me (try to) log in. But despite using prefilled creds (and also copy/pasting), it tells me they're invalid. I open a new tab container, clear the cache (just to be thorough), and repeat the above steps. This time it redirects me to a single signon server page (their concept of oauth), and presents me with a system error telling me to contact "the Administrator." -.- Any second attempts, refreshes, etc. just display the same error.

Further attempts to log in from the download page fail with the same invalid credentials error as before.

Fucking oracle and their reverse Midas touch.

This is something that happened 2 years ago.

1st year at uni, comp sci.

Already got project to make some app for the univ that runs in android, along with the server

I thought, omg, this is awesome! First year and already got something to offer for the university 😅
(it's a new university, at the time I was the 2nd batch)

Team of 12, we know our stuffs, from the programming POV, at least, but we know nothing about dealing with client.

We got a decent pay, we got our computers upgraded for free, and we even got phones of different screen sizes to test out our apps on.

No user requirement, just 2-3 meetings. We were very naive back then.

2 weeks into development, Project manager issues requirement changes

we have a meeting again, discussing the important detail regarding the business model. Apparently even the univ side hadn't figure it out.

1 month in the development, the project manager left to middle east to pursue doctoral degree

we were left with "just do what you want, as long as it works"

Our projects are due to be done in 3 months. We had issues with the payment, we don't get paid until after everything's done. Yet the worse thing is, we complied.

Month 3, turns out we need to present our app to some other guy in the management who apparently owns all the money. He's pleased, but yet, issued some more changes. We didn't even know that we needed to make dashboard at that time.

The project was extended by one month. We did all the things required, but only got the payment for 3 months.

Couldn't really ask for the payment of the fourth month since apparently now the univ is having some 'financial issues'.

And above all: Our program weren't even tested, let alone being used, since they haven't even 'upgraded' the university such that people would need to use our program as previously planned.

Well, there's nothing to be done right now, but at least I've learned some REALLY valuable lesson:

1. User Requirement is a MUST! Have them sign it afterwards, and never do any work until then. This way, change of requirements could be rejected, or at least postponed

2. Code convention is a MUST! We have our code, in the end, written in English and Indonesian, which causes confusion. Furthermore, some settle to underscore when naming things, while other chooses camel case.

3. Don't give everyone write access to repository. Have them pull their own, and make PR later on. At least this way, they are forced to fix their changes when it doesn't meet the code convention.

4. Yell at EVERYONE who use cryptic git commit message. Some of my team uses JUST EMOTICONS for the commit message. At this point, even "fixes stuffs" sound better.

Well, that's for my rant. Thanks for reading through it. I wish some of you could actually benefit from it, especially if you're about to take on your first project.

Well, it wasn't fun, but I switched jobs this month. And sadly, it was mostly because my old company started building custom applications for our larger customers. Now, normally that wouldn't be too bad (other than the fact that it distracts us form working on our main product...) but... it was decided that we would use the back end of our user-generated forms module as the data storage layer. Someone outside of my department thought it would be a great idea, and my boss kinda just rolled over without a fight because he always just figures he can "make it work" if he works hard enough...

You shoulda seen the database and SQL code...

Because of that decision, everything took at least 3x as long to write and there was always the looming possibility that the user could change the schema on a whim and break the app.

I think the reasoning behind it was to try and keep the customers tied to the aging flagship product (with a pricy subscription model), but IMO, it was not with it. Our efforts could've had much greater impact somewhere else. Nobody seemed to care what I thought about it though...

I had to start over as a front-end dev, but I'm trying to look on the bright side and seeing it as an opportunity to sharpen my skills in that area. I'm already learning a lot. And although it's a little scary at times, it's also so refreshing to work at a place where I know I'm not the smartest guy in the room.

To the future!

It's march, I'm in my final year of university. The physics/robotics simulator I need for my major project keeps running into problems on my laptop running Ubuntu, and my supervisor suggests installing Mint as it works fine on that.
I backup what's important across a 4GB and a 16GB memory stick. All I have to do now is boot from the mint installation disk and install from there. But no, I felt dangerous. I was about to kill anything I had, so why not `sudo rm -rf /*` ? After a couple seconds it was done. I turned it off, then back on. I wanted to move my backups to windows which I was dual booting alongside Ubuntu.
No OS found. WHAT. Called my dad, asked if what I thought happened was true, and learnt that the root directory contains ALL files and folders, even those on other partitions. Gone was the past 2 1/2 years of uni work and notes not on the uni computers and the 100GB+ other stuff on there.
At least my current stuff was backed up.

TL;DR : sudo rm -rf /* because I'm installing another Linux distro. Destroys windows too and 2 1/2 years of uni work.

Newly hired developer who calls himself ”senior” on linkedin has not contributed for 6 months. At least. I have been very helpful on many pair programming sessions. Directing him. Being extremely precise how things works and are working together. Small and big picture. He calls me and ask questions and I answer. Explain. Again and again. But it does not stick.

Nothing.

Extremely precise tasks. Written specifically for him.

Nothing.

He has like 10 commits in one year. It’s the worst I’ve seen in a developer role.

The other day in a zoom meeting he failed to declare a variable correctly. He copy/pasted a line instead and renamed the variable.

I saw this early. But I need not to work with him for a long time. It is now very clear that he will never contribute but in fact decrease the velocity of the team.

One year is a long time.

He is stupid. He can’t learn. Did he not tell the truth about himself when management hired him?

It so sad they hired him.

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....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In january 2023 i was contacted by a recruiter offering me a job position.

I DID NOT ASK FOR A JOB.

I WAS NOT LOOKING FOR A JOB.

THEY contacted ME.

Ok. So i went along with it and see how it goes. They probably wont hire me nor would i give a shit. Chatted with this recruiter for a while. She forgets to answer my message for 5 fucking days. Twice. Once because she was doing God knows what and the second time because she was on paid vacation. Fine i don't give a shit about you at all anyways.

So this recruiter chatting has been stretched out for several days. I think over a WEEK. So she forwarded me to their lead developer.

I applied to work as a full stack java spring boot backend + angular frontend engineer.

So:
- java backend
- angular frontend
- full stack
- shitload of devops
- shitload of projects i built
- worked with clients
- have CS degree, graduated
- worked a job at their rival company

What could go fucking wrong with all of these stats right?

During technical + hr interview (3 of us on google meets) they asked me what salary I'd be comfortable with.

I said $1500/month straight out.

keep in mind:
- In my country $500 or $600 is a salary for engineers per month
- You get a raise of +$150 which is around $750 after working for 1+ year
- You can earn $1000+ after you work for +2 years
- Rent here is $200-300 a month at minimun. And because of inflation its just getting worse especially with food. So this salary is not for living but for survival.

Their lead engineer gave me a WHOLE ASS FUCKING PROJECT TO BUILD and i had to code it within 10 days. Great so at least 17+ days of my fucking life to waste on these fucktards who contacted ME.

The project was about building a web app coffee shop literally what mcdonalds has when you order via those tablets. I had to build this in java spring boot and angular. I had to integrate:
- docker, devops
- barmen, baristas, orders
- people can order at the table or to go
- each barista can take 5 orders at a time
- each coffee has different types of fields and brewing time
- each barman brews each coffee different period of time
- barista cant take more than 5 orders for to go until barman finishes the previous order
- barista can take more than 5 orders but if those orders were ordered from table, and they have to be put in queue
- had to build CRUD admin functionality coffee's
- had to export them all of the postman routes
- had to design a scalable database infrastructure for all of this alone
- shitload of stuff more

And guess what. After 10 painful days I BUILT THE WHOLE THING MYSELF AND I BUILT EVERYTHING THEY ASKED FOR. IT WAS WORKING.

Submitted it. They told me they'll contact me within 7 days to schedule the final Technical interview after they review what i built. Great so another 17+7 days of my fucking time wasted.

OH and they also told me to send them THE WHOLE GITHUB REPOSITORY AND TRANSFER OWNERSHIP TO THEIR COMPANY'S OWNERSHIP. once you do this you cant have your repository back. WTF? WHY CANT YOU JUST REVIEW THE CODE FROM MY PUBLIC REPOSITORY? That was so weird but what can i fucking do argue with these dickheads?

After a week of them not answering i contacted them via email. They forgot and apologized. Smh. Then they scheduled an interview within 3 days. Great more of my time wasted.

During interview i was on a google meets with their lead engineer, 1 backend java spring boot engineer and 1 angular frontend developer. They were milking me dry for 1 whole fucking hour.

They only pointed out the flaws in what i built, which are miniscule and have not once congratulated me on the rest of the good parts. I explained them i had to rush those parts so the code may not be perfect. I had other shit to do in my life and not work for your shitty project for $0/hour for 10 days you fucking dickriders.

So they quickly ran over to theory. They asked me where is jwt token stored. Who generates it. How the backend knows to authenticate user by it. I explained.

What are solid principles. I said i cant explain what is it but i understand how it works, why its needed and how to implement it (they can clearly see in the project i just build that i applied SOLID principles everywhere) - but i do admit i dont know the theory behind it 100% clearly.

Then they asked me about observables and promises in angular. I explained them how they work and how subscribe method is used (as they can clearly see that i used it in the code). Then they asked me to explain them under the hood of how observables work. The fuck? I dont know and dont care? But i can learn it as i work there?

Etc

Final result: after dragging this for 1 fucking month for miserable $1500/month they told me: we can either hire you now but for a much lower salary which you probably wont be happy with, or you can study more these things we discussed "and know why the car leaks oil" and reapply back to us in 2-3 months!

!dev

Oh my fucking god spotify is SOOOOO trash for free users!!!
I don't mind ads, I don't mind not being able to download.

BUT, it won't let me freaking repeat a single song!
AND, it automatically adds random music to my playlist while listening to it!!!!!!!

Apparently, it has a "feature" (cough limitation cough) that if you are a free user, your playlist must contain at least 15 songs or they will randomly add songs WHILE you are listening to your bloody playlist!!!!

I was so hyped about spotify finally being in India, now I am more disappointed than it not being at all 😑😑😑😑😑😑😑

Edit: This is about spotify android, the desktop (mac for me) version works just fine 😑😑🤷🏻‍♂️🤷🏻‍♂️

LONG RANT ALERT, no TL;DR

* Writes an email to colleague about why I can't create a page on our CMS without at least a H1 title. She wants to me to put up an image with text on it (like a flyer), for multiple reasons, I say I need a textless image. *

30 minutes later:
* Casually plans a frontend optimization project, by looking at files on the CMS, in order to make further development easier and less time-taking*

*** EMAIL NOTIFICATION ***
* clicks *

"Hello, this is [Graphic designer] from the company who created the image with text on it. I do not understand why you can't put display:none on your <h1> tag. Also, being a web company, we are used to making themes and my solution of display:none will work. It's pityful to work on a design only to have it stripped out from most of its concept. If you can't do that, do tell me what resolution you need."

My first reaction:

"Dear [Graphic designer], I am managing our corporate identity, our backend and frontend codebase, I am a graphic designer myself, and am also SEO-aware. For at least 8 reasons (redacted, 'cuse too long), I will need an image without text. As told to my colleagues, I need a 72/96 DPI 16:9 ratio image, 1920x1080 is a good start but may be bigger. Also, looking at the image, it'll have to be in JPG, at 100% quality, exported for the web. Our database software will optimize the image by itself."

Reasons are about SEO issues, responsiveness issues, CMS tools issues, backend and frontend issues.

Instead, I sent following email "We can't. Image please."

I mean seriously. A bit of clarity for you:

In my company, nobody has the slightest idea what I do. They don't understand how a computer works (we all know it works by magic, right?). So of course, when one thinks what we don't know, we know it better than the one who knows, my colleague thought our CMS was like a word document, and began telling me how I should display her bible-length text-infected image, by using some inline css styling display:none.

I tell her "nope, because of my 8 reasons". She transmits that to the agency who's done the visual, now I have this [Graphic designer] not understanding that there are other CMSs than Wordpress on the web, and she tells me, me being one of the most aware on this CMS we have, how I should optimize my site?

Fucking shit, she connects on our CMS for 1 second and she'll get cancer since it's so bad. I'm in the process of planning a whole new rewrite so the website is well designed (currently I am modifying a base theme made by an incompetent designer). I know the system by heart and I know what you can, or can't do.

Now I just received an answer: "so it's only a pure technical problem". NO, OUR WEBSITE WAS CODED BY A CHIMPANZEE WHO THOUGHT WEB DEV WAS AS EASY AS WRITING "HELLO WORLD" ON A SHITTY CMS THAT FORCES DEV USERS TO USE A FUCKING CUM-WHITE-THEMED EDITOR TO EDIT THE WHOLE SITE!!!

I can't just sneeze and "oh look, it's working!"

I just tried to sign up to Instagram. I made a big mistake.

First up with Facebook related stuff is data. Data, data and more data. Initially when you sign up (with a new account, not login with Facebook) you're asked your real name, email address and phone number. And finally the username you'd like to have on the service. I gave them a phone number that I actually own, that is in my iPhone, my daily driver right now (and yes I have 3 Androids which all run custom ROMs, hold your keyboards). The email address is a usual for me, instagram at my domain. I am a postmaster after all, and my mail server is a catch-all one. For a setup like that, this is perfectly reasonable. And here it's no different, devrant at my domain. On Facebook even, I use fb at my domain. I'm sure you're starting to see a pattern here. And on Facebook the username, real name and email domain are actually the same.

So I signed up, with - as far as I'm aware - perfectly valid data. I submitted the data and was told that someone at Instagram will review the data within 24 hours. That's already pretty dystopian to me. It is now how you block bots. It is not how Facebook does it either, at least since last time I checked. But whatever. You'd imagine that regardless of the result, they'd let you know. Cool, you're in, or sorry, you're rejected and here's why. Nope.

Fast-forward to today when I recalled that I wanted to sign up to Instagram to see my girlfriend's pictures. So I opened Chromium again that I already use only for the rancid Facebook shit.. and it was rejected. Apparently the mere act of signing up is a Terms of Service violation. I have read them. I do not know which section I have violated with the heinous act of signing up. But I do have a hunch.

Many times now have I been told by ignorant organizations that I would be "stealing" their intellectual property, or business assets or whatever, just because I sent them an email from their name on my domain. It is fucking retarded. That is MY domain, not yours. Learn how email works before you go educate a postmaster. Always funny to tell them how that works. But I think that in this case, that is what happened.

So I appealed it, using a random link to something on Instagram's help section from a third-party blog. You know it's good when the third-party random blog is better. But I found the form and filled it in. Same shit all over again for info, prefilling be damned I guess. Minor convenience though, whatever.

I get sent an email in German, because apparently browsing through a VPS in Germany acting as a VPN means you're German. Whatever... After translating it, I found that it asks me to upload a picture of myself, holding a paper in my hands, on which I would have a confirmation code, my username, and my email address.. all hand-written. It must not be too dark, it must be clear, it must be in JPEG.. look, I just wanted to fucking sign up.

I sent them an email back asking them to fix all of this. While I was writing it and this rant, I thought to myself that they can shove that piece of paper up their ass. In fact I would gladly do it for them.

Long story short, do not use Instagram. And one final thing I have gripes with every time. You are not being told all the data you'll have to present from the get-go. You're not being told the process. Initially I thought it'd just be email, phone, username, and real name. Once signed up (instantly, not within 24 hours!) I would start setting up my account and adding a profile picture. The right way to ask for a picture of me! And just do it at my own pace, as I please.

And for God's sake, tackle abuse when it actually happens. You'll find out who's a bot and who isn't by their usage patterns soon enough. Do not do any of this at sign-up. Or hell, use a CAPTCHA or whatever, I don't fucking care. There's so many millions of ways to skin this cat.

Facebook and especially Instagram. Both of them are fucking retarded.

Step 1: Run to the store to buy a USB card reader because all of a sudden you have a need to use a 16Mb CF card that was tossed in a junk drawer for 20 years (hoping it still works, of course), but that was the easy part...

Step 2: Realize that the apps - your own - you want to run on your new (old) Casio E-125 PocketPC (to re-live "glory" days) are compiled in ARM format, not MIPS, which is the CPU this device uses, and the installer packages you have FOR YOUR OWN APPS don't include MIPS, only ARM (WHY DID I DO THAT?!), so, the saga REALLY begins...

Step 3: Get a 20-year old OS to install in a Hyper-V VM... find out that basic things like networking don't work by default because the OS is so damn old, so spend hours solving that and other issues to get it to basically run well enough to...

Step 4: Get that OS updated so that it's at least kind/sorta/maybe (but between you and me, not really!) safe online, all without a browser that will work on ANY modern site (oh, and good luck finding a version of Firefox that runs on it - that all took a few hours)...

Step 5: Okay, OS is ready to go, now get 20-year old dev tools that you haven't even seen in that many years working. Oh, do this with a missing CD key and ISO's that weren't archived in a format that's usable today, plus a bunch of missing dependencies because the OS is, again, SO old (a few MORE hours)...

Step 6: Get 20-year old code written in a language you haven't used in probably almost that long to compile, dealing with pathing issues, missing libs, and several other issues, all the while trying to dust off long-dormant knowledge somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of your brain... surprisingly, it all came back to me, more or less, in under an hour, which lead to...

Step 7: FINALLY get it all to work, FINALLY get the code to compile, FINALLY get it transferred to the device (which has no network capabilities, by the way, which is where the card reader and CF card came into play) and re-live the glory of your old, crappy PocketPC apps and games running on the real thing! WOO-HOO!

Step 8: Realize it's 3:30am by the time that's all done and be VERY thankful that you're on vacation this week or work tomorrow would SSUUCCKK!!!!

Step 9. Get called into work the next day for a production issue despite being tired from the night before and an afternoon of errands, lose basically a whole day of vacation (7 hours spent on it) and not actually resolve it by after midnight when you finally say that's enough :(

Talk about your highs and your lows.

Im so frustrated with myself . I've always been afraid of being stupid . Perhaps it was because i was always called the "less intelligent" sibling by my parents . Well i did self-learn java , c++ and android (when i was 15) and made some apps and i did get acknowledged finally but i may have not acknowledged myself . I got into college a couple years ago and i can tell you right out that its like an island filled with stupidity. The teachers , the students. The other day i caught my teacher learning how a transistor works. This is unacceptable for someone who is teaching us advanced op-amps and other circuits . Well , I did get into this college cause it was less tedious and i thought college doesn't matter cause i can self-learn . All i needed was free time . Well college totally destroyed that too and provided no facilities in the process as well . So yeah should i blame my college for my inability to do things the past couple years. I mean i don't think i've learnt a single thing all this while. This is where my frustration begins cause i dont want to blame the college , it's not going to help me and i'll probably end up in a 9 to 5 call center job at this rate . Im also very heavily frustrated with myself , it's like everything i've done so far has been a path of least effort. I have tried a few things which were all just fads like machine learning and crypto and even trading . They felt good and thats what scares me , maybe i don't have the passion and am just looking for a quick buck . This is clearly reflected in the ideas i've been having as well . Well i've never had access to proper funds but now im just trying to justify this layman emotion . I just want to learn and be passionate about learning , researching and i just want enough funds for that . But im afraid , maybe its just that i want to feel superior than my circle . I mean i still don't know why i tried learning rust and wasted even more time setting up fedora and everything around it while i already had a working debian setup and a programming language i'm kind of versed with . i wouldn't say well cause im a self learner and i feel guilty for that . I definitely know i just learnt the surface of the language . Deep down i'm just another stupid fad obsessed guy who feels better by choosing a more complex language that my colleagues look upto . Is this what i am , if so im scared and i don't know what to do . People say that you are what you are and you cant change that . If i cant change this then i dont deserve this wasteful stupid life . I don't know what i should do and it makes me cry . Maybe acknowledging this would've helped but it hasn't , I've felt better playing fortnite rather than learning some basic electronics. Im another one of those aren't I ?

iPhones are ridiculously picky when it comes to finding a mate- um charger. And knowing why doesn't really make it any easier to understand why. If anything it baffles me more.

So, let's start with appliances that are not phones. Think Bluetooth headsets, keyboards, earbuds, whatever. Those are simple devices. They see 5V on the VCC line and 0V on ground, and they will charge at whatever current they are meant to. Usually it will not exceed 200mA, and the USB 2.0 spec allows for up to 500mA from any USB outlet. So that's perfectly reasonable to be done without any fuss whatsoever.

Phones on the other hand are smarter.. some might say too smart for their own good. In this case I will only cover Android phones, because while they are smarter than they perhaps should be, they are still reasonable.

So if you connect an Android phone to the same 5V VCC and 0V ground, while leaving the data lines floating, the phone will charge at 500mA. This is exactly to be within USB 2.0 spec, as mentioned earlier. Without the data lines, the phone has no way to tell whether it *can* pull more, without *actually* trying to pull more (potentially frying a charger that's not rated for it). Now in an Android phone you can tell it to pull more, in a fairly straightforward way. You just short the data lines together, and the phone will recognize this as a simple charger that it can pull 1A from. Note that shorting data lines is not a bad thing, we do it all the time. It is just another term for making a connection between 2 points. Android does this right. Also note that shorted data lines cannot be used to send data. They are inherently pulled to the same voltage level, probably 0V but not sure.

And then the iPhones come in, Thinking Different. The iPhones require you to pull the data lines to some very specific voltage levels. And of course it's terribly documented because iSheep just trying to use their Apple original white nugget charger overseas and shit like that. I do not know which voltage levels they are (please let me know!), but it is certainly not a regular short. Now you connect the iPhone to, say, a laptop or something to charge. An Android phone would just charge while keeping data transmission disabled (because they can be left floating or shorted). This is for security reasons mostly, preventing e.g. a malicious computer from messing with it. An iPhone needs to be unlocked to just charge the damn thing. I'm fairly sure that that's because the data lines need to be pulled up, which could in theory enable a malicious computer to still get some information in or out of it. USB data transmission works at at least 200mV difference between the data lines. It could be more than that. So you need to unlock it.

Apple, how about you just short your goddamn data lines too like everyone else? And while you're at it, get rid of this Lightning connector. I get it, micro USB was too hard for your users. I guess they are blind pigs after all. But USB-C solved all of that and more. The only difference I can think of is that the Lightning connector can be a single board with pads on either side on the connector, while in USB-C that could be at the socket end (socket being less common to be replaced). And at the end of the day, that really doesn't matter with all the other things that will break first.

Think Different. Think Retarded. Such tiny batteries and you can't even fucking charge them properly.

Yknow, I want to make an android app that I have in my mind for about half a year now and I already tried twice, both with Kotlin and with Java but everytime I try it's just pain and suffering and frustration...

No it's not because of the language, I like Java and I like Kotlin too and I'd say I'm at least decent at Kotlin and really good in Java...

No no.. the issue is the fucking Android SDK and the mix-and-match documentation available online!!!

Every fucking time I want to implement some sort of UI element, user action or a background service and I start googling how to do it It comes with with at least 3 different stack overflow solutions, all of them saying "that way of doing it is deprecated, instead you should X" and looking up the OFFICIAL FUCKING DOCS it will just make me roll up in the corner and cry because of how fucking inconsistent it is and the retarded domain language it uses... fucking transactions for fucking fragments inside fucking activities... because I guess the word "screen"/"view"/"template" or something similar natural just was too mainstream for the all knowing alphabet soup that google is...

And then you start looking up what the fucking difference even is and how to code it up only to find out there's at least 12 other opinions on how fragments should be used and what should be an activity and what should be a damn fragment...

But that's not all, that's just the base... I get a headache even thinking about how the fucking inflating of templates and the entire R. notation works. You want to open a fucking tiny corner menu with the settings options? WELL THEN YOU FUCKING BETTER REMEMBER TO IMPLEMENT IT THROUGH SOME SORT OF EVENT AND INFLATE THE MENU YOURSELF EVEN THOUGH ITS THE SAME FUCKING THING WITH STATIC STRINGS...

AND WHY THE FUCK DO I NEED LIKE 4 NEW FILES TO IMPLEMENT A FUCKING LISTVIEW...
also talking about ListViews... what was wrong with "ListView"... Why do we need a "RecyclerView"... oh right... because the fucks fucked the fuck up and all the legacy components were designed by a monkey and are next to useless! SO WE NEEDED A NEW NAME FOR THE FIXED VERSION, CANT NAME IT LISTVIEW AGAIN... FUCK YOU...

honestly... if I got a dolar for every "what the fuck android" I said during trying to understand that mess I'd be richer by a few hundred...

oh oh oh, but you know what? You don't like the android SDK? that's fine, you can use fucking React or Flutter or something... yeah.. because instead of torturing myself with the android SDK I want to torture myself with an abstraction of the same SDK and JavaScript as the fucking cherry on top... HAVE YOU FUCKING SEEN THE CODE FLUTTER SHOWS ON THEIR WEBSITE AS THE "Introduction" ?!!!

Look at this piece of shit:

[code in attached image, we could really use a proper Markdown support at least for rants]

THAT'S NOT EVEN THE ENTIRE THING, THAT'S JUST THE *REALLY* UGLY PART...

The fucking nesting... What is it with JS and all the fucking nesting everytime?! It looks like shit.... It reads like shit as well...

WHY, in the name OF FUCK, IS THERE MORE THAN 5 ANDROID FRAMEWORKS and ALL of them... used this FUCKING NOVEL idea of programming using A FUCKING BRACKET WALL

It always looks like:
(code(code[code{code(code{code()})}]));

If I wanted to make a fucking app or a website using fucking Haskell I'd do that.... at this point reading assembly code feels like heaven compared to this retardation... Why is this so popular?! WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE SEE IN IT?! Clearly it's not the aesthetics... it looks like a fucking frog vomit running down an emus leg, fuck that.... I don't even hate classic JavaScript, it's a good enough language and it does what I tell it to... but these ugly fucking frameworks like react, angular and whatever else uses this fucking format can go fuck right off. This is not the way JS is gonna get a better name for itself...

So:
Fuck Google

Fuck the marionette that designed the Android SDK

Fuck the Hellspawn the came up with the "functional-like" way of using JavaScript

Fuck everyone that thinks "JavaScript everywhere" is a good thing

And deeply future-fuck everyone that makes a new framework following any of these standards, stucks a .js at the end of the name and releases his hairball.js of an invention into the fucking world....

It's a mess... fuck everything android related...

I haven't ranted for today, but I figured that I'd post a summary.
A public diary of sorts.. devRant is amazing, it even allows me to post the stuff that I'd otherwise put on a piece of paper and probably discard over time. And with keyboard support at that <3

Today has been a productive day for me. Laptop got restored with a "pacman -Syu" over a Bluetooth mobile data tethering from my phone, said phone got upgraded to an unofficial Android 9 (Pie) thanks to a comment from @undef, etc.

I've also made myself a reliable USB extension cord to be able to extend the 20-30cm USB-A male to USB-C male cord that Huawei delivered with my Nexus 6P. The USB-C to USB-C cord that allows for fast charging is unreliable.. ordered some USB-C plugs for that, in order to make some high power wire with that when they arrive.

So that plug I've made.. USB-A male to USB-A female, in which my short USB-C to USB-A wire can plug in. It's a 1M wire, with 18AWG wire for its power lines and 28AWG wires for its data lines. The 18AWG power lines can carry up to 10A of current, while the 28AWG lines can carry up to 1A. All wires were made into 1M pieces. These resulted in a very low impedance path for all of them, my multimeter measured no more than 200 milliohms across them, though I'll have to verify and finetune that on my oscilloscope with 4-wire measurement.

So the wire was good. Easy too, I just had to look up the pinout and replicate that on the male part.

That's where the rant part comes in.. in fact I've got quite uncomfortable with sentences that don't include at least one swear word at this point. All hail to devRant for allowing me to put them out there without guilt.. it changed my very mind <3

Microshaft WanBLowS.

I've tried to plug my DIY extension cord into it, and plugged my phone and some USB stick into it of which I've completely forgot the filesystem. Windows certainly doesn't support it.. turns out that it was LUKS. More about that later.

Windows returned that it didn't support either of them, due to "malfunctioning at the USB device". So I went ahead and plugged in my phone directly.. works without a problem. Then I went ahead and troubleshooted the wire I've just made with a multimeter, to check for shorts.. none at all.

At that point I suspected that WanBLowS was the issue, so I booted up my (at the time) problematic Arch laptop and did the exact same thing there, testing that USB stick and my phone there by plugging it through the extension wire. Shit just worked like that. The USB stick was a LUKS medium and apparently a clone of my SanDisk rootfs that I'm storing my Arch Linux on my laptop at at the time.. an unfinished migration project (SanDisk is unstable, my other DM sticks are quite stable). The USB stick consumed about 20mA so no big deal for any USB controller. The phone consumed about 500mA (which is standard USB 2.0 so no surprise) and worked fine as well.. although the HP laptop dropped the voltage to ~4.8V like that, unlike 5.1V which is nominal for USB. Still worked without a problem.

So clearly Windows is the problem here, and this provides me one more reason to hate that piece of shit OS. Windows lovers may say that it's an issue with my particular hardware, which maybe it is. I've done the Windows plugging solely through a USB 3.0 hub, which was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the host. Now USB 3.0 is supposed to be able to carry up to 1A rather than 500mA, so I expect all the components in there to be beefier. I've also tested the hub as part of a review, and it can carry about 1A no problem, although it seems like its supply lines aren't shorted to VCC on the host, like a sensible hub would. Instead I suspect that it's going through the hub's controller.

Regardless, this is clearly a bad design. One of the USB data lines is biased to ~3.3V if memory serves me right, while the other is biased to 300mV. The latter could impose a problem.. but again, the current path was of a very low impedance of 200milliohms at most. Meanwhile the direct connection that omits the ~200ohm extension wire worked just fine. Even 300mV wouldn't degrade significantly over such a resistance. So this is most likely a Windows problem.

That aside, the extension cord works fine in Linux. So I've used that as a charging connection while upgrading my Arch laptop (which as you may know has internet issues at the time) over Bluetooth, through a shared BNEP connection (Bluetooth tethering) from my phone. Mobile data since I didn't set up my WiFi in this new Pie ROM yet. Worked fine, fixed my WiFi. Currently it's back in my network as my fully-fledged development host. So that way I'll be able to work again on @Floydian's LinkHub repository. My laptop's the only one who currently holds the private key for signing commits for git$(rm -rf ~/*)@nixmagic.com, hence why my development has been impeded. My tablet doesn't have them. Guess I'll commit somewhere tomorrow.

(looks like my rant is too long, continue in comments)

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

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

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

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

I was asked to look into a site I haven't actively developed since about 3-4 years. It should be a simple side-gig.
I was told this site has been actively developed by the person who came after me, and this person had a few other people help out as well.
The most daunting task in my head was to go through their changes and see why stuff is broken (I was told functionality had been removed, things were changed for the worse, etc etc).
I ssh into the machine and it works. For SOME reason I still have access, which is a good thing since there's literally nobody to ask for access at the moment.
I cd into the project, do a git remote get-url origin to see if they've changed the repo location. Doesn't work. There is no origin. It's "upstream" now. Ok, no biggie. git remote get-url upstream. Repo is still there. Good.
Just to check, see if there's anything untracked with git status. Nothing. Good.
What was the last thing that was worked on? git log --all --decorate --oneline --graph. Wait... Something about the commit message seems familiar. git log. .... This is *my* last commit message. The hell?
I open the repo in the browser, login with some credentials my browser had saved (again, good because I have no clue about the password). Repo hasn't gotten a commit since mine. That can't be right.
Check branches. Oh....Like a dozen new branches. Lots of commits with text that is really not helpful at all. Looks like they were trying to set up a pipeline and testing it out over and over again.
A lot of other changes including the deletion of a database config and schema changes. 0 tests. Doesn't seem like these changes were ever in production.
...
At least I don't have to rack my head trying to understand someone else's code but.... I might just have to throw everything that was done into the garbage. I'm not gonna be the one to push all these changes I don't know about to prod and see what breaks and what doesn't break
.
I feel bad for whoever worked on the codebase after me, because all their changes are now just a waste of time and space that will never be used.

Fuck uninspired jr devs that are simply collecting a pay check.

I have been handed a project that a jr dev was allowed to wallow on for over two fucking years. This lazy mother fucker managed to create 5 functions, a whole fucking mess of bullshit that I now have to straighten out on top of the 8 other things that I have to deliver on in the next month.

They never followed requirements. Not-a-one. The API is fully broken. The DB schema is BEYOND fucked. There's ZERO validation/sanitation on I/O. The deployments only work half the fucking time. Their code is so spaghetti I'm getting triggered from when I worked at Olive Garden with Eminem. But hey, at least they were able to demo it to the client to say "it works".

I don't condone violence, but every time I find malformed if statements, linter exceptions, broken deploy configurations in this project -- I just want to kick them in their stupid fucking face.

Wherever you ended up you piece of shit, I hope your dreams of becoming a rich asshole only bring you unending despair. I believe you can make it though, because you're already halfway there.

Got pulled out of bed at 6 am again this morning, our VMs were acting up again. Not booting, running extremely slow, high disk usage, etc.

This was the 6 time in as many weeks this happened. And always the marching orders were the same. Find the bug, smash the bug, get it working with the least effort. I've dumped hundreds of hours maintaining this broken shitheap of a system, putting off other duties to keep mission critical stations running.

The culprits? Scummy consultants, Windows 10 1709, and Citrix Studio.

Xen Server performed well enough, likely due to its open source origins and Centos architecture.

Whelp. DasSeahawks was good and pissed. Nothing like getting rousted out of bed after a few scant hours rest for patching the same broken system.

DasSeahawks lost his temper. Things went flying. Exorcists were dispatched and promptly eaten.

Enough. No consultants, no analysts, and no experts touched it. No phone calls, no manuals, not even a google search. Just a very pissed admin and his minion declaring blitzkrieg.

We made our game plan, moved the users out, smoked our cigs, chugged monster, and queued a gnu-metal playlist on spotify.

Then we took a wrecking ball to the whole setup. User docs were saved, all else was rm -r * && shred && summon -u Poseidon -beast Land_Cracken.

Started at 3pm and finished just after midnight. Rebuilt all the vms with RDP, murdered citrix studio (and their bullshit licenses), completely blocked Windows 10 updates after 1607, and load balanced the network.

So what do we get when all the experts are fired? Stabbed lightning. VMs boot in less than 10 seconds, apps open instantly, and server resources are half their previous usage state. My VMs are now the fastest stations in our complex, as they should be.

Next to do: install our mxgpu, script up snapshots and heartbeat, destroy Windows ads/telemetry, and setup PDQ. damn its good to be good!

What i learned --> never allow testing to go to production, consultants will fuck up your shit for a buck, and vendors are half as reliable over consultants. Windows works great without Microsoft, thin clients are overpriced, and getting pissed gets things done.

This my friends, is why admins are assholes.

So I'm writing some multithreaded shit in C that is supposed to work cross-platform. MingW has Posix threads for Windows, so that saved already half of the platform dependency. The other half was that these threads need to run external programs.

Well, there's system(), right? Uhm yes, but it sucks. It's incredibly slow on Windows, and it looks like you can have only one system() call ongoing at the same time. Which kinda defeats the multithreaded driver. Ok, but there's CreateProcessA(), and that doesn't suck.

Fine, now for Linux. The fork/exec hack is quite ugly, but it works and is even fast. Just never use fork() without immediate exec(). First try under Cygwin... crap I fork bombed my system! What is this shit? Ah I fucked up the path names so that the external executable couldn't be run.

Lesson learnt: put an exit() right after the exec() in the path for child process. Should never be reached, but if it goes there, the exit() at least prevents a fork bomb.

Well yeah, sort of works under Cygwin, but only with up to 3 threads. Beyond that, it seems like fork() at some point gives two processes the same PID, and then shit hangs.

Even slapping a mutex around the fork and releasing it only in the parent process didn't help. Fork in Cygwin is like a fork in the ass. posix_spawn() should work better because it can be mapped more easily to the Windows model, but still no dice.

OK, testing under real Linux. Yeah, no issues with that one! But instead, I get some obscure "free(): invalid size" abort. What the fuck would that even mean?! Checking my free() calls: all fine.

Time to fire up GDB in the terminal! Put a catch on the abort signal, mh got just hex data. Shit I forgot to compile with -O0 and -g. Next try. Backtrace shows the full call trace, back to the originating line in my program - which is fclose() on a file.

Ahhh I remember! Under Linux, fclosing a file that is already closed makes the program crash. So probably I was closing it twice. Checking back.. yeah that's where it was.

Shit runs fast on several cores now!

LabVIEW.

Because WHY THE ACTUAL FUCK should you want to use a visual programming language in a professional environment and pay for it.

(Other than: the manufacturer of your measurement device/power supply/electronic load/etc. has already provided a LabVIEW module so you just have, you know, 'click' your program together and be done.

No, we won't give you the documentation on how to do it properly without that piece of crap or even give you code snippets.

(If you don't feel the urge to shoot yourself in the foot, you have obviously too much time on your hands and could simply be reading the interface definitions for that particular interface. At least it's standardized, d'uh.)

Oh, and you want a lightweight application? Here comes the runtime environment! A big clunky ... thing you'll need now to start up even a simple measure-and-log-data-thing.

Well, OK, it works for the occasional Measure-and-Log-Thing. If you don't need the data too fast.

If you want to do something a bit more complex, knock yourself out, but don't ask me to debug it for you afterwards because that colourful entanglement of wires and connections and blocks is a DAMN HUGE MESS and trying to understand how it works feels like defusing a bomb in a shitty action movie.)

Never again.

Spent a lot of time designing a proper HTTP (dare I even say RESTful) API for our - what is until now a closed system, using a little-known/badly-supported message-over-websocket protocol to do RPC-style communications - supposedly enterprise-grade product.

I make the API spec go through several rounds of review with the rest of the dev team and customers/partners alike. After a few iterations, everybody agrees that the spec will meet the necessary requirements.

I start implementing according to spec. Because this is the first time we're actually building proper HTTP handling into the product, but we of course have to make it work at least somewhat with the RPC-style codebase, it's mostly foundational work. But still, I manage to get some initial endpoints fully implemented and working as per the spec we agreed. The first PR is created, reviews are positive, the direction is clear and what's there already works.

At this point in time, I leave on my honeymoon for two weeks. Naturally, I assume that the remaining endpoints will be completed following the outlines/example of the endpoints which I built. When I come back, the team mentions that the implementation is completed and I believe all is well.

The feature is deployed selectively to some alpha customers to start validation testing before the big rollout. It's been like that for a good month, until a few days ago when I get a question related to a PoC integration which they can't seem to get to work.

I start investigating and notice that the API hasn't been implemented according to the previously agreed upon spec at all. Not only did the team manage to implement the missing functionality in strange and some even broken ways, they also managed to refactor my previously working endpoints into being non-compliant.

Now, I'm a flexible guy. It's not because something isn't done exactly as I've imagined it that it's automatically bad. However, I know from experience that designing a good/clear/future-proof API is a tricky exercise. I've put a lot of time and effort into deliberate design decisions that made up the spec that we all reviewed repeatedly and agreed upon. The current implementation might also be fine, but I now have to go over each endpoint again and reason about whether the implementation still fulfills the requirements (both soft and hard) that we set out to meet.

I'm met with resistance, pushback and disbelief from product management and dev co-workers alike when I raise the concern that the API might actually not be production-ready (while I'm frantically rewriting my integration tests and figuring out how the actual implementation works in comparison to what was spec'ed).

Oh, and did I mention that product management wants to release this by end-of-week?!

So I found this consulting job a while ago thinking that some extra cash while studying would be nice to have.

I meet with the guy, a researcher trying to start a business up, good for him I think, maybe we'll hit it off, continue working, why not? Except he has no clue how to write working code, all he ever did was writing matlab scripts he says, thats why he hired me he says.
Okay, fine, you do your job I do mine.

He hands me the contract, its about comparing two libraries, finding out which one is better suited for his job, cool, plots and graphs everywhere.

Except this is an unpaid job. YOU WHAT?! It's a test job. FINE. At least it'll look good on my resume.

We talk about the paid part where I'm supposed to scale the two libraries, looks good, as expected from an ML engineering perspective. It comes to payment. The dude has no idea how taxes work, says he has a set amount to pay and not a penny more. I explain with examples how taxes are paid, how you get reimbursed for them and so on. Won't budge. Screws me over.

Opens the door for other jobs I think, he'll learn next time I think and take the job.

Fast forward a month, 90% of the job done, he adds a third thing to compare. Gives a github link to a repo with 2 authors, last commit a year ago. There are links to a 404, claiming compiled jars. Fuck.

Not my first rodeo, git clone that shit, make compile, the works. The thing uses libs that ain't in no repo, that would be too easy. Run, error, find lib, remake all the things, rinse repeat.

The scripts they got have hardcoded paths and filenames for 2 year old binaries, remake that shit.

It works, at least I get a prompt now. Try the example files they got, no luck, some missing unlinked binary somewhere, but not a name mentioned. Cross reference the shit outta the libs mentioned on readme, find the missing shit, down it.

Available versions are too new, THE MOLDING NUTCRACKER uses some bug in an old version of the lib.

I give up. Fuck this. This ain't worth the money OR time. Wanker...

It is time... to rant about macs!

No, seriously - I had such a different experience about which not many talk in real life or pretend that it never happens....

Model: 2015 mid MBP 15" with second to highest specs (don't have dedicated gpu).

Rattling fucking toy.... Yea, it rattles! If you shake/move ir sit in trait/bus - it non-stop rattles as a fucking toy. Worst part? It's confirmed issue by apple and it manifacturing issue that they are not keen on fixing!!!! WTF? We have 4 macs in our office - all of them fucking rattles... God help me how annoying that is. (Lose LCD control panel that unsticks from glue. Replacing it solves the issue for 1 month if you carry it anywhere).

Constant fucking crashing/updates.... Every morning I wake up and don't have an app that requires confirmation for restart - it's restarted. YAY, turning on all apps once again.... Why you may ask? Well, because if you tinker with software in any way - it fails to update it and hell breaks lose. It's been a long time since High-Sierra came around and the issue is still there (not running Mojave as it conflicts with soft I have... Woo!). Tried few times - updates fail. Resolution? Reinstall OS!

OS conflicts with applications - damn... People told me it works out of the box.... Yeah, as long as you don't upgrade the OS - then it breaks. Why? Well, because.

Piece of shit power supply. With 4 of our office power supplies - 2 of them failed twice withing warranty and once afterwards... Really? Not to mention that all 4 are starting to shear the sleeve or already did (mine is just wrapped with white electrical tape to give it a support... lol).

Bluetooth - who the hell needs that in mac, right? Well, people do. To start with - it conflicts with 2.4GHz wireless network - you might have one of those and not both at the same time. Next thing is using a device that needs constant connection (mouse, headphones, keyboard - non apple branded) - shit... They can't stay connected for more than an hour without any issues... Constant battle to re-connect it, to re-pair the device and all due to smart apple bluetooth settings. Hell, my mouse (logitech MX master) was even printing random symbols in some applications if moved. All of the issues went away after using a bluetooth dongle... WOO!!!!

Xcode... Ahh, you may never prepare your mac if you don't download 17GB of fucking xCode libraries that enables some tools to be installed/runned as you can NOT get them in any other way and you have to install full xCode software in order to get them... YAY! 17GB wasted on my 256GB SSD that I can't upgrade. GREAT!

OsX applications - ah, don't get offended but if you are using them and you are fine with them - you are probably a monkey that loves being told what to do. You can't customise any actions, you can't configure it the way you like - either you accept their default workflow or go kill yourself. Yep... Had issues with calendar, mail, iMessages, safari... None of them fit my needs :)

Resolution scaling... Fucking hell, the display is 2880 x 1800 but all you let me to use is 1440x900 without scaling? Am I blind to you? Scaling the resolution means that you are fucked if some applications don't support scaling very well. Looking at you Jetbrains - your IDES suck at scaling and slows down the pc to a potato....

Now the pros - keyboard is way better than the new ones, trackpad is GREAT - no need for mouse (using it on external 4k displays only), the battery life is great - getting around 6h of continues development time, 8 if using sublime instead of phpStorm and well, that's about it...

To clarify:
I've bought this device due to the fact that at that time mac and windows pc's with similiar specs costed the same while windows pc sucked with their quality of the device and trackpad... Now the situation is better and when time comes for a next upgrade - it's going to be one of these:
Razer Blade 15, Dell XPS 15, Lenovo Carbon X1 series.
And of course - LINUX. I've had enough issues with windows, and had enough of retardness of apple ecosystem, so switching it is a must for me.

Disclaimer: I might be an unhappy customer, a bit picky but I'd like my device to be setted up as I like and continue to have that until I don't like, not until the company decides to break it. Not to mention that paying almost a yearly salary in my country for one device - I'd expect it to be at least reliable and work without issues....

Rant over.

ps. You can disagree with me, this is my personal experience with MBP over the last 3 years :)

As a pretty solid Angular dev getting thrown a react project over the fence by his PM I can say:

FUCK REACT!

It is nigh impossible to write well structured, readable, well modularized code with it and not twist your mind in recursion from "lift state up" and "rendercycle downwards only"

Try writing a modular modal as a modern function component with interchangeable children (passeable to the component as it should be) that uses portals and returns the result of the passed children components.

Closest I found to it is:
c o d e s a n d b o x.io/s/7w6mq72l2q
(and its a fucking nightmare logic wise and readability wise)

And also I still wouldn't know right of the bat how to get the result from the passed child components with all the oneway binding CLUSTERFUCK.

And even if you manage to there is no chance to do it async as it should be.
You HAVE to write a lot of "HTML" tags in the DOM that practically should not be anywhere but in async functions.

In Angular this is a breeze and works like a charm.
Its not even much gray matter to it...

I can´t comprehend how companies decide to write real big web apps with it.

They must be a MESS to maintain.

For a small "four components that show a counter and fetch user images" - OK.
But fo a big webapp with a big team etc. etc.?

Asking stuff about it on Stackoverflow I got edited unsolicited as fuck and downvoted as fuck in an instant.
Nobody explained anything or even cared to look at my Stackblitz.
Unsolicited edit, downvote, closevote and of they go - no help provided whatsoever.
Its completely fine if you don't have time to help strangers - but then at least do not stomp on beginners like that.
I immediately regretted asking a toxic community like this something that I genuinely seem to not understand. Wasn't SO about helping people?
I deleted my post there and won't be coming back and doing something productive there anytime soon.

Out of respect for my clients budget I'm now doing it the ugly react way and forget about my software architecture standards but as soon as I can I will advise switching to Angular.

If you made it here: WOW
Thank you for giving me a vent to let off some steam :)

So a friend of mine is starting to learn PHP and HTML and he tells me:
"I wrote some code in HTML but I can't run it through the browser"

I'm not brave enough to tell him you can't "run" HTML

But later, he told me "so now i'm writing PHP just to understand how it works, but don't want to install the program to run PHP"

How the fuck you gonna learn?

I already know I'm gonna have to build what he wants to do :/ at least a couple thousand euros incoming :D

After at least half a year of using a computer that froze or crashed at least every 10 minutes I finally replaced the faulty stick of ram.

Now it works beautifully and I'm dissapointed in myself for not doing it earlier.

When college professors want students to do college portal's works.
ACCEPT THE FUCKING WORK.

DO NOT CHANGE THE INITIAL REQUIREMENT WHILE I'M WORKING ON IT.

DO NOT CHANGE MY WORK WITHOUT ASKING ME OR AT THE LEAST NOTIFYING ME.

YOUR PORTAL LOOK HORRIBLE NOW WITH SHIT TIER MENU WHICH I SUGGESTED IN THE FIRST PLACE THAT IT WOULD LOOK GOOD THIS WAY. AND NOW YOU'VE MADE IT LOOK SO BAD MY EYES HAVE CANCER.

So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.

I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.

Here's my problems with this place:

1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.

2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.

3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.

4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.

5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.

6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.

7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.

8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.

9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.

10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.

11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.

Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.

My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.

I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.

Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?

Love you DevRant <3

Built a C#/.NET application with support for a serial device. Tested it on systems A, B, C initially, all Windows system, same .NET version, same targeting, same build tool version, same initial connection configuration etc, etc.

Testing - works on A and C, B nopes.
...
OK, let's check the source, is there something about B that makes it impossible to execute that bit? - No, there is not, you checked that already, stop poking around, it definitively should work on B.
...
OK, maybe admin privileges, there is I/O involved, didn't need that on A and C, but who knows - nope, doesn't work on B.
...
OK, maybe something wrong with the connection settings? First try at reinstalling driver - but no, it doesn't work on B.
...
OK let's try with another device - more/less devices on B. Other USB ports. No. Still does not work on B.
...
OK, this is stupid, but, is the cabling alright? It is, of course it is, stupid - but it still does not work on B.
...
OK, at that point I'm just gonna ask a colleague, GrumpySoftwareDev whether he has any clue why it doesn't work on B. GrumpySoftwareDev knows nothing, but discovers that one of his applications doesn't work on Windows 10. You know nothing, Jon Snow, but it doesn't work on B.
...
OK, now I'm just going to ask another colleague TheLastOfHisKind who handed B down to me somewhat bluntly if he ever experienced problems when working with B and its serial configuration. TheLastOfHisKind tells me he does not and kindly offers me some input on the situation. Still no progress to get it working on B but he hinted he might have fucked up B's driver. I already reinstalled the driver but didn't reboot, which comes after reinstall.
...
OK, I'm just gonna remove and re-install the driver, then restart. Hu! Now the UI is gone but another serial device reacted on a general call. Not fully working on B but we're getting there.
...
OK, I don't know, I'm getting frustrated, let's borrow another system D - which has roughly the same configuration as B - from my colleague StrongCurrentGuy. StrongCurrentGuy borrows me his system and cautions me not to break it. I install the driver, plug the device and copy the application from B. It just works on D. Not on B though.
...
OK, you know what. I'm done. For shits and giggles I'm gonna remove that driver again, reinstall it and restart, maybe it'll magically work afterwar- WHAT THE HELL, I JUST OPENED IT AFTER RESTARTING, IT JUST WORKS - ON B!

... seriously, what the fuck. But yeah, at least it works now.

I think that two criterias are important:

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

1) Some simple anti examples:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My worst enemies....

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

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

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

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

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

Still on the primenumbers bender.
Had this idea that if there were subtle correlations between a sufficiently large set of identities and the digits of a prime number, the best way to find it would be to automate the search.

And thats just what I did.

I started with trace matrices.
I actually didn't expect much of it. I was hoping I'd at least get lucky with a few chance coincidences.

My first tests failed miserably. Eight percent here, 10% there. "I might as well just pick a number out of a hat!" I thought.

I scaled it way back and asked if it was possible to predict *just* the first digit of either of the prime factors.

That also failed. Prediction rates were low still. Like 0.08-0.15.

So I automated *that*.

After a couple days of on-and-off again semi-automated searching I stumbled on it.

[1144, 827, 326, 1184, -1, -1, -1, -1]

That little sequence is a series of identities representing different values derived from a randomly generated product.

Each slots into a trace matrice. The results of which predict the first digit of one of our factors, with a 83.2% accuracy even after 10k runs, and rising higher with the number of trials.

It's not much, but I was kind of proud of it.

I'm pushing for finding 90%+ now.

Some improvements include using a different sort of operation to generate results. Or logging all results and finding the digit within each result thats *most* likely to predict our targets, across all results. (right now I just take the digit in the ones column, which works but is an arbitrary decision on my part).

Theres also the fact that it's trivial to correctly guess the digit 25% of the time, simply by guessing 1, 3, 7, or 9, because all primes, except for 2, end in one of these four.

I have also yet to find a trace with a specific bias for predicting either the smaller of two unique factors *or* the larger. But I haven't really looked for one either.

I still need to write a generate that takes specific traces, and lets me mutate some of the values, to push them towards certain 'fitness' levels.
This would be useful not just for very high predictions, but to find traces with very *low* predictions.

Why? Because it would actually allow for the *elimination* of possible digits, much like sudoku, from a given place value in a predicted factor.

I don't know if any of this will even end up working past the first digit. But splitting the odds, between the two unique factors of a prime product, and getting 40+% chance of guessing correctly, isn't too bad I think for a total amateur.

Far cry from a couple years ago claiming I broke prime factorization. People still haven't forgiven me for that, lol.

Today I told to my Project Manager that after one year of taking care ( explaining thousands of lines of codes) to an external team ( another company) to migrate our application from a monolith to microservices + react, that the React UI they build looks like shit.

He replied "at least it works".

Now I must find the courage to tell him that it doesn't work correctly because instead of a simple *migration* the external team rewrote some algorithms used in a bank application and now the data are wrong.

advices ?

So yeah XML is still not solved in year 2018. Or so did I realize the last days.
I use jackson to serialize generic data to JSON.

Now I also want to provide serialization to XML. Easy right? Jackson also provides XML serialization facitlity similar to JAXB.

Works out of the box (more or less). Wait what? *rubbing eyes*

<User>
<pk>234235</pk>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>6356679041773291286</pk>
</groups>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>1095682275514732543</pk>
</groups>
</User>

Why is my groups property (java.util.Set) rendered as two separate elements? Who the fuck every though this is the way to go?

So OK *reading the docs* there is a way to create a collection wrapper. That must be it, I thought ...

<User typeCode="user">
<pk>2540591810712846915</pk>
<groups>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>6356679041773291286</pk>
</groups>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>1095682275514732543</pk>
</groups>
</groups>
</User>

What the fuck is this now? This is still not right!!!

I know XML offers a lot of flexibility on how to represent your data. But this is just wrong ...

The only logical way to display that data is:
<User typeCode="user">
<pk>2540591810712846915</pk>
<groups>
<groupsEntry typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>6356679041773291286</pk>
</groupsEntry>
<groupsEntry typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>1095682275514732543</pk>
</groupsEntry>
</groups>
</User>

It would be better if the individual entries would be just called "group" but I guess implementing such a logic would be pretty hard (finding a singular of an arbitrary word?).

So yeah theres a way for that * implementing a custom collection serializer* ... wait is that really the way to go? I mean common, am I the only one who just whants this fucking shit just work as expected, with the least amount of suprise?
Why do I have to customize that ...

So ok it renders fine now ... *writes test for it+
FUCK FUCK FUCK. why can't jackson not deserialize it properly anymore? The two groups are just not being picked up anymore ...

SO WHY, WHY WHY are you guys over at jackson, JAXB and the like not able to implement that in the right manner. AND NOT THERE IS ONLY ONE RIGHT WAY TO DO IT!

*looks at an apple PLIST file* *scratches head* OK, gues I'll stick to the jackson defaults, at least it's not as broken as the fucking apple XML:

<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>PayloadOrganization</key>
<string>Example Inc.</string>
<key>PayloadDisplayName</key>
<string>Profile Service</string>
<key>PayloadVersion</key>
<integer>1</integer>
</dict>
</plist

I really wonder who at apple has this briliant idea ...

I don't know what to chose.

The fact that for three months, I had to design a 16-page catalog, when I have no experience and my job is web development;

The fact that I have to do SEO for the site, but that means for my boss that for a one-page long text, we have to find at least 60 (sixty! ) times the occurrences of the keywords;

The fact that when I finally have something interesting to do, the boss finds that it doesn't go fast enough and decide to drop the project even if making a whole new dynamic stock system with the db we have is something hard and long to do;

The fact that when I come to work five minutes late, my boss is at the verge on screaming on me, even if I come ten minutes early every other day;

The fact that when I'm coding, I need concentration, I don't need the boss to give me the phone to answer customers, stop everything I am doing and explain them what products we are selling;

The fact that I am paid the minimum wage for a trainee, and when there's no coffee anymore, we have to buy some ourselves because "you drink way too much coffee, you understand" (three a day, sorry for wanting to stay awake);

The fact that I have asked for one year how many days of vacation I still had, and the only answer they gave to me yet was: "Oh, we have to ask the accountant". I still don't know how many days I have left;

The fact that the site is made only by trainees since the beginning, so circa 2008, and the code is horrible but "it works, so don't touch it". The admin part is in CodeIgniter, the front in laravel 4.2, there are a lot of useless code but we can't touch it because the boss doesn't think it is worth the time.

I almost made a burn-out last year, my doc saw my state right before and made me stop for a week. I still have to work there 'till end of august, then I will have my diploma and find another company to work with. Now, I check everyday on my calendar.

The infuriating edgecases of python copypasta.

If you're like me, and you find it easier to noodle in notepad++ and the console, then you may have encountered this peculiar bug.

Try padding blank spaces on an empty string variable, and follow it with print(blanks + str(var))
#for any variable

Now copypaste that along with at least one other line at the same time.

Observe how no matter what you do, print will always output the blanks variable on a separate line, with quotes.

Try rewriting right-justify? No good.
Try using f-format strings? No good.
Raw strings? Inspecting bytes to see where the newlines and carriage returns are being inserted? Nothing.

Copypaste with multiple strings will *always* insert quotes and a new line when printing *any* variable with a string thats been justified.
And this is 100% non-congruent with pasting the same *line* of code *by itself*, which works as intended, no quotes or additional new lines are inserted.

I just went ahead, turned the snippet into a function, and called it from there, which solved the problem entirely.

I'm amazed how some people either think I'm fucking jesus or a god or both.

App XY not working.

Yeah. We're talking about how App XY and it's exhaustion of the connection pool since a year....

It's not working, what can we do?

Well. I don't know. Tried restarting?

Not working.

Well... Nothing I can do, you're responsible for developing the app and we've talked many times how complex the problem is.

It's not working, can u do something?

<Me just fed up increasing the connection count>

Well. I've increased the connections.
This will not work. It's a band aid. The app needs really a complete migration.

Ok. But it works.

No it doesn't work.. For fucks sake... It still exhausts the connections for unknown reasons, this is a band aid.

But it works....

-.-

This conversations was over then....

Well. Have fun.

I reverted the change I did.

May this crappy piece of shit die a thousand deaths, I:m now working on something else.

Goodbye mother fucking bitches, habe fun with the nightmare you created.

I'll cry over the other fucking nightmares I at least can solve, cause what you created in this App is beyond irresponsible and dumb.

!rant ✓devrant-meetup

Met @condor irl today. He's the same weird guy as I feel at moments. Interests that don't interest people around us in any way..

Drank some beers, evidently called Belgium.
He came all the way to the town I work at.. kudos!

Talked about breadboards taking 230V via cables that aren't meant to take the voltage in any way.. Security implications in networks and online services, like Fb. Faraday's cage & how it works; and some other shit I swear I won't tell anyone about as you should be comfortable discussing it.

Quite interesting, I swear! (:

Now on the bus home, as I had to cut it short to get to some parental business... But I'm looking back on some positive social interaction, which I'll gladly re-do another time.

Condor, it was sure nice to meet ya. I'll come your way next time. That ~10eu for your transport will be equalled some day in the near future.

@FunkDelegate sorry it was badly timed and plaved, you'll join us soon enough! At least you saw decent ass! xD

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

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

Well maybe it's for good.

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

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

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

What on earth could possibly go wrong?

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

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

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

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

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

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

short minded idiots.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What in the actual fuck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm very short tempered at the moment.

A lot like Dr Cox in Scrubs.

And really ... You mother fucking stupid idiotic developers with your tendency to discuss absolutely everything just to not have to work for a dozen more minutes...

But ok. Let's discuss.

But even that seems to be absolutely impossible for you little shitheads.

Instead of discussing solutions, nooooooooo....

We're grown up developers so we discuss how the baddy manager hurt our lil feelings by saying that we're morons for wasting all the fucking time without coming up with a solution.

Now my lil cry babies, once the baddy manager got your pacifiers so at least once in an hour my migraine finally calms down for not hearing your bitching pathetic lil whiny noises...

Face it. Over the years you collected a huge ton of mother fucking tech debt because no one of you actually took a bit of time to use that empty space in your head to think at least a mu further than the dumb jira task you were given.

And yes. That ends badly.

And yes. As it is now in a state of cluster fuck, guess what. You have to work. You get money for it, remember?

And yes. if you would stop moping and bitching and crying and being a pathetic lil piece of shit, you'd realize we could come up with solutions very fast.

But nooo... Let's talk about our feelings.

And how we are over worked.

And how nothing works.

Cause yes. That will be the hail mary that saves us all.

Let me give u a hint: it's a mother fucking waste of time bitches.

I think it's time I put a pacifier not only in your mouth, but arse too. Maybe it helps overcoming the anal and oral phase of childhood so we can at least have something close to adult talk.

*breathes in*

Gooozfraba.

I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get a ride to the airport on Friday and I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get a ride to the airport on Friday and I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get my car out the time to do it again and I look forward to hearing from you in awhile I have a few questions about the other I have a few questions about the same as the other day I will have a talk at you and I hope to see everyone again and again I apologise I didn't get a response to your advertisement for a while but it is a little chilly here is a copy to the store to buy the car is in a good way to start a little more time with the family for a while but it is a little chilly here is a copy to the time of the year for the first time in a long time and I don't want it for a couple days so I'm just trying for you guys I just want a ride with us to get a few things done and I will be there at the end if this works out well for you and your family a very happy and excited about this weekend so I'm just going to go to the store and get back with me and my family is going to be a little late today but I'm still in my car and I will be there at like midnight so much and have to be at work at the moment but I'll try again later in life I have been trying to get a hold of the guy that I have a meeting with you to discuss the details of the job and I have been working in my room so I can get a ride to the airport on Sunday so we are all on my own and I will be there at noon so I'll just be me my money back and I will get it done this weekend but I will be there at the same time and where would we have been in the hospital for a week or two to see you soon and have a great day today love it and it will not work for me to come in and get a new phone or in person and I am not sure how long it would have taken it off and on again and again I apologise I didn't know you were going to be a little late to the game and it will not work on it this morning I was wondering if you had a choice but I don't know if you have any questions please feel free to contact me at any rate is higher up for it and the other is a good time to come in for an appointment with the surgeon on my phone and I don't want to be a good friend to come in at all and the other is a good time to call and talk about what we can do to help you feel better I can come by to pick up the kids from school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next few days and I have a few more days before we get into my car to go out for lunch at home and I will be there at the same time as you can imagine how hard is it to late to get a new car is a lot more done with the interview and the kids will have a good day at school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next two days so we are all on my way home from the gym and then I will be able to make it today because I'm a very nice person who can do it for you if you want to come by and see you soon and have to go back in the office tomorrow morning at work today but I'm going back and I will be there at the same time and where would we have been trying all of us and the rest are you still interested I can send you a picture of the front and back of the house and the kids are going well with the family for a while but it is a little chilly here is a picture of the front and back of the house is in my prayers as a friend but it will have a great weekend and I will be there at the end if this works out well and that your mom and dad are going to be a bit of an emergency at least you have a good day at school today so I'm going to be in the office tomorrow and will be back to the hotel now I'm in bed with a friend and then I will be able to make it to the meeting tonight but I will be there at the same time I was in a hurry and come to the office and I will send the other side and a little about me and you will see that you sent it out and get a good deal and you have the address of where I can get a ride to work on it this week but will have a good day at school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next two days so we are going to be in the office tomorrow and I have been working in the morning and I will get it done this weekend but will be back in the office on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday are going well for you and your wife is not the case then you have the address of your day goes on and I have been working in the morning and I will be there at the same time I am in need and I'll see what the status is on the way to the airport and then we will have a great day at school today so I'm trying to get a hold of the guy who was the guy who was the guy who is going well and I am going to be out by then but if I can find a way to get the car out the door to go to the store and I have to be in a relationship with a friend and then I will be able to make it to the meeting and will get the info for the guy who was the guys are doing the meeting at the church

Small company, sole engineer. Non-tech management. Increasingly fancy job titles despite working alone most of the time, with the promise of hiring someone (again) I can actually manage soon.

Backlog of projects/tasks is truly a mindfuck, with new things being added each week. This backlog will never ever get done, and nothing matters anyway because the next idea is "the future", all the time.

While I have influence on some aspects of decision making, it usually ends up being what the boss wants. Actively opposed a project because it's just too big of an undertaking, it was forced through anyway. I'm trying to keep the scope manageable as I'm building it now, and it's hard.

"It's the future, we absolutely have to do this. It will be the biggest thing we've ever done."

Boss's excitement then quickly faded since it's actually in development, now nobody really seems to want to know where it's at, or how it will all work. I need to scope it out, with the knowledge that many decisions boss signed off will be questioned when he actually looks at it. We now have even more "exciting" ideas of utter grandeur. Stuff that I can't even begin to comprehend the complexity of, while struggling to keep a self imposed deadline on the current one.

Every single morning we sit on Zoom for a "valuable" "catch-up". This is absolutely perfect for one thing: Completely destroying whatever drive and focus I have going into the day. Unrelated topics, marketing conversations, even more ideas, ideas for ideas sake, small problems blown out of proportion, the list goes on. I recently argued in detail why it should be scrapped or at least be optional to attend. No luck, it's "valuable".

Today a new idea was announced, and we absolutely have to do it ASAP because it can only be better than the current solution. I raise my concerns, saying it's not as easy as you make it out to be, we should properly think about it. Nope! We'll botch something to prove that it works... So you'll base your decision whether it's good on some half ass botch job that nobody really has the mental capacity to actually pay attention to. What a reliable way to measure!

"Our analytics data isn't useful enough to tell us the impact of things we do. We (you) have to fix this." Over the last 2 or so years, I've been pushing for an overhaul and expansion of our data analysis capabilities for exactly this reason. Integrating different data sources into a unified solution so we can easily see what we're doing, etc. Nope, never happened.

The new project idea which is based on wild assumptions is ALWAYS more important than the groundwork.

Now when I mentioned that this is what I wanted to do all along, it got brushed aside. "We don't need to do anything complicated, just fix this, add that, and it's done. It should be an easy thing to do. This is very important for our decision making." Fine, have it your way.

I'm officially burned out. It's so fucking hard to get myself to focus on my work for more than an hour or two. I started a side project, and even that effort is falling victim to my day-job-induced apathy.

I'm tempted to hand in my resignation without another offer on the table. I just need time to rediscover my passion, and go job hunting from that position, instead of the utter desperation of right now.

If you've read through all this rambling, kudos to you!

It is the time for the proper long personal rant.

Im a fresh student, i started few months ago and the life is going as predicted: badly or even worse...
Before the university i had similar problems but i had them under control (i was able to cope with them and with some dose of "luck" i graduated from high school and managed to get into uni). I thought by leaving the town and starting over i would change myself and give myself a boost to keep going. But things turned out as expected. Currently i waste time everyday playing pc games or if im too stressed to play, i watch yt videos. Few years ago i thought i was addicted, im not. It might be a effect of something greater. I have plans, for countess inventions, projects, personal, for university and others and ALL of them are frozen, stopped, non existant. No motivation. I had few moments when i was motivated but it was short, hours or only minutes. Long term goals dont give me any motivation. They give as much short lived joy, happines as goals in games and other things... (no substance abuse problems, dont worry). I just dont see point of my projects anymore. Im sure that my projects are the only thing that will give me experience and teach me something but... i passed the magic barrier of univercity, all my projects are becoming less and less impressive... TV and other sources show people, briliant people, students, even children that were more succesful than me

if they are better than me why do i even bother? companies care more for them, especialy the prestigious ones, they have all the fame, money, funding, help, gear without question!
of course they hardworked for ther positions, they could had better beggining or worse but only hard work matters right?

As i said. None of my work matters, i worked hard for my whole life, studing, crafting, understanding: programming, multiple launguages, enviorements, proper and most effcient algorithms, electronic circuits, mechanical contraptions. I have knowlege about nearly every machine and i would be able to create nearly everything with just access to those tools and few days worth of practice. (im sort of omnibus, know everything) But because had lived in a small town i didnt have any chances of getting the right equpment. All of my electronical projects are crap. Mechanical projects are made out of scrap. Even when i was in high school, nobody was impressed or if they were they couldnt help me.
Now im at university. My projects are stagnant, mostly because of my mental problems. Even my lifestyle took a big hit. I neglect a lot of things i shouldnt. Of course greg, you should go out with friends! You cant dedicate 100% of your life to science!
I fucking tried. All of them are busy or there are other things that prevent that... So no friends for me. I even tried doing something togheter! Nope, same reasons or in most cases they dont even do anything...
Science clubs? Mostly formal, nobody has time, tools are limited unless you designed you thing before... (i want to learn!, i dont have time to design!), and in addition to that i have to make a recrutment project... => lack of motivation to do shit.

The biggest obstacle is money. Parts require money, you can make your parts but tools are money too. I have enough to live in decent apartment and cook decently as well but not enough to buy shit for projects. (some of them require a lot or knowlege... and nobody is willing to give me the second thing). Ok i found a decent job oppurtunity. C# corporation, very nice location, perfect for me because i have a lot of time, not only i can practice but i can earn for stuff. I have a CV or resume just waiting for my friend to give me the email (long story, we have been to that corp because they had open days and only he has the email to the guy, just a easier way)
But there are issiues with it as well so it is not that easy.

If nobody have noticed im dedicated to the science. Basicly 100% scientist that want to make a world a better place.

I messaged a uni specialist so i hope he will be able to help me.
For long time i have thought that i was normal, parent were neglecting my mental health and i had some situations that didnt have good infuence on me as well. I might have some issiues with my brain as well, 96% of aspargers symptoms match, with other links included. I dont want to say i have it but it is a exciuse for a test. In addition to that i cant CANT stop thinking, i even tried not thinking for few minutes, nope i had to think about something everytime. On top of that my biological timer is flipped. I go to sleep at 5 am and wake up at 5pm (when i dont have lectures).
I prefer working at night, at that time my brain at least works normaly but i dont want to disrupt roommates...
And at the day my brain starts the usual, depression, lack of motivation, other bullshit thing.

I might add something later, that is all for now.

RANT

We use Exact for our time sheets/hour tracking. How it's supposed to work:
-Manager plans my hours in Exact.
- I work those hours on the given projects
== All fine till here ==
But then ... there is a button (don't know the correct translation) "realise" which books the planned hours for me. So I don't have to do it manually.

This simply didn't work!! No one seem to know why not... Not even the guys at Exact.

Since it's web based I opened the developers window and looked for the call behind the button. You would think it would be at least an Ajax call thingy (I'm not completely into JS)
Turns out it's a readable JS function!

It doesn't stop there... It first makes all calculations on what to display, at last, at the fucking end, it checks a setting whether to proceed the booking or not!!!!

So I found and switched the setting and tried the button again.... Now it fucking works...

No fucking way I am going to tell Exact what the problem is 😫

What the fuck this fucking shit of an app supposedly went through five rounds of QA and I broke it in 5 minutes? Holy fucking shit How this is the main point of your job. You shitty shits take forever getting this PR to me and now it’s buggier than a haunted house on Halloween?

After this is after wanting to cuss Apple for making me update the os then then xcode then iTunes just to recognize the goddamn development phone. It’s an app built off Cordova it works for like 14 versions of iOS just run the bugger you over priced aluminum chassis dildo riding fruit Fuckers.

Now back to the goddamn cluster fuck I just got delivered. What the goddamn fuck. This level of bullshittery I have not seen before. And apparently Cordova is only partly de-sandboxed? I don’t know for sure because I don’t have time to test it because I’m running the entire technological stack of this company on a junior dev salary!

When you tell me it goes though all this QA and you spend 2 weeks on just QA tickets for fucks sake the first operation I do, the most common fucking operation on the app, the shit we have been building around all this fucking time, should not fucking error out. For fucks sake at least try to get the main fucking thing working. I recognize you did a lot of work and implemented a number of features but what the fuck good are they if I can’t even run them for one fucking time.

Since I started working at my current job, I've been growing to admire agile development more and more (or the ideal at least) to the point where I manage my LIFE with an agile perspective now!

It honestly works so well! 😁

This is a story about my disappointment in modern GUI editors for desktop applications.

Well, first of all, I grew up with Delphi 5. Delphi has an awesome form editor. It's intuitive and works without any problem. It always does what you want it to do. Prototyping is really a problem of seconds here, even for people that never used it (I guess).

But the problem is that it is Delphi. Its so old, bloated, and most problems you'll ever have have been solved (through a hack) 20 years ago in some weird forum.

So I looked on and tried many other drag'n'drop gui editors.

The one for java is the biggest pile of crap I've ever seen. It slows down eclipse /intellij and does almost never do what I want. At least its not really intuitive.

Right after that, the one for C# (this xml Designer ) is okay-ish, but it's also not really intuitive and does not always what the user wants.

I also tried other ones. But I still miss an intuitive one that works without weird side effects.

I now can understand why the Web dev stack grows in the region of desktop apps. I can prototype stuff even faster in angular than in Delphi.
But shouldn't we improve the desktop stack instead of taking some bloated stack using a language that should have never existed?

Short angry rant
What the fuck is wrong with the SalesForce Authenticator logic?! How in the hell do you fuck up a simple 2FA system this hard?!!

Login -> Waiting for Notification... nothing... -> Reload Page -> Login -> Waiting for Notification... nothing -> Click "Use Code instead"... nothing happens... -> Reload Page -> "Login -> don't even wait for notification and just pres "Use Code instead"... nothing -> Reload Page -> Notice there's a "Use Code" button on this page as well -> Finally be able to log into the fucking Aloha piece of shit...

How TF is it, that Duo is able to send me a push notification within 1 second and it ALWAYS works... and THIS FUCKING SHIT NEVER FUCKING WORKS THE FIRST TIME AND AT WORST JUST DOESN'T WORK AT ALL!!!!!

Fucking hell.... Don't offer me a push notification service if you don't know how to make one... jesus fucking christ... All of Salesforce security is fucking stupid, but at least the others mostly work, but this retarded piece of crap is making me actively surprised when it works on first try... Maybe it's because I'm on a slow connection, but again Duo Mobile doesn't have this problem and works *instantly*... so what sort of retarded monkey coded the SF one I don't know, but I hope they are making better products now, because this is a disgrace to programming and security

It all started with an undelivereable e-mail.

New manager (soon-to-be boss) walks into admin guy's office and complains about an e-mail he sent to a customer being rejected by the recipient's mail server. I can hear parts of the conversation from my office across the floor.

Recipient uses the spamcop.net blacklist and our mail was rejected since it came from an IP address known to be sending mails to their spamtrap.

Admin guy wants to verify the claim by trying to find out our static public IPv4 address, to compare it to the blacklisted one from the notification.
For half an hour boss and him are trying to find the correct login credentials for the telco's customer-self-care web interface.
Eventually they call telco's support to get new credentials, it turned out during the VoIP migration about six months ago we got new credentials that were apparently not noted anywhere.

Eventually admin guy can log in, and wonders why he can't see any static IP address listed there, calls support again. Turns out we were not even using a static IP address anymore since the VoIP change. Now it's not like we would be hosting any services that need to be publicly accessible, nor would all users send their e-mail via a local server (at least my machine is already configured to talk directly to the telco's smtp, but this was supposedly different in the good ol' days, so I'm not sure whether it still applies to some users).

In any case, the e-mail issue seems completely forgotten by now: Admin guy wants his static ip address back, negotiates with telco support.
The change will require new PPPoE credentials for the VDSL line, he apparently received them over the phone(?) and should update them in the CPE after they had disabled the login for the dynamic address. Obviously something went wrong, admin guy meanwhile having to use his private phone to call support, claims the credentials would be reverted immediately when he changed them in the CPE Web UI.

Now I'm not exactly sure why, there's two scenarios I could imagine:
- Maybe telco would use TR-069/CWMP to remotely provision the credentials which are not updated in their system, thus overwriting CPE to the old ones and don't allow for manual changes, or
- Maybe just a browser issue. The CPE's login page is not even rendered correctly in my browser, but then again I'm the only one at the company using Firefox Private Mode with Ghostery, so it can't be reproduced on another machine. At least viewing the login/status page works with IE11 though, no idea how badly-written the config stuff itself might be.

Many hours pass, I enjoy not being annoyed by incoming phone calls for the rest of the day. Boss is slightly less happy, no internet and no incoming calls.

Next morning, windows would ask me to classify this new network as public/work/private - apparently someone tried factory-resetting the CPE. Or did they even get a replacement!? Still no internet though.
Hours later, everything finally back to normal, no idea what exactly happened - but we have our old static IPv4 address back, still wondering what we need it for.

Oh, and the blacklisted IP address was just the telco's mail server, of course. They end up on the spamcop list every once in a while.

tl;dr: if you're running a business in Germany that needs e-mail, just don't send it via the big magenta monopoly - you would end up sharing the same mail servers with tons of small businesses that might not employ the most qualified people for securing their stuff, so they will naturally be pwned and abused for spam every once in a while, having your mailservers blacklisted.

I'm waiting for the day when the next e-mail will be blocked and manager / boss eventually wonder how the 24-hours-outage did not even fix aynything in the end...

Well, being the only one in the house who can really solve computer problems:
We have a home nas in our network for filestorage and since a few weeks, we couldn't acces the device through windows explorer, so today I went on a exploration... First I tried the nas in a seperate different network, and it worked immediatly! oke great, try it in our main network again. And 'ofcours' it's not visible. So I go to the router webpage, and the page of our router just really sucks! So it was quite hard to find out if the NAS was attached or not, ad if so, under which IP. Finally found that, tried to connect to the webpage of the NAS, but got a timeout, ping would timeout too! I thought that that might have someting to do with that the NAS would connect via static IP. So I changed that to a dynamic IP, and I could atleast get to the website. After that I could try all the services and all of them worked perfectly, except for samba... And samba is the only service we actually use, so after that I thought that the device not showing up in network view in explorer had something to do with that the nas wouldn't show me a hostname in the router. So I tried to fix that, after an hour of trying to get the hostname to showup in the router, I just thought that I might try to connect to the nas via the IP. So I found via SO that I could just use //192.168.0.104 and I got into the samba server. So I guess that it was actually working all along 😒. After that I didn't want to bother to work with the hostnames, so I just gave the NAS a fixed IP, made a few shortcuts for my housemates and now it all works again.. For now at least...

“Huddles don't work in safari 🤡,” Slack said.
Develop → User Agent → Google Chrome.
Boom, huddles suddenly work in Safari, and my today's huddle went absolutely fine.

Yep, I switched to Safari as my default browser. Previously, I didn't use it solely because YouTube's full-screen mode acted weird, but now I quit watching YouTube altogether.

Safari is a stellar browser. First, it wipes the floor with everything, even including Thorium, in the performance department (on Apple Silicon at least). Second, it's really beautiful with its new inline tab panel, where you have just one line of icons on top, instead of having two (tabs and url bar). DevTools are amazing. It can also connect to my iPhone's Safari via Wi-Fi and inspect the opened page — a must-have for heavy layouts. Plus, if my website works fine in Safari, it sure as hell will work fine everywhere. Safari is a great hack detector, as it won't tolerate dirty hacks. Works wonders for your code discipline.

After 3 months of working at my current and first job I inherited a spaghetti codebase with files as large as 1000 lines because my mentor left.
Everything works but dare to change a thing. No Unit tests or any sane practices. At least our CI/CD is automated. 😂

Now I am asked to bend the library backwards in order to integrate it with another product. No one helps me and I am slowly starting to feel devastated. 😩

I am so pissed. Someone i know asked me if we were hiring marketting people so I asked the COO and he said we are and asked me to refer them. I asked my friend for her CV and referred her.

I ask the COO a week later whether he contacted her and he says that they will hire a girl they had as an intern a few months ago instead.

I give no fuck to whether my friend ended up getting hired. But i at least expect to get her an interview. When u ask ur friend to refer you to their company, u expect the fact he works there will help u get a chance for an interview or even a god damn phone call at the very least. But now the COO made me look very useless infront of her, it wasnt any different than if she had applied online rather than me referring her personally.

i honestly feel disrespected having been indirectly told my position in this company doesnt even let me help people i know to get a small interview. nevermind the outcome of the interview, but me being in this company should give me the ability to get someone an interview AT LEAST. just for the sake i referred her personally as a current employee at the company... they shouldve interviewed her and forgot about her. just make it look like u cared about the fact that a current good employee referred someone and that my referral actually did something.

I feel very useless infront of my friend now and i hate that now its obvious to her my company doesnt give a shit about my referrals...

So I'm finally doing the job I was hired to do 2 years ago, with the promise of working 1.5 years ago, and scheduled to work 1 year ago as the project slips about a 1.25 years.

The project is on it's 3.5th year of a 3 year plan and based on the architecture of the project, the project architect started a degree in software architecture 4 years ago. In Latin. When his first language was Japanese and his second was Indian English while this was a US company. And his entire degree was in Lisp, PHP, and html, this project is in C#, and his professional background is in Fortran.

This is a man who is no longer on the project, not allowed to contribute or talk to us about the project, and what little documentation he left us is in Swahili translated from Korean via Google translate from the second year Korean language major exchange student from Russia who got really into meth and Telenovelas.

It is every version of MV* without the M and with every definition of * including some he made up and some that have only been proven to exist via machine learning algorithm written in SQL statements.

This project represents an implementation of the presentation tier of an n-tier application, yet attempts to reimplement the other n-1 tiers in html5 and the dreams of children.

The new lead is a former engineer that couldn't begin coding until he figured out how to map all of his variables to his former cars and girlfriends inclusively and learned his management skills from the big book of micro managers and that one time everyone else in the office was sick but the intern. Who now has a girlfriend whom he works 200 feet from so he isn't 100% thinking with his largest head. At least from observation.

Yet, I still can't bring myself to go be with the whales/become an accountant.

It was the last year of high school.

We had to submit our final CS homework, so it gets reviewed by someone from the ministry of education and grade it. (think of it as GPA or whatever that is in your country).

Now being me, I really didn’t do much during the whole year, All I did was learning more about C#, more about SQL, and learn from the OGs like thenewboston, derek banas, and of course kudvenkat. (Plus more)

The homework was a C# webform website of whatever theme you like (mostly a web store) that uses MS Access as DB and a C# web service in SOAP. (Don’t ask.)

Part 1/2:

Months have passed, and only had 2 days left to deadline, with nothing on my hand but website sketches, sample projects for ideas, and table schematics.

I went ahead and started to work on it, for 48 hours STRAIGHT.

No breaks, barely ate, family visited and I barely noticed, I was just disconnected from reality.

48 hours passed and finished the project, I was quite satisfied with my it, I followed the right standards from encrypting passwords to verifying emails to implementing SQL queries without the risk of SQL injection, while everyone else followed foot as the teacher taught with plain text passwords and… do I need to continue? You know what I mean here.

Anyway, I went ahead and was like, Ok, lets do one last test run, And proceeded into deleting an Item from my webstore (it was something similar to shopify).

I refreshed. Nothing. Blank page. Just nothing. Nothing is working, at all.

Went ahead to debug almost everywhere, nothing, I’ve gone mad, like REALLY mad and almost lose it, then an hour later of failed debugging attempts I decided to rewrite the whole project from scratch from rebuilding the db, to rewriting the client/backend code and ui, and whatever works just go with it.

Then I noticed a loop block that was going infinite.

NEVER WAIT FOR A DATABASE TO HAVE MINIMUM NUMBER OF ROWS, ALWAYS ASSUME THAT IT HAS NO VALUES. (and if your CPU is 100%, its an infinite loop, a hard lesson learned)

The issue was that I requested 4 or more items from a table, and if it was less it would just loop.

So I went ahead, fixed that and went to sleep.

Part 2/2:

The day has come, the guy from the ministry came in and started reviewing each one of the students homeworks, and of course, some of the projects crashed last minute and straight up stopped working, it's like watching people burning alive.

My turn was up, he came and sat next to me and was like:

Him: Alright make me an account with an email of asd@123.com with a password 123456

Me: … that won't work, got a real email?

Him: What do you mean?

Me: I implemented an email verification system.

Him: … ok … just show me the website.

Me: Alright as you can see here first of all I used mailgun service on a .tk domain in order to send verification emails you know like every single website does, encrypted passwords etc… As you can see this website allows you to sign up as a customer or as a merc…

Him: Good job.

He stood up and moved on.

YOU MOTHERFUCKER.

I WENT THROUGH HELL IN THE PAST 48 HOURS.

AND YOU JUST SAT THERE FOR A MINUTE AND GAVE UP ON REVIEWING MY ENTIRE MASTERPIECE? GO SWIM IN A POOL FULL OF BURNING OIL YOU COUNTLESS PIECE OF SHIT

I got 100/100 in the end, and I kinda feel like shit for going thought all that trouble for just one minute of project review, but hey at least it helped me practice common standards.

Joined a new startup as a remote dev, feeling a bit micromanaged. So this week I joined an established startup as a senior mobile dev where I work remotely.

Previous two devs got fired and two new guys got hired (me as a senior dev and another senior dev as a teamlead, also third senior dev will join next week).

Situation is that codebase is really crappy (they invested 4 years developing the android app which hasn't even been released yet). It seems that previous devs were piggybacking on old architecture and didn't bother to update anything, looking at their GIT output I could tell that they were working at 20-30% capacity and just accepting each other MR's usually with no comments meaning no actual code reviews. So codebase already is outdated and has lots of technical debt. Anyways, I like the challenges so a crappy codebase is not really a problem.

Problem is that management seems to be shitting bricks now and because they got burned by devs who treated this as a freelance gig (Im talking taking 8-10 weeks pto in a given year, lots of questionable sick leaves and skipping half of the meetings) now after management fired them it seems that they are changing their strategy into micro managament and want to roll this app out into production in the next 3 months or so lol. I started seeing redflags, for example:

1. Saw VP's slack announcement where he is urging devs to push code everyday. I'm a senior dev and I push code only when I'm ready and I have at least a proof of concept that's working. Not a big fan of pushing draft work daily that is in in progress and have to deal with nitpicky comments on stuff that is not ready yet. This was never a problem in 4-5 other jobs I worked in over the years.

2. Senior dev who's assigned as the teamlead on my team has been working for 1 month and I can already see that he hates the codebase, doesn't plan on coding too much himself and seems like he plans on just sitting in meetings and micromanaging me and other dev who will join soon. For example everyday he is asking me on how I am doing and I have to report this to him + in a separate daily meeting with him and product. Feels weird.

3. Same senior dev/teamlead had a child born yesterday. While his wife was in hospital the guy rushed home to join all work meetings and to work on the project. Even today he seems to be working. That screams to me like a major redflag, how will he be able to balance his teamlead position and his family life? Why management didn't tell him to just take a few days off? He told me himself he is a senior dev who helped other devs out, but never was in an actual lead position. I'm starting to doubt if he will be able to handle this properly and set proper boundaries so that management wouldn't impact mental health.

Right now this is only my 1st week. They didn't even have a proper backend documentation. Not a problem. I installed their iOS app which is released and intercepted the traffic so I know how backend works so I can implement it in android app now.

My point is that I'm not a child who needs hand holding. I already took on 2 tickets and gonna push an MR with fixes. This is my first week guys. In more corporate companies people sit 2 months just reading documentation and are not expected to be useful for first few months. All I want is for management to fuckoff and let me do my thing. I already join daily standup, respond to my teamlead daily and I ping people if I need something. I take on responsibility and I deliver.

How to handle this situation? I think maybe I came off as too humble in the interview or something, but basically I feel like I'm being treated like a junior or something. I think I need to deliver a few times and establish some firm boundaries here.

In all workplaces where I worked I was trusted and given freedom. I feel like if they continue treating me like a junior/mid workhorse who needs to be micromanaged I will just start interviewing for other places soon.

> wanting to add an embed google maps to a website I'm working on for fun, with React
> Check the API documentation, excepted their iframe they create from your needs, not much info about how to set in a a js framework
> decide to check if anyone has already created something with React
> They did! 1 american dude, one polish, one last from idk where
> The rest is basic doc so let's try each of them
> Errors, errors everywhere
> Screens stays awefully white
> Spend 2 hours checking, checking and checking again each library
> Each of them have a different problem
> Fuck this, let's copy the iframe thingy from Google's doc, adapt 1 or 2 things because of React and run npm
> Google maps works on first try

I think the one of the more common reason for imposter syndrome is that a lot of smart people constantly get told as children the "you're so smart/capable, you can do everything!" too much, and when you hear it enough times, it gets to you, so you think everything is just easy. And then when they start hitting roadblocks, instead of helping or explaining that it's normal for things to be hard and it's normal to fail, usually parents and teachers and whatnot tell them "Oh it's okay, don't worry about it, you're smart, you'll get it" and so they at first it works, maybe it just takes more time but they manage, but as things get harder and they still put little effort because "don't worry, you're so smart, you learn so fast/easy" and as they find out more and more things they don't umderstand or don't know they start to feel a dissonance, which builds anxiety.
And this is where I thinks it actually starts: at some points there comes a situation where they either share this anxiety with someone or someone notices their worry, and(at least from what I've seen from others) usually the response they get is something along the lines of: "Nah, you're just worrying too much, you're smarter than you think, don't be so down on yourself, you need to worry less", which, maybe I'm wrong, but I'm not sure telling someone that thinks he has a problem that he doesn't have a problem, helps their worrying.
And on one hand the amount if things they don't get/know/understand or fail at grows(cuz you can't just be good at EVERYTHING, so the more things you know about, the more things you don't understand) while mentally still being in that "Wait a minute, you're smarter than this, you should be getting this!" mindset that's been drilled into them, and so at some point the illusion shatters, and they start to think "Maybe I'm not so smart after all", and because they think they were wrong about their level, they feel like they have "oversold" themselves in the past and that makes any past accomplishments feel like lucky accidents instead: "If I'm not actually smart, the things I did manage to achieve must've been just accidental", which makes them feel like they've lied to themselves and everyone else when they "took credit for an accidents" and that their life is just a snowball of pretending.

Now, is that actually a cause or is it another one of my crazy 1AM ramblings? I don't know xD
I'm not an expert in any of this and I don't really know any psychology so hell if I know if that's how any of this works but that's just my theory of one of the reasons why. *shrug*. I've had this theory for years, but I don't know.
It at least makes sense to me, but not everything that makes sense is true soooo.

Anyways, wall of text is over.

Oh, and for anyone struggling with imposter syndrome: I just want you to know, it's okay to fail, and it's okay to not know shit, especially in the dev industry where every "insignificant" detail can have an entire rabbit hole of expertise behind it, nobody can expect to know every part of it. And it doesn't make you any less smart no matter how much you fail. Tnis shit is hard, so I hope you stay strong and I hope you succeed in whatever it is you're struggling with.
*Massive virtual hug* <3

I'm such a fucking idiot

I'm setting up an api and to prevent unwanted fields or circular dependencies from showing up I define what fields should appear in a few serialization yaml files.

These files define what fields should appear in a given context. The default context for every field is to always show the id, and only a call to /posts will give you all the fields of the posts for example. This means that if you retrieve a comment with a linked post, the post will only show up as an id, but the comment will have all its fields.

I've been struggling with a stupid problem for 2 hours, I could verify that the yaml files were loaded in, all entities had such a file and the configuration was exactly according to the docs.

Guess why my api calls still caused circular errors?

Because I forgot to do the $view->setContext$this->defaultContext); call that determines what context should be used for the response.

FUCK ME WHY DID IT TAKE SO FUCKING LONG TO FIGURE THAT OUT OMG

Google you say? Ofcourse I hunted google results! But I was unknowingly part of an XY problem and was looking for what the problem wasn't >:(

At least it works now, ugh

Today I found github student developer pack thing. It was the golden chance to sharpen my git skills at least I thought so.. 2 hours tried to figure out how does "merge" works in gitkraken and now I'm depressed..

So I decided to run mozilla deep speech against some of my local language dataset using transfer learning from existing english model.
I adjusted alphabet and begin the learning.
I have pc with gtx1080 laying around so I utilized that but I recommend to use at least newest rtx 3080 to not waste time ( you can read about how much time it took below ).

Waited for 3 days and error goes to about ~30 so I switched the dataset and error went to about ~1 after a week.
Yeah I waited whole got damn week cause I don’t use this computer daily.

So I picked some audio from youtube to translate speech to text and it works a little. It’s not a masterpiece and I didn’t tested it extensively also didn’t fine tuned it but it works as I expected. It recognizes some words perfectly, other recognize partially, other don’t recognize.

I stopped test at this point as I don’t have any business use or plans for this but probably I’m one of the couple of companies / people right now who have my native language speech to text machine learning model.

I was doing transfer learning for the first time, also first time training from audio and waiting for results for such long time. I can say I’m now convinced that ML is something big.

To sum up, probably with right amount of money and time - about 1-3 months you can make decent speech to text software at home that will work good with your accent and native language.

So in the morning today, I played with some game engines and libraries, one of them is Orx.

When I `git clone` the repo and setup for it, the doc says that I can use `init.sh` to setup my Orx game project. Sweet!

When I run it, the program ask me for the path, I thought that it will allow me to create a game project at any path. So I entered `~/Projects/Games/my-orx-game`.

After that, it asked for some other stuff and I just skip though it.

Then, I went to `~/Projects/Games` and use `ls` to check my game project, but I don't see anything. I went back to where I installed Orx and realized that it creates a game project __in__ the directory that it was installed. Now, there's a directory called `~` inside the directory. I remove it using `rm -rf ~`, but Linux stopped me with `Premission denied`. Then for some stupid reason, I typed `sudo rm -rf ~` without thinking. After doing that line, my fish shell comes to it original prompt. And I realized I fucked up.

I restarted the computer, thought that I wiped the whole OS. Luckily, it just wiped the configuration files. The softwares works completely fine. My Project files and any content in those default directories (Like `Music` and `Downloads`) are also wiped. But I don't care about them at all. At least not right now.

Now I know that I need to be more careful when typing a command in the terminal.

Ubuntu 17.10...

WORST UBUNTU RELEASE TO DATE!

Why oh why did they go with /swapfile by default? I was legacy booting with UEFI enabled and it still didn't work! And don't get me started on nouveau (Nvidia OSS).

When I click "use proprietary software" I want the OS to do everything in its power to just work. Disable 3D acceleration if you must - at least boot to a console.

I'm scared to try it on my main desktop now!

I switched to Linux Mint and I'm happy now, I just needed an instant OS that works. 😊

Another case of "couldn't you've told me BEFORE I started working on this?"

I'm making a training in Unity3D for a client, and they want it to integrate with their learning management system (LMS).
I made a simple SCORM package that gets the userID and then uses a custom URL scheme to launch the app with the user data from the LMS.

Tested on multiple platforms, all works perfectly fine.

Than, during a meeting, some says they "can't download it". I ask "which browser are you using?" and he says "I'm using the LMS app."
... the LMS has an APP?

So I start figuring out ways to launch the system default browser from within a app's embedded browser, and nothing so far has worked.
target=_system, nope.
all kinds of weird javascript shenanigans, but the LMS APP browser just blocks everything.
Probably to protect students from malicious software that could be injected in courses, but now I'm stuck trying to find a workaround for this too.

But what sucks the most is that this happened DAYS BEFORE THE DEADLINE!
Well, at least the deadline won't be my problem anymore soon.

So some notification types are broken again (at least ++ notifs are not), ++ counts don't update again, search finds next to nothing, and the weekly doesn't work properly either (I saw wk288 topic once but can't find it anywhere now).

It still works better than the thing I'm currently dealing with.

So I promised a post after work last night, discussing the new factorization technique.

As before, I use a method called decon() that takes any number, like 697 for example, and first breaks it down into the respective digits and magnitudes.

697 becomes -> 600, 90, and 7.

It then factors *those* to give a decomposition matrix that looks something like the following when printed out:

offset: 3, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('3')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('2')]]

offset: 2, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('2')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('1')]]

offset: 1, exp: [[Decimal('7'), Decimal('1')]]

Each entry is a pair of numbers representing a prime base and an exponent.

Now the idea was that, in theory, at each magnitude of a product, we could actually search through the *range* of the product of these exponents.

So for offset three (600) here, we're looking at

2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 2.

But actually we're searching

2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 2.
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 1
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 0
2^3 * 3 ^ 0 * 5 ^ 2.
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 1

etc..

On the basis that whatever it generates may be the digits of another magnitude in one of our target product's factors.

And the first optimization or filter we can apply is to notice that assuming our factors pq=n,
and where p <= q, it will always be more efficient to search for the digits of p (because its under n^0.5 or the square root), than the larger factor q.

So by implication we can filter out any product of this exponent search that is greater than the square root of n.

Writing this code was a bit of a headache because I had to deal with potentially very large lists of bases and exponents, so I couldn't just use loops within loops.

Instead I resorted to writing a three state state machine that 'counted down' across these exponents, and it just works.

And now, in practice this doesn't immediately give us anything useful. And I had hoped this would at least give us *upperbounds* to start our search from, for any particular digit of a product's factors at a given magnitude. So the 12 digit (or pick a magnitude out of a hat) of an example product might give us an upperbound on the 2's exponent for that same digit in our lowest factor q of n.

It didn't work out that way. Sometimes there would be 'inversions', where the exponent of a factor on a magnitude of n, would be *lower* than the exponent of that factor on the same digit of q.

But when I started tearing into examples and generating test data I started to see certain patterns emerge, and immediately I found a way to not just pin down these inversions, but get *tight* bounds on the 2's exponents in the corresponding digit for our product's factor itself. It was like the complications I initially saw actually became a means to *tighten* the bounds.

For example, for one particular semiprime n=pq, this was some of the data:

n - offset: 6, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('5')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('5')]]

q - offset: 6, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('6')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('5')]]

It's almost like the base 3 exponent in [n:7] gives away the presence of 3^1 in [q:6], even
though theres no subsequent presence of 3^n in [n:6] itself.

And I found this rule held each time I tested it.

Other rules, not so much, and other rules still would fail in the presence of yet other rules, almost like a giant switchboard.

I immediately realized the implications: rules had precedence, acted predictable when in isolated instances, and changed in specific instances in combination with other rules.

This was ripe for a decision tree generated through random search.

Another product n=pq, with mroe data
q(4)
offset: 4, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('4')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('3')]]

n(4)
offset: 4, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('3')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('2')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('3')]]

Suggesting that a nontrivial base 3 exponent (**2 rather than **1) suggests the exponent on the 2 in the relevant
digit of [n], is one less than the same base 2 digital exponent at the same digit on [q]

And so it was clear from the get go that this approach held promise.

From there I discovered a bunch more rules and made some observations.
The bulk of the patterns, regardless of how large the product grows, should be present in the smaller bases (some bound of primes, say the first dozen), because the bulk of exponents for the factorization of any magnitude of a number, overwhelming lean heavily in the lower prime bases.

It was if the entire vulnerability was hiding in plain sight for four+ years, and we'd been approaching factorization all wrong from the beginning, by trying to factor a number, and all its digits at all its magnitudes, all at once, when like addition or multiplication, factorization could be done piecemeal if we knew the patterns to look for.

Started making an Android app for the first time a few days ago and wanted a button in a fragment to trigger a function. Easy enough right? Well not for me...

-Thought if the button is in fragment_xyz.xml the function should be in xyz.kt right?
-Wrote the function and told the button to run it when clicked.
-Tested the button and the app crahsed.
-Spent 3+ hours trying to find the bug.
-Eh fuck it might as well copy paste it from the fragments file to the action the viewpager showing the fragment is on.
-Works perfectly fine first try.
-😑

I spent three fucking hours googling that and trying to debug that while I could have been doing so much more on ither parts of the app...
I mean at least I know now for the future?

*me discovering esp32*
Wow it's amazing!
i'll get one for my project.

*me working with esp32*
I ported my project to esp32, and.....
Wtf!?! after some time (unpredictable 1sec to N mins) i2c devices stops working. (i2c reset doesn't solve)

I lost several weeks trying to fix that
I felt so angry.

then I realized that it's not my fault
it is a bad implementation of i2c api by espressif.

at this point there is only one thing to do.

throw away the esp32!
(at least for some months waiting for espressif fix)

now i did a git revert and switched back to arduino.
now everything works and it's an awesome sensation!

Fucking Visual Studio is such a piece of shit. 2 years ago we created a solution for our 7 webclients with 30 projects (clients, common stuff, tests, ...).
Things were ok, we could change something, save the file and everything was built and we just had to reload the client. Only F12 between the projects does not work.

But now the studio doesnt get shit done. Opening the clients solution after a clean checkout takes 5 minutes, saving doesnt build anymore, building breaks the project because it cant find references, rebuilding works but takes 3 minutes. When you have a syntactic error in a file the fucking thing almost crashes and becomes unresponse for a few seconds. It randomly shows errors in some files that disappear once you rebuilt it, sometimes it builds but still shows an error in that file.

But at least we will soon rewrite the clients in angular5 and dont need this piece of crap software anymore for the front end.

If I only could get my team to use another technology for the server so that I dont have to see this big pile of shit anymore. Fuck Visual Studio.

Proper rant tonight... I was getting an upgrade to my home entertainment today. It needed an engineer visit. What a useless clown he turned out to be.

2 hrs after arriving, he left and things weren't working remotely right at all. But it was Saturday and he was off the clock so I had to suck it up. No option to back out either - it was all activated and I had to accept it.

He spent most of the time arguing with me about my home network was set up and how it was wrong and how it was important for the overall system to work. Being a geek and having done research, I couldn't understand this - that wasn't how it was meant to be, I knew. I accept my home wiring is a bit odd, but I've had a working system for years because it's all necessary.

After all the faffing about and purchase of some new powerline units (which I accept I needed anyway but where unrelated to this set up), looking more into it myself, it is now up and running correctly.

I am thoroughly pissed at the ineptitude of the engineer. He clearly doesn't understand how the system works. He doesn't understand how powerline works and how it's a life saver for people with awkwardly shaped houses or thick walls where Wi-Fi is useless. If he had, we would have had far fewer issues and I wouldn't have had the stress of thinking I'd killed our home entertainment and internet and there was nothing I could do about it.

I don't blame the provider (besides them clearly not providing adequate training). But this was arrogant uselessness. At least I had the knowledge to understand how it was meant to work and get it sorted myself.

Maybe it could be a useful sideline job if I get fed up with developing.

First "computer" : Electronika BK. Had some fun with table software and some basic

first X86 : Intel 80286 with wooping 1MB of ram and 40 MB hard drive.

First fun experiance :

Me : "I'm gonna clean folders"
Me : "What are these files on the c: ? I'll move them into a folder"
(Youknow like io.sys, autoexec.bat)
Reboots :
Computer : "Please insert a boot drive"
Me : "The what now?"
Needed some help to fix it.
At least I learnt how boot loader works and wrote my own small thingy in asm

Without a break this would probably be around 4 hours. After that I just loose all productivity. So there so is really no point in forcing it any further.

For working without sleep I have regular done stretches as long as 32 hours. With just breaks for food and a quick walk around. To keep my body awake.

Why you probably ask yourself, well this has several reasons. For me to get in the "zone" I have to be awake for at least 12 hours. I'm not sure why this is, but the combination of being too tired to get distracted and the increase in dopamine from sleep deprivation. Is I think what makes for this, or by now it might just be a placebo. But well it works for me.

So when a deadline gets near and I'm not going to be able to make it, which used to happen a lot because I used to have a lot of migraines. I would start working in the morning, trying to get things done but not being to able to. Then after a full workday would take a dinner break and get back in the office, at this point I get in the zone and time flies by as I work through the night. Next morning people are coming back in the office and I start another workday.

I try to plan this so I have a lot of meetings or other social work. I get really social and chatty after being awake for more then 24 hours. Because my problem solving skills have really declined after being awake for so long.

Now when I still used to drink, I would after this workday get some dinner and go out to a bar to have drinks with friends. To celebrate me having made my deadline and well I'm really social from being awake so long. And I stop overthinking everything.

Still looking for a way to get in the zone before being awake for so long, so any tips are welcome!

I'm way past the point of being pissed now....

So there's some software (API's, mobile app + website) that I wrote to manage supplier incentive programs in a big hurry last year - which lead to a bunch of stuff being hard-coded in to launch on time. So after last years promotion was done I took down all the services etc was very fucking clear that in order to finish & deploy it to run again I would need at least around 4 months notice.

On the surface its pretty simple but it has quite a large user base and controls the distribution of enough cash & prizes to buy a small country so the setup of the incentives/access/audit trails is not something to be taken lightly.

Then once I'm done with the setup I have to hand it over to be "independently audited" by 3 of the larger corporate behemoths who's cash it distributes (if I get a reply from one in 3-4 weeks it's pretty fast).

I only happened to find out by chance an hour ago that we are apparently launching an even larger program this year - ON FUCKING MONDAY. I literally happened to over hear this on my way for a smoke - they have been planning it since last year November and not one person thought it might be kinda important to let me know because software is "magic" and appears and works based on the fucking lunar cycle.

This shit is long story of my computer experience over my lifetime.

When I was young I got my first PC with windows it was not so bad. It required safe shut down of it’s fat32 partition. From time to time I needed to reinstall it cause of slow down but I got used to it I was only a gamer.

Time passes and I got more curious about computers and about this linux. Everything worked there but installation of anything was complete madness and none of windows programs worked well, and I wanted to play games and be productive so I sticked with windows.

I bought hp laptop once with nvidia card, it was overheating and got broken. So I bought toshiba and all I told to the seller was I want ATI card. Took me 5 minutes to do it and I was faster then my friend buying pack of cigarettes because I was earning money using computer.

Then I grown up running my small one person programming businesses and I wanted to run and compile every fucking program on this world. I wanted linux shell commands. I wanted package manager, and I wanted my os to be simple because I wasn’t earning money by using my os but by programming. So after getting my paycheck I bought mac. I can run windows and linux on vm if I need it. I try not to steal someones work so I didn’t want to run hackintosh. I am using this mac for some time.

Also I use playstation for gaming. Because I only want to run and play game I am not excited about graphics but gameplay. I think I am pragmatic person.

I can tell you something about my mac.
When I close lid it go sleep when I open it wakes up instantly. I never need to wonder if I want to hibernate or shut down or sleep and drain battery. It is fucking simple.
When I want to run or open something it doesn’t want me to wait but it gives me my intellij or terminal or another browser or whatever I search for. Yeah search is something that works.
Despite it got 8 gigs of ram I can run whatever number of programs I want at the same speed. The speed is not very fast sometimes but it’s constant fast.
I have a keychain so my passwords are in one place I can slow down shared internet speed, I can put my wifi in monitor mode and I don’t need to install some 3rd party software.
And now I updated my mac to high sierra, cause it’s free and I want to play with ios compilation. Before I did it I didn’t even backup whole work. I just used time machine and regular backups. And guess what, it still works at the same speed and all I did was click to run update and cook something to eat.
When I got bored I close the lid, when got idea open lid and code shit, not waiting for fucking wakeup or fucking updates.

I wanted to rant apple products I use but they work, they got fucking updates all along at the same time. And all of updates are optional.

I cannot tell that about all apple products but about products I use.

I think I just got old and started to praise my limited time on this world. Not being excited about new crap. When I buy something I choose wisely. I bought iPhone. I can buy latest iPhone x but I bought iPhone 7 cause it’s from fucking metal. And I know that metal is harder then glass, why the fucking apple forgot about it? I don’t know.
I know that I am clumsy and drop stuff. Dropped my phone at least 100 times and nothing.

I am not a apple fan boy I won’t buy mac with this glowing shit above keyboard that would got me blind at night.
I buy something when I know that it can save my time on this world. I try to buy things that make me productive and don’t break after a year.

So now piece of advise, stop wasting your time, buy and update wisely, wait a week or a month or a year when more people buy shit and buy what’s not broken. And if something’s broken rant this shit so next customer can be smarter.
Cheers

The old method of how to deal with semi close friends needing support still works:
1) Redirect their call to voice mail.
2) If the mention computer problems, ignore them for now.
3) Call back in at least 4 hours. By then, they've probably solved it using Google.

(Why "semi close friends"? Because if they're close, I take their calls and if they're not close, I'm not their free support service. And if they're close and want a lot of free labour, they'll soon find themselves distant.)

My phone got stuck in funky restart boot loop yesterday. The first 2 restarts was odd but after 3 cycles, I started panicking. Went on my PC, googled for all kinds of button combinations of power button, volume button, back button, and home button to get into fastboot, recovery and safe mode to see if I can clear stuff or at least get backup of my stuff. I also tried taking the battery out. Nothing works, except when I factory reset.

Everything was new again and as it booted up, I have to remember to change my authentication keys in LastPass, my private ssh key in Krypt. But fortunately, Google remembered all my apps and suggested if I wanted to install them again since it recognized my phone was an old phone. Thanks for tracking me Google. And now since its a reset, everything is clean, no cache, cookie, and some of my music files are all gone. Well at least its fast like before.

I just want things to do on my phone that are intellectually going to be stimulating

and not brainwashing

is that so hard to ask for

I can't keep playing sudokus all the time. the other day I wanted to go read a coding answer I asked an AI in my browser on my laptop but I was in bed on a voice chat with a sleeping person and didn't wanna get up out of bed to go fetch the laptop. my browser lets me see tabs I have open on other machines and this AI website makes a url with a unique id so you can browse to the chat you had, but it seems to not always work

earlier in the day I had asked the AI a theoretical coding question and it answered, but I got distracted and needed to go do something before I finished reading it (it was long). but when I was in bed on my phone playing sudokus for intellectual stimulation, annoyed and bored it was the only thing I could do, I had the bright idea of opening the tab on my laptop through my phone. Vivaldi is great and this always works. unfortunately the AI website's unique id thing doesn't. it loaded the website by URL correctly but the AI website just took me to the home page and I had no chat history to read =[

phones are literally computers but you can't do anything on them. can't watch videos without ads or bugs, if you load a lot of websites the tab management system sucks and performance is shit, controls for games suck even if you could find something not ad infested

hell you can't even do a pedometer that's not trying to get you to "log in". bruh

you can't even browse GitHub code! at least last I checked. it's just awkward, their app

I feel like I'm in a straitjacket in terms of technology and I wanna scream. I don't even know how to adequately describe my frustration or what I keep wishing for. it's been prominent in my head a couple years now. it's like we're regressing in terms of compatibility. went from card games provided by Microsoft like solitaire and spider, paint... to Jesus fuck you can't even get paint in a browser now without someone trying to fleece you

remember when things were inventive, nice, and not shit?
I don't even like playing mindustry on a phone to be fair. fighting the controls is most of the experience. so maybe phones are only good for reading things

I just noticed my brain over time doing sudokus learns so I wanted to practice engaging in something and learning as exercise, cuz I think it would be good for the brain damage. bah

Contrary to popular opinion, I still firmly stand by my belief that you should thoroughly study something in-depth before you attempt to do anything serious with it. Failure to do so will have an enormous cost of waste of time attached to it.

Here's an example:
I was using AJAX to post a multi-part request containing a file.
Now here was the problem: no matter what code I forced in the backend, the browser would in all cases refuse to prompt a SaveFileDialog (and I had turned on the option in the browser to ask the user if download). This took me two entire days and at least 100 Google queries and several RFCs to figure out.

From StackOverflow:
The cause was simply that you can't (typically) make a browser prompt a SaveFileDialog via an AJAX request, even if you set the necessary headers. Why? The browser will just dump everything back into the XmlHttpRequest object..

If you make a regular request with Content-Disposition: attachment; and so on, then it works, but yeah, not with an XmlHttpRequest.

Conclusion:
Had I better studied the HTTP spec, networking and AJAX in-depth, I would have instantly known what the cause was.

This fucking WHORE girl at my office that im supposed to work the project with, talks with the other girl about finding a new RICH sports basketball guy because shes looking only for RICH guys. Then talks about how women take rich guys young and marry them ASAP because they view it as an investment. She views marrying a rich guy as INVESTMENT. This is so Fucking saddening it pisses me off. Cant focus on my fucking work from this whore bragging about wanting to marry a millionaire basketball guy (shes 25 and nearing expiry date probably got ran through by the whole city and now looks for a simp to inherit massive wealth)

A girl that works as a difficult job as mine and is backend, and talks like this, has this whore mentality, is fucking SADDENING and DEGRADING. It is humiliating towards me. I find it extremely offensive and do not appreciate this at all even if it has nothing to do with her whore activities.

The sole fact that she is looking ELSEWHERE for a rich guy, a guy who throws a Fucking BALL, because everyone knows we working in tech are NOT rich, while a retard throwing a ball IS rich--this is Fucking HUMILIATING. I'll perform a ritual and hope to God that basketball guy cheats on her or leaves her. Every whore fucking deserves this. I thought she was a cool girl until i heard her talk shit where shes only looking to be with a rich guy. Who the FUCK are you? You're working a 9-5 backend job while i work devops + your job. I make more than you even though i still find it being a slave wage. She apparently wants someone who earns at least x100 more than her. Fuck you whore

I had to build a few packages today from a git source.

Everything just plain text or shell scripts - so no fancy shit, no buildsystem... Nothing.

I was painfully reminded why I had forgotten a lot about dpkg package builds.

Fun facts:
- seems like impossibro to define an output directory for debuild (../ from source which must be pwd/cwd)
- i used /opt/<vendor_name>... Purging the deb from system deletes opt too, as it is empty
- reprepro (or whateva it is called) fails with an "uncommon GPG error" instead of saying "I don't know which key to use"
- creating rolling release numbers (as the packages won't have a real versioning system...) is fun - when you remember that date isn't sufficient, as the time part is necessary to build multiple packages (versions) per day

Compared to an Gentoo ebuild, this was really rocket science....

Guess as soon as someone does not follow the debian way, he must be shunned and exiled. At least it felt like this ....

But it works now. Woohoo. *cries internally*

Kinda !rant, but still..
Most professional devs have or have had PM's/KAM's. I've had quite a few,, most I've really liked.. Now I have an issue thought, I like one a little too much,, correction there's no little about it, I fucking love her.. We do spend some time together outside of work as well, and she's become a very close personal friend.. She's really easy to work with and really good at her job, so we make a shitty working situation livable together.

But; of course, I want more, but not ruin anything,, And most of all not make her working situation uncomfortable.. I'm pretty sure she don't see me the same way..

Question: has this ever happened to anyone else? How did it turn out?

Yes, I realize the irony of asking relationship advice from the stereotypically least social group of all..

Oh, and to top it off,, my other closest friend, also works with us, and they know each other from before.. So it's kinda hard to talk to her about it..

Are sql joins a bad practice? :o
I recently did some work on a page for a site ive never worked on cause my boss told me to. So they recently added product detail video urls to a table that has a relationship to the products table. The existing code was querying for the products on that said page and then during the loop that was outputting the products ,there was another query for getting the url for the current iteration/product. Told my coworker that this imo was pretty inefficient way to do it and switched it to a join and did 1 query then output that but his words were "The way it is now maybe ineffecient in your opinion but it works. Also combining inner joins with left or right is not a good practice. If the data is changed upstream the entire query would need to be redone to accommodate the change". Mind you that they query views a lot which are all made from queries that use joins and I'm also pretty sure these views were written by someone who used to be here because these guys are not good at sql or at least that's what there queries show. I'm at the point now where I'm realizing that my boss and this other guy don't give a fuck about efficiency or doing things the right way they just want it "to work". So this coworker changed my query back to the way it was because he said it broke the shopping cart even though that was already broken when I started... What is life? Maybe I'm the stupid one?

Today spent 20min in a senior android dev interview debating an ex backender CTO about the importance of final classes where he tried to pull out some sort of perfect answer from me about it. Ironically this is the same CTO who failed managing a previous android contractor who was supposed to rewrite old app and ended up with an even shittier new app in 6 months of time. Now they are insecure and are looking for a new contractor who will be micromanaged this time.

But hey I guess he knows the importance of final classes. Some CTO's need a reality check and at least some business training, because your perfectly written app is useless if it doesnt fulfill business needs.

Their app is based on heresdk and built around navigation. The biggest bottleneck is that it works shitty on low end devices so their competition solved this problem by using a whitelabel rooted tables with a custom ROM wher u have full control over hardware, permissions and battery management. However this startup thinks they can build a perfect navigation app which will work perfectly on all devices while at the same time while also relying on a poorly optimized navigation sdk. Poor initial strategy I'd say and they didnt learn from previous 2 failures, now they are searching for the next savior android contractor who will have to solely implement evrything.

As promissed.

Day #1 on THE other project. Nothing fancy, just setting up my dev env. Got a decent pc with all the required network permissions. And this time I got w10 [last year I was working there on w7 pc via rdp from another w7 laptop. Dont ask...]
of course no localadmin rights to set shit up. Downloaded all the installs, found someone who has admin rights to run them. I even managed to get admin powershell!

Ran all installers, enabled long paths support, env vars, tweak here, tweak there,... Installed git bash to at least have a taste of shell. Decided to try out wsl. Enabled the feature, didnt reboot right away.
Rebooted. 2xclick on ubuntu setup and I get an error claiming wsl is not ebabled. Wtf? Did I do it wrong? I see bash command is there now so I must have done it right. After some googling I found out that even though I can enable wsl, it doesnt work on my version of windows. It's too okd they say. Yeah, tx MS, that's very intuitive and user friendly!

Allright, my hopes to habe a decent sub-os died. Git bash it is :( but I miss tmux soooo much. Then I came across smth that caught my eye. Msys2 it's called. Apparently it's based on cygwin and has a pacman package manager! ´pacman -S tmux´ -- hippee-ka-yay motherfuckers! It's not the best terminal emulation, but it works quite allright and it has tmux. And netcat!

Banished to mouseclickerland still managed to find a good enough shell. Yayy!

So there it is. My first day's ups and downs, disappointments and discoveries.
If you know a better shell I could set up on w10, please, share

Needed to create an app for android for a school project so we tried xamarin because c#. After 2 weeks of crying and breaking we decided to switch java. Now we only hate programming in java but at least we it works

I understand the reasoning behind switching to a new, maybe better, technology, but for fuck sake, it’s against typical Microsoft strategy to “kill and shoot to the dead corpse” something instead of maintaining backward compatibility. Why they’ve changed?
I still can develop VB6 software for Windows 11 that just works. But you removing newer tools for no reason.

In short: Xamarin is dead, and that’s alright, but they are even deciding to “remove” development tools from future updates of VS 2022. Why?? Keep it optional, allow me to write legacy code (just 4 years old actually) a bit longer. 🙃

And also, .NET MAUI doesn’t seem “great”, at least at the first sight.
Why you’re forcing me to switch to it if there are 0 benefit for my product?
It’s so bad the only way to bring developers is this one?!

What is incredible to me is that the “industry field”, which is HUGE is so often ignored because of the “customers field”. Keep them separated. If you don’t want to support old tools, just don’t, but leave them there.
They killed Windows Mobile 6.5 which was old but still alive and fine in the industries, you had the biggest market share in PDAs and decided to give it to fucking Google.
The manufacturers kept selling WM devices even in 2020… and they stopped just because you stopped selling licenses.
You acquired Xamarin, gave everyone for free the tools to keep writing .NET for Android and move the industry apps, and now you are saying “actually fuck you, do it again, even though nothing really changes, but convert your entire project to this bs we’ve created”. Why???

Microsoft response: it’s just a few clicks and everything works fine.
My response: No, it’s not… the entire UI is rendered in a different way, I have to rewrite the whole UI of my app and a lot of modules stopped working because of nuget packages I can’t install anymore…
I have to spend additional time to make it work THE SAME as before, not better. So what’s the fucking point?

!rant && seekGuidance
Been coding for 8 years now, working for at least 6-7 ( freelancing mostly ). Have done multiple big projects along the way, and have not written a single test case ever. Everything works just fine, I usually test things alongside coding stuff. Could someone explain the benefits of creating tests? You can slap me in the face for not doing it if you want ( after explaining why it's so bad ). btw, i'm a web developer ( symfony / angular / vue )

I'm just fed up with the industry. There are so much stupidity and so much arrogance.
My professional experience comes mainly from the frontend and I feel like it's not as bad on the backend but I'm still convinced it's not really different:

I'm now about to start my 3rd job. It's always the same. The frontend codebase is complete shit. It's not because some juniors messed up not at all. It's always some highly paid self-proclaimed full-stack developer that didn't really care somehow hacked together most of the codebase.
That person got a rediculous salary considering the actual skill and effort that went into the code, at some point things became difficult, issues started to occur and that person left. If I search for that person I find next to the worst code via gitlens on Linkedin it's somebody that has changed companies at least two times after leaving and works now for a lot of money as tech-lead at some company.

There's never any tests. At the same time the company takes pride in having decent test coverage on the backend. In the end this only results in pushing a lot of business logic to the frontend because it would just take way to long to implement it on the backend.

Most of the time I'm getting told on my first day that the code quality is really high or some bullshit.

It's always a redux app written by people, that just connect everything to the store and never tried to reflect about their use of redux.
Usually it's people, that never even considered or tried not using redux, even if it's just to learn and experiment.

At the same time you could have the most awesome projects on github but people look at your CV, sum up the years and if you invested a lot of time, worked way harder to be better than other developers with the same amount of experience, it's totally irrelevant.
At the same time all companies are just the worst crybabies about not being able to find enough developers.

HR and recruiters are generally happy to invite somebody for an interview, even if that person does not have any code available to the public, as long as that person somehow was in some way employed in the industry for a couple of years. At the same time they wouldn't even notice if you're core contributor for some major open-source product if you do not have the necessary number of years in the industry.

I'm just fed up.
By the way, I got my first real job about two years ago. Now I'm about to start my third position because my last job died because of the corona crisis. I didn't complain for some time because I didn't want to look like I'm just complaining about my own situation. With every new job I made more money, now I'm starting for the first time at a position that is labeled "lead" in the contract.
So I did okay. But I know that lots of talented people that worked hard gave up at some point and even those that made it had to deal with way too much rejection.
At the same time there are so many "senior" people in the industry, that don't care, don't even try to get better, that get a lot of money for nothing.

It's ridiculously hard to get a food in the door if you don't have any experience.
But that's not because juniors are actually useless. It's because the code written by many seniors is so low quality, that you need multiple years of experience just to deal with all the traps.
Furthermore those seniors are so busy trying to put out the fires they are responsible for to actually put time into mentoring juniors.

It's just so fucked up.

TLDR: I didn't & still not sure if it is..

I love bug hunting & fixing & figuring out how stuff works, but many will argue this is not even real programming..

Long version how I ended up programming:
Back in highschool, I was deciding between english and mathematics & computer science.. I filled in the form for the latter. Got a change of hearts but I already gave the extra/backup empty form to schoolmate..

Figured it's for the better because it's a hell to get a job as an english teacher/prof anyways + I dislike comunications with people + documentation (if any) is in english etc..

At the end of first year, I didn't even apply for all the exams because you had to have both programming 1&2 to pass or even be eligible to take the year again.. I figured I'd fail them, so once I actually passed both (& actually not with bad grades), I was fucked.. had to retake the year, which means I lost time + still had to pay the rent etc.. decided to drop out and return home and do the IT engineer course instead to at least have some formal education to help me find a job. Finished that without problems, I 'specialised' in network administration.
I got a job straight out of school as a web developer.. the irony.. got some conflicts with the boss and was terminated (material for another rant).

Later I sought out admin jobs, but got declined because I was overqualified and had programming experince. FML, right?

Ended up sending out mandatory job applications for IT administration & programming to not lose the bonuses & got called up to a meeting in the company I work for since then.

No qualifications for .net & MS technologies, but they liked my CV so the ended up setting up the interview anyway. I didn't know half of the technologies and concepts by proper name, but they figured I understand enough of the content to give me a try. A few years later, I got the most fucked up project they have because of my love for new thigs and trying to understand everything. It's aaaalmost bearable now.. still needs a lot of work, but I'm happy where I am. Saddly, I'm still second guessing if I'm doing a proper job as a dev, but they seem to be very ok with my work. (:

Maxi-Rant, rest in the first comment!

Yay, I've caught up with my "watch later" list on YouTube! Next thing: Just quickly go through my subscribed channels and add old videos that I haven't seen yet to the watch later list so that I have more stuff to watch the next months. The easiest way to do that is to go to the "all uploads" playlist of the channel (that is luckily always linked now, it used to be hidden sometimes) and use "add all to" to get them on my playlist. Then sort out the stuff that I've already seen and turn on automatic sorting by date, easy. Yeah...
Firstly, in the new design there's no "add all to", I have to go to the old design. For my own playlists, there's a handy "edit" button to do that, but on other pages I have to do it manually. Luckily I have set Ctrl+Shift+1 as a shortcut for "&disable_polymer=true" long ago.
Next surprise: On "all uploads" playlists, there is no "add all to" button. It's on every single other playlist on YouTube, including "liked", "watch later", "favourites" and so on, just not there.
Fine, I'll just abuse my subscription playlist script that I already have by making a copy of it, putting the channel IDs in it and setting the last execution date to 1.1.2001. Little problem with that: Google apps scripts can run for at most 5 minutes and the YouTube API restricts it to add one video per second. So it doesn't work for more than 300 videos. I could now try to split it up by dates, but I didn't write the script myself and I don't know how it sorts the videos to add, so I'll just google for another solution instead.
Found one: Go to the video overview of the channel in the old layout, Ctrl+Shift+I, paste this little Javascript thing and it automatically clicks all the little clocks that add the video to the watch later list. Yay, that works! Ok, i'm restricted to 5000 videos, because that's the maximum size of a YouTube playlist, so I can't immediately add all 8000+, but whatever, that's a minor problem and I'll sort out later anyway. Still another little problem: For some reason I can't automatically sort the watch later list. Because that would be too easy.
But whatever, I'll just use "add all to" from there to add it to my creatively named "WL" list. If that thing is restricted by the same rate limit of 1 video per second, it should be done in about 1½ hours. A bit long, but hey, I'm dealing with 5000 videos. Waiting 2 hours... Waiting 3 hours... Nothing happens. It would be nice if it at least added them one by one, but no, it waits an eternity and then adds all at once. At least in theory, right now it does absolutely nothing.
Shortly considered running it for more hours or even days on my Raspberry Pi, but that thing already struggles when using Chromium normally, I shouldn't bother it with anything that has to do with 5000 videos.
Ok, what else can I do then? Googling, trying out different things, mainly external services that have their own concept of "playlists" and can then add them to an arbitrary playlist later...
Even tried writing my own Java program with the YouTube API, but after about an hour not even the example program in the YouTube API tutorial worked (50 errors and even more open questions, woohoo), so I discarded that idea.
Then I discovered "DiskYT". Everything looked like it would work and I'm still convinced that I can do it with that little pile of shit. Why is it a pile of shit? Well, for example the site reloads itself after a while, so it can at most add 700 videos to a playlist. Also I can't just paste the channel link (even though it recognises those links, but just to show an error message that it can't copy from channels). I can't enter/paste URLs, I have to drag them. The site saves absolutely nothing (should in theory work, but in practise it doesn't), so I have to re-drag everything on every try. In one network, the "authorise YouTube" button (that I have to press again on every computer) does absolutely nothing ("inspect" reveals that there isn't even any action bound to the button), in another network the page mostly doesn't work at all or the button to copy from playlists is suddenly gone or other weird stuff. Luckily I have the WiFi at home, there it works in theory. But just on my desktop PC, no other device, wow. I tried to run it on my new laptop, but it's so new that it still has the preinstalled OS and there I can't deactivate going to standby when closing the laptop, so while I expected it to add 5000 videos, it instead added 4 and went to standby. But doesn't matter, because it would have failed at about 700 anyway. Every time I try to use this website, I get new problems, but it seems to still be the best option, because everything else just doesn't do anything. This page at least got to 700 before.

Continuing in first comment!

This is more of an advice seeking rant. I've recently been promoted to Team Leader of my team but mostly because of circumstances. The previous team leader left for a start-up and I've been somehow the acting Scrum Master of the team for the past months (although our company sucks at Scrum generally speaking) and also having the most time in the company. However I'm still the youngest I'm my team so managing the actual team feels a bit weird and also I do not consider myself experienced enough to be a Technical lead but we don't have a different position for that.

Below actions happen in the course of 2-3 months.

With all the things above considered I find myself in a dire situation, a couple of months ago there were several Blocker bugs opened from the Clients side / production env related to one feature, however after spending about a month or so on trying to investigate the issues we've come to the conclusion that it needs to be refactorised as it's way too bad and it can't be solved (as a side note this issue has also been raised by a former dev who left the company). Although it was not part of the initial upcoming version release it was "forcefully" introduced in the plan and we took out of the scope other things but was still flagged as a potential risk. But wait..there's more, this feature was part of a Java microservice (the whole microservice basically) and our team is mostly made of JS, just one guy who actually works as a Java dev (I've only done one Java course during uni but never felt attracted to it). I've not been involved in the initial planning of this EPIC, my former TL was an the Java guy. Now during this the company decides that me and my TL were needed for a side project, so both of us got "pulled out" of the team and move there but we've also had to "manage" the team at the same time. In the end it's decided that since my TL will leave and I will take leadership of the team, I get "released" from the side project to manage the team. I'm left with about 3 weeks to slam dunk the feature.. but, I'm not a great leader for my team nor do I have the knowledge to help me teammate into fixing this Java MS, I do go about the normal schedule about asking him in the daily what is he working on and if he needs any help, but I don't really get into much details as I'm neither too much in sync with the feature nor with the technical part of Java. And here we are now in the last week, I've had several calls with PSO from the clients trying to push me into giving them a deadline on when will it be fixed that it's very important for the client to get this working in the next release and so on, however I do not hold an answer to that. I've been trying to explain to them that this was flagged as a risk and I can't guarantee them anything but that didn't seem to make them any happier. On the other side I feel like this team member has been slacking it a lot, his work this week would barely sum up a couple of hours from my point of view as I've asked him to push the branch he's been working on and checked his code changes. I'm a bit anxious to confront him however as I feel I haven't been on top of his situation either, not saying I was uninvolved but I definetly could have been a better manager for him and go into more details about his daily work and so on.

All in all there has been mistakes on all levels(maybe not on PSO as they can't really be held accountable for R&D inability to deliver stuff, but they should be a little more understandable at the very least) and it got us into a shitty situation which stresses me out and makes me feel like I've started my new position with a wrong step.

I'm just wondering if anyone has been in similar situations and has any tips or words of wisdom to share. Or how do you guys feel about the whole situation, am I just over stressing it? Did I get a good analysis, was there anything I could have done better? I'm open for any kind of feedback.

It is surprisingly difficult to make two things equally high in css (without putting height in pixels). Like two columns of a parent div. You can't use "height: 100%;" out of the box like you can with width.

Why though? I understand that height is more difficult that width. But the parent element has a height. Not by me, but the browser figures it out. So why can't something inside it be 100 % of it. Beats me.

Well at least it works now.

Wait. Why does this work? It doesn't copy any of the frontend code into the deploy location.

I'm not sure how this works, but it does. Crap, there goes my morning tracking down this wretched spaghetti deploy code.

At least I understand how it works in production. Shit, why is it different between production and our integ servers ,that isn't good. Maybe I can just refactor it.

That was all on Monday. It's now Wednesday and I'm still fucking refactoring something that wasn't actually broken. It just didn't make sense.

Maybe I should just revert my last three days of work on this branch and move on. No! It's too late, I've invested way too much time into this project...

... and I'm almost done, just a few more commits right?

So I did some testing with WebAssembly to see how it works in the most recent version and without Emscripten. I installed CMake and Visual Studio Community 2015 and compiled Binaryen, LLVM and Clang for a few hours (had to do it multiple times because I used the wrong version and forgot a compile flag), ended up with over 10 GB less free space on my laptop.

All that to compile a < 1kb C file to < 1kb WASM code.

At least it works for now and can natively run in (some) browsers.

I’m so sorry if this is the place for questions. I’m terrified of stack overflow and have been searching for a week for a solution and can’t find one. This is for React.js people.

I was tasked to create a webpage with react. The limitation is, they did not wanna adopt the node.js dependency. I said ok, I’ll figure it out. You can inject react, material UI, and babel with script tags in HTML, then put ur lil components in it. I did that and it works beautifully.

However, now I have to write tests for this. I think it’s actually impossible without a way to render React, so I have to use the browser, or node, right? I convinced my boss to allow me to use a node.js container just for testing, which I thought would make my life easier.

I don’t know how to render this thing with node. It’s just an HTML file that pulls react via script tags, and idk how to serve html with node. Additionally, none of the React testing libraries seem to support testing a system that wasn’t designed to be served with node, at least not easily. My gut tells me that the complication with how things are imported contributes at least a little to this (dependencies pulled via script tags in the HTML file and made available to react through global const variables).

I could be wrong about any of this — im fairly new. But how tf do I go about testing these react components? For reference, if you go to Reacts docs, there’s a section called “add react to a page in one minute” that’s pretty much what I did.

Holy shit.

This was an effort to combine Gitlab, Github and Bitbucket with VSCode and git SSH authentication. SSH agent doesn't work, configured, added some code in .bashrc, seems fine. Then there was still ssh-askpass missing.

"ssh_askpass: exec(/usr/bin/ssh-askpass): No such file or directory"

WTF VSCode? Why do I need this crap?

However, installed it. Nevertheless, I'm still asked for my password every time when I synchronize using the GUI. Thank God everything was in docker containers/images. So at least there is no garbage left after every failed attempt.

I don't know how, but I finally made it that at least synchronization using the terminal works without a password.
Took me five hours to do this shit.

Now I just report the bug to Microsoft and then straight to McDonalds. I'm starving.

I don't want to answer my manager. Each SCRUM, each SPRINT retrospective is becoming so long. Everyone in my team works on different projects, it's no use listening to all that and wait for your turn and on top of that your manager bombards you with the questions that you really know the answers to but he always questions again like give me estimates, like if I haven't ever worked on something how am I supposed to give you the estimates.
My english is just lowering it's standard day by day, I try to think smarter words but no it is sucking bad.
I am not frustrated as I am learning how to see all this as a part of my learning. I am a good developer I know but I haven't worked on code for like 3 months, everything needs to be investigated, contacting the other teams etc. I am just thinking to close on the projects that I have right now and leave.
In 1:1s my manager said something else but in team meeting asked me to do something else.
I haven't coded in more than 2 months even before that it was at least 3 months gap. I want to take leave for a week and work on the code. But fuck it, open source is not allowed in my company. WTH WTH WTH!!!
I switched the company for growth and I definitely did not have any technical growth.

I'm still on a regular basis reminded of how I might be wrong despite the absolute certainty in how obviously wrong the other person is.

Lately I've been working on setting up this API with a fairly intricate database integration. One request can lead to multiple db calls if we're not careful, so we have been polishing up the implementation to guard against ddosing ourselves and dealing with thread-unsafe concurrency.

Someone on the team could happily report that they got rid of all async use so there should no longer be threading issues. "You mean it all runs sync now?" "I guess. It works at least".

I'm just internally pulling a surrender cobra. If this was pre-dev me I would have let him and everyone know what a stupidpants he is and that I thought he had some experience in api development. But let's not make an exception to the rule; I might be wrong. I mean I'm not, but let's pretend I could be. Let's pull down the changes and maybe set up a minimal example to demonstrate how this is a bad idea.

Funny story. He got rid of explicit calls to the database entirely. When resolving data, the query is instead constructed virtually and execution is deferred until the last step. Our functions are sync now because they don't call the database, and threading isn't an issue since there's only one call per request context.

Thank god I've learned to keep my mouth shut until I can prove with absolute conclusive certainty that they are wrong. Here's to another day of not making an ass of myself.

Eternal rest doesn’t help. I had the privilege to experience it once, but it’s only recently that I had a chance to reflect on it. Yes, when I have everything figured out and slip into neet lifestyle, I don’t find happiness.

Sooooo, I decided to establish a solid routine. It was Past Life by Tame Impala that inspired me: “I have a pretty solid routine these days, it just works for me”. I wanna be that person.

Here’s mine so far:
- Mon: ironing clothes
- Tue: revising laptop/phone contents, eliminating infoclutter
- Wed: tidying up online presence
- Thu: writing my book, at least one section at a time
- Fri: coding for personal projects that do/can make me money (I have three now)
- Sat: cleaning up the house, changing bedsheets
- Sun: rest

Oh china, you always know how to snap me out of long stints of mundane and/or annoying, chore-esq work.
//...and letting me excuse a 10min, otherwise purely wrong procrastination down a current political rabbit hole

I gotta say, at least in china they are bold enough to put their image and identity on whatever they make... but in that 'im selling pseudo-sex, not because im sexy--just the opposite, so you know I relate' way.

Side note: i got an automated spam call survey yesterday*... it ot got to the 1st (of claimed 3) question.. which had a surprising amount of actual reiterations before looping... it was determined to get opinions(and totally incept the lemmings, soccer moms and politically ignorant into their stance, plus intense rage/disgust/dreams of standing on a soap box and fighting about this new issue they were totally unaware of.)... about this actively serving, politician's demand that china sell tiktok or totally stop allowing any operations/use on american soil... because of the heavily implied heinous nature of controlling and twisting society via media to it's explicitly declared communism... even directly called china, as a whole, communists, with impressive dramatics (and i coached public speaking hs and college kids then over a decade of business consulting, typically involving coaching vocals and implicit vocab)

I actually listened to it because it's what a typical subject, brought out of the koolaid fog, would view as ridiculously ironic(assuming they knew the actual, and therefore inherently ironic, def if irony... most dont. It's disturbing)... but it you have decent common sense, and dont emotionally view your entirety as wrong/broken/needing to be fixed in a cult-like manner, it's the oposite of irony. History of/and politics pull this crap all the time. It still works.

It reminds me of how my moniker, awesomeest, came about. In 3rd grade i realised that even adults, knowing they were chatting with an 8yr old, even if they knew/used the correct spelling of a, less common, term... if i misspelled it as if i thought it was right, theyd actually change their spelling to match (in perpetuity) albeit my vocab was easily high school level by then...likely at least in part to my flawless(aka blind/ignorant) demeanor of confidence that whatever i said/thought was totally correct, as a matter of fact. Not like the insecure ppl trying to prove something

I used to find it so comical... now it's just sad.

This bs automated political spam/manipulation is the modern version of i remember of kids farting in the late 90s... the culprit quickly accusing someone else of their offense, but even extra immature kids 25+ yrs ago figured that out... and even made the retort a catchy rhyme..."the one who smelt it, dealt it"

*i basically programmed in a counter attack/something akin to immature passive aggressive ' who"s really the one wasting the other's time and resources now?!? Ha!' ...odd numbers automatically go into a sort of echo chamber instead of ringing, with a manual escape to actually ringing/calling prompt built in.

I can listen in at any time without it having any effecf/sound too.

I'm curious if anyone participates in these minor acts of terrorism to complete an unrequested, intrusive, and human-less format of a proclaimed opinion poll? And if you do, are you honest? Why do you do it?

Annoyance at spam aside... the real victim I mentally mourn, and view it's method of demise akin to a cardinal sin (assuming religion...blah blah)... is the data! I <3 data... good, unobscured, not contrived, simple, pure, raw data... killed before its birth :'(

!dev-related

The charging port on my Galaxy S8 is messed up and is constantly disconnecting while charging, which results in the phone either slow charging or just got charging at all.

I thought I got the monthly phone insurance through Verizon and I was just gonna pay the deductible and get the phone replaced, but apparently I don't actually have the insurance even though I could've sworn I did. So that option is out the window.

So now I'm left with 3 other options:

1.) Pay $100 to get the charging port repaired at a local repair shop
2.) Pay off the remaining $200 I owe on the phone and get a phone upgrade from Verizon (because I am due for an upgrade)
3.) Get the upgrade but still keep my current phone on my plan and just pay the remaining $200 off monthly like I have been since I got the phone, except I'd also be paying for a second phone. Which is fine, because either way I'd be paying the $200. It's just a question of paying it in a lump sum or paying it monthly. Either works for me, it's $200 both ways

The downside of upgrading now is that I wouldn't be able to get the Galaxy S10 when that comes out, and that's what I've been waiting for as I prefer the smaller Galaxy S phones over the Galaxy Notes.

I suppose I could trade in whichever phone I get when the S10 comes out, but that would be a huge hassle and I'd have to pay at least 50% of the phone off in order for it to be eligible for trade-in

Decisions decisions.

I am trying to make a simple portfolio website nothing fancy. I have to install wordpress clean for thee fourth time now :D I read on a GoDaddy Support Page that I should type in the domain I was trying to set up into my settings in the wordpress. Didn't seem that weird at first. I did that and now I can't log in anymore because for some reason wordpress won't accept the old domain. I couldn't take down the page because (1) the page didn't ask me if it was helpful (2) I am not a GoDaddy customer but apparently they killed my website :D
Also, funny domains in general. There are 0 Tutorials on how to set up a simple domain from another website than the hoster. It's a nightmare that (apparently) has gone on for weeks. I don't know what to do. It's so crazy. I mean, I can learn algebra, it will take time yes, It's gonna be difficult yes, but at least I don't have 5 billion 3 paragraph articles having conflicting opinions on what problem they are trying to solve. Becoming a developer today must be hell.
But my favorite part was when I realised that I had to type in the domain I want also in the settings of my hoster which I found in an article I only came across by realising that none of the domain support I had talked to could help me :D So I did that and what it did was my domain works BUT my website looked completely fucked up xD
It's crazy. You would think it would get easier.

!dev

I need some help with advice regarding getting new headphones, as my current ones are quite literally about to fall off my head. Thing is that I have a hard time finding what I want, and even then be able to determine stuff based on reviews.

My current ones are a pair of Turtle Beach Ear Force Z60, which is my first headset to have surround sound. They also sit very comfortably on my head without really pressing on my ears at all, and the audio when playing games is nice and clear. Unfortunately that has now set the bar pretty high when trying to find a new pair.

I tried out a pair of HyperX Cloud II, but I can't configure the settings and the surround sound doesn't seem to work at all (there seems to be a "gap" between one o'clock and three o'clock, so to speak, as well as between nine o'clock and eleven o'clock). I tried listening to a 7.1 audio clip, but the only ones in the right positions were center front and left and right fronts. The left and right sides, and left and right rears were all at the center point. And besides that the audio is unbalanced and just... not quite muffled, but not clear as with the old ones.

Thing is also that I don't know crap about audio stuff, like if it's got to do with me doing something wrong in terms of drivers or hardware or something, or if it's actually got to do with the headphones themselves. I've tried to find info but there's just none to be found, it seems, at least nothing that works. :(

Currently I'm considering trying out another pair from Turtle Beach, but it's so hard to trust the reviews. I mean, like the Z60 has pretty halfassed ratings, but I personally like them a lot. :/

Does anyone have any advice at all? Whether it's recommendations of headphones, or ideas on things I could try on my end to make things work.

AND, side note; I don't care for any comments along the line of "surround sound is bullshit, just stick with stereo, it's better", because 1) I don't agree nor do I care, and 2) it's unconstructive as shit.

I'm thankful for any ideas or advice you guys may have. :/

Browser automation is a PITA. I’m going on my fourth side mission with this crap and I honestly still look like a newbie. I’ve tried Java Selenium with Chrome, Excel VBA with IE9, Vanilla JS in the browser console, and tonight I’m thinking to concoct some kind of hybrid CDP & Selenium approach in Chrome. Never used CDP before, not even sure where to start but I heard it sucks like anything else unless you get some extra libraries and plugins and stuff.

It doesn’t help that I can’t get just anything I want from our IT Department. It would be another PITA to ask for puppeteer. If puppeteer is totally legit please let me know.

Selenium sucks. The buttons don’t click, the waits don’t wait. Its unusable. Iframes are annoying as all hell but I can deal with that. HTML Tables suck too. It doesn’t help I have to restart my whole java program and whole Chrome every time an element doesn’t get picked correctly. Scripting one single element can take all fucking night.

Chrome dev tools what the fuck. Why the fuck is the DOM explorer in the same window as the web page I’m working on?? I can’t undock it. Am I supposed to use a fucking TV screen to work with this bastard?? If I use the remote chrome tools on port 9225 or whatever - It Still Renders The Whole Fucking Page Alongside The Console. Get Out Of My Way!!! The nested HTML CODE IS ONE CHARACTER WIDE ALL THE TIME. I can’t for the life of me figure out what the fuck I’m looking at. Haven’t you people ever heard of A HORIZONTAL SCROLL BAR at least.

Fuck I tried using getElementById, and the Xpath thing and its not all that great seeing I have seemingly 1000s of nested Divs all over the god damned place oftentimes containing a single element. I’m finally on chrome now should I learn Jquery now? I mean seriously wtf.

I use this one no code tool for dev it has web automation built in. As you can imagine its just as broken as anything else!! I have 10 screens to navigate it gets stuck on the second screen all the damn time. Fuck I love clicking the buttons when my script misses and playing catch up with it.

So as a work around to Selenium not waiting even 1 millisecond when I use explicit wait or implicit wait or fluent wait, I’m guessing maybe I can attach both Chrome Dev Tools Protocol (CDP as ive called it earlier) and selenium to the same browser and maybe I can use CDP to perform a Wait with any degree of success. Selenium will do nothing more than execute vanilla javascript Element.click(); This is the only way I know to even ACTUALLY use selenium beyond the simplest html documents possible. Hell I guess CDP can execute js idk.

I can’t get the new selenium that has CDP but I do have some buggy ass selenium from a few years back. Yeah, I remember reading there was a pretty impactful regression defect in the version I have. Maybe I’m being gaslighted by some shit copy of selenium?

The worst part is that I do seem to be having issues that the rest of the internet’s devs do not seem to be having. People act like browser automation is totally viable and pretty OK. How in the fuck hell is my Selenium Test Suite going to be more reliable my application under test?!!?? I’ll have more fucking bugs in my test suite than in my application. Today, I have less than half a test script and, I. already. fucking. do.

I am still SUPER PISSED at the months of 12 hour days (always 8 hours spent on normal sprint work btw only 4 to automation) I spent trying to automate our regression tests. I got NOWHERE.

I did learn a lot about HTML and JS though like I’m not that mad…but I’m just trying to emphasize my achievement on my task was zero.

The buttons don’t click. There are so many divs and I swear you sometimes need to select a div somewhere in the middle sometimes to get it working. The waits don’t wait. XHR requests are invisible. Java crashes 100 times before I find an xpath and thread.sleep() combo that works. I have no failure modes to use — Sometimes I click the same element 20x in a script because I have no way to know if it clicked the first time! Sometimes you gotta scroll the page to make the click work. So many click methods all broken. So many wait methods all broken. Its not just the elements don’t click! There are so many ways to click that almost work but surely they all fail the same in the end. ok at this point I’m just repeating myself…

there yet even more issues that I can’t remember…and will soon remember as I journey into this project yet again…

thanks for reading I hope I entertained and would love to hear your experience!

Just wanted to do some scripted image resizing for school in school because the teacher asked me to help her with that.
So I thought: Let's just write a tiny script. Written the script in almost no time (just iterates over all jpg's and resizes them)

30sec.

Now I tried to run it. Didn't have my laptop so I had to somehow run it on their windows PCs. At least it's windows 10, unlike other schools that still run XP and stuff so I thought it might be doable. Well guess what, nope it wasn't.

First tried to install imagemagick, that didn't work as only teacher accounts have admin and the teacher was already pretty scarred once he saw me doing stuff in powershell so I thought I'd better not ask to do this via a teacher account and mess with stuff as admin.

Next method: Installing msys2. That worked at least (after taking forever to install and having to mess with the av software to get it to run).
And there comes the next problem: pacman doesn't connect via the proxy so I can't download any packages. There is free wifi but only for teachers, and students aren't going to get access until the school finally has a faster connection because they'd (understandably) cause this connection to be constantly overloaded. I just happen to have access to this wifi network, too, because at least the guys from the IT dept know how bad using proxies under linux is. So I connect via wifi and it works. At least I thought: After running the script it yields weird errors about unsupported arguments even though the command is exactly the same I have been using for years (already checked typos twice)

Then got the idea of simply installing imagemagick on termux on android and transferring the files onto my phone.
Too bad we aren't allowed to attach our own USBs to the pcs. Luckily I got a rooted phone so I simply activate adb over network and connect to it.
After downloading the platform-tools I can't run them because of AV software. Luckily there is an option to add an exception per executable so I do that. After doing that it works.... nope it doesn't. The wifi only allows 443/tcp and 80/tcp, even for internal network devices.

So that's it. I'm simply going to upload that stuff to my nextcloud and convert it at home.

Windows, I hate you!!!

>decided trying to update my Neovim plugins
>Telescope.nvim no longer works, apparently it needs Neovim 0.9.0 now, only have 0.8.3
>decide to re-run the script which I've built that takes care of setting up neovim including plugins and whatnot, only updating the version part in the URL
>the URL was for a .deb package... apparently .deb packages are no longer available or something, at least for newer versions

I'm going to have to use VS Code, am I not?

i need an adult. I know noone who would understand my worries, so you guys need to be it.

i have a nextcloud running on my raspberry pi. performance is horrible, dont ask, but it works.

i mostly use it to backup the photos of my phone sd card every night when my phone charges. Internally this works good. If i am elseplace it wont for obvious reasons.

In my youthful joy of doom i opened port 443 and forward it to my raspi. I get internet via cable and my ip is pretty much static (it was the same for 10 months). So external access is provided.

Now i thought, its stupid that i cannot sign an ssl certificate cause i dont have a domain. Lets buy domain. But before i do that i did some try runs with duckdns to test the principle.

Some back and forth, it works now. Pretty god, i could even make a cron job on the raspbi to renew (that should work right?). Only problem. randoname.duckdns.org doesnt work internally. Or should not at least.

So i googled a bit and it turns out that my router (a cable fritz!box i bought myself) can be a local network dns. Or cannot. Regardless what i try, it doesnt accept the changed config file.

Now the problem.

It works anyway. randoname.duckdns.org points to my external "static" ip and resolves to that from my internal network..so it works on my phone or laptop. if i traceroute the thing it goes via two hops out and finishes in less than 1ms.

Now to the problem:
I have no fokkin clue why. The expected behaviour would be that it shouldnt work. If i do what i intended todo on pc in the hosts file tracert works correctly, directly pointing to the internal ip.

What i cannot figure out, is it the fritz!box being smart? Is it my ISP being smart?

Reason to rant: i have absolutly NOONE to ask, i know not a single person who would even understand what troubles me. I want to learn, i want to know WHY not just some mindless russian patchwork of "if it works its good enough".

thats depressing.