The first time I realized I wasn't as good as I thought I was when I met the smartest dev I've ever known (to this day).

I was hired to manage his team but was just immediately floored by the sheer knowledge and skills this guy displayed.

I started to wonder why they hired outside of the team instead of promoting him when I found that he just didn't mesh well with others.

He was very blunt about everything he says. Especially when it comes to code reviews. Man, he did /not/ mince words. And, of course, everyone took this as him just being an asshole.

But being an expert asshole myself, I could tell he wasn't really trying to be one and he was just quirky. He was really good and I really liked hanging out with him. I learned A LOT of things.

Can you imagine coming into a lead position, with years of experience in the role backing your confidence and then be told that your code is bad and then, systematically, very precisely, and very clearly be told why? That shit is humbling.

But it was the good kind of humbling, you know? I really liked that I had someone who could actually teach me new things.

So we hung out a lot and later on I got to meet his daughter and wife who told me that he had slight autism which is why he talked the way he did. He simply doesn't know how to talk any other way.

I explained it to the rest of the team (after getting permission) and once they understood that they started to take his criticism more seriously. He also started to learn to be less harsh with his words.

We developed some really nice friendships and our team was becoming a little family.

Year and a half later I had to leave the company for personal reasons. But before I did I convinced our boss to get him to replace me. The team was behind him now and he easily handled it like a pro.

That was 5 years ago. I moved out of the city, moved back, and got a job at another company.

Four months ago, he called me up and said he had three reasons for us to meet up.

1. He was making me god father of his new baby boy
2. That they created a new position for him at the company; VP of Engineering
and
3. He wanted to hang out

So we did and turns out he had a 4th reason; He had a nice job offer for me.

I'm telling this story now because I wanted to remind everyone of the lesson that every mainstream anime tells us:

Never underestimate the power of friendship.

My mentor/guider at my last internship.

He was great at guiding, only 1-2 years older than me, brought criticism in a constructive way (only had a very tiny thing once in half a year though) and although they were forced to use windows in a few production environments, when it came to handling very sensitive data and they asked me for an opinion before him and I answered that closed source software wasn't a good idea and they'd all go against me, this guy quit his nice-guy mode and went straight to dead-serious backing me up.
I remember a specific occurrence:
Programmers in room (under him technically): so linuxxx, why not just use windows servers for this data storage?
Me: because it's closed source, you know why I'd say that that's bad for handling sensitive data
Programmers: oh come on not that again...
Me: no but really look at it from my si.....
Programmers: no stop it. You're only an intern, don't act like you know a lot about thi....
Mentor: no you shut the fuck up. We. Are. Not. Using. Proprietary. Bullshit. For. Storing. Sensitive. Data.
Linuxxx seems to know a lot more about security and privacy than you guys so you fucking listen to what he has to say.
Windows is out of the fucking question here, am I clear?

Yeah that felt awesome.

Also that time when a mysql db in prod went bad and they didn't really know what to do. Didn't have much experience but knew how to run a repair.
He called me in and asked me to have a look.
Me: *fixed it in a few minutes* so how many visitors does this thing get, few hundred a day?
Him: few million.
Me: 😵 I'm only an intern! Why did you let me access this?!
Him: because you're the one with the most Linux knowledge here and I trust you to fix it or give a shout when you simply can't.

Lastly he asked me to help out with iptables rules. I wasn't of much help but it was fun to sit there debugging iptables shit with two seniors 😊

He always gave good feedback, knew my qualities and put them to good use and kept my motivation high.

Awesome guy!

Had an external hdd for backing up family photos etc. (back when I just discovered Linux and still used windows as well)

Connected it to my windows system and it said that the thing was corrupt and i had to format it.

Well fuck, a few hundred gb's of pictures, memories, backups etc etc probably lost. (keep in mind I didn't know that much about computers at that point)

Was about to format that thing with literally tears in my eyes when I thought I'd, because why the fuck not since I was out of options anyways, try it as well on my Ubuntu installation.

EVERYTHING WAS STILL ON THERE AND PERFECTLY ACCESSIBLE.

After a very much rage attack on windows I formatted the windows partition and used that as a backup space as well :).

A dude with a THICK Russian accent just called me offering server security services.

After I politely declined, he insisted on a free audit of my servers. I declined that as well.

Now I’m backing up our DB’s and going through my nginx logs.

Am I being racist?

Storytime!

This customer comes in and practically throws a computer on the counter.

Customer: This computer isn't working. I've ran the diagnostics and it says it's software. *places a dvd case with a 32 bit Windows 7 disk in it on the counter* It had Windows 10 on it, but I want Windows 7 on it.

Me: Well, you may have issues with the drivers if you put Windows 7 on it--

Customer: I don't care, I just want Windows 7.

Me: You SHOULD care. That means no wifi, no display, no mouse... Windows 7 doesn't like Windows 10 hardware.

Customer: Then... check to see Windows 7 compatibility!

Me: Alright.... *makes notes to check for Windows 7 compatibility*

Me: So has this Windows 7 been used before?

Customer: Yes, it has.

Me: On how many computers?

Customer: I've installed it on two computers and it works just fine.

Me: That's weird because Windows license keys are for one computer only. Are both of them connected to the internet?

Customer: Yes.

Me: Well, okay then... *finishes up ticket*

Customer: I work in this field and I just don't understand why they don't come with the disks anymore. How much is a Windows 10 disk?

Me: *gives price*

Customer: And do you have any?

Me: Let me check *I go to where they are, find some and come back out*

Me: Unfortunately we're out at the moment and would have to special order some back in.

Customer: OK. So then how much to fix this computer?

Me: *price of installing Windows and backing up data*

Customer: That's halfway to the price of a new one of these!

Me: Well yes, an HP at Walmart... But you do have that option if you want to take it.

Customer: Well, why does it cost that much?

Me: Well, it's $labor1 to install Windows, $labor2 to do some basic setup and drivers, and $labor3 to backup and restore data.

Customer: Oh, well I don't want data.

Me: Okay, well then it would be $total - $labor3

Customer: ...Okay, fine

Me: *updates the ticket*

When she finally left I put it on the bench and the first message said "SMART ERROR." I then did 4 different tests that said "lol, the hard drive is failing."

If you "worked in this field," you would know that a SMART error is hard drive related.

If you worked in this field, you would know that Windows is only a 1PC license, so why are you lying about installing it with no issues on other computers?

If you worked in this field, you would know you would want a 64bit Windows on your computer.

If you worked in this field, you would know how to find a Windows 10 installation media online.

If you worked in this field, you would know that HPs are not good computers to get.

IF YOU FUCKING WORKED IN THIS FIELD YOU WOULDN'T BE SUCH A FUCKING CUNT.

My current project at work: purchase verification, aka anti-fraud.

It's been two weeks, and my boss is flipping out because it isn't done. A robust anti-fraud solution. in two weeks. And he thought one week was a little much.

like, fucking really?

There are companies whose entire service is helping combat fraud. and he wants this done in a bloody week?

What makes me laugh through my tears of frustration is that the company that moved into the previous office? Yep, anti-fraud. Their entire business model is providing anti-fraud services to other businesses. They even tried selling him on it when they moved in. Bossman sales guy turned it around and sold my freaking desk out from under me instead.

But like. They're a small company: they had 9 people when they moved in, and were looking to add three more, so a total of 12 people. (I totally considered jumping ship, but their stack was too different.)

So. Bossman wants me to replace 9-12 people and their entire business in a fucking week. Yeah.

"Oh, but it's just sms verification" says he. What he also wants is the ability to flag users as fraudulent, have sticky verifications so they can't bypass them by backing out, have email checks as well as sms, have deferred verification to allow collecting required info (e.g. phone number), verification fallback, lockouts, manual admin whitelisting, admin blacklisting, and different rules per merchant and rule groups for affiliates to apply to all of their merchants, and of course the ability to customize those merchant/affiliate anti-fraud rules. But he shortens this gigantic list to "I want sms verification," despite actually asking for all of the above. I don't want to know about the mental gymnastics and/or blindfolding required to equate the two, but he's nuts.

Yeah.
All of that.
In a goddamn week.

And I get chewed out when it isn't done? Fuck off.

Go build me a goddamn 5m ft^2 castle out of basalt and marble using only your toothbrush and a rusty garden trowel, and have it done in a week. No outsourcing.

talk about ridiculous.

First broken rule - Publish on Friday

Second broken rule - Delete without backing up

Major screw up - Main folder deleted containing several sites

Major problem - Cannot find anyone on the server team for backups

!rant

I got the job!

Yesterday morning I got a call from the wonderful recruiter I’d been working with, to say they were giving me a decent competitive offer 😄

After handing in my notice, backing my colleague, trying my best to look after the current employer... it paid off, I have the job that I wanted.

The guys at the new place really impressed me out the gate, clever, decent people doing some interesting stuff.

Senior is going back in my title where it belongs.

Basically it all worked out in time for Christmas 😄

I’ve been tracking this little saga on a tag but if you want to know what lead me down this route my previous rants are there. I’ll continue to rant as I finish in the current place and move on to the next 😄

November brings .Net 5, for anyone who cares about that, and after listening to my husband watch Ignite "reveal" advertising container, and all the enterprise virtue signaling therein, I am now to the point where the only thing I can think is "Fuck you Microsoft, and Fuck .Net 5."

During a 30 minute speech, the director of the dotnet platform commits the following flagrant faux pas:

1. Introduces tons of visual studio easy buttons for shit we already do, no mention of VS code support.
2. Shows tools that anyone other than the most insular enterprise mouth-breather have been using for no less than 6 years
3. Gives absolutely no credit to the Open Source community projects backing the features he's showing
4. Shows nothing but mono-cloud integration, makes no mention of any other cloud targets for new features
5. Acts like "deploy your app the cloud from IDE" is something anyone should be doing in 2020
6. Showed an API repl that is pathetic compared to httpie when it was in alpha
7. Showed blazor loading from cache and said "Look at how instantaneous it is" (if you ignore the 5mb of cached payload it took to run the hello world demo)
8. Shows Project Tye, presenting it as a new groundbreaking xyz, fails to mention helm already exists

What's absent is what is most offensive:

- acknowledgment of community contribution
- no linux/mac tools, entirely windows-centric (which jives with my prediction of second-class citizenship for the people who contributed to .net core the most)
- cross-cloud capabilities
- bash/zsh (again with the untermensch relegation)

Fucking microsoft back to their old bullshit.

Sober, jogging and lifting again. Working steady. Back to hiking and songwriting which I gave up on a couple years ago. Feeling more productive, happy, clear headed and calmer than I've been in two years. And the amount of attention I'm getting from the opposite sex lately has been crazy.

Joined a church, though I'm not mega into organized religion or anything. Looking for a backing pianist and vocalist to help record my songs. Back to studying math, learning Russian, and working on my game in between.

The only thing I'm not getting a lot of at the moment is sleep.

Feels good man.

the only thing more difficult than acquisition of a DevRant sticker, is the application of a DevRant sticker. seriously peeling the backing off has just made me type another rant.

So my schoolmate asked me to reformat his computer, not before backing up his father's work data. Medical data of his patients.
He had two hard drives, C: and D: . Easy job, it could be done in four steps:
1- collect all data into c:\backup
2- xcopy /e c:\backup d:
3- format c:
4- move all data from d:\backup back to their original places.

Guess which step did I forget to do?
Yes, step 2.

Got an offer to work at a game development company. Office looked awesome (decked out in pinball machines and a huge marble track), located overlooking Schreveningen beach, young energetic team.
Then I saw the code. Oh God the code. And they wanted me to become system architect.
Hybrid PHP 4/5 OOP/procedural code custom framework running on a spaghetti database creaking by on the skin of its teeth... all backing Flash Facebook games.

Nope.

Pro tip:

Make sure you can RECOVER from your backups.

It's all well and good backing this and that up, but make sure that when the shit really hits the fan you can recover.

I've now 4 days into recovering a raspberry pi that ran:
Pi-hole
Snort
DHCP
VSFTP
Logwatch
Splunk forwarder
Grafana

And serveral other things... I've learnt my lesson

I was noticing some slow network and it was dropping some connections. So I booted up my old XP install with Java 6 so connect to the ASA 5505, I see it’s logging max connections of 10000 has been reached.

Fine, I recon it’s my colleague backing up his entire machine to Google Drive.
Because when he shut it off, n connections dropped.

I check back in the log, and I see there’s 4-500 connections happening per second, I think WTF and check the source IP. Lots of random IPs from Vietnam, all going to a Windows2008 Server using rdp.

(I didn’t setup our servers, so I didn’t know which server it was accessing)

Ask my other colleague, he told me it’s a windows server from an earlier project that’s not used anymore.
I rdp into it, see there’s users logged in from around the world, and I immediately do a shutdown.

Would you look at that, connections per second dropped to about 50.
I guess that server isn’t going back online ever.
And I now need to ask management for a budget to update our network infrastructure, because the old ASA 5505 is begging me to die.

TL;DR gg previous employees didn’t shut down old servers and left them open to the world to enjoy

So... The client saw a screenshot of me calling him a 'mother fucking French fuck' which resulted in him backing out, our company bearing a loss of almost half a million and me getting suspended.

So how's your day been going?

My wife's phone started having power button issues. Then it broke completely with spastic random presses, causing the phone to boot loop. It's a 3 year old Nexus 5 so I was mostly concerned with backing things up, not rescuing it.

Cleaning didn't work, tapping the switch didn't work. This hack worked.

Backup complete.

Best code performance incr. I made?

Many, many years ago our scaling strategy was to throw hardware at performance problems. Hardware consisted of dedicated web server and backing SQL server box, so each site instance had two servers (and data replication processes in place)

Two servers turned into 4, 4 to 8, 8 to around 16 (don't remember exactly what we ended up with). With Window's server and SQL Server licenses getting into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the 'powers-that-be' were becoming very concerned with our IT budget. With our IT-VP and other web mgrs being hardware-centric, they simply shrugged and told the company that's just the way it is.

Taking it upon myself, started looking into utilizing web services, caching data (Microsoft's Velocity at the time), and a service that returned product data, the bottleneck for most of the performance issues. Description, price, simple stuff. Testing the scaling with our dev environment, single web server and single backing sql server, the service was able to handle 10x the traffic with much better performance.

Since the majority of the IT mgmt were hardware centric, they blew off the results saying my tests were contrived and my solution wouldn't work in 'the real world'. Not 100% wrong, I had no idea what would happen when real traffic would hit the site.

With our other hardware guys concerned the web hardware budget was tearing into everything else, they helped convince the 'powers-that-be' to give my idea a shot.

Fast forward a couple of months (lots of web code changes), early one morning we started slowly turning on the new framework (3 load balanced web service servers, 3 web servers, one sql server). 5 minutes...no issues, 10 minutes...no issues,an hour...everything is looking great. Then (A is a network admin)...
A: "Umm...guys...hardly any of the other web servers are being hit. The new servers are handling almost 100% of the traffic."
VP: "That can't be right. Something must be wrong with the load balancers. Rollback!"
A:"No, everything is fine. Load balancer is working and the performance spikes are coming from the old servers, not the new ones. Wow!, this is awesome!"
<Web manager 'Stacey'>
Stacey: "We probably still need to rollback. We'll need to do a full analysis to why the performance improved and apply it the current hardware setup."
A: "Page load times are now under 100 milliseconds from almost 3 seconds. Lets not rollback and see what happens."
Stacey:"I don't know, customers aren't used to such fast load times. They'll think something is wrong and go to a competitor. Rollback."
VP: "Agreed. We don't why this so fast. We'll need to replicate what is going on to the current architecture. Good try guys."
<later that day>
VP: "We've received hundreds of emails complementing us on the web site performance this morning and upset that the site suddenly slowed down again. CEO got wind of these emails and instructed us to move forward with the new framework."

After full implementation, we were able to scale back to only a few web servers and a single sql server, saving an initial $300,000 and a potential future savings of over $500,000. Budget analysis considering other factors, over the next 7 years, this would save the company over a million dollars.

At the semi-annual company wide meeting, our VP made a speech.

VP: "I'd like to thank everyone for this hard fought journey to get our web site up to industry standards for the benefit of our customers and stakeholders. Most of all, I'd like to thank Stacey for all her effort in designing and implementation of the scaling solution. Great job Stacy!"
<hands her a blank white envelope, hmmm...wonder what was in it?>

A few devs who sat in front of me turn around, network guys to the right, all look at me with puzzled looks with one mouth-ing "WTF?"

So recently I did a lot of research into the internals of Computers and CPUs.
And i'd like to share a result of mine.

First of all, take some time to look at the code down below. You see two assembler codes and two command lines.

The Assembler code is designed to test how the instructions "enter" and "leave" compare to manually doing what they are shortened to.

Enter and leave create a new Stackframe: this means, that they create a new temporary stack. The stack is where local variables are put to by the compiler. On the right side, you can see how I create my own stack by using

push rbp
mov rbp, rsp
sub rsp, 0

(I won't get into details behind why that works).

Okay. Why is this even relevant?
Well: there is the assumption that enter and leave are very slow. This is due to raw numbers:
In some paper I saw ( I couldn't find the link, i'm sorry), enter was said to use up 12 CPU cycles, while the manual stacking would require 3 (push + mov + sub => 1 + 1 + 1).

When I compile an empty function, I get pretty much what you'd expect just from the raw numbers of CPU cycles.

HOWEVER, then I add the dummy code in the middle:

mov eax, 123
add eax, 123543
mov ebx, 234
div ebx

and magically - both sides have the same result.

Why????

For one thing, there is CPU prefetching. This is the CPU loading in ram before its done executing the current instruction (this is how anti-debugger code works, btw. Might make another rant on that). Then there is the fact that the CPU usually starts work on the next instruction while the current instruction is processing IFF the register currently involved isnt involved in the next instruction (that would cause a lot of synchronisation problems). Now notice, that the CPU can't do any of that when manually entering and leaving. It can only start doing the mov eax, 1234 while performing the sub rsp, 0.

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

NOW: notice that the code on the right didn't take any precautions like making sure that the stack is big enough. If you sub too much stack at once, the stack will be exhausted, thats what we call a stack overflow. enter implements checks for that, and emits an interrupt if there is a SO (take this with a grain of salt, I couldn't find a resource backing this up). There are another type of checks I don't fully get (stack level checks) so I'd rather not make a fool of myself by writing about them.

Because of all those reasons I think that compilers should start using enter and leave again.

========

This post showed very well that bare numbers can often mislead.

26 or so hours up now. And I've got a few stories to tell :) feel free to refresh your cup of coffee and take a seat.

Last few days I've been going into this odd place called intown.irl to get in touch with its inhabitants. An odd place I have to say. But in some cases quite rewarding, even got a MILF home with me and into bed at some point. Anyway...

3 days ago I think it is now? Thursday evening I took my laptop to this local bar where I had this issue about dihydrogen monoxide with one of the bartenders earlier (you'll find that rant on those keywords). Still wanted to visit it regardless though, as I met that first woman there earlier that approached me. Unfortunately I didn't see her there that day.

Some bald guy who was clearly drunk approached me. Many people were already giving curious looks at this laptop I brought to the bar. I finally tuned it up with the stickers from FOSDEM.. I'll put a picture of it in the comments. My theme was one of privacy (central), distributions and Google's open source initiative (which aligns with the keychain token I got from them as well). But of course.. that guy.. he thought that a pimped/riced laptop obviously meant that I was a hacker.

Guy went to the toilet.. went back.. and suddenly grabbed my laptop and turned it towards him. Boy was I never more smugly satisfied that those rubber pads on the bottom are quite resilient. Could've almost damaged my screen by trying to grab it like that. But it's a CCFL display.. so high voltage. If it were to become broken.. worth it. 😈

On it at the time was a terminal, pinging Google (had network issues at that bar, to the point where one of the - I think - staff members got up to me and offered the WiFi password and got to talk with me.. more on that later), and my usual Linux desktop along with the Arch anime wallpaper with the quote of Da Vinci.. simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Of course the guy saw the terminal.. and probably reaffirmed.. yep, that's a hacker. At least he wasn't too wrong about the general term.. but the hat.. most likely he was wrong on that one.

Guy left with this question.. "you are a hacker, aren't you."
I replied to him: "No sir. I'm not a hacker. I've got no idea what you're talking about."
Guy kept looking at me weirdly for the whole night to come.

Back to that companion guy though. Mac user, yada yada.. but he told me about his backup solution. Apparently - I shit you not - he has not only the photos on his local device, he's also frequently backing them up in Time Machine (which I was really curious about whether it uses mirroring or snapshots.. he couldn't tell, lmk if you do) but not only that.. he was storing another offsite backup in that very bar, in case his house went on fire.

Now that is a proper backup scheme!!! If only more people were like that.

Seriously though.. that bald guy who took my laptop just like that... I just let it slide for that one time, but I tend to treat my machines as an extension of my very self. I think that was a very uncalled for move. Asshole...

How would you have reacted to such a thing? And.. maybe that's why we technologists don't get outside too often? Fucking everything is hacking these days if it's not Knopkes and Blinkenlights… Not every shell is a h4xx0ring console for h3kk1ng de fasbuk…

Maybe backing up WhatsApp messages is not such a great idea after all.

You’re always telling people the importance of backing up important files, but do they listen? Of course not. Sometimes you have to simply sit back and wait for natural consequences to teach them that lesson.

so i signed in into a new win 11 install a few weeks back. hadn't noticed until now, windows has been backing up all my new PC's files to one drive. all the junk and temp files too 😭. Completely messed up my organisation on onedrive 😭. Fuck whoever thought it would be good idea to backup documents folder into documents folder fromevery fucking PC. not naming what PC or user it came from. I'm so fucked cleaning up this mess. Motherfucking assholes.

On the side note, anyone have any idea how can i find out which PC or user a file was uploaded by in the explorer itself. ☹️

Following on from yesterday's catastrophe...
It happened again overnight!
And THEN another server failed when backing up the DBs...turns out 2 websites have activated logging .. each of around 20GB in the database!

So this morning both of our servers are down for different but similar reasons.

It's absolutely fine everybody.
I'm fine,
we're fine,
it's FINE!

Not backing up my 4 year projects folder on my 5 years old laptop...

RIP long forgotten projects

Back where I used to work, we had this a-hole call center guy who isn't a programmer but got promoted as our team leader. He said he used to program on his early days at the company (?) . He claims that made back-ups of his source code in MS Word and even tries to gives us a lecture about backing up programs.
I really hate those a-wipes who often get promoted and suddenly goes up to their heads

I HAVE BEEN CALLED TO 3 OF THE FINEST HACKATHONS IN MY COUNTRY RN, 2 BEING ORGANISED BY HUGE COMPANIES AND ONE BY A COOL COLLEGE. I CAN'T GO BECAUSE FUCKING INFOSYS IS COMING TO MY COLLEGE FOR PLACEMENTS AND MY TEAM MEMBERS ARE NOW BACKING OFF. WTF.

Maybe if you started actually fucking backing up your bullshit MONTHS ago when I told you your system was dying, or replaced it when I told you it was failing, you wouldn't have lost 6 fucking months worth of fucking work when it finally died today.

I setup a file backup system since you never had one, I gave you detailed instructions a fucking 40 year adult she be able to follow, I even offered to walk you through the process the first time after I set it up.

It shouldn't be my fucking problem you're too fucking stupid to listen to the tech person YOU fucking hired and lost data.
I was hired as a damn programmer, setting up the server wasn't in my job description, backing up emails because you refuse to pay for more GMail storage isn't in my job description, fucking 70% of what I've done this past fucking year working for you isn't in my job description.

Fucking hell, I'm fucking glad I'm working on leaving. The fucking employee shouldn't fucking care more than the damn owner. This place is not going to grow, and most of your employees are working on applying elsewhere because of your short-sightedness and petty bullshit drama you bring everywhere, everyday.

A service had/has been logging hundreds of errors in the development environment and I reached out to the owning process mgr that the error was occurring and perhaps a good opportunity to log additional data to help troubleshoot the issue if the problem ever made its way to production. He responded saying the error was related to a new feature they weren't going to implement in the backing dev database (TL;DR), and they know it works in production (my spidey sense goes off).
They deployed the changes to production this morning and immediately starting throwing errors (same error I sent)
Mgr messaged me a little while ago "Did you make any changes to the documentation service? We're getting this error .."

50% sure someone misspelled something in a config, but only thing they are logging is 'Unable to parse document'. Nothing that indicates an issue with the service they're using.

PM: I need a brand new feature that we haven't had before and it has to have a framework backing it so that we can extend it to anywhere in the future. It also has to have X, Y, Z, it has to be able to tell the future, cure cancer, fly, and have a return on investment for us of 1000x. How long will that take?

Me (or any dev ever): Umm... well, that's kind of asking for the moon. The first few pieces will take as least 5 sprints. When do you need it by?

PM: Tomorrow. When can you have it?

Me: ......

I think I just managed to fry my hdd THE SAME GODDAMN DAY I FINALLY GOT AROUND TO BACKING IT UP.
Holy fucking shit, that was WAY too close for comfort... 😰

Backups is the most important thing, but there is something more important then that. Making sure your actually backing up the files your paying to back up. Now im stuck waiting on 4 2tb drives in raid 6 connected over sata 2 to be recovered because a raid card failed but the drives are still good. Estimated time over 3 days.

So, this was about 6 years ago, I had a small HDD of only 80 gigs dedicated for projects code, models, textures etc.

I didn't use GitHub or anything as a backup.

One morning when I turned my pc on I could hear a metal on metal-ish sound, no idea what it was, when windows finally booted ... And I wanted to start coding again, the 80 gig HDD was unformated like brand new ...

Few hours later I gave up and opened the HDD, the arm fucked up the disk inside ... Rip

I started backing up my shit ever since

Windows 10 backing up shortcut (.lnk) files from desktop to OneDrive. Lmao 😂

I was about 8. A family member was like a secretary, but not exactly. There are was a term used, but I can't remember. It's not really that important.

Anyways, I was like 8. Their job consisted of backing data up on.... Floppy disks. The software they used to back this data up just used a console and you had to input commands. Well this was amazing to me at the time. So they taught me the order of the commands and let me do it. Was the most fascinating thing to me. And it definitely planted the seed of interest in computers.

Some other early experiences also involve me hanging around the IT guy that worked with my relative. He taught me a little bit, such as some keyboard short cuts.

First rant that I really want to get out of my chest!

Never hated a job as much as this one. Haven’t done any development/programming related work since I joined. I have been mostly configuring Linux systems for IoT devices. When I get stuck at an issue, it takes me many frustrating nights to figure it out because no one on the team wants to deal with Linux shit… they’d rather be doing real development work (someone actually stated this!). There’s no one else on the team that knows Linux. Even the manager that was supposedly a Linux fanatic can’t even answer some of my questions and if they do, it’s the wrong fucking answer. Joined the company because they sold it as startup team with big money backing. Was excited to learn new technologies, new best software engineering practices, add new programming languages to my resume. But nope, been stuck at configuring Linux systems. At one point I was just pumping out updated Linux images with our updated application for a month straight. I was so excited when a development task was assigned to me a couple weeks back, but guess what?! There were Linux configuration tasks that no one knows how to do or don’t want to look at it, so my one and only fucking development work was swapped out!

And the funny thing is, I barely had any Linux experience when I joined. Why the fuck was I hired?

Man, I even bought books related to Linux programming (application and kernel) before I joined. Those books barely have a crease in them. What a waste.

Now in my free time, I’ve been learning new technologies on my own. Doing my own projects. But damn, I lose a lot of family time. Sorry wifey, I haven’t been paying a lot of attention to you!

But who knows, maybe this experience will have a silver lining in the end.

Thanks for reading :)

Fun experience backing up my laptop drice to external hdd :

1 folder : 100 sub folders with 12000 files, size 6gb
>> Ctrl A-> ctrl C -> ctrl v
>> Copying time 55 mins , files remaining 12000
CANCEL CANCEL CANCEL!!

>> add to archive (5 mins) -> ctrl c, ctrl v
>> copying time 6 mins , files remaining 1

(*Insert hackerman meme here*)

Quotes are paraphrased (unless *) to protect the incompetent and stupid (or more the case: client and I'm reducing risk of exposure)

Situation: We have a program that opens sqlite database files. Occasionally new versions of the program needs to upgrade these files.

Program UI: To proceed you need to upgrade your database. It is recommended you backup your database before proceeding. Hit Yes to continue or No to abort.

Client: How do you back up a model once it has upgraded? If I hit No the program closes leaving me no option to backup the model.

Support: *The easiest way of backing up a model before upgrading is creating a copy of the file and keeping it in a separate folder*

Client: *Haha forgot about being able to do that outside of* <program name>

TL;DR: engineer in technical role who is probably getting paid $150k+ forgets it is possible to make a copy of a file.

Please, share your website backup strategies and practices - I have a simple php/mysql webapp and files don't actually have any backup other than the fact that they're also saved in a dropbox, and for DB I have a cron job that will export it daily and send it to my email.

How do you do it? How large are sites/app that you're backing up?

I found out today that productivity gains by TDD doesn't actually have any empirical backing despite numerous studies.

It now goes in the same drawer as object oriented programming.

Manager ran docker prune on a server that had run out of drive space. One of our internal sites/automation tools was running on said server in docker. Fortunately the only persistent info that was wiped is user/passwords, we don't even bother backing it up, but a bit of tedious admin this morning...

Do you give back to the projects you have built your skills and knowledge from?

I regret ever picking my CS major every time I stare at my VS Debugger and am stuck reading the values stored in a List<Int>. Why, List<Int>, as the backing for my shortest path, do you not have the proper values after I walk my tree.

I have lovingly set up my Priority Queue. I have followed the class notes and lectures.

Oh why, my List, have your forsaken me?

Oh.

It's a recursion bug. I'm not updating nodes properly.

I'm a dumb ass.

So a few months ago I created a css grid system. I ended up fucking my windows installation by playing around with shit I knew I shouldn't be playing with. And silly old me, not backing shit up obsessively, ended up losing the only copy of my grid system.

Luckily I remember how I made it.

But right now I am lacking motivation to do any serious work. So what did I do tonight?

Signed up for a hosting account
Registered a domain name (for my grid system) through my reseller account
Setup DokuWiki
And am now in the process of creating documentation for...

... A grid system that I have not [re]created.

That's some backwards ass logic right there lol

TMW you want to introduce a big feature that will require you to refactor the existing code, but you don't have to worry about breaking the latter since you have tons of unit tests backing you up.

Backing my home folder up.

currently backing up a micro-usb pendrive with the following method:
I have mounted my usb hard drive on my raspberry
I have mounted the raspberry on my phone using sshfs
Now I'm dd-ing the pendrive (the device) to the mounted disk on the phone.

I've developed a habit to kickstart stuff I probably use once or twice in my life, am I the only one? Deciding to block all traffic to kickstarter.com

!dev

the most ridiculous things get the best backing on kickstarter

I'm talking 200% of initial funding

!Rant

Not sure where else to ask but here, as I am an unsocial creature; But I need new music!

My general favourite type of music is anything from any of the wipeout games, 90s techno style, think of the backing music from the film Hackers, and that's pretty much my vibe 90% of the time.

You guys got any suggestions? I can't be the only one here into deep techno/progressive industrial techno whatever you can call it I am really unsure!

things like:
prodigy, 808 state, wipeout style, possibly borderline on keygen/chiptune type music depending how its done

Thanks guys! *hug*

Ended up dong an internship for my school (not really internship, more along the lines of formal volunteering, but whatever) helping set up laptops for a statewide standardized assessment.

I made a program to log the machine's identifying info (Serial, MAC addresses, etc), renames it, joins it to the school's Active Directory, and takes notes on machines, which gets dumped into a csv file.

Made the classic rookie mistake of backing things up occasionally, but not often enough. Accidentally nuked the flash drive with the data on it, and spent a good while learning data recovery and how grep works.

Lesson Learned? Back up frequently and back up everything

For the past 5 hours I’ve been backing up my pc, reinstalling windows(full wipe of every drive) and, reinstalling programs to my fucking pc. I can now say I’ve been to hell and back, because fuck everything, now I need to rebuild it because 2 years ago “oh cable management is optional I don’t need to do that.” So fml. And especially fuck apple and windows. Fucking windows with having to reinstall once a year and Apple with overpriced bullshit lightning to 3.5 adapters, $10 for one because they removed 3.5 jacks. @linuxxx I understand why Linux is a good alternative although it sucks for gaming due to no support( I know about wine but I don’t want to use it due to it having problems half the time)

Been reading for a while now, finally frustrated enough to add my rant...

Backing up my home server with Veeam to finally ditch raid 5 and add some space. 38% finished when we had to leave for a Thanksgiving dinner. Thought that was perfect because I'd come home to a finished backup, install the new drives and get Plex/webserver back up and running. Nope. Win 10 decides to update and reboot in the middle of my freaking backup at 79% complete. Now, I've just told the friends and family I was with to expect the outage in the next hour or two thinking I was ready. Nope. Start all over again. None of this is truly important, really... But Jesus, that's annoying.

Win 10, you have a special place in hell. And Veeam, as much as I love you, you can be right beside them for not letting me run backup console on Linux.

So, the past 2 months I get random freezes on my OS(Ubuntu 18.04). ONLY the mouse is working, nothing else but REISUB.

This happens sporadically, but seemingly ONLY WHEN I'M 30-80% DONE AND MY "ADD" HAS ME WORKING ON 4 DIFFERENT THINGS AT ONCE.

Disabling docker hasn't helped.. Ensuring using less than 50% RAM doesn't help. Changing browsers, cleaning my VSCode extensions, shifting to XMonad(lightweight DE) from gnome(which almost worked for almost a couple of days), changing graphics drivers, downgrading kernel AND JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING ELSE.. DOES. NOT. WORK.

AAARGH MY MOTHERFUCKING 7 YEAR OLD LAPTOP WITH SSD IS PROBABLY SINGING ITS LAST TUNES. TODAY IS THE LAST TIME I'LL LET FREEZES HAPPEN.. I'M RUNNING MEMTEST86 AND WILL COPY ALL MY LATEST LOGS AND LEARN A BUNCH OF STUFF I'LL NEVER WANT TO TOUCH AGAIN. I HAVE TO SPEND SUPER VALUABLE TIME TO MAKE SURGERY ON THE MIRACLE THAT IS MY ANCIENT LAPTOP. I'M SO AFRAID THAT IT FALLS APART WHEN OPENING IT.. THE PLSTIC FOR THE COOLER IS BROKEN AND THE SHIT HASENT HAD THE BEST LIVING CONDITIONS (SOME TIMES -5c OTHER 40+)

I'm aware that I should go to the forums, which is my next move. But reading on there, it could be a graphics drive or, kernel problem, a faulty harddisk or RAM problems. It also goes without saying that I'm backing up for the 14th time the past month.

My thing is, that I have dual boot and running Windows for 14 hours straight with loads of loads, while really getting punished, renders a completely functional computer...

Go is the first language with it's own dedicated hate page. Just go to golang.sucks

The anti-awesome github backing the website is also something I've never seen before.

Is GoLang really just a hype and a language created of retarted developers at Google ?

Thought I'd post this for my friend in QA, because she's been having a horrible week at work.

So we were supposed to have production deployments last night (Tuesday) and tonight (Wednesday). We were told these dates a week ago, which is fine. The QA support cleared their after-office schedules on those dates to accommodate, since the deployments would be happening at 10pm.

Last Monday they moved the deployments to Thursday and Friday, because our "project managers" want to cram as many fixes and resolutions as possible. So of course, we devs are being rushed to speed these additional tasks through to being included (bypassing a LOT of quality checks).

Of course, the QA team finds defects (we devs were expecting that, so no big) and the PMs start blaming them for the delays. Which is just stupid. And my QA friend? They're trying to make her a scapegoat by throwing her under the bus with business.

Fortunately, she's a smart cookie and not only has all communications with the PMs documented, she also has the other QAs backing her up by running the same tests.

tldr; Fuck those project managers who suck up to business and don't give a shit about the people who do the actual work. May they burn in hell and their souls rot in a cesspool of acidic farts for all eternity.

I just realised I have 1TB of MS OneDrive Cloud space lying around unused. DAMNNN!!!

Just yesterday, I was thinking of backing up all my content to cloud (because just in case and past experiences of losing data).

I did a quick fact check and figured that I have ~450 GB of unbacked data.

After quick calculations, I came to a number of how many Google accounts I'll need for 15 GB per account of drive space.

Today, I was playing around with my Microsoft Developer account and saw OneDrive. I thought let's check how much free space does MS Dev subscription offers.

It showed 1024 GB. FUCK! My balls dropped.

Now here's what I did...

I have a local drive of 500 GB, which holds all the unbacked data. Now I setup my local OneDrive there and put everything into OneDrive.

And then, I moved my local Google Drive into OneDrive. A nested setup for important stuff.

So this way, less important stuff is backed up on cloud and accessible everywhere.

And more important stuff gets synced on Google Drive and OneDrive, both.

Did I do the right and sensible thing with this kind of setup?

MS Developer subscription says they expire it in 90 days but until today, they have auto renewed it always.

I still have ~500 GB of space which can be consumed.

Also, overall MS ecosystem seems much better to me than Google. Moreover, MS allows custom domain mapping which Google doesn't.

Let's see how can I entirely migrate to MS ecosystem in near future.

Feels good when your a month in a coding boot camp and not thinking of backing out.

Life has been cluttered for a while. Currently backing up important files to reset my Windows laptop and also install deepin OS.

May be even install MacOS on it just for fun.

Hoping for a fresh start to 2017

The one that never leaves the backing sheet

When the way to get a promotion at your company is so bullshit and you need to do a lot of things collectively, but even then you work towards each of those things and ensure you have enough backing of each one, after getting feedback from your manager from the previous session on what type of things would apply, only to then get told manager failed to promote few other people because the higher ups want even more bullshit things and thus he wants even more from you at the same level.

Time to see if any company would take me, before I wanted some salary boost but I might just take one for very small boost as compared to what I wanted before.

Trying to upgrade to macOS High Sierra, guess what? After half a day of backing up and installation, I time traveled. My Mac is still running macOS Sierra. 🙄

(Luckily i backed up)

So I've been using Duet on my iPad Pro for a couple years now (lets me use it as an external monitor via Lightning cable) and without issue. Shit, I've been quite happy with it. Then the other day, whilst hooked up to my work laptop, there was a power fluctuation that caused my laptop to stop sending power to connected devices. Which is fine - I have it plugged into a surge protector so these fluctuations shouldn't matter. After a few seconds the laptop resumed normal operation and my connected devices were up and running again.

But the iPad Pro, for some reason, went into an infinite boot loop sequence. It reboots, gets to the white Apple logo, then reboots again.

In the end, after putting the iPad into recovery mode and running Apple's update in iTunes (as they recommend), it proceeds to wipe all my data. Without warning. I lost more than a couple of years of notes, illustrations and photos. All in one fucking swoop.

To be clear, you get 2 options in iTunes when performing a device update:

1. UPDATE - will not mess with your data, will just update the OS (in this case iPadOS)
2. RESTORE - will delete everything, basically a factory reset

I clicked UPDATE. After the first attempt, it still kept bootlooping. So I did it again, I made sure I clicked UPDATE because I had not yet backed up my data. It then proceeds to do a RESTORE even though I clicked UPDATE.

Why, Apple? WHY.

After a solemn weekend lamenting my lost data, I've come a conclusion: fuck you Apple for designing very shitty software. I mean, why can't I access my device data over a cabled connection in the event I can't boot into the OS? If you need some form of authentication to keep out thieves, surely the mutltiple times you ask me to log in with my Apple ID on iTunes upon connecting the damn thing is more than sufficient?! You keep spouting that you have a secure boot chain and shit, surely it can verify a legitimate user using authenticated hardware without having to boot into the device OS?

And on the subject of backing up my data, you really only have 2 manual options here. Either (a) open iTunes, select your device, select the installed app, then selectively download the files onto my system; or (b) do a full device backup. Neither of those procedures is time-efficient nor straightforward. And if you want to do option b wirelessly, it can only be on iCloud. Which is bullshit. And you can't even access the files in the device backup - you can only get to them by restoring to your device. Even MORE bullshit.

Conversely, on my Android phone I can automate backups of individual apps, directories or files to my cloud provider of choice, or even to an external microSD card. I can schedule when the backups happen. I can access my files ANYTIME.

I got the iPad Pro because I wanted the best drawing experience, and Apple Pencil at the time was really the best you could get. But I see now it's not worth compromise of having shitty software. I mean, It's already 2021 but these dated piles of excrement that are iOS and iPadOS still act like it's 2011; they need to be seriously reviewed and re-engineered, because eventually they're going to end up as nothing but all UI fluff to hide these extremely glaring problems.

Losing data if I don't start backing up my important data

Yeah, it hasn't happened yet, but I have a feeling I'm getting closer

Piggy backing off an earlier rant about Linux. Let's talk about time wasted fixing Linux.

One time for me was I couldn't get Ubuntu to boot. Whenever it booted through UEFI it would go straight to the EFI bash like command line boot screen, not allowing me to access Ubuntu.

I tried for almost a full day to fix it, Googling solutions, resetting my BIOS and fixing Boot using a Ubuntu Live USB.

In the end I found it was an issue with setting my filesystem as XFS. I reinstalled using EXT4 and it booted right up. Must've been some sort of bug. Strange because XFS boot worked with Fedora. A day wasted trying to set up Ubuntu.

tl;dr: azure support are utter bollocks

so about late june-ish, my azure student subscription expired, which i wasn't notified about. but that's fine, surely once it's expired i can get my data back, right?

...right?

i try to download the .vhd file with my nodejs project on, and then contact their support after failing to mount the vhd. i asked them whether they could get my data for me (or at least provide some clear instructions, in case i mounted the vhd incorrectly). instead i was told to do loads of things, creating blobs, making snapshots, etc... all of which did absolutely nothing.

mid-august, i'm still trying to get my data back, when i get a call from, you guessed it, microsoft azure. a manager had told me that all my data had been lost, and that i was eligible for $500 in credit in compensation. i was angry (and rightly so), and refused their offer. i emailed azure support again expressing my anger, for them to tell me that my data wasn't lost...?

come to mid-september, and and i was fed up of waiting for my project. i wanted to finalise the fucker and launch the website, but azure had stalled me for well over two months. i had to put some money towards azure just to start up the vps, zip up the project, transfer it to another vps, and shut it back down.

and that kids, is why i wouldn't ever recommend azure.

ps: yes, i'm backing up files daily from now on

!rant

For a first job, is it better to have a large company backing you, or going to a startup?

I realise being in a startup means more exposure to different technologies, but how would each impact future job prospects?

this is something that's always bothered me, I figured this would be the perfect place to ask. so some projects have files you need for development but can't commit to VCS (for example, files containing AWS keys, certs, etc). I've always dealt with this by just storing them/backing them up on an intranet server not connected to the internet. does anyone have a solution easier than manually distributing these files to new developers via a flash drive?

Workmate (experienced developer) on suspension for not backing up database and server data got corrupted.
Workmate worked on server instead of localhost.
Manager repeatedly asked workmate to stop working from remote server and ensure that workmate commits and pushes every day.
Workmate blames it on manager for allegedly not telling workmate to backup.

Your thoughts?

Spent days wedging a new application into an existing PHP single sign-on "implementation" only to discover the backing stored procs in SQL are broken and have been for years... fix them, and everything else breaks. *sigh*

Wanted backing up my windows files so I can install Linux but my 500gb hard drive is acting up, just closed a pop up telling me installed successfully and it never showed up even on my disk management.. I hope it's not dead, pls is there anyone who has experienced this before? 😰

qemu-img keeps on reporting error:
Could not open 'some-qcow2-img': No such file or directory

Why you waste me 2 hours for troubleshooting instead of telling me it's the backing file that could not be found?

waste a few hours trying to debug shit im working on a feature branch, only to check main branch and it turns out somebody else broke main but the dev environment i'm piggy backing on using is cutting edge

i now miss having a separate individual dev environment to use, but i suppose id lose on some perks probably

What advice/opinion would you give to someone who is looking for a dev job without any experience or background or passion/interest in engineering - just getting into this field for the money and consulting firms backing this person saying they will train and help find him/her a job in California...

I've been studying a bit about business analytics and intelligence to diversify a bit from dev.

After a lot of looking around I've found it's all just glorified jargon which basically enables your decision to have backing of facts and logic. It sounds as if it's a great coverup tool but don't know if it actually helped decision-making.
Why does researching the market/competition need to have a thousand breakdowns/categories/focus areas.

I feel like an interpretation of business analytics is a very simple and intuitive solution but there is just too much random and wasteful metrics attached to it.

I believe it's just my nascent knowledge and experience speaking, but I never felt the same way about software development, financials, etc

I've been reading some stuff related to CoreAnimation and then I asked myself this question:
"Is UIKit = User-Interface Kit or User-Interaction Kit?"
Given that all the drawing and content representation is already done by the backing layer (CALayer). The only responsibility UIView adds to the underlying CALayer is the ability to handle user interaction.

Dependability is a fundamental more modest than common expertise for bosses
New managers a significant part of the time feel that since they have been raised to the heap up they ought to know everything immediately. Truly, it anticipates that adventure should gain capacity with the association styles and approaches that turn out to be cruel for your social affair. Being flexible and being open to the bewildering will assist you with changing into a useful manager. A Roman scientist named NURS FPX 4000 Assessment 4 Analyzing a Current Health Care Problem or Issue Seneca is credited with saying, "Karma slants toward the coordinated." And while karma can earnestly play a consider life, all that verifiably pivots around orchestrating yourself for when incredible karma comes your bearing. Excellent affiliations do this by orchestrating themselves for an entrance through status and planning.
Plan for disappointment and goofs - it's really clever to expect them a lot early so you can lessen the effect. A SWOT assessment (Qualities, Shortcomings, Anticipated open doorways and Risks) is an important instrument for this. The more you plan for a social event the more useful it will be. Approach saves time by lessening blunders, forestalling re-work and shortening works out. And it in addition decreases pressure, which is overall something that would justify being thankful for! Other than being a NURS FPX 4010 Assessment 1 Collaboration and Leadership Reflection Video State financed School English educator, Kine is in this way the head of Ryan Search &amp; Directing and facilitates Held Supervisor Pursue, Help and Drive New turn of events. His clients range different undertakings from Headway to Monetary Associations.
Whether an overwhelming event, network prosperity break or stock association disrupting impact, astounding occasions can emerge whenever. Being available to the unexpected assists you with finding sure results and make depend with your partners. One strategy for doing this is to remain mindful of vulnerability, where you proceed with like the circumstance is both customary and novel. This assists you with expanding your NURS FPX 4010 Assessment 3 Interdisciplinary Plan Proposal data affirmation and seek after the most ideal choice. ClickUp's Business Development Plan Configuration is an incredible contraption for planning the normal and the unforeseen!
Dependability is an essential limited scope ability for bosses to make. Supervisors should be ready to have authentic two-way discussions with specialists and should endeavor to get themselves when they are concealing reality or lying. Fair correspondences among supervisors and representatives can assist with fostering a positive work environment culture and can expect a fundamental part in the connection's prospering. While giving investigation, supervisors ought to convey NURS FPX 4020 Assessment 1 Enhancing Quality and Safety both the positive and negative parts of a representative's show. They ought to in addition have the decision to give obliging assessment and backing workers when essential. This correspondence style is as frequently as conceivable implied as moderate candor.
MORE
Instagram is a powerful tool for businesses
The best digital marketing agencies
Instagram is an amazing asset for businesses

So, as per usual, I am not sure what I am doing.

I want to make multiplayer games on the web using web sockets.

But of course I want there to be multiple game servers for horizontal scaling (I'm gonna hit it big)

Specifically for either Node.JS or ASP.Net (or both) how could I manage such a thing where there are 2 servers and 2 users. User A is assigned to server A by load balancer, and user B is assigned to server B. But they play in the same game?

Best I know of so far is to connect both game servers to a redis backing. But this seems like a convoluted way to communicate. I would rather have them both route to the game server (Whichever server the game starts on)