Long but worth it...

So I was cleaning out my Google Drive last night, and deleted some old (2 years and up) files. I also deleted my old work folder, it was for an ISP I worked for over 2 years ago. After deleting the files I had a little twinge of "Man I hope they're not still using those". But seriously, it'd be a pretty big security risk if I was still the owner of those files... right? Surely they copied them and deleted all the info from the originals. IP addresses, Cisco configs, username and passwords for various devices, pretty much everything but customer info.

Guess who I get a call from this morning... "Hi this is Debbie from 'ISP'. I was trying to access the IP Master List and I can't anymore. I was just told to call you and see if there's any way to get access to it again" (Not her real name...)

I had to put her on hold so I could almost die of laughter...

Me: "Sorry about that Debbie, I haven't worked for that company for over 2 years. Your telling me in all that time no one thought to save them locally? No one made a copy? I still had the original documents?!"

Long pause

D: "Uh... Apparently not..."

Another long pause

D: "So is there any way you can give me access to them again?"

Me: "They're gone Debbie. I deleted them all last night."

D: Very worried voice "Can... Can you check?"

This kids is why you never assume you'll always have access to a cloud stored file, make local copies!!

A little bit of background on this company, the owner's wife fired me on trumped up "time card discrepancy" issues so she could hire her freshly graduated business major son. The environment over there was pretty toxic anyway...

I feel bad for "Debbie" and the other staff there, it's going to be a very bad week for them. I also hope it doesn't impact any customers. But... It is funny as hell, especially since I warned the owner as I was clearing out my desk to save copies, and plan on them being gone soon. Apparently he never listened.

This is why you should have a plan in place... And not just wing it...

PS. First Post!

This code review gave me eye cancer.

So, first of all, let me apologize to anyone impacted by eye cancer, if that really is a thing... because that sounds absolutely horrible. But, believe me, this code was absolutely horrible, too.

I was asked to code review another team's script. I don't like reviewing code from other teams, as I'm pretty "intense" and a nit-picker -- my own team knows and expects this, but I tend to really piss off other people who don't expect my level of input on "what I really think" about their code...

So, I get this script to review. It's over 200 lines of bash (so right away, it's fair game for a boilerplate "this should be re-written in python" or similar reply)... but I dive in to see what they sent.

My eyes.

My eyes.

MY EYES.

So, I certainly cannot violate IP rules and post any of the actual code here (be thankful - be very thankful), but let me just say, I think it may be the worst code I've ever seen. And I've been coding and code-reviewing for upwards of 30 years now. And I've seen a LOT of bad code...

I imagine the author of this script was a rebellious teenager who found the google shell scripting style guide and screamed "YOU'RE NOT MY REAL DAD!" at it and then set out to flagrantly violate every single rule and suggestion in the most dramatic ways possible.

Then they found every other style guide they could, and violated all THOSE rules, too. Just because they were there.

Within the same script... within the SAME CODE BLOCK... 2-space indentation... 4-space indentation... 8-space indentation... TAB indentation... and (just to be complete) NO indentation (entire blocks of code within another function of conditional block, all left-justified, no indentation at all).

lowercase variable/function names, UPPERCASE names, underscore_separated_names, CamelCase names, and every permutation of those as well.

Comments? Not a single one to be found, aside from a 4-line stanza at the top, containing a brief description of that the script did and (to their shame), the name of the author. There were, however, ENTIRE BLOCKS of code commented out.

[ In the examples below, I've replaced indentation spacing with '-', as I couldn't get devrant to format the indentation in a way to suitably share my pain otherwise... ]

Within just a few lines of one another, functions defined as...

function somefunction {
----stuff
}

Another_Function() {
------------stuff
}

There were conditionals blocks in various forms, indentation be damned...

if [ ... ]; then
--stuff
fi

if [ ... ]
--then
----some_stuff
fi

if [ ... ]
then
----something
something_else
--another_thing
fi

And brilliantly un-reachable code blocks, like:

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]; then
--SOME_VAR="blah"
fi

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]
----then
----SOME_VAR="foo"
fi

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]
--then
--echo "SOME_VAR must be set"
fi

Do you remember the classic "demo" programs people used to distribute (like back in the 90s) -- where the program had no real purpose other than to demonstrate various graphics, just for the sake of demonstrating graphics techniques? Or some of those really bad photo slideshows, were the person making the slideshow used EVERY transition possible (slide, wipe, cross-fade, shapes, spins, on and on)? All just for the sake of "showing off" what they could do with the software? I honestly felt like I was looking at some kind of perverse shell-script demo, where the author was trying to use every possible style or obscure syntax possible, just to do it.

But this was PRODUCTION CODE.

There was absolutely no consistency, even within 1-2 adjacent lines. There is no way to maintain this. It's nearly impossible even understand what it's trying to do. It was just pure insanity. Lines and lines of insanity.

I picture the author of this code as some sort of hybrid hipster-artist-goth-mental-patient, chain-smoking clove cigarettes in their office, flinging their own poo at their monitor, frothing at the mouth and screaming "I CODE MY TRUTH! THIS CODE IS MY ART! IT WILL NOT CONFORM TO YOUR WORLDLY STANDARDS!"

I gave up after the first 100 lines.

Gave up.

I washed my eyes out with bleach.

Then I contacted my HR hotline to see if our medical insurance covers eye cancer.

Being paid to rewrite someone else's bad code is no joke.

I'll give the dev this, the use of gen 1,2,3 Pokemon for variable names and class names in beyond fantastic in terms of memory and childhood nostalgia. It would be even more fantastic if he spelt the names correctly, or used it to make a Pokemon game and NOT A FUCKING ACCOUNTANCY PROGRAM.

There's no correspondence in name according to type, or even number. Dev has just gone batshit, left zero comments, and now somehow Ryhorn is shitting out error codes because of errors existing in Charmeleon's asshole.

The things I do for money...

You know what?

Young cocky React devs can suck my old fuckin LAMP and Objective-C balls.

Got a new freelance job and got brought in to triage a React Native iOS/Android app. Lead dev's first comment to me is: "Bro, have you ever used React Native".

To which I had to reply to save my honor publicly, "No, but I have like 8 years with Objective-C and 3 years with Swift, and 3 years with Node, so I maybe I'll still be able help. Sometimes it just helps to have a fresh set of eyes."

"Well, nobody but me can work on this code."

And that, as it turned out was almost true.

After going back and forth with our PM and this dev I finally get his code base.

"Just run "npm install" he says".

Like no fuckin shit junior... lets see if that will actually work.

Node 14... nope whole project dies.

Node 12 LTS... nope whole project dies.

Install all of react native globally because fuck it, try again... still dies.

Node 10 LTS... project installs but still won't run or build complaining about some conflict with React Native libraries and Cocoa pods.

Go back to my PM... "Um, this project won't work on any version of Node newer than about 5 years old... and even if it did it still won't build, and even if it would build it still runs like shit. And even if we fix all of that Apple might still tell us to fuck off because it's React Native.

Spend like a week in npm and node hell just trying to fucking hand install enough dependencies to unfuck this turds project.

All the while the original dev is still trying TO FIX HIS OWN FUCKING CODE while also being a cocky ass the entire time. Now, I can appreciate a cocky dev... I was horrendously cocky in my younger days and have only gotten marginally better with age. But if you're gonna be cocky, you also have to be good at it. And this guy was not.

Lo, we're not done. OG Dev comes down with "Corona Virus"... I put this in quotes because the dude ends up drawing out his "virus" for over 4 months before finally putting us in touch with "another dev team he sometimes uses".

Next, me and my PM get on a MS Teams call with this Indian house. No problems there, I've worked with the Indians before... but... these are guys are not good. They're talking about how they've already built the iOS build... but then I ask them what they did to sort out the ReactNative/Cocoa Pods conflict and they have no idea what I'm talking about.

Why?

Well, one of these suckers sends a link to some repo and I find out why. When he sends the link it exposes his email...

This Indian dude's emails was our-devs-name@gmail.com...

We'd been played.

Company sued the shit out of the OG dev and the Indian company he was selling off his work to.

I rewrote the app in Swift.

So, lets review... the React dev fucked up his own project so bad even he couldn't fix it... had to get a team of Indians to help who also couldn't fix it... was still a dickhead to me when I couldn't fix it... and in the end it was all so broken we had to just do a rewrite.

None of you get npm. None of you get React. None of you get that doing the web the way Mark Zucherberg does it just makes you a choad locked into that ecosystem. None of you can fix your own damn projects when one of the 6,000 dependency developers pushes breaking changes. None of you ever even bother with "npm audit fix" because if security was a concern you'd be using a server side language for fucking server side programming like a grown up.

So, next time a senior dev with 20 years exp. gets brought in to help triage a project that you yourself fucked up... Remember that the new thing you know and think makes you cool? It's not new and it's not cool. It's just JavaScript on the server so you script kiddies never have to learn anything but JavaScript... which makes you inarguably worse programmers.

And, MF, I was literally writing javascript while you were sucking your mommas titties so just chill... this shit ain't new and I've got a dozen of my own Node daemons running right now... difference is?

Mine are still working.

I’ve had a good amount of incompetent co-workers in the past. One that stands out was this junior developer who worked at one of my previous companies. He was incompetent, but that wasn’t even his worst attribute. He was incompetent, and worse, he had a piss-poor attitude.

Myself and a few other devs at the company tried to help him, but he would literally get mad when people tried to help him. Sometimes he would even call one of us over and start getting snarky with us as we tried to help him. He was a piece of shit and a shitty developer. I don’t think he built one complete feature or fixed one bug in the year he was at the company before he was eventually fired.

Oh, and aside from his incompetence and shitty attitude, he had no sense of humor. It was so annoying. My friend and I made a little song based on his name and a group that sounded like his name, and he got pissed. We always used to sing it anyway after that and it always riled him up. I feel a bit bad about that now but he pretty much got mad at everything so whatever.

One of my favorite memories of him is when he was leaving one day, my good friend/co-worker and I were having a Nerf gun battle. The junior was leaving the office, and my friend tried to get him involved in the battle and shot him, but accidentally hit him in the back of the head. He said nothing, didn’t turn around, and just walked out lol. He was not happy about it.

Father bought a PC in 1997. Back then very few had it. I learned doing things like accessing the internet and sending emails, among others. I remember having added age on websites to be allowed to sign up at times :P My sisters used to play games on it sometimes. The first few ones we had were Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, Tomb Raider Chronicles, American McGee's Alice(Which caused us to upgrade the PC xD)... And some others.

I have a memory of this pseudo-3D-looking game where you move in a maze and try answering questions. I want to remember its name, but I cannot :(

We literally have video evidence of me liking the computer as a child, yet my parents either say I'm addicted or deny I've ever liked it before. Not only that, but continuously limiting my time with the PC hasn't been a literal obstacle in my way of trying to do things in their opinion. Funny how my parents think the last few years I've been my worst when they've hurt me in those years so much that our relationship is guaranteed not working out. There were doubts in my head before, but now it's cemented and there is no way of going back. Father, for example, tells me it's too late to do anything with a PC now(As well as how I've been unable to use the PC. He looks at these pro players' footage in some TV show and he's like, „You've been unable to use your hobbies“, as if they have never ever screamed at me for perceived gaming and not actually cared to check), and I need to look for a „real“ job.

Sorry. I went to bed at 2:00 in the morning. Feel like a zombie because of ongoing weirdly insufficient sleep, even though I sleep kinda more than normal. Even when I took Melatonine for that it didn't help at all.

Childhood was where beating began. I was about 6/7. Right when I entered school. The first school that I attended was a private one and supposedly for „Wunderkinds“, while in reality I haven't seen a SINGLE teacher or psychologist approve of it, their argument being that children were basically drowned in work that wasn't age-appropriate(I don't mean anything bad. Just that teaching about Galaxies and all in first grade isn't the brightest idea). There was always a mountain of homework to do and as opposed to some other countries, we had to do it on a day to day basis. We didn't have a week-long deadline. I was predictably not keeping up with it as I could have, had it been a normal amount, so my parents decided I didn't want to study and began their methods of getting me to „study“. I have yet to see a person able to keep up with that school's tempo, no matter the age.

This place was also where I got bullied. I felt I had nowhere to be: At home, the parents' situation, at school, the bully. I never really went outside to play with other children, so I missed that part of childhood.

After the second year of school I was transferred to an advanced German school, called like that because they taught German and not English there. I also got to learn a bit of Russian before they removed it from school. In that period I used to attend ballet. But for less than a year. And piano, which I remember having attended for quite a long while, some years, if my memory isn't fried. I quit it because of it having been forced on me. Last piece I ever played fully was Beethoven's Marmotte.

In this school I was once again the outcast of the class. I had some people to interact with. All of those interactions lasted a few years at most. Then, because of a part of my class choosing me as a laughing-stock N2 and another girl as the N1, I found my best friend, who I still have today. She's the only friend I have nearby.

Most of the time I hated myself. Even today I struggle with that sometimes.

After that came university. This us where I got something like a friend circle at last. But it still didn't last. I got in a relationship with one of the guys, but I was just attracted. There was another I couldn't dare getting close to. Turns out he also had something for me. Then he disappeared from our lives and a year after, I still cannot forget the person. If I want to, I have to deprive myself of my own personality. Not a thing I'm willing to give up. Then I broke up with the guy I was in a relationship with and completely disappeared from the friendship circle. To be honest, I had reasons to. They refused to even try to look for the guy and they called him a friend for years. Sometimes parents hitting me can occur even today, but if I REALLY piss them off.

Now I'm here and oh, my God, I'm officially am aunt now! My sister gave birth to a daughter this morning... She's in Berlin with mother and both she and the child are doing great. I just hope she manages to be a good mother.

Dear fellow developer,

You are not alone. No matter what situation you have been, you are in, you might be, there definitely are people who can share your pain and joy on similar wave length. Here at devrant.

Introvert?
Poor?
Alone?
Odd one out?
Trouble studying?
Family issues?
Debts?
Hate workplace?
Bad teacher?
Depression?
Laziness?
Forever alone?
Struggling?
Full of regrets?
Lost something?
Lost someone?
Lost?

You name it. All of us may not understand, sure. But there definitely will always be more than one person who will totally know what you are trying to say. Here at devrant only.

So whatever you are in, wherever you are and however you feel, just rant it out. 😄 And remember that we are one tap away from you.

For that devrant creators and most of all each and everyone of you have my eternal thank.

I just had a client complaining on the phone that she read my database design documents and that they are all wrong and need to be done again. Because things like varchar and int are confusing. And nobody understands what they mean. She asked around and nobody understood it.

Ooh, and I should place the customer name in more then one table because it would be handy to have in several places.

Spend a hour on the phone trying to explain that these documents are not intended for her. They are not for her to understand.

I make these documents to build a stable product and in case something bad happens to me its easier to pick up for another developer.

Long story short.. I'm currently making a document that explains the database design... Getting paid for it..... But fucking hell. Somebody save me.

I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.

So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?

This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:

1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!

2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...

3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.

But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.

4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.

There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.

After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.

So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".

So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".

So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.

So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.

If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>

So... I just remembered a story that's perfect for devrant.

My brother got into engineering in university, and during the second semester they had their introductory class to programming. They had weekly homeworks that the lecturer would check and give grades accordingly.

The factors that could influence the grading were: execution (meaning that the code would excecute as intended), efficiency and readabilty. The weeks passed and everyone was doing well, getting fairly good grades. Everyone was happy.

Until one day a random guy we'll call bob got the worst grade possible. Bob wasn't a bad student. He had over-the-average grades in all the weekly homeworks and even impressed the professor in some. Naturally, he was baffled when he saw his grade on the google spreadsheet. He was pretty sure his code ran well. He always tested it on different machines and OSs. So, at the end of the class, he went straight to the helper of the class, in a pretty imperative manner, to demand to know how the fuck he got that grade. It's impossible he got excecution, efficiency and readabilty, wrong. All three wrong? Impossible. Even the stupidiest kid in the class had some points on readabilty.

"Oh, so you are Bob. Huh?" said the helper in a laid-back attitude. "Come with me. Prof. X is waiting for you in his office."

This got Bob even more confused. As they approached the office, the courage he had in a first moment banished and gave way for nervousness and fear.

The helper nocks the door. "Prof., Bobs here"

As soon as Bob sits in the chair in front of Prof. X's, he knew something bad was coming.
"In all these years of teaching..." said Prof. X hesitantly. "In all these years of teaching I have not come even close to see something similar to what you've done. You should be ashamed of yourself." Needless to say, Bob was panicked.

"In all these years I have not seen such blatant mockery!" added the professor. "HOW THE FUCK DID YOU EVEN DARE TO SEND A HOMEWORK WITH SUCH VARIABLE NAMING" That's when Bob realised the huge mistake he made. "NEVER IN ALL THESE YEARS I HAVE SEEN SOMEONE NAME HIS VARIABLES *opens the file on his desktop *: PENIS, SHIT, FUCKSHIT, GAYFUCKING<insert Prof. X's name>MAN, GOATSE, VAGINAVAR, CUMFUNCTION, [...]" The list of obcenities went on and on. In each word, the professor hit the table harder than the last time.

Turns out Bob felt so in comfort with the ease of the course he decided to spice things up by using "funny naming conventions" while coding, and then tidying everything up before uploading the homework. This week he forgot, and fucked it big time.

So remember folks, always check your code before committing/giving it in/production. And always adhere to naming conventions.

"devRant has changed" "I'm so fed up with this site" "Its a bunch of hate and memes, it was so much better before"

A rebuttal.

devRant is approximately the same as it was when it was just a newborn. Remember the days of semicolon jokes being unironically funny?

Look at the top rants of all time, for fucks sake. #2 ever is:

"A different error message! Finally some progress!"

Posted three years ago. That's the second most upvoted rant in history (Remember, this was a "rant" because the joke/meme category didn't exist back then), it made it's way into the app store screenshots, and was a welcome post.

Now imagine that posted today. It would probably go over okay, in fairness, but it's certainly at risk of any number of pretentious pricks complaining about how this is "devRANT not 4chan" or how they had seen the joke before and it's a shitty repost.

And sure, the repost bullshit is fair. I'm not saying that all the reposts are good content. What I'm saying is devRant has always been full of reposts - they just weren't reposts in the early days. The quality of content is the same.

There's also the common misconception that your posts need to be directly related to tech to post on devRant. This is a myth propagated by 0 IQ heathens that don't read any further than the name of the application. Your posts can be anything that isn't prohibited, like porn, spam, and, importantly, politics (commonly overlooked rule)

"All the memes are just too much". Oh you poor fucking baby, let me pour you a healthy serving of pity juice. First of all, you can turn off the memes category, and while they will still find their way to your feed, the concentration will be much lower and it will once again be bearable for your pitiful, weak little soul. Do you seriously get annoyed that severely by shitty posts that you need to leave the app altogether, or do you just want the attention of being a "cool hipster that hates on xyz"?

"This place is just filled with hate! Why can't you just respect xyz technology, it isn't actually that bad!"

This is probably the most stupid fucking thing you could possibly ejaculate from your fingers into whatever device you are using to type. Welcome to devRant, we hate on shit. That's at our core. No, xyz technology ISN'T actually that bad, you're correct. But we're here to tear it apart because it probably has frustrated us in the past. I fucking hate JS because it was my first language and it confused the shit out of me. JS is a great language. But I still talk shit about it, and that's what we're here to do.

Like seriously, I know a lot of people post stuff they're proud of here, and then they're met with "Would be great if you didn't use xyz tech", and that hurts, but holy shit, this is devRant. If you're sensitive to criticism, or even just straight up being made fun of, don't post shit that you're proud of. You won't have a good time. It's just not what we do here.

Quick interlude before the conclusion, "My girlfriend dumped me after I named a class after her. She felt I treated her like an object." is also on the first page of all-time most popular posts.

In conclusion, devRant has not changed. Reposts have been a nuisance since day 0, and just because reposts look different these days doesn't mean the quality of content has decreased in any manner. The two main sources of your frustration are the volume of low-quality posts (Mind you, not the concentration of them, but the volume of them) and your own prejudices about the platform. You're looking back with rose-tinted glasses.

Here are some tips for a more enjoyable experience:

-Make sure you have the "Hide reposts" setting ENABLED in settings. Any posts marked as repost will be hidden in your feed, pulling down the concentration of low-quality posts.
-Keep to the algo sorting method. Obviously, algo is a bot, and there's still gonna be some shit content in there anyways, but if you're in recent, you are absolutely guaranteed to see low-quality posts. It's unfiltered.
-Keep in mind that what you consider a "quality" post is not what others consider a "quality" post. Just because you don't like memes doesn't mean memes are poor content. There are people here who have never seen the bobby tables comic. And they deserve the same experience we got when discovering dev humor.
-Don't be a prick. And if you cannot help yourself, leave. Ironically, you're making the site worse by complaining about how bad the site is. You can always come back if you aren't a prick anymore. And you can leave permanently if you choose as well.
-Downvote and move on. You're not doing anything but making yourself more aggravated by leaving a shitty comment about how shitty the shitty post is.
-Think critically. Obviously optional, and I know not many people like to use their brain when a phone is suspended between their hands, but if you want a better experience, remember to use your head and not to lose it.

So this happened today. I'm bad at remembering names so I always have to ask again.

for($i=0;$i<15;$i++)
{
Me: what was your name again?
Client: well, it still IS {name}. I'm still alive, you know.
😅😰
}

Colleagues noticed it as well 😅

[This makes me sound really bad at first, please read the whole thing]

Back when I first started freelancing I worked for a client who ran a game server hosting company. My job was to improve their system for updating game servers. This was one of my first clients and I didn't dare to question the fact that he was getting me to work on the production environment as they didn't have a development one setup. I came to regret that decision when out of no where during the first test, files just start deleting. I panicked as one would and tried to stop the webserver it was running on but oh no, he hasn't given me access to any of that. I thought well shit, I might as well see where I fucked up since it was midnight for him and I wasn't able to get a hold of him. I looked at every single line hundreds of times trying to see why it would have started deleting files. I found no cause. Exhausted, (This was 6am by this point) I pretty much passed out. I woke up around 5 hours later with my face on my keyboard (I know you've all done that) only to see a good 30 messages from the client screaming at me. It turns out that during that time every single client's game server had been deleted. Before responding and begging for forgiveness, I decided to take another crack at finding the root of the problem. It wasn't my fault. I had found the cause! It turns out a previous programmer had a script that would run "rm -rf" + (insert file name here) on the old server files, only he had fucked up the line and it would run "rm -rf /". I have never felt more relieved in my life. This script had been disabled by the original programmer but the client had set it to run again so that I could remake the system. Now, I was never told about this specific script as it was for a game they didn't host anymore.
I realise this is getting very long so I'll speed it up a bit.
He didn't want to take the blame and said I added the code and it was all my fault. He told me I could be on live chat support for 3 months at his company or pay $10,000. Out of all of this I had at least made sure to document what I was doing and backup every single file before I touched them which managed to save my ass when it came to him threatening legal action. I showed him my proof which resulted in him trying to guilt trip me to work for him for free as he had lost about 80% of his clients. By this point I had been abused constantly for 4 weeks by this son of a bitch. As I was underage he had said that if we went to court he'd take my parents house and make them live on the street. So how does one respond? A simple "Fuck off you cunt" and a block.

That was over 8 years ago and I haven't heard from him since.

If you've made it this far, congrats, you deserve a cookie!

I can’t count money as quick. I don’t know how to operate a cash register. I’m bad at following small tasks in the kitchen. Ex: girlfriend yells at me for putting unstrained yolk in recipe (after straining it).

I can’t lift heavy stuff. Out of breathe helping my mom move. My uncle told me, “if you can’t do that, how can you work?” Then he touts his son around proudly for being in the army. I felt like shit for years.

My cousins told me to get a job at McDonald’s to learn the value of a dollar. I spent all this time studying and hadn’t found a single job at the time (not that I was looking). I was living off financial aid and some income from an app that sold for a dollar on the App Store.

I would mess up if I worked there. It was depressing guys. These people who worked at McDonald’s and Starbucks. It was like a cool club that I couldn’t be a part of! I wanted to be that smooth barista at Starbucks with a smug look on my face. Making coffee for all the ladies and writing hearts next to their name on the cup.

The responsibilities of going to work day after day and blowing your paycheck at a meal at Denny’s with your friends. Complaining about not getting enough hours and talking about adult stuff! Sigh sigh sigh. Oh and taxes! Let’s complain about taxes on a single W-2 just for the hell of it (not sure why they do this when you can file a simple 1040EZ) even though we get a refund.

Then..

After many paid internships (roughly 3), now I may be receiving an offer that is 100k+ with a 401k and all benefits I can imagine. Free food up the wazoo. Gym on site. Happy hour Friday’s.

I brag about taking a shit for an hour at work and coworkers don’t give a shit. Or taking a day off to do personal errands anytime.

Having my own place in a nice area (though the cost of living is enough to take care of 3 families in another state). Supporting my girlfriend through school and helping her with her dreams of art.

Going to fancy dinners and not worrying about the bill afterwards.
Accidentally damaging my 2017 Honda Accord and not giving a fuck because I can pay $900 for repair with less than a week of work.

But I can’t help but think that all this time..

I could’ve just quit and worked at McDonalds. I could’ve been one of the cool kids..

One comment from @Fast-Nop made me remember something I had promised myself not to. Specifically the USB thing.
So there I was, Lieutenant Jr at a warship (not the one my previous rants refer to), my main duties as navigation officer, and secondary (and unofficial) tech support and all-around "computer guy".
Those of you who don't know what horrors this demonic brand pertains to, I envy you. But I digress. In the ship, we had Ethernet cabling and switches, but no DHCP, no server, not a thing. My proposition was shot down by the CO within 2 minutes. Yet, we had a curious "network". As my fellow... colleagues had invented, we had something akin to token ring, but instead of tokens, we had low-rank personnel running around with USB sticks, and as for "rings", well, anyone could snatch up a USB-carrier and load his data and instructions to the "token". What on earth could go wrong with that system?
What indeed.
We got 1 USB infected with a malware from a nearby ship - I still don't know how. Said malware did the following observable actions(yes, I did some malware analysis - As I said before, I am not paid enough):
- Move the contents on any writeable media to a folder with empty (or space) name on that medium. Windows didn't show that folder, so it became "invisible" - linux/mac showed it just fine
- It created a shortcut on the root folder of said medium, right to the malware. Executing the shortcut executed the malware and opened a new window with the "hidden" folder.
Childishly simple, right? If only you knew. If only you knew the horrors, the loss of faith in humanity (which is really bad when you have access to munitions, explosives and heavy weaponry).
People executed the malware ON PURPOSE. Some actually DISABLED their AV to "access their files". I ran amok for an entire WEEK to try to keep this contained. But... I underestimated the USB-token-ring-whatever protocol's speed and the strength of a user's stupidity. PCs that I cleaned got infected AGAIN within HOURS.
I had to address the CO to order total shutdown, USB and PC turnover to me. I spent the most fun weekend cleaning 20-30 PCs and 9 USBs. What fun!
What fun, morons. Now I'll have nightmares of those days again.

---- Startup RantLife ----

A senior developer joined the team, let's name him Bob, and this guy is really good no doubts about that.
He made suggestions, some improvements, but Bob is always waving his hands and says out loud that some part of the code base is really really bad.
I kept quiet until one day I had to pair with Bob to check a feature. Guess what happened, as usual, Bob clenched his fist and start pointing that this code is super ugly.
So let's check the history of changes and boom, Bob was the main writer.
That moment, I was completely silent, trying not to smile as Bob came up with an excuse, he never admits that he is wrong, now he needs a scapegoat and he starts blaming the process, the planning...
I believe that being humble and saying sorry is a quality that it requires time to develop.
So don't be like Bob, please :)

People that make shit like the original tweet piss me off.

So what if I like to spend a lot if my time looking at social media and on my phone? I can name lots of things that are more unhealthy than social media and enjoying modern technology.

Don't get me wrong, it does reach unhealthy levels when you're obsessed with the likes or followers and allow it to consume your life. But fuck off Gareth; the average user that you'll claim is "addicted" isn't even that bad.

And it's ironic that you'd post this on a social media that you're bitching about.

With all this being said, I hope you enjoy the sarcastic reply. I almost cropped it out but decided it was pretty funny, so I left it.

Let me preface this by saying I'm not a designer.

While I can make individual bits of a site look good, and I'm actually pretty skilled with CSS/Sass, overall design completely escapes me. I can't come up with good designs, nor do I really understand *why* good designs are good. It's just not something I can do, which feels really weird to say. but it's true.

So, when I made the Surfboard site (that's the project's internal name), I hacked everything together and focused on the functionality, and later did a branding and responsive pass. I managed to make the site look quite nice, and made it scale well across sizes/devices despite being completely new to responsiveness. (I'm proud, okay? deal.)

After lots of me asking (in response to people loudly complaining that the UI doesn't have X feature, scale properly on Y device, and doesn't look as good as Z site), the company finally reached out to its UI contractor who does their design work. After a week or two, he sent a few mockups.

The mockups consisted of my existing design with a darker background, much better buttons, several different header bars (a different color) with different logo/text placements, and several restyled steppers. He also removed a couple of drop shadows and made some very minor styling changes (bold text, some copy edits). Oh, he also changed the branding colors. Nothing else changed. It's basically the same exact site but a few things look a little better. and the branding is different.

My intermediary with the designer asked for "any feedback before finalizing the designs" -- which I thought odd because he sent mocks for two out of the ten pages (nine plus a 404 page). (Nevermind most of the mocks showed controls from the wrong page...).

So, I typed up a full page of feedback. Much of it was asking for specifics such as responsive sizing on the new header layout, how the new button layout would work for different button counts, asking for the multitude of missing pages/components, asking why the new colors don't match the rest of our branding, etc. I also added a personal nitpick about flat-looking controls because I fucking hate them. Everything I wrote was very friendly and professional.

... His response was full of gems. Let me share a few.

1. "Everything about the current onboarding site looks like a complete after-thought." (After submitting a design basically identical to mine! gg!)

2. "Yes [the colors match our current branding]." (No. They don't. I checked. The dark grey is different, the medium grey is different, the silver is different, the light blue is different. He even changed the goddamn color of the goddamn LOGO for fuck's sake! How the fuck is that "matching"?!)

3. "Appreciate the feedback [re: overlapping colored boxes, aka 'flat'], design is certainly subjective. However, this is the direction we are going." (yet it differs from the rest of our already-redesigned sites you're basing this off. and it's ugly as shit. gg again :/)

4. "Just looked at the 404 page. It looks pretty bad, and reflects very poorly on the [brand name] brand. Definitely will make a change here!" (Hey! I love that thing. It's a tilted, dotted outline of a missing [brand product] entirely drawn with CSS. It has a light gray "???" underlay and some 404 text inside. Everyone I showed it to, coworkers and otherwise, loved it. "Looks pretty bad". fuck you.)

I know I shouldn't judge someone so quickly, but what the fuck. This guy reminds me of one of those pompous artists/actors who's better than everyone and who can never be wrong, even while they're contradicting themselves.

just.
asfjasfk;ajsg;klsadfhas;kldfjsdl.

Modern software has gotten so bad that it even gets sluggish at times on late 2018 flagship devices. Slow, cheap hardware like is usually developers' and fanboys' excuse, particularly when it comes to Windows stuff? Like hell it is.

Software "engineering" has become so.. terribly inefficient. I'd dare any developer worth their salt to rewrite their program to make it work on an early 2000's machine. After all, those can run pretty advanced GUI's, have a reasonable amount of hardware (just think about how large a gigabyte of RAM really is) yet should be able to make for a reasonable limitation set.

Hardware limitations are the mother of optimization. Not every person on the planet has a 32-core Xeon workstation with 64GB of DDR4 RAM and a GTX Titan in it. Whether your application performs reasonably well on your machine shouldn't be the metric. Try deploying it on that laptop you tucked into a shelf years ago and reevaluate.. please.

And definitely you Slack!! Slacking off, is that what inspired the name of that pile of junk?! 😡

This is what I found in the logs:
3280546 I had a cup of tea and now it's fixed
9daaf6c copy and paste is not a design pattern
958ca5b It compiles! Ship it!
a9edf8d LAST time, Masahiro, /dev/urandom IS NOT a variable name generator...
438072f 640K ought to be enough for anybody
1fb839b Too lazy to write descriptive message
4d70890 ...
d6ce0c8 Ugh. Bad rebase.
a00b544 Programming the flux capacitor
49715cb Fix my stupidness
4babf07 Do things better, faster, stronger
49b3a7b SEXY RUSSIAN CODES WAITING FOR YOU TO CALL
12c7b55 formatted all
2658c87 and so the crazy refactoring process sees the sunlight after some months in the dark!
2376c89 - Temporary commit.
a83220a I honestly wish I could remember what was going on here...
3347007 work in progress
3382b4c well crap.
109748a Glue. Match sticks. Paper. Build script!
c3f025e Useful text
70394e7 Who knows WTF?!
0d78f14 breathe, =, breathe
5344e39 removed tests since i can't make them green
8a3a6bf better grepping
2777cc4 first blush
cf620ff Continued development...
9591c19 Too lazy to write descriptive message
767e0cd Some shit.
763602a Yes, I was being sarcastic.
8d7a602 /sigh
c6296e5 rats

#UnpopularOpinion

PHP isn't inherently a bad language. Bad developers give PHP a bad name.

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

🍿🍿 pull up a chair and get comfy. This was a few years ago and anger has filled some details, so bear with me...

One day, during one of rare afternoons off of work, I was in the library to work on a group project for school. This was maybe a month before it was due, so we were tracking for decent progress and one less stressor over finals. It was about 80° F out, with the perfect breeze for the beach, but school comes first.

I'm team lead (which is terrifying, but less important) and my bro C shows up early to be ready to go on time because he's professional. I'M SO BAD I FORGOT DOUCHEBAGS NAME, so he's A (for asshole), shows up AN HOUR AND 15 MINUTES LATE. But it's not the end of the world, C and I worked around our database schema (which A sent us and we approved), so we could iron out kinks as we went.

A gets there... Fucking finally.

Fucker didn't have the database built (had 2 months to do it, we all agreed on schema a month prior. We're trying to be the adults our ages claim is to be).

*breathe in, count to 10* not a problem, A, just go ahead and start it now so we can at least check what we have.

Ok, my queen, I'll have it done in 10 minutes...

🤔🤔

We needed an id (sku... Which, in 99.9999% of companies is numeric), a short name (xBox one, Macbook, don't smart tv), a description and a price (with 2 decimals). All approved by all 3 of us.

His sku ranges from 3 to 9 ALPHA NUMERIC CHARACTERS, the names were even more generic than expected (item1, item 2, Item_3), no description, and he somehow thought US currency had 5 decimal places!!! (it's more accurate...)

There was an epic, royal, and expensive fight scene in the library (may have been during the Lenten season I decided to give up caffeine AND fast for 40 days to prove a point to an ass wipe of a history teacher, don't recall). I made him cry, he failed the class because C and I wound up fixing everything he touched (graded by commits, because it was also an intro to git, but also, a classmate saw it all), and I had to buy multiple people coffee for yelling in the library.

A tried making out buttons work (I was fed up and done thinking for the day, so moved to documentation), but he fucked those up. I then made those worse by having nested buttons, but I deleted all his shit and started over and fixed it.

I then cried, but C and I survived and have each others backs still.

I work for a company known for its unbelievable perks and benefits. Every time a job opens up, we get thousands of applications.

Candidates are becoming increasingly aggressive to stand out. Hundreds of them (literally) have purchased Facebook ads or LinkedIn promoted posts to get their information in front of current employees.

Others have taken to outright stalking our employees. I freelance occasionally and have a separate website for my freelance business. I receive dozens of calls and emails to my freelance number and email account daily from people who want to “chat about the open position.”

My husband — who has a different last name — runs a small retail shop. He’s had people come into his store and tell him that they did internet sleuthing and found out he was married to an employee of my company, and would he please pass on their resume?

I expect to get these messages on my LinkedIn or company email, but am I wrong in thinking that stalking me out and trying to contact me via personal contact info (or my husband) is way out of line?

Is there a way to sharply tell them that this is not okay? Normally, I just don’t respond, but I have to turn my phone off or it rings all day and it’s really annoying. Would it look weird to put a message on my freelance website that says do not contact me about Company X jobs?

My company is aware of this problem, and has said to forward the names of aggressive or alarming candidates their way to remove them from consideration, but it’s so common, I’m thinking this is a product of being told that if they just showed GUMPTION, they’d get the job. I feel bad for them, but it’s also creeping me out.

expect([
row[‘blah’][0][1],
row[‘blah’][1][1],
row[’blah’][2][1],
row[‘blah’][3][1],
row[‘blah’][4][1],
]).to contain_exactly(
a.name(user), # “John doe”
c.name(user), # “John doe”
e.name(user), # “John doe”
b.name(user), # “John doe”
d.name(user), # “John doe”
)

(Note: The comments are mine.)

See the problem? No, not the ugly code (which is actually worse than what i posted here).

It’s using the same ridiculous getter (if you can call it that) that pulls a name out of the passed user object, and then expecting each row to have that name, in order. Not that order matters when they’re all the same.

Upon inspection, all objects created by the spec have the exact same name, so the above test passes (as long as there are 5 rows). It passes, but totally not because it should: those aren’t the objects that are actually in the table. All of the specs — all 22 of them — only check for that shared name on various rows, and no other data. And it’s not like this is the only issue, either.

Fuck me these are bad.

And this guy is a senior dev earning significantly more than me. Jesus what the fuck Christ.

My private Email Account got hacked when I was in school, and they sent out a mail with something along the lines of "hey, you should really use this product to lose weight, it is great" to all of my contacts. Many of them ignored it, some of them called me to inform me about the issue (the worst part was, long after I used 2fa and changed passwords regularly, they still had my name and contact list, so they just made email adresses that looked like mine and continued to send out spam to my contacts). Anyway, one teacher of mine didn't know that this was a scam and was insulted because I regularly sent emails about her losing weight. And as if the whole situaion, which I couldn't do anything about, wasn't bad enough, my parents and I had do have a 1h conversation (which ended up in me explaining how those hacks work, and luckily she understood, but still). Never again. I prefer those fake ms support guys that call me over this every day.

Interviewer: Do you mastering PB? Because this company always use PB.
Me: I good on it.
Int: Oh well you're accept here, welcome.
Me: Thanks.
...
*the first day I joined the company*
Lead. Programmer: Today you will code Java.
Me: Okay sir.
...
Then I ask what the Interviewer's "PB" means, and I got the answer is Power Builder. I think it's the name of the game I always play, Point Blank.
...
And I smile, because of my fool, I was accepted to the company.
....
*sorry in my bad English*

It was the time of the 90s when one created HTML with frames. During an HTML exam we had 1 hour to create a website with 3 frames. Top, left, main. Some aligned random images and some formatted text. Kind of boring, I know. So I finished early and handed in my diskette with my homepage. To make it easy for him I added my name and class to the title.
When we got our grades I was in for a surprise since I had expected a good grade. I asked him why I didn't get a good grade. He kind of shouted at me that my task was perfectly done but I shouldn't have written my name in the title but name and address of this school. It is not a really dramatic thing but I always hated when teachers quietly assumed stuff and didn't tell us. And then handed out bad graded for totally unrelated stuff.

Security rant ahead - you have been warned.
It never fails to amuse and irritate me that, despite being in the 2019 supposed information age, people still don't understand or care about their security.
I've travelled to a lot of ports and a lot of countries, but, at EVERY port, without fail, there will be at least one wifi that:
- Has default name/password that has been cracked already (Thomson/SpeedTouch/Netfaster etc)
- Has a phone number as password (reduces crack time to 15-30 mins)
- Someone, to this day, has plain old WEP
I am not talking about cafeteria/store wifi but home networks. WTF people?! I can check my email (through VPN, of course) but it still bugs me. I have relented to try and snoop around the network - I can get carried away, which is bad. Still...
The speed is great though :P

I've come to a conclusion today: Management are fucking with me. I know it sounds far fetched, but its the only thing that makes sense.

I was in a meeting today, discussing some bad emails back and forth. Part of my issue was the amount of time spent on useless meetings, or waiting around to give demos.

The meeting got cut short, so I could prepare a demo for a VP ... after an hour and a fucking half of waiting around ... theres no time to see my demo.

What the actual fuck, seriously .... seriously what the actual fuck. What if the name of mother fucking christ is going on with this team, that they call me into a mother fucking meeting to discuss the "developers attitude" only to go and cut it short ... so they can fucking waste my time ... for the second time in 3 mother fucking days.

Oh i'd rather fuck myself with a cactus than spend the rest of my days dealing with this utter bullshittery.

!rant
Our lead dev in the company seems to be a smart guy who's sensitive about code quality and best practices. The current project I'm working on (I'm an intern) has really bad code quality but it's too big an application with a very important client so there's no scope of completely changing it. Today, he asked me to optimize some parts of the code and I happily sat down to do it. After a few hours of searching, profiling and debugging, I asked him about a particular recurring database query that seemed to be uneccesarilly strewn across the code.
Me: "I think it's copy pasted code from somewhere else. It's not very well done".
Lead Dev: "Yeah, the code may not the be really beautiful. It was done hurriedly by this certain inexperienced intern we had a few years back".
Me: "Oh, haha. That's bad".
Lead Dev: "Yeah, you know him. Have you heard of this guy called *mentions his own name with a grin*?"
Me: ...
Lead Dev: "Yeah, I didn't know much then. The code's bad. Optimize it however you like. Just test it properly"
Me: respect++;

The gym I go to has an app for user's to scan a QR code when they arrive and it has multiple HUGE issues.

This app shows the credit card info used for the direct debit without anything being redacted.

When the gym is signing up someone they give them a password so they can login, not too bad except the password is always the person's first name with the first letter capitalised.

This gets worse when you figure out that their is no way to change the password given to you AT ALL.

And just to top it all off, when you click the "Forgot Password" link on the login screen, the app just sends you an email with your password (your first name) in plain text.

The app also doesn't log you out or notify you if your login is used on a different device.

So I have tested this with 2 of my friends that go to the same gym and, with only knowing their email and first name (which I could have gotten from their email if I didn't know them), I can get into their app and see their credit card info without them being any the wiser.

So a few years ago when I was getting started with programming, I had this idea to create "Steam but for mods". And just think about it - 13 and a half years old me which knew C# not even for a half of a year wanted to create a fairly sizable project. I wasn't even sure how while () or foreach () loops worked back in the day.

So I've made a post on a polish F1 Challenge '99-'02 game forum about this thing. The guy reached out to me and said: "Hey, I could help you out". This is where all started.
I've got in touch with him via Gadu-Gadu (a polish equivalent of ICQ). So I've sent him the source code... Packed in .ZIP file... By Zippyshare… And just think how BAD this code was. Like for instance, to save games data which you were adding they were stored in text files. The game name was stored in one .txt file. The directory in another. The .exe file name in yet another and so on. Back then I thought that was perfectly fine! I couldn't even make the game to start via this program, because I didn't know about Working Directory).

The guy didn't reply to me anymore.

Of course back then it wasn't embarrassing to me at all, but now when I think about it...

I sometimes remember the time when I wrote a Email-inbox-exporter-PHP-script-type of application that collects all the emails from an inbox, "copied" it to a database with the attachements and stuff and moves it to a folder..

I just started at the company for like a couple of months, had no privileges to create mailboxes and such and I didn't want to interrupt our programmer to do this for me, so... I decided.. to save time and resources.. to test run it on our global, live 'support' mailbox.. :D Well.. You might guess what happened.. Apparently I mistyped the name of the move-destination folder (because imap-weird-things) that resulted in a completly empty mailbox and an empty database because the inserts failed due to bad encoding and mime-type issues..

The moment I refreshed my Outlook and noticed that all our mails where gone.. I swear, I can't describe that feeling of fear, cold sweat, intense heartbeat... I just stood up, asked if anyone wanted coffee, and just walked out of the office.. When in the hallway, I heard my collegues ask to one another "do you have any issues with outlook, all my mails are gone?". Everyone was stressing out, the chief was stressing out "what happened?!", nobody knew what happened.. :D

They could partially resolve it via one collegue who hadn't refreshed the mailbox and he could forward all the mails back to our support mailbox..

I dropped the project idea and learned to work with dev environments :D A couple of months later, I accidentially forgot a where condition in my SQL UPDATE statement, but that was the last time I seriously f*cked up.. :D Got to learn the hard way I guess.. Now everything I do runs in dev environments, I test everything before publishing,.. When I look back.. I don't even recognize the (inexperienced) guy I was back then ! :D

Ps. No one still knows what happened that day and they blamed it on server issues :D

Hey Root, we have a high priority ticket for you! It's adding some columns to a report. Should be simple. Details are in the ticket.

First: reports are some of the most boring, drool-inducing drudgery i have ever worked on.

Second: Specs for these reports are a nightmare since everything is ... very indirectly tested, and the specs are everywhere but where you'd expect them to be, so it's a lot of spelunking and trial/error. It's also slow as beans.

Anyway. The ticket's details are in ... not the worst engrish i've ever seen, but it's bad enough that i have no idea what they're asking despite (thus far) five attempts at deciphering it. There's also a numbered list of "fields" to add, so you'd think it would be straightforward. It is not. Half the list is crossed out, and half of the remaining items are feature requests (in yet more engrish), not columns to add. Also, one of the actual fields is impossible as the data it's asking for is not recorded anywhere.

yeah...

I cringe every time I see this person's name as the reporter because it's always the same. and honestly, there are more of these engrish people every month, and believe me: it isn't just a language barrier...

It has come to my attention that people like to read!

Specifically, I mean that a lot of ranters like fiction.. :D

I've been trying to decide on something to write for a while now, and I think I have it..

"The Traveler" (name open to suggestions)

The Traveler is a magic-based fantasy where our main character travels between world's using ancient stone portals (think: Stargate) and uses her unique powers to play god.

Each world she visits will equal to a different story, and she might play a good or bad guy (or both) depending on what the world has in store for her.

Her powers will include my WIP magic system from RISE, as well as some extra querks that aid the flow of the story.

I may still work on RISE, and I will keep in mind that The Traveler and RISE come from the same universe (I think RISE will be a prequel to The Traveler, and tell the tale of how she got her powers, and the origin of the portals..)

Let me know your thoughts below! ^~^

Oh man. Mine are the REASON why people dislike PHP.

Biggest Concern: Intranet application for 3 staff members that allows them to set the admin data for an application that our userbase utilizes. Everything was fucking horrible, 300+ php files of spaghetti that did not escape user input, did not handle proper redirects, bad algo big O shit and then some. My pain point? I was testing some functionality when upon clicking 3 random check boxes you would get an error message that reads something like this "hi <SENSITIVE USERNAME DATA> you are attempting to use <SERVER IP ADDRESS> using <PASSWORD> but something went wrong! Call <OLD DEVELOPER's PHONE NUMBER> to provide him this <ERROR CODE>"

I panicked, closed that shit and rewrote it in an afternoon, that fucking retard had a tendency to use over 400 files of php for the simplest of fucking things.

Another one, that still baffles me and the other dev (an employee that has been there since the dawn of time) we have this massive application that we just can't rewrite due to time constraints. there is one file with (shit you not) a php include function that when you reach the file it is including it is just......a php closing tag. Removing it breaks down the application. This one is over 6000 files (I know) and we cannot understand what in the love of Lerdorf and baby Torvalds is happening.

From a previous job we had this massive in-house Javascript "framework" for ajax shit that for whatever reason unknown to me had a bunch of function and object names prefixed with "hotDog<rest of the function name>", this was used by two applications. One still in classic ASP and the other in php version 4.something

Legacy apps written in Apache Velocity, which in itself is not that bad, but I, even as a PHP developer, do not EVER mix views with logic. I like my shit separated AF thank you very much.

A large mobile application that interfaced with fucking everything via webviews. Shit was absolutley fucking disgusting, and I felt we were cheating our users.

A rails app with 1000 controller methods.

An express app with 1000 router methods with callbacks instead of async await even though async await was already a thing.

ultraFuckingLarge Delphi project with really no consideration for best practices. I, to this day enjoy Object Pascal, but the way in which people do delphi can scare me.

ASP.NET Application in wich there seemed to be a large portion of bolted in self made ioc framework from the lead dev, absolute shitfest, homie refused to use an actual ioc framework for it, they did pay the price after I left.

My own projects when I have to maintain them.

Quick question.

The domain name I wanted was taken, and the person who bought it refused my offer.
So, I'm going to change it up a bit. Which one should I go for?

michelle-midnight.com (the dash might be a bad a idea.)

authormichellemidnight.com (this is way too long.)

“I Pay $900 A Month for student loans.”

Not sure why there’s a video about this but let’s watch it...

*Sad music is playing*

“My name is _____ and I pay $900 a month for student loans..”

Yeah so what?

*Sad music continues*

??

*Woman makes a call and asks about when they’re going to make a student loan reform aggressively*

????

Then I realized my family was eligible for low income and I received Cal and Pell grants to pay for my tuition and living.

Then I realized that the salary for my computer science degree has numbed me to a point where $900 a month doesn’t seem too bad. Or awful. I mean I just leased a new car for my mom! And didn’t hesitate (only when having fun negotiating though).

Back then, I would be shocked. But it’s a surreal feeling to see now that I don’t. I was literally confused at the basis of this video. And now I’m surprised at my disconnect from it.

I also realized that they make videos based on how society should react to it. Am I an outcast to society because of this? Why am I not reacting the same way?

Maybe society (nowadays) would disdain me because I’ve come into high income like we all will because of our passion (and the demand for it).

But fuck society. It’s full of the very same people who use technology each and every day. Protesting for things they found trending on Twitter. The ones who refused to learn even though it’s a huge part of their lives. They’re the ones holding us back for an Engel’s Technological Utopia (idk if I’m even correct about the philosopher but anyways..)

We’re above them. We make things they’ll use and in massive numbers.

Don’t let them dictate what you should like. How you should act. Whether or not you should feel lonely while they’re posting pictures of fun times on Facebook.

We should be the ones doing that. Because we are the ones doing that.

That’s why we’re given the best to perform what we love most.

So devs, continue what you’re doing. Small or big, you’re still driving the world forward. Opening pull requests and contributing to open source projects. Answering questions on Stack Overflow not only for the person intended but for the beginner or even experienced professional who may stumble upon it later in a Google search.

And be highly rewarded for it. How society feels doesn’t matter any more when it comes to your passion. You’re important. Your work helps others in ways you can’t even imagine. We’re like one big fucking hivemind of engineers with the accessibility of the internet.

I love drinking on a Sunday!

I tried writing this rant before, but I was (and still am) in too good of a mood so it was lengthy, meandering, and over-specific. so I'll summarize(ish).

summary:
* miscommunication
* working weekends
* incompetence and/or screwy integrations

summary of the summary:
* I can't fix someone else's mess if you don't talk to me!

Summary^3: #TODO: learn telepathy

Shortened rant:
Bossman at work signed up a very lucrative client by promising them something he couldn't deliver because he misunderstood and miscommunicated scope -- anti-fraud, if you've been following my rants.

Their signup (all four...) are screwy and cause issues and nobody knows why. I didn't write the code, have barely even glanced through it, and it uses a third-party (Clover) that's rather screwy.

Bossman has been asking me to do various things concerning the merchant, but has never been around to provide specifics, so I'm left to guess. I've done my best, but due to the aforementioned screwiness, I really have no idea what's going on. I just sort of muddled my way through.

Bossman also asked me, super late on Friday night (after 8:30pm), to rename one of the merchants because there are two with the same name (with different Clover creds, etc.) and that's just confusing. I didn't see the message because late and tired, and he didn't follow up or text/call me until two days later (today, Sunday). I also thought these were strictly for diagnosing and were de-listed. I had no idea the merchant was live and people were actually purchasing things for it. Had I known this I would have freaked out and demanded specifics on Thursday/Friday because wtf? debugging in production? with broken merchants? selling things for real money? scary bad? hello?

Anyway, I didn't see his message until he texted me about it at like 5pm today while I was about 2 hours from my computer. He's understandably frustrated, and I totally don't blame him, but fuck, miscommunication is a serious problem in this company, and that's amazing because it's so freaking small.

But the short version is that I'm likely going to get blamed for all this, Clover screwiness included. Bossman and I set up a call for 10am tomorrow and I'm positive he's going to try pinning it on me. Totally not going to let him, but his social is lv16+ while mine's like. 2 or 3. 😕 I'll see how it goes.

Really though, I should read @rutee07's book and just roast these fuckers.

15 years ago I had a job interview as technical leader. They asked me about the trendy framework in those days, Struts. I didn't know much to be honest. I actually started to study java the month before. I was 30 y.o. and I managed to sell myself well.

I got the job. I never saw Struts, the real job was to migrate a z/OS application written on PL/I for DB2 (all things where new to me, I programmed something in VB when I was younger, before studying a career in statistics). Anyway, somebody else already scaffolded Struts, I implemented some business logic here and there, and mostly tried to make sense of the monster-legacy.

Fast forward now.
Two months ago I was interviewed on the last version of Angular and AWS devops, kubernetes etc. I managed not to look completely idiot, but honestly, I never went beyond an Hello World in Angular, and kubernetes, well, I like the name.

I got the job as Technical Architect.

First project I'm assigned to: migrate a 15 years old Struts application to cloud.
Somebody has containerized everything.
Somebody will scaffold a dotNet application.

I'll watch. Maybe I'll write some nice powerpoint presentation. Maybe I'll fill in some business logic in some methods.

I wanted really to be a technical Architect and do things other modern people do.

I actually wanted to learn something.

Anyway.
For 160K$ a year is not bad, I wouldn't complain.

So Patanjali(aka Ramdev Baba trying to sell you even a fucking underwear as ayurvedic and locally made) released their chat application "Kimbho" and was taken down within 24 hours because of major security flaws.

Some obvious ironies I would like to point out here.

1. Coming up with a chat application with gaping security flaws at this stage when privacy related discussions are happening at every nook and corner, worst move ever.

2. There are elections in 2019 and 1 year would be the right amount of time to gather data on public and start targetting and influencing people. It shouldn't be so obvious and everyone knows which political party Patanjali leans towards.

3. You are promoting an app citing Make In India initiative. You are the biggest Indian based FMCG operating in India, courtesy exploiting nationalist sentiments. Whatever you aim of doing, at least invest a decent amount of money in hiring good developers and designers. If not anything get a content writer who will write you an original description of your app for as low as ₹1000.

4. Promoting a competitor of whatsapp on whatsapp is a brilliant move. Give that marketting fellow a big raise.

5. Replacing the phone icon with a shankh is not innovation. Also, everyone knows about spam farms in Bangladesh and many places in India. So boasting about 1.5 lakh downloads in less than an hour only speaks more about your ignorance and lack of technical knowledge.

6. If you really are promoting "swadeshi app", why are you offering logging in through facebook? I mean even a blind person can clearly see your agenda here.

7. Hike is a messaging app made in India and they are here since long and still it are nowhere near the usage of whatsapp. Selling shit in the name of Make in India is not cool and its high time Patanjali realises this. But then again, it is their only marketting strategy because how else can you sell something as gross as cow urine and that too people buying it voluntarily.

8. If this stunt was carried out to be in the news, well played. You are getting a good amount of publicity, but this time a bad publicity will do more harm than good. People are calling out your bluff and you will get to see the results.

Mr. Baba Ramdev, fraud karo, itna blatant mat karo. India ki public sentimental hai chutiya nahi.

If I recognize someone by their username or remember their name.. it's usually a bad thing because they're on my mental blacklist for fucking up Production....

Ahh life in IT Ops...

#3

There are like 50 views. But that's not the bad part about it. Each view is backed up twice or more within the same vie directory by adding a date to the views name.

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've never used Windows in my day-to-day life. No kidding.
When I got my father's first computer, I used an old distribution called BBC Linux. I didn't have any computer knowledge, it was my first contact with a computer, so I went to a friend's house and asked for a CD to install on my computer. I don't know if this friend ended up making a "gotcha" and thought I'd give up, but I just read the manuals and fell in love. That was year 2000.
Then I used Conectiva Linux, then I went to Red Hat 9, then Slackware, then in 2007 I started using Solaris. And I stayed on Solaris (Solaris 10, Solaris Nevada and OpenSolaris) until 2011.
In 2011 I bought a Mac. I stayed at Apple until 2020, when I couldn't stand Apple forcing me to buy new computers (I still don't understand how a 2011 iMac, i5 (4 Hyper Thread cores) with 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD only runs up to High Sierra).
Then I bought a Dell. It came with Windows 10, the first thing I did was install WSL2. I could not stand it, the system is bad, sorry. I installed OpenSuse and have been using it for two years.

It's just that every day someone tells me "how can you use this"? "There is no alternative to Windows, do you want to be different?"

I know that my story was the reverse of the "mainstream", so I'm going to talk about my vision of Windows, that in my brain it is actually the "alternative".

- Having a file explorer without "tabs" in 2022 is unthinkable for me.
- I love terminal. And the Windows terminal is very limited. "ps ... | awk ... | xargs ..." is a must for me. "find ./ -name '...' -exec ..."... these things on Windows are totally "different" and have the "powershell way" while all other operating systems keep the same form. And cygwin is not an option. As Wine for serious work is also not.
- Dragging a file into the terminal, and having it write its path, is so natural, that when Windows didn't do it, I was dismayed.
- I've always used StarOffice, OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. All the people in my story received my documents and reports as a PDF and no one complained. Until a coworker saw me editing in LibreOffice and said "oh I want it in word format". As long as he didn't know, everything was fine, right?
- Windows is paid. And is there advertising? I don't understand. And I refuse. If you want to display advertising, then excuse me. I have no problem paying, I'm not an opensource shiite. It's just that paying and not working bothers me much more than an opensource that I can fix or expect a fix knowing the good will of the people involved.
- Hyper-V is a joke. QEMU/KVM is better, and Bhyve on FreeBSD which is a very young project, is already a million times better than Hyper-V.
- Developing in C/C++ for Windows is only possible in two ways: Either you've always lived in Windows and your brain is conditioned, or you compile with MSYS2 (CLang or GCC).
- There is no significant evolution of the windows desktop since 95.
- Multiple workspace support with multiple monitors, not ready. It's another joke.
- REGEDIT does not need any comment.
- The system loses performance over time. I still don't know how Windows achieves this.
- I've seen people complain about desktop fragmentation on Unix and Linux. Many DEs end up leaving applications with different themes (like running a Qt application in Gnome and GTK in KDE), but to be quite honest, the lack of Windows standard bothered me much more. Even Microsoft's own software is completely different: Control Panel, Calculator, Paint and Office, To-Do, and Settings, have horrible style differences and look-and-feel fragmentation.
- Dark mode has not been implemented. It's another joke. Many applications are white while everything else is dark. Sorry, even on Linux which is a mess, this has been resolved. And well resolved.
- NTFS? Serious?
- C:, D:.. It doesn't convince me since DOS.
- Bloatware.
- News "biased" in the search bar is a lack of respect for those who use the computer to work.

And that. For me, Windows is the alternative operating system. I can't take Windows seriously, for me it's an experimental one like Haiku or ReactOS. It's good to play.

About market share, it doesn't convince me to use it. But convinces me to sell. I've always developed applications to run on Windows. And when I need it, I turn on a VM to compile the project. But in everyday life? Impractical.

I'm taking an Intro to Programming course along aside an Intro to Computers class so I already know about basic programing, still very new to it though! At the end of the Intro to Comp, we're learning about programming and a classmate was having a hard time understanding assignments and variables.

I explained the idea of the input command at least three times and he kept trying to print out a statement he just wanted to write in instead of printing out the input that the user will enter. He also assigned the same name to different variables.

Explained that what he was doing was not versatile and not useful, explained in an example situation, explained by writing some lines of code myself (THRICE), and he still had trouble understanding me. I didn't want to hold his hand the entire time.

Glad that I was called to leave early since I might get too frustrated if I had to stay back and continue to help him.

Hope he managed to finish the assignments successfully though! Feel kinda bad now...

I joined ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) when I helped my friends found out school's chapter.

I haven't had time to explore all it offers (other than free access to books I'm using for my certs), but I got an email saying they elected Cherri Pancake as President and I can't stop laughing. I feel a bit bad for the lady, as she may have had no say in her name (if it's her maiden name), but it's a wonderful name that makes me happy.

I'm planning on writing an open source (and much improved) version of my logger, but I'm stuck on picking a name :<

So, anyone have naming suggestions for a tagged and branching/nesting logging library? (ES6)

(I don't think "deforestation" is a good choice. sounds kinda bad.)

Security lifehacks 101

Why pay for password managers? Just use one secure password for every service you use! Password managers are really designed for fools who don’t know that you can just use one password for every service and who are ready to pay for that shit.

The best practice is to use your name starting with a capital letter + your main credit card number + CVC code from the back of that card as your go-to password. It’s long and hard to bruteforce and you can remember everything that way! You just need to remember that one password and you’ll always remember your payment info! No need for apple’s bad Apple Pay which is not so secure after all like everything else that Apple offers.

I've just realised it might be a bad idea to use my real name on devRant.

I use it everywhere online. Work "agree" to leave my social alone... but I'm still sure they spy on me.

Whoops. Hi?

One of the worst guys I've worked with was a guy from Romania that got at consulting gig where I used to work. He didn't have an apartment at first, so one of the senior guys let him live at his house to get going. He repaid that favor by drinking all the wine in the house, leaving glasses everywhere. He also sang opera on the front porch early in the morning disturbing all the neighbours.

At work he spent more time outside smoking his strong foreign sigarettes than inside coding. One day he just disappeared, and no one could get a hold of him on the phone or email. Days turned to weeks, and our manager ended up sending him an email saying "I don't know where you went, but don't bother coming back".

The best part of this story is that when we were hiring the next time, he actually applied. You know what he wrote? "I'M BETTER NOW".. 😂😂

(The sad thing is that the code he wrote wasn't half bad, but the guy? Jesus. We just called him Vlad. Don't know his real name to this date)

I have been working for my current employer about 3 years now. When I first got to work I was asked by another employee to work on an editor for certain types of files. We will call this employee Ed. Because his name is Ed.

Ed is a verifiable genius, and a genuinely great guy to work with. He is amazing with hardware and math. Ed has a need, or shall I say fetish. He wants an editor for some our proprietary files called "Settings files". They are just xml. Nothing special.

However, I have always had other priorities. We actually had a tense moment when I had to tell Ed my boss doesn't want me to work on the editor. I had started looking into working on the editor when my boss said stop working on this file. So since then it had become a running joke between Ed and myself. Well, I think it is funny, Ed smiles, but I know he wants this editor bad. Our boss even suggested at one time that Ed write this editor. He looked into it, but "other priorities" trumped this effort.

Okay, so now it has been 3 years and we still don't have this editor. Then I had an epiphany. Since Ed wants this editor I found an idea for the name of this program. "Settings Editor" is just too mundane. I now think it should be called: "Mr. Edit". I also found that the library we use for most of our development has text to speech built in. So when the program starts I can have it say: "Hello, I am Mr. Edit, the talking Settings Editor". I have never wanted to write this program so badly before. Muahahahahaha!

At this point, I just feel bad for my coworker.

No, I am not frustrated or angry, just feeling terribly bad for her as how difficult life must be for someone so dumb.

We are introducing a new method to track some data in our product, like total number of sign-ups, DAU, etc.

Now the implementation is already WIP and this is known to all.

The dev has documented the approach where he has mapped the screen name, a screenshot, and a snippet of the schema that tracks that particular screen.

I kid you not guys, this coworker somehow landed on that document and started some scientific study to try and extract data.

Yes, she looked at the schema screenshot and spent like few hours trying to decode it to figure out the sign-ups and DAU.

Data via a screenshot in a document. I can't even express it.

And then texts me in panic mode that she isn't able to access the data because the file is . jpeg within a document.

I asked where is she executing the schema, because I thought she is joking initially. She said she doesn't know and asked me where she should execute it.

My mind is numb. Life must be real hard when you are so fucking dumb.

So ok here it is, as asked in the comments.

Setting: customer (huge electronics chain) wants a huge migration from custom software to SAP erp, hybris commere for b2b and ... azure cloud
Timeframe: ~10 months….

My colleague and me had the glorious task to make the evaluation result of the B2B approval process (like you can only buy up till € 1000, then someone has to approve) available in the cart view, not just the end of the checkout. Well I though, easy, we have the results, just put them in the cart … hmm :-\
The whole thing is that the the storefront - called accelerator (although it should rather be called decelerator) is a 10-year old (looking) buggy interface, that promises to the customers, that it solves all their problems and just needs some minor customization. Fact is, it’s an abomination, which makes us spend 2 months in every project to „ripp it apart“ and fix/repair/rebuild major functionality (which changes every 6 months because of „updates“.

After a week of reading the scarce (aka non-existing) docs and decompiling and debugging hybris code, we found out (besides dozends of bugs) that this is not going to be easy. The domain model is fucked up - both CartModel and OrderModel extend AbstractOrderModel. Though we only need functionality that is in the AbstractOrderModel, the hybris guys decided (for an unknown reason) to use OrderModel in every single fucking method (about 30 nested calls ….). So what shall we do, we don’t have an order yet, only a cart. Fuck lets fake an order, push it through use the results and dismiss the order … good idea!? BAD IDEA (don’t ask …). So after a week or two we changed our strategy: create duplicate interface for nearly all (spring) services with changed method signatures that override the hybris beans and allow to use CartModels (which is possible, because within the super methods, they actually „cast" it to AbstractOrderModel *facepalm*).
After about 2 months (2 people full time) we have a working „prototype“. It works with the default-sample-accelerator data. Unfortunately the customer wanted to have it’s own dateset in the system (what a shock). Well you guess it … everything collapsed. The way the customer wanted to "have it working“ was just incompatible with the way hybris wants it (yeah yeah SAP, hybris is sooo customizable …). Well we basically had to rewrite everything again.
Just in case your wondering … the requirements were clear in the beginning (stick to the standard! [configuration/functinonality]). Well, then the customer found out that this is shit … and well …

So some months later, next big thing. I was appointed technical sublead (is that a word)/sub pm for the topics‚delivery service‘ (cart, delivery time calculation, u name it) and customerregistration - a reward for my great work with the b2b approval process???

Customer's office: 20+ people, mostly SAP related, a few c# guys, and drumrole .... the main (external) overall superhero ‚im the greates and ur shit‘ architect.
Aberage age 45+, me - the ‚hybris guy’ (he really just called me that all the time), age 32.
He powerpoints his „ tables" and other weird out of this world stuff on the wall, talks and talks. Everyone is in awe (or fear?). Everything he says is just bullshit and I see it in the eyes of the others. Finally the hybris guy interrups him, as he explains the overall architecture (which is just wrong) and points out how it should be (according to my docs which very more up to date. From now on he didn't just "not like" me anymore. (good first day)
I remember the looks of the other guys - they were releaved that someone pointed that out - saved the weeks of useless work ...

Instead of talking the customer's tongue he just spoke gibberish SAP … arg (common in SAP land as I had to learn the hard way).
Outcome of about (useless) 5 meetings later: we are going to blow out data from informatica to sap to azure to datahub to hybris ... hmpf needless to say its fucking super slow.
But who cares, I‘ll get my own rest endpoint that‘ll do all I need.

First try: error 500, 2. try: 20 seconds later, error message in html, content type json, a few days later the c# guy manages to deliver a kinda working still slow service, only the results are wrong, customer blames the hybris team, hmm we r just using their fucking results ...
The sap guys (customer service) just don't seem to be able to activate/configure the OOTB odata service, so I was told)
Several email rounds, meetings later, about 2 months, still no working hybris integration (all my emails with detailed checklists for every participent and deadlines were unanswered/ignored or answered with unrelated stuff). Customer pissed at us (god knows why, I tried, I really did!). So I decide to fly up there to handle it all by myself

Why do some people have to be so self-centered?

They asked for my help with a logo. I said I will help even without any charges. I know they don't want to spend money. And that's why I frankly said I can help free. But then they said they will feel bad then and ask for my quotation. Ok, I sent.

They said "Sorry it is too high, can you give 60% discount?" Ok, sure.

Then they asked if they can get it in 4 days. Ok, I said.

Then they said they changed the name just now.

At least give me a fucking ounce of respect.

Most succesful project was around this time last year.

A scary club of privacy haters made a 'webapp' to advise people what to vote for in the national elections.

The tool was really bad in multiple ways. For instance, if two parties would score the same amount of points, one would, at random take second place without conveying this to the user.

Oh and it also collected all the data people entered "for scientific purposes". A very sketchy practice, a non profit, funded by the government and George Soros (I kid you not, illuminatie confirmed ;) ).

The tool had this disclaimer on the bottom, saying this webapp needs cookies to function. So that triggered me to make a copy of the tool that works better and ... offline, and without cookies. You could download a html file and turn of your wifi (for the paranoid ppl among us), use the tool, delete the file. No trace.

It was a little bit of tung and cheek project, a gimick, the original was called stemwijzer, mine was called offline stemwijzer.

It was a one day build and a day after launching I got a call of the original stemwijzer project leader. Demanding to take the thing offline for infringing copyright (yeah sort of was). I tried to explain him why I made this and why privacy for such things should be held in high regard. He basicly told me I was talking shit and did not want to discuss, I told him I don't take stuff offline because of phone calls. I told him to email me a seist and desist.

So that guy prolly had a stressful day (because of the launch of his tool), had a few glasses of wine, and wrote an email. He wrote me I was a pathtic kid and I should do more useful stuff. He wrote that anyone could program a tool like that. And he wrote me I should do him a favour not share this email with my measly amount of twitter followers. Super professional email.

So I did him that favour, I did not share it with my twitter followers, I shared it with one of the largest political blogs in the country.

My tool sort of took of after that. To stop infringing copy right I changed the name and I removed their content from the script and wrote instructions on how to copy and paste in the json content yourself and "make your own tool".

The response was great, people actually emailed me job offers and I think that the current job I have is due to the succes of said project. So be balsy, challenge giants, start riots, it will get you places.

When I started off working on this particular project under a new technical manager, I used to love working overtime because the work and the problem we were trying to solve was really interesting. My technical lead was also a really awesome dude and I was able to learn a lot of things under his guidance. A couple of times, I didn't even mind working on the weekends too in case we wanted to meet some strict deadlines. I wanted to make sure that my team's brand name does not get spoiled and we deliver on what we promise.

It was all good until all the management started taking our overtime and weekend work for granted. It took me some time to realize this. Now it almost became a part of standard expectations. It was getting irritating. Managers could see this uneasiness but chose to do nothing.

The work increased, so did the team and the communication channels. The newbies in the team now worked overtime and on weekends. And everybody started acting as if it was normal. That's when it stuck me that I am responsible for inculcating this unsustainable and life sucking culture in the team. I stopped working overtime and started questioning the set deadlines, often asking them to postpone things. Management got furious and changed their focus on the newbies who'd work overtime, often rewarding them to reinforce the behavior.

I tried undoing it, asking managers that the team will not work on weekends. There was friction and managers would agree but the old bad habited cultural spore would pop up tume and again and the team would go back to the regular overtime and working weekends thing. As more time passed, the managers would circumvent me and start talking to others in the team, giving them work and deadlines directly because I started to say 'No' when I felt the need to do so. I tried to protect some folks in the team who would not be able to speak up but were frustrated. I started caring less about the team's brand and more about colleagues who were suffering due to such unethical (and illegal?) practices being normalised in the team.

Trying again and again to get back to 'normal', I failed everytime. Unsure of how far I'll be able to go on with this without getting severly burnt in the process and seeing no respite, I decided to move on. I put in my resignation two weeks back and want to start a fresh in another company.

I feel I am responsible for bringing this into the team without realizing the repurcussions of my working overtime. Staying in the team for more than 3.5 years, I could actually feel how managers have no fucks about your personal life and work life balance (despite showing oh so much concern about the well being of my family) and would reward anyone who works as per their whims and fancies. I wish I never get to work for a management such as this.

I want to share this story and need your advise.

When I was teaching exisiting team members about git and new iOS development ecosystem. I was changing the whole ios development practices and processes that time. One of my teammates wasn’t listening, when implementing the new ios development practices and standards, he actually screwed all of the projects.

He’s been with us for 2 years and he even don’t know how to use git. He forcefully push his changes without pulling our changes first. I was so angry that I reported him to my manager to address this matter. And then my manager told me, he is aware of my teammate’s incapabilities. He said he was planning to terminate him, and he is been thinking about it for 3 months.

When the judgement day came, we were in the meeting room. My manager told us the bad news that one of us will be terminated. During the meeting he said, “I am sorry, {my teammate’s name}. You will be out of the team due to {reason of termination}. {my name} reported to me that you dont meet the deadline, you are always late with 2 weekly sprint to your tickets”. As my manager keeps talking, my teammate look at me with his eyes so angry together with his girlfriend (her girlfriend is part of mobile team, but she is focused on UI/UX).

After my manager stops talking, her girlfriend started crying and said I was the one who should be terminated. Her reason was that I keep on giving difficult tasks to his boyfriend, that’s why he is always late to report. In my defense, those tasks are not difficult, most of his tasks is just changing the color of labels, changing layouts. If you are an iOS developer you know how easy it is to change font colors, changing the layouts using storyboards. Her girlfriend keeps on rambling that I should be the one needs to be terminated.

After few days, he left the team and surprisingly his girlfriend stayed and we never talk to each other except anything about work.

I am really pissed guys. Now my teammates think I am the bad guy asking my manager to terminate anyone in the team if I feel to. I feel very very not good in my work now. I can’t function what I used to. The termination of my teammate was already planned why am I should take the blame?

When I did games dev in college, it’s fair to say that most of my class started off really stupid. Like, I met these people. We were all dumb.

Except this one guy. His name was Jordan. He was huge. He smelled bad. Everyone made fun of him, (I kept my distance in fear of being decimated because he was known for his temper).

But fuck, that guy knew how to model and code. In the time we had spent working out how to build a single model or write a working line of code, he’d been working on this full scale Skyrim-esque environment that just reminded me of Whiterun.

I wonder what he’s doing now.

The display of the candy machine in my job works bad. At least the manufacturer it's honestly with that name...

I promised a friend to have a look over his dads website to add a small blog. No big deal, I've got it on my drive, can reuse it just need to adapt it to the environment.

I take a look at what I'm working with and I see the most terrifying piece of "Please, take my data" code I could possibly imagine (And I've seen passwords, in plain text in a script tag). I quote "function queryDB(mode, val) {
var query=" ";
if(mode==="findProd")
query="Select * from Products where ProdNam=" +val;
... (same shit for different cases)
sendQuery(query) ;
}

He literally built the query on the client side sent it to a php script (without validation) and inserted it into the database.
You could literally call window.sendQuery with any sql query and get the result printed into the console.
And other than the plain text passwords guy that wasn't some kid someone knew, this was a "Webdesign" Agency.
Now I took the entire thing offline, called my friends dad, explained it to him and try to sort this out. I would not charge a good friends father but that hack will get a quite hefty bill since my hourly rate just tripled.

And the worst thing : If I publicly name that asshole or warn the people in his portfolio I can, according to Google, be sued. (But, and I assume thats vague enough not to count as bad mouthing, if anyone of you has a customer from Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany with a preexisting page, please have a look at the database interface)
I will call that agency tomorrow, ask for a detailed explanation for why they apparently let trained monkeys write their code and anonymously warn everyone in their portfolio about those flaws...

I don't know if I'm cursed or if there are just that many bad devs but it seems that once a year I have to stumble over some "mistakes" that make me question my sanity.

In my school, eleventh grade (so nearly "Abitur", A levels), we got the task to create a program which will be running on every computer here which should replace the Classbook (like a book where homework and lessons and stuff is written down).
Now, the class before mine already did a part of that, a program to share who is ill/not at school, with a mark whether it is excused or not.
So far so good. They all seemed not that bad when they were presenting it to us. Then, the first thing: they didn't know what git is. Well, okay I thought.
Next, there was this password field to access the program. One of them entered the password and clicked enter. That seemed suspiciously fast for an actual secure login. So fast, the password could have been in the Code...
Yesterday I copied that program and put it into a decompiler.
And... I was right.
There were the login credentials in plain text. Also, haven't thought of it but, IP address + username + password + database name were there in plain text, too.
Guess I am going to rewrite this program down to the core

Zero Days documentary about stuxnet malware features a "identity protected" NSA employee who reveals information about classified NSA tactics.

She claims "I would NEVER compromise ongoing operations in the field."

Well it's too bad that Amazon Prime Video and IMDB don't share your values. They have compromised your name, Joanne Tucker, and the other films you were in.

Nice acting though. You really have people believing you were a real source!

Client A

At the first few meetings, told us they are giving sponsors to World Cup 2018 and we should totally talk about it loudly on media.

Then when we submitted our plan, they said things have changed and they no longer can mention about World Cup. We had to redo everything.

Now, they blame us that our service quality is so bad that we should learn from *some refernce* company. Said company is only talking about their sponsorship for World Cup.

---

Client B

Bought smallest package from us. Demand services greater than our largest package.

Gave us an information of a name spelled in "Barbu". We used that spelling and used it for various tasks in past few weeks. All approved by client.

Blamed us we are giving such a poor service that we cannot even spell "Babu" correctly this morning.

Got a ticket saying we need our website's record creation wizard to have better validation. No worries, just some regex, right?

Sure, regex for name entry (with the usual white person assumptions about names), and fixing the fact that it's in-page popup doesn't close on save. Or save draft. Or delete.

And also you need to apply the name regex for the fields on this page to all the previous names that the user lists.

And there's that one issue where the address history message always shows no matter what.

Oh and make sure that if they choose to ignore those validation issues then the validation message is in the notes for the record.

And fix the thing where it saves as draft instead of as a normal record.

And and and and and...

Can we just talk about making it 1 problem per ticket? This sort of shit makes me look bad when it takes me a week to fix 1 ticket, when I'm usually a few-a-day kinda person

Fuck Homestead.

For the fortune of you not to know, Homestead is a sad attempt at a Wix-like build your own website platform.

However, Homestead is the most unusable piece of shit platform that humans have ever had the misery of interacting with

Lets start off with the login page. The login page is small, unresponsive and half the time just deletes your input whenever you press submit.

It's important to note that unless you're running MacOS or Windows, Homestead will send to an error page on which there's a link to contact support, but pressing that link requires MacOS or Windows.

Fine, I'll fiddle around with my user-agent, and we'll be in soon enough. But now we come to the joy that is the website editor itself.

The website editor is clunky, hard to use, and has enough menus and submenus and sidebars to make the Jira UI shake with fear. Each interface option label is either ridiculously ambiguous or just straight up wrong. The built-in HTML editor doesn't support HTML5, in the name of "browser compatibility".

CSS? Pah! Who needs it! Our psuedo-90s skeuomorphic ugly-as-shit prebuilt styles will work just fine. Responsive design? Bullshit! Nobody uses a smartphone to browse the web, so why do we need to handle it?

Uploading a file? Good fucking luck buddy. There's a complicated dance among the minefield of pop-ups that ask you to confirm some shit or modify some shit and you gotta click the right option each time or else the file won't upload.

Wanna use https like 86% of the entire web and all modern websites? That's a premium feature. Fork over an extra $10 a month

Ok ok, I made it through all that. Dig through the thousands of menus to find the 'publish changes' button, and sigh with relief.

Open up a private browser tab to check my work, and nope. The site looks like shit, even by Homestead's standards. That's because Homestead claims to be a WYSIWYG editor, but it's a damn lie. The site looks like shit, so it's time do dive back into the hellhole that is this damn site editor.

And rinse and repeat. Deal with the shitty editor, publish, and pray it doesn't look like garbage. Be too scared to test on other devices because this flaming pile of dog shit pretending to be a website is bad enough on my device.

Two more months, then I'm done with this client. Someone get me a drink

Can we talk about Google Allo for a second?

What the everloving f*ck, Google? I don't get it. You built a perfectly solid, pretty chat app with lots of neat features and interesting ideas. And then you ruin it by completely neutering SMS support.

Here's (roughly) what your recipient gets when you message someone who isn't on Allo:

(Allo)(Name): <message> Send STOP to stop Allo messages. Download Allo here: <shortlink>

iMessage figured out SMS integration three f*cking years ago, how could you guys have messed this up so bad?

</rant>

! rant

Sorry but I'm really, really angry about this.

I'm an undergrad student in the United States at a small state college. My CS department is kinda small but most of the professors are very passionate about not only CS but education and being caring mentors. All except for one.

Dr. John (fake name, of course) did not study in the US. Most professors in my department didn't. But this man is a complete and utter a****le. His first semester teaching was my first semester at the school. I knew more about basic programming than he did. There were more than one occasion where I went "prof, I was taught that x was actually x because x. Is that wrong?" knowing that what I was posing was actually the right answer. Googled to verify first. He said that my old teachings were all wrong and that everything he said was the correct information. I called BS on that, waited until after class to be polite, and showed him that I was actually correct. Denied it.

His accent was also really problematic. I'm not one of those people who feel that a good teacher needs a native accent by any standard (literally only 1 prof in the whole department doesn't), but his English was *awful*. He couldn't lecture for his life and me, a straight A student in high school, was almost bored to sleep on more than one occasion. Several others actually did fall asleep. This... wasn't a good first impression.

It got worse. Much, much worse.

I got away with not having John for another semester before the bees were buzzing again. Operating systems was the second most poorly taught class I've ever been in. Dr John hadn't gotten any better. He'd gotten worse. In my first semester he was still receptive when you asked for help, was polite about explaining things, and was generally a decent guy. This didn't last. In operating systems, his replies to people asking for help became slightly more hostile. He wouldn't answer questions with much useful information and started saying "it's in chapter x of the textbook, go take a look". I mean, sure, I can read the textbook again and many of us did, but the textbook became a default answer to everything. Sometimes it wasn't worth asking. His homework assignments because more and more confusing, irrelavent to the course material, or just downright strange. We weren't allowed to use muxes. Only semaphores? It just didn't make much sense since we didn't need multiple threads in a critical zone at any time. Lastly for that class, the lectures were absolutely useless. I understood the material more if I didn't pay attention at all and taught myself what I needed to know. Usually the class was nothing more than doing other coursework, and I wasn't alone on this. It was the general consensus. I was so happy to be done with prof John.

Until AI was listed as taught by "staff", I rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes.

AI was the worst course I've ever been in. Our first project was converting old python 2 code to 3 and replicating the solution the professor wanted. I, no matter how much debugging I did, could never get his answer. Thankfully, he had been lazy and just grabbed some code off stack overflow from an old commit, the output and test data from the repo, and said it was an assignment. Me, being the sneaky piece of garbage I am, knew that py2to3 was a thing, and used that for most of the conversion. Then the edits we needed to make came into play for the assignment, but it wasn't all that bad. Just some CSP and backtracking. Until I couldn't replicate the answer at all. I tried over and over and *over*, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and could find Nothing. Eventually I smartened up, found the source on github, and copy pasted the solution. And... it matched mine? Now I was seriously confused, so I ran the test data on the official solution code from github. Well what do you know? My solution is right.

So now what? Well I went on a scavenger hunt to determine why. Turns out it was a shift in the way streaming happens for some data structures in py2 vs py3, and he never tested the code. He refused to accept my answer, so I made a lovely document proving I was right using the repo. Got a 100. lol.

Lectures were just plain useless. He asked us to solve multivar calculus problems that no one had seen and of course no one did it. He wasted 2 months on MDP. I'd continue but I'm running out of characters.

And now for the kicker. He becomes an a**hole, telling my friends doing research that they are terrible programmers, will never get anywhere doing this, etc. People were *crying* and the guy kept hammering the nail deeper for code that was honestly very good because "his was better". He treats women like delicate objects and its disgusting. YOU MADE MY FRIEND CRY, GAVE HER A BOX OF TISSUES, AND THEN JUST CONTINUED.

Want to know why we have issues with women in CS? People like this a****le. Don't be prof John. Encourage, inspire, and don't suck. I hope he's fired for discrimination.

BielyApp, yeah, GOOOOOOOOD IDEA! I still can‘t understand how this works or why did a reasonable human being though that this would be a great idea! 🤔

Ok. There‘s a community that lives 4 or 5 hours from my my city. I don‘t want to offend anybody, so let‘s call them “Bielys” (just a random name, I don’t know if there’s actually a group or etnia with that name).
Bielys live isolated from modernity, they speak their own language and they don’t use technology.

A dev friend of mine was having a hard time (he got divorced and was almost in bankrupt). One day, a man asked him and another dev to work on a mobile app:

...

“BielyApp”.

...

It was supposed to be a movile app for commerce. Bielys could sell and buy biely stuff from another bielys. Well, at this point you can figure out why this was a bad idea. Anyway, they developed it. Even it’s on GooglePlay and AppStore 😱 I installed it to see if it was truth or not. Incredibly it was true. BielyApp exists and the worst thing is that you can log in with your facebook account. WTF?!

I asked to him “But why?! WHY?! They don’t even use smartphones!!!!”
And he answered “I know, but I needed the money”

Well... I once accidentally deleted a classmates entire assignment. Basically we were working together on one and we had the code in Github, I had named the repo after the module code.
He was having some weird git issues and I thought it would be easier to just delete and re-clone on his machine. You can probably see where this is going.

Me: rm -rf <DIR NAME> Enter
Him: wait, which folder did you just delete

Turns out he had the repo cloned inside another directory with the EXACT SAME NAME, which also contained his previous assignment, the only copy of it in the entire universe (it was a group project and they did it all on his laptop with no source control, which i found hilarious).
It wasnt so bad since that assignment was already submitted and graded, but a bit of a fail on both our parts.

I was mentoring a group of students and helping them with their graduation project. I taught them NodeJS, MongoDB & few other things.

One time, one of them came to show me her code, and it has the weirdest and most bizarre structure ever!

I asked her, “who told you to structure your code like that? This is wrong! I didn’t teach you this way!”.

She replies: “<<a local shitty tech startup name>>’s CTO”

When I searched about him, he’s a civil engineer who founded a startup and assigned himself as CTO with no technical background or knowledge whatsoever! FFS students believe that he’s a real CTO and started learning from him 😑 His code was so bad in every way that a fresh would write a better code!

fuck my school. all i had to do was log in to see my grades and what do i get? the fucking stack trace. security? i think not. seriously though, why the fuck would my county want to make their own grading website when the one we had worked just fine? it looks like it was written terribly, the cause was just a bad socket connection and it even gave me the server name and version. i copied it to a google doc (it was already shortened) and it took up seven pages. jesus.

How do you debate the "it's more complex in my opinion" statement?

So, some months ago I was looking at some code which has stuff as 300 lines of code function(s) and I could feel the bad smell irl...

I analyze it a bit and there is a lot of stuff which is misplaced, repeated or unsafe.
I first re-arrange it and remove redundancy, then break it down in about five functions (plus a caller), all is now readable and assignIcon k(made-up name) only assigns an icon, it doesn't also send a rocket in space.

But then I put the code in review and the previous author of the code says that it's now unreadable, because s/he has to look as multiple functions. I counter by showing how s/he does not need to read 300 lines of code to find a bug, but approximately 60, and I point at how misleading having an `assignIcon` function which also sends rockets in space is.
The counter? "But it looks confusing to have smaller functions, revert it."

How would you debate that? I am shy and hate myself a lot, so I have issues debating good points, but I am really really sure a lot of bugs I encountered were due to stuff like this so I would like to be able to explain my point in a more efficient way, for future teams.

Ok, first rant, about my struggles getting reliable internet over the past 6 years. It's not too interesting of a topic, but here we go:

I'm living in a more rural part of Germany and internet here is shit. I pay more than 50 bucks a month for 700kb/s downstream (let's just not talk about upstream...), which is meh by itself but it gets worse. Before this I had roughly 230kb/s downstream using DSL. My provider came out with a new oh-so-fucking-fancy solution for giving people faster internet without upgrading their lame ass fucking backbone and POS infrastructure from 70 years ago: they sell you hybrid internet which combines your shit DSL and an LTE connection using TCP Multicast. Not only do I get only 6 of my promised (and payed for) 50 Mbit, no, It's also a fucking piece of nonworking shit!!!

Let me illustrate:
You constantly have problems with web content (or any remote content) not loading because the host server does not support TCP Multicast. It either refuses connection altogether or it takes about 30-50 seconds to establish a connection. Think about your live when it takes two or three fucking minutes to load 5 YouTube thumbnails or load new tweets at the bottom of the Twitter page! Also, you never know if you a) have an error in your implementation of a new API or if b) the remote host doesn't support TCPMC (there's never an error for that! Fuck you!), your SSH sessions ALWAYS drop in the most inopportune fucking moments because the LTE thing lost connection, you always have to turn on a VPN if you want to visit specific websites (for example your school's website) and so on....

Oh and also, my provider started throttling specific services again these days with Netflix and YouTube struggling to display 240p, fucking 240p video without buffering when I get 600kbit down on steam (ofc the steam download is paused when watching videos). When using a VPN, YouTube 720p and Netflix HD work like a charm again. Fucking Telekom bastards

Then there is the problem with VPNs. The good thing about them is that they solve all the TCP Multicast problems. Yay. Now for the bad things:
First of all, as soon as I use a VPN, access times to remote go up by like fucking 500%. A fucking DNS lookup takes 8-15 seconds!!! The bandwidth is there but it takes forever.. because reasons I guess. Then the speed drops to DSL speeds after a while because the router turns off my LTE connection when it is unused and it does not detect VPN traffic as traffic (again because... Reasons?) And also, the VPN just dies after an hour and you have to manually reconnect (with every VPN provider so far)

And as if that wasn't enough, now the lan is dying on me, too, with the router (the fucking expensive hybrid piece of shit, 230 bucks..) not providing DHCP service anymore or completely refusing all wifi connections or randomly dropping 5Ghz devices, or.....

You get the point.

The worst thing is, they recently layed down 400mbit fiber in my neighborhood. Guess where the FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT CABLE ENDS??? YEAH, RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY NEIGHBORS HOUSE. STREET NUMBER 19 IS SERVED WITH 400MBIT AND MY HOME, THE 20, IS NOT IN THEIR FUCKING SERVICE REGION. Even though there is a fucking cable with the cable companies name on it on my property, even leading up to my house! They still refuse to acknowledge it! FUCK YOU!!!!

Well anyways thanks for reading. Any of you got the same problems? :/

If Java versions can coexist on a system
If all java versions have their own packages on the AUR
If you can change envvars in a launch script and be sure that all processes of the application will persist your settings
Then why THE FUCK do package maintainers keep announcing to change the default java version to install their package, rather than explicitly doing that by themselves? Fuck off, do you really think yours is the only package that needs a specific Java version? Do you think each and every user will write their own init script, or edit the PKGBUILD to include the new version as an envvar in the desktop file? This is why Arch has a bad name, and they're fucking right. If you don't have the time to put a single motherfucking diff in the motherfucking pkgbuild to specify the java version in the desktop file, then don't fucking maintain the package. I know there are too few maintainers, but pretending to maintain a package while doing fuckall is much worse than leaving it unmaintained on the AUR so the first person who has time can pick it up.

Every website we craft at work has some email substitution logic so that addresses you see on the site don't actually exist in the HTML source like that (you wouldn't find them in a format like "foo@example.com").

Instead the @ and the period right before the TLD get replaced with something else (to prevent (dumb) spam bots from using that address and blast it with junk).

Some people replaced them with images in the past (ew), replaced the @ with "(at)" or other stuff.

I made it a habit to render the @ and . by replacing them with span tags which then get a ::before in CSS that contains "content: '@';", so that the @ is visible but is not actually inside the HTML source code.

The classes for these spans then have a random name (persistent for that website though). The first one was called "move-along-nothing-to-see-here", but then I started naming them after Star Wars quotes.

One website's @ class is called "that-s-no-moon" (Obi Wan), others are called "i-have-a-bad-feeling-about-this" (Han Solo), "powerful-you-have-become-the-dark-side-I-sense-in-you." (Yoda) and "these-are-not-the-droids-you-are-looking-for" (Obi Wan).

Company has a severe lack of fresh blood.

"let's recruit everyone who has an IQ over room temperature and barely passes the mark".

Me protesting bloody murder cause I know that the idea is not just profoundly dumb, but frustration from high staff turnover takes a toll on *everyone*.

"nah can't be that bad".

Then the discussion started who could do monitoring and mentoring, so we can sort out the bad apples *quickly*.

Me reminding again that this is exactly what leads to a high staff turnover, as this is nothing else than "hire, hire - quickly fire".

Guess who won the award of being the mentor / monitor ....

*drum roll*

Come on, I know you would NEVER expect this.

Let me surprise you: M E.

Yeah. They chose the person that was absolutely against this idea...

Because that person is "most qualified for the task at hand and has the necessary qualifications".

Today was the first 4 h workshop with a new recruit.

The Lord has had zero mercy on me.

I started to mute myself after 30 minutes in regular intervals to just scream and curse the world.

How profound dumb a person can be amazes me.

Person has had a "very expensive 6 month boot camp course".

I was close asking if the boot camp course was in watching porn and wanking their brain cells out....

Git... Yeah he knew what he was doing...

Except that he messed up every commit by either not sticking to the companies format or - what I found funny the first 2 times, then not so much anymore - just writing a git commit message like a 15 year old teenage girl would write to their diary.

Programming. Oh yeah. He should be a programmer.

He had much Bootcamp.

Bootcamp expensive. Bootcamp good.

If someone is unable to iterate over an iterator... And instead starts creating an integer based array of a map's key name to then fetch the map value in an for loop based on the created key array.

Yeah. Bootcamp much good.

Creating DTOs...

It took an hour to write a DTO with him... Cause constructors are hard and it's even harder when you have to explain primitive datatypes in Java, null safety, constructors, NPEs, final, ...

Like really no experience at all.

The next week's will be amazing.

Either I get a valium drop or I'm gonna blow my head off, cause mentoring will drain the last bit of hope I had left in me.

Note that I do not blame the recruit (yeah he's dumb. But he has ZERO work experience, so it's not unexpected), I'm just too fed up with getting the poo crown despite being against the whole process.

I think the recruit could make it..........

But that I got the shittiest job ever is really haunting me.

I dunno how I survive the next weeks.

And this is just the first recruit... There will be more.

If I was to name one reason I use Safari on my Mac, it would be internet captchas disappearing completely from all sites. And this is with privacy-protecting measures enabled. I tested them, and it fucks fingerprinters even better than resistFingerprinting flag does in Firefox, and that's HUGE.
It seems like Safari is so rarely used by bad actors that if you use Safari, you get a pass.

The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.

Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.

Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.

A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).

This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.

Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:

1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.

2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).

3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.

4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.

5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.

He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.

Here are some shitty stuff he has done:

1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.

2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.

3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.

4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.

One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.

While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.

Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.

I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.

Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.

Thanks for reading this far!

!dev

I had semi-jokingly changed my username from dextel2 to nothappy, because of that one bad day.

But, it is now when I realized that I am actually NOT HAPPY, things are lately rough, I am constantly scared for no reason, I doubt my skills, I doubt myself for no reason, and top of that there's always a chance for another epileptic attack.

I tried and keep trying to distract myself from negative thoughts but the more I try the more I fail, I've become distant with my younger brother, for the record I'm very overprotective about him. I don't even know if he feels the same, as this year ends or every day passes by I feel changed from my past self (not in a good way).

Switched my first job to get another good job, turns out they don't even have any projects and I'm just a guy they are showcasing like they have ONE amateur developer and we are looking for an entire project and it did work for one client which I'm gonna deny personally because the client is not clear about the project itself, I do not care about the consequences, my heart lies in academics and I'll put my 100% in academics, shall I'm kicked.

A lot has happened in this year, but this one is/was unique and very hard to process. I've always been joyful, sarcastic, funny, you name it, but all of it has just vanished, don't know why. I'm also becoming distant from my ONLY 3 friends and parents.

Saw @Linuxxx sad cuz his name was not among @BroCow porn tags.
So I figured I'd rant to include his name with triple xxx in rant.

Oh on a side node..
How's things going, @Ashkin?
Bad Trifecta still got ye down? :/..

Finally got my anime api somewhat working.

Tomorrow (or in a couple of hours 😅) I'll try to register my first domain and and get my first vps(?) up and running

The api features the data from /r/animethemes, so it'll have 2000+ animes entries with opening / ending urls.

I've also tried to implement some form of searching ('%term%' stuff 🤣), but you better know your abime by its romanized name, or you're gonna have a bad time since I have no alternative names per anime yet.

Hi, my name is bohr and I'm a recovering distro hopper.

It all started with Ubuntu, out of my frustrations with the unintuitive nature of DOS I gravitated to a Unix environment which Ubuntu naturally solved. But I quickly became annoyed with the laggy nature of it's daily usage. So I switched to Linux mint. Loving the HTML/css/js configuration aspect of cinnamon I thought it was the answer to all my problems. But I became annoyed with apt and it's lack of a few programs I wanted. This got me to look into an arch based distro, because pacman seemed like the answer to my problems. Unfortunately there are way too many arch distros to use. I experimented with antegros' many DE options: gnome, kde, i3, deepin, openbox... Always finding something wrong. I tried manjaro and it's many flavors, still being annoyed with minute aspects of the os. Out of frustration, with the deep configuration settings I was getting into and the need to actually focus on the work being done on the computer I crawled back to Linux mint. But now my friends, I have decided that maybe it's time to just use a more established distro? Maybe gnome isn't actually that bad? Maybe I need to give it another try? And that is why, I promise, this is the last hop for me. Arch Linux, Gnome here I come and I'm ready to commit this time!...

But have you guys seen POP!_OS? Woah, I bet it would solve all of my problems....

// first rant

So this isn't really a "dev" rant but I'm a developer taking my first ever design class. It's a senior level, group based class where we design a mobile OS from the ground up, using any inspiration we like. I love it because I'm the developer and designer for all of the Android apps I've worked on so far. I get to practice my design skills and have a portfolio addition. Neat! It's a pretty easy class too.

But my group. Oh God my group.

I spent a week and a half designing the style guide and it was jam packed with anything we'd need. Typography, icons, rationales, you name it!

But noooo, they can't use it because it's not in sketch. As a Windows user, this is infuriating. So three weeks go by and all this work is done that's SUPER INCONSISTENT. Bad colors, elements off by 3px... I mean even the font sizes are just 1 or 2 off. Seriously, I wish I could just be frank with them and tell them to put in the 1% effort to make it right. It's really not that hard. I just don't want to screw up the peace in my group..

A friend of mine asked me yesterday for help for his bachelor thesis.

He wants to write about MySQL internals in regards to BLOB storage / usage.

We had a veeeerrrry long discussion....

And found a loooot of scary internet pages.

It's so .... Insane....

What some people with doctor titles or higher education generate...

Isn't content. More poo...

Most "blogs" / "articles" or whatever the author named it were missing all kinds of relevant data (version, configuration, anything relevant) but full of opinionated / biased bullshit.

Highlights were:
- we store lot of BLOB data, Backups take long and require more space
(you store additional data in an database, whaddya expect???!!!!)

- interesting guesswork about locking without any reference (interesting since it was sometimes so far away from reality that it looked more like quantum physics)

- storing blobs means that _each_ blob entry will be stored in a separate file (without any reference, but if an RDBMs did that... It would end in an amazing fireball I guess)

- BLOB's bad since it can represent only the file content, the database cannot distinguish wether it's an MP3 / MPG or anything like that...

(Ehm. Yeah. And an database cannot distinguish if you store under "Name" an Name or gibberish?!)

I somehow think that some people made an doctor and post this gibberish nonsense so people stay dumb to give them a job...

Like the TV repair men who steals the batteries from the remote.

Even conspiracy theories were more convincing

I used to make batch files that would restart people's computers if they clicked on it. I would of course name it something like "DO NOT CLICK ON THIS OR SOMETHING VERY BAD WILL HAPPEN". It never failed....

TL;DR: Stop. Hating. On. Ads. Here are 5 reasons why:

1. "No one likes ads"
I love seeing *good* ads before I watch a YouTube video. Or I looked up videos that YT recommended because they sounded fun and they were fun:
- Coke - Hey Brother is an amazing and touching short film
- Fressnapf (="food bowl") had an incredibly enjoyable "things you didn't know about cats" video I clicked on purpose and it was good.
- I found JetBrains through ads (free for me, student perks. But tbh I use atom)
and I could name more.

2. What are the alternatives?
I know there are some non-profits and that's cool but you wanna be paid in your job, right? So ads are why Facebook (I know, Facebook isn't enjoyed here but), YouTube, stackoverflow, etc. Wikipedia asks for a few million dollars of donations each year because they don't run ads. Smaller businesses can't do that really. Hell, even codepen has a "sponsored" section. Imagine you would have to pay for all of those services.

3. "Manipulation"
isn't a bad thing unless you abuse it. I manipulate you when I say that I love codepen in the same way an ad does. No one forces you to use a product or watch an ad (you can look away and often times skip).

4. Adblock
What if everyone did that? Adblock blocks happened a while ago and the war between adblock and ad-senders is still ongoing. The moment you see an ad, you are using/watching etc something which the creators thought is worth making money off. If you don't think so, leave the site. I am an adblock user but if the site politely asks me to disable it and I enjoy the content - I will disable it with pleasure.

5. Targeted ads
Yes. The internet is a huge data-crawling piece of shit. But there are many more questionable or even dangerous ways of data-harvesting online. I am glad to see ads I like and not the ones my sister might like. Some services allow you to disable personalized ads. Or use vpn if you really want to.

This Safari Bug is sooo bad, really hard to find it. (It initializes new variables with the element where id and variable name is the same, why?)

Every bad recruiter ever...

---

Hello {name},

I recently came across your CV and {empty compliment}.

Would you be interested in me making 20-40% commission on your yearly salary for doing next to nothing other than make you miserable in 3-6 months time by promising the world and delivering nothing?.

Look forward to making money off you...

{recruiter},
Super Mega Uber Extreme Ltd.

---

Seriously, fuck bad recruiters...

I have this friend of mine, he was a former course mate and we can call him J.
J called a week ago saying he wanted to come stay with me for a few days and I said no problem buddy come home I'm always around.

When he came around he sounded quite different than the J I used to know. The first thing he said when I opened the door for him was "Do you know God?" and I was like "Hunh... Is that the latest javascript framework?". With my reply I was expecting laughter as a response but seems like buddy is serious.

J: Are you ashamed of him?
Me: What's up man? Jesus ain't coming anytime soon *still joking*.
J: Yes, he is. And we...
Me: Okay. Cut the crap man.

That night was quite long as we argued religious stuff front, back and center. I asked him why he became so religious but his response wasn't really clear. What I could sense from the discussion was "he's in it for the money" because while we were arguing he mentioned that God spoke to him that he would own a Mercedes Benz this year, so for that he created a WhatsApp group luring people to join to receive gospel messages and in turn ask them to sow seeds and make offerings all in the name of God. I was both pissed and perplexed by such an act of selfishness. Why don't you just get a real job, I asked J, and he said the jobs he could find doesn't match his taste :/

The religious argument continued to day 3 and I wasn't feeling it because it has affected my work as I couldn't even concentrate on most task that was supposed to be completed that week. I called him the next day and told him he shouldn't come to my place if he won't boycott the religious arguments we normally have at night because those are my working hours and the arguments wasn't helping matters. I ended the call when I got no response.

Throughout the rest of that day I felt guilt for what I had said to him, maybe there would have been a better way of putting out my reasons to him or atleast allow him arrive home before telling him what I just told him. I felt really bad that night, so the next day I tried to reach so he could come around when he's available but his line wasn't going through.

Few hours later I got a call from another friend we can call E.
--- E: Hey, have you seen J lately.
Me: Yes, he has been with me for few days now.
--- E: Is he there now.
-- Me: No he's not.
--- E: I need to let you know what's up. J isn't feeling okay. He has been with me for quite a while but recently this year he started acting strange. I think he has some mental issues.
-- Me: Mental what?
--- E: Yes. One time he pulled of his shirt running towards the street. I asked him where he was going and he said "they're calling me... they're calling me".
-- Me: That must be serious, I never paid attention I just noticed he was acting too religious.
--- E: Yes man. It took some time before I myself realised what was going on.
--- Me: So what do we do?
--- E: I've spoken to his brother and we also informed the police he was missing, I never knew he was with you.
--- Me: I'll try reaching out if I find him I'll get in touch.
--- E: Okay.

Hanging up the phone, I have never felt so broken in my entire life. All through those time I was arguing with someone in need of help.
How could I not have known. I'm stupid... I'm stupid... I'm stupid! I kept stumping my palm on my head. Shame unto me.
There were moments in our arguments with signs of clear red flags, some things he said wasn't just right but I ignored just to win the arguments. At one point he claimed he was God, at another point he said he doesn't need to work to become rich that money will visit him, he said some really bizarre things if I was observant enough I would have noticed but fuck me I didn't.

Next day, I got a call that he has been found and has been taken to a psychiatric hospital. He was suffering from bipolar disorder. When I got there, he no longer recognises me. This was the same person we both argued few nights ago.
This short experience was devastating for me. I cried like a baby right there in room filled with his family and some other friends.

No one knew why I was crying, it was just me and my guilty conscience. This would have been prevented atleast a little if I had acted differently. I can't hug him now... It's of no use. I can't tell him how great a friend he is and and how much he deserves the world now because it would be useless.

I pray day and night that he gets well soon and I could tell him how sorry I am for not realising he had a condition unknown to me.
I get to visit him twice a week and hope he gets back to the J I've always known, my buddy for life 💑

For anyone reading this:
Sometimes the people around you might look okay from the outside but I promise you there is a lot going in on the inside. Show love to whoever call you their friend and also don't take arguments personally (I failed this test), some people uses arguments to validate theirselves and some might not be as sane as you think.
#ListenMoreSayLess

I've had a Xiaomi Mi 8 for a few months now. Although I'm impressed by what I got for the amount I paid (a phone that cost about $250 for 6GB RAM, Snapdragon 845, Android 9 and premium build quality is quite a steal), it definitely comes with a consequence.

MIUI (specifically MIUI 11) is godawful. It is single-handedly the worst Android ROM I've ever used since my shitty Android 2.2 phone back around 2010. If you're gonna buy a Xiaomi phone, plan to install Lineage OS on it (but even that's a pain which I'll explain why later).

- Navigation buttons don't hide while watching a video.

Why? God only knows. The ONLY way to bypass without root this is to use its garbage fullscreen mode with gestures, which is annoying as all hell.

- 2 app info pages?

Yeah, the first one you can access just by going to its disaster of a settings app, apps, manage apps and tap on any one.

The 2nd one you can access through the app info button in any 3rd party launcher. Try this: Download Nova launcher, go to the app drawer, hold on any app and tap "app info", and you'll see the 2nd one.

Basically, instead of modifying Android's FOSS source code, they made a shitty overlay. These people are really ahead of their time.

- Can only set lock screen wallpapers using the stock Gallery app

It's not that big an issue, until it is, when whatever wallpaper app you're using only allows you to set the wallpaper and not download them. I think this is both a fuckup on Xiaomi and (insert wallpaper app name here), but why Xiaomi can't include this basic essential feature that every other Android ROM ever made has is beyond me.

- Theming on MIUI 11 is broken

Why do they even bother having a section to customize the boot animation and status bar when there's not one goddamn theme that supports it? At this point you're only changing the wallpaper and icon pack which you can do on any Android phone ever. Why even bother?

They really, REALLY want to be Apple.

Just look at their phones. They're well designed and got good specs, but they don't even care anymore about being original. The notch and lack of a headphone jack aren't features, they're tremendous fuckups by the dead rotting horse known as Apple that died when Steve Jobs did.

Xiaomi tries to build a walled garden around an inherently customizable OS, and the end result is a warzone of an Android ROM that begs for mercy from its creator. Launchers integrate horribly (Does any power user actually use anything that isn't Nova or Microsoft launcher?), 3rd party themes and customization apps need workarounds, some apps don't work at all. People buy from Xiaomi to get a high end budget Android phone at the price of some ads and data collection, not a shitter iOS wannabe.

They really, REALLY want you to have a sim card

If you don't have a sim card and you're using your phone for dev stuff, you're a 2nd class citizen to Xiaomi. Without one, you can't:

- Install adb through adb
- Write to secure settings
- Unlock your bootloader and get away from this trash Android ROM

What's the point? Are they gonna shadow ban you? Does anyone contact them to unlock their bootloader saying "yeah I wanna use a custom rom to pirate lizard porn and buy drugs"? They made this 1000000000x harder than it needs to be for no reason whatsoever. Oh yeah and you gotta wait like a week or something for them to unlock it. How they fucked up this bad is beyond me.

So yeah. Xiaomi. Great phones, atrocious OS.

Sometimes just I hate school.

While my gf had to take 2 "Leistungskurse" ("advanced courses"), I have to take 3.
Also, our little-country-side school doesn't offer IT-class as a Leistungskurs. So besides Math, I need 2 extra courses I am super-not interested in. I chose English since it's okay (but I'm not really good either) and ( ._.) chemistry. I had a good teacher in 10th grade but now I have this teacher who
- uses 1980 material
- explains not/bad most times
- is childish as fuck (we are 17-18 y/o)
- expects too much (we need to learn everything by heart)
- throws ugly, unorganized prints at us w/o context & explaination
and I could name more. My A-levels are going to be so fucking bad. Tuesday is my chemistry exam. Kill me, please......

So a package came at my door today and it looked like it had stickers in it. I thought they were my devRant stickers and became so overjoyed I happily signed the package and quickly went back in without reading the sender's name.

And then I opened it up and it had a phone's battery.

My sis-in-law sent her phone's battery and asked me to buy and send her a replacement.

Feels fucking bad, man...

Hey Bad-practice, i see you’re looking for a new job? Are you interested in working in the main capital only 60km away?

Yeah sure, here are my contact details.

Ok great! Expect an invitation for somewhere next week.

Two days later i receive an email from their HR manager, who wasn’t even able to spell their own company name correctly... Asking again my phone number that i already gave to the first contact.

Impression so far? Very mediocore.

Today I had a casual chat with my friend and we were discussing how human mind limits the things one can achieve. Like giving up after constant failures, or lack of determination, blaming destiny for failures. I told him I am never easy about the fact that your destiny is pre-written and you can't do anything about it. If you are willing, you can change it. You just need to have the right mindset.
He said I am going to do MBA after engineering. You can't be rich with just engineering. I told him if you work smart and hard enough, and just follow your passion, there is no need for an MBA. And he went on to tell me how top richest persons mostly comprise of businessmen.

I fear for the future. People like this with no goals when take up engineering, they blame everyone but themselves and the stream gets the bad name. People want money, but they don't want to work from the beginning. Even after that they give up too easy.

People like Bill and Mark were not pre-destined. They made themselves. They were just like us, but they never got satisfied with themselves. We all have the capabilities to be them or even better. We just need to keep driving ourselves until we reach there, we don't have to get satisfied. We have to keep improving and learn from our mistakes, then try again.

Got one right now, no idea if it’s the “most” unrealistic, because I’ve been doing this for a while now.

Until recently, I was rewriting a very old, very brittle legacy codebase - we’re talking garbage code from two generations of complete dumbfucks, and hands down the most awful codebase I’ve ever seen. The code itself is quite difficult to describe without seeing it for yourself, but it was written over a period of about a decade by a certifiably insane person, and then maintained and arguably made much worse by a try-hard moron whose only success was making things exponentially harder for his successor to comprehend and maintain. No documentation whatsoever either. One small example of just how fucking stupid these guys were - every function is wrapped in a try catch with an empty catch, variables are declared and redeclared ten times, but never used. Hard coded credentials, hard coded widths and sizes, weird shit like the entire application 500ing if you move a button to another part of the page, or change its width by a pixel, unsanitized inputs, you name it, if it’s a textbook fuck up, it’s in there, and then some.

Because the code is so damn old as well (MySQL 8.0, C#4, and ASP.NET 3), and utterly eschews the vaguest tenets of structured, organized programming - I decided after a month of a disproportionate effort:success ratio, to just extract the SQL queries, sanitize them, and create a new back end and front end that would jointly get things where they need to be, and most importantly, make the application secure, stable, and maintainable. I’m the only developer, but one of the senior employees wrote most of the SQL queries, so I asked for his help in extracting them, to save time. He basically refused, and then told me to make my peace with God if I missed that deadline. Very helpful.

I was making really good time on it too, nearly complete after 60 days of working on it, along with supporting and maintaining the dumpster fire that is the legacy application. Suddenly my phone rings, and I’m told that management wants me to implement a payment processing feature on the site, and because I’ve been so effective at fixing problems thus far, they want to see it inside of a week. I am surprised, because I’ve been regularly communicating my progress and immediate focus to management, so I explain that I might be able to ship the feature by end of Q1, because rather than shoehorn the processor onto the decrepit piece of shit legacy app, it would be far better to just include it in the replacement. I add that PCI compliance is another matter that we must account for, and so there’s not a great chance of shipping this in a week. They tell me that I have a month to do it…and then the Marketing person asks to see my progress and ends up bitching about everything, despite the front end being a pixel perfect reproduction. Despite my making everything mobile responsive, iframe free, secure and encrypted, fast, and void of unpredictable behaviors. I tell her that this is what I was asked to do, and that there should have been no surprises at all, especially since I’ve been sending out weekly updates via email. I guess it needed more suck? But either way, fuck me and my two months of hard work. I mean really, no ego, I made a true enterprise grade app for them.

Short version, I stopped working on the rebuild, and I’m nearly done writing the payment processor as a microservice that I’ll just embed as an iframe, since the legacy build is full of those anyway, and I’m being asked to make bricks without straw. I’m probably glossing over a lot of finer points here too, just because it’s been such an epic of disappointment. The deadline is coming up, and I’m definitely going to make it, now that I have accordingly reduced the scope of work, but this whole thing has just totally pissed me off, and left a bad taste about the organization.

Global variables destroyed my day

Of course you can call me a bad programmer and all. When you have the idea, sometimes globals make it seem easy, accessible and "saving resources". They are devils.

The app was connected to a suite of applications. So I ended up silently destroying it neighbors. I committed and pushed the shit. Just when the testers made their weed high smoke tests, a server stopped working.

I got an email that boss wanted the latest version, I reverted the wrong branch, which had code unrelated to its name, pushed shit again and voila.

I went to the bathroom and laughed. I had to take a smoke. I'm still laughing while typing this. The damage is too much and I can't help it. I'll go home, leave this pc on and work remotely through the night. It might be the hysterics speaking now, but I messed up, and I need magic by friday morning.

I need some opinions on Rx and MVVM. Its being done in iOS, but I think its fairly general programming question.

The small team I joined is using Rx (I've never used it before) and I'm trying to learn and catch up to them. Looking at the code, I think there are thousands of lines of over-engineered code that could be done so much simpler. From a non Rx point of view, I think we are following some bad practises, from an Rx point of view the guys are saying this is what Rx needs to be. I'm trying to discuss this with them, but they are shooting me down saying I just don't know enough about Rx. Maybe thats true, maybe I just don't get it, but they aren't exactly explaining it, just telling me i'm wrong and they are right. I need another set of eyes on this to see if it is just me.

One of the main points is that there are many places where network errors shouldn't complete the observable (i.e. can't call onError), I understand this concept. I read a response from the RxSwift maintainers that said the way to handle this was to wrap your response type in a class with a generic type (e.g. Result<T>) that contained a property to denote a success or error and maybe an error message. This way errors (such as incorrect password) won't cause it to complete, everything goes through onNext and users can retry / go again, makes sense.

The guys are saying that this breaks Rx principals and MVVM. Instead we need separate observables for every type of response. So we have viewModels that contain:

- isSuccessObservable
- isErrorObservable
- isLoadingObservable
- isRefreshingObservable
- etc. (some have close to 10 different observables)

To me this is overkill to have so many streams all frequently only ever delivering 1 or none messages. I would have aimed for 1 observable, that returns an object holding properties for each of these things, and sending several messages. Is that not what streams are suppose to do? Then the local code can use filters as part of the subscriptions. The major benefit of having 1 is that it becomes easier to make it generic and abstract away, which brings us to point 2.

Currently, due to each viewModel having different numbers of observables and methods of different names (but effectively doing the same thing) the guys create a new custom protocol (equivalent of a java interface) for each viewModel with its N observables. The viewModel creates local variables of PublishSubject, BehavorSubject, Driver etc. Then it implements the procotol / interface and casts all the local's back as observables. e.g.

protocol CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable: Observable<Car>
isErrorObservable: Observable<String>
isLoadingObservable: Observable<Void>
}

class CarViewModel {
isSuccessSubject: PublishSubject<Car>
isErrorSubject: PublishSubject<String>
isLoadingSubject: PublishSubject<Void>

// other stuff
}

extension CarViewModel: CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isErrorObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isLoadingObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
}

This has to be created by hand, for every viewModel, of which there is one for every screen and there is 40+ screens. This same structure is copy / pasted into every viewModel. As mentioned above I would like to make this all generic. Have a generic protocol for all viewModels to define 1 Observable, 1 local variable of generic type and handle the cast back automatically. The method to trigger all the business logic could also have its name standardised ("load", "fetch", "processData" etc.). Maybe we could also figure out a few other bits too. This would remove a lot of code, as well as making the code more readable (less messy), and make unit testing much easier. While it could never do everything automatically we could test the basic responses of each viewModel and have at least some testing done by default and not have everything be very boilerplate-y and copy / paste nature.

The guys think that subscribing to isSuccess and / or isError is perfect Rx + MVVM. But for some reason subscribing to status.filter(success) or status.filter(!success) is a sin of unimaginable proportions. Also the idea of multiple buttons and events all "reacting" to the same method named e.g. "load", is bad Rx (why if they all need to do the same thing?)

My thoughts on this are:

- To me its indentical in meaning and architecture, one way is just significantly less code.
- Lets say I agree its not textbook, is it not worth bending the rules to reduce code.
- We are already breaking the rules of MVVM to introduce coordinators (which I hate, as they are adding even more unnecessary code), so why is breaking it to reduce code such a no no.

Any thoughts on the above? Am I way off the mark or is this classic Rx?

I want to get your take on an icebreaker I was subjected to recently. For a 9 a.m. Monday morning training last week, the facilitator opened with, “Tell us your name, your team, how long you’ve been with the company, and a ‘scar story’. Pick a scar on your body and tell us how you got it. If you prefer not to talk about a physical scar, you can tell us about an emotional scar.” I am not joking.

As we went around the room, there were lots of blood and guts stories (gross) but people also shared really traumatizing tales, like an infant daughter being diagnosed with leukemia. The whole thing took 30 minutes of a 90-minute session. I was very turned off by the activity in the moment and even more so later after reflecting a bit.

Besides this one being in very bad taste, I find myself turned off by icebreakers in general. They feel forced and never seem to give you a useful introduction to your colleagues. I’m wondering if your readers have ever participated in an icebreaker they think was particularly effective or are these just a reality of office life we need to endure?

A message from my colleague (product name removed):

"I think I hate absolutely everything on this network. I think <insert product name> wouldn't be so bad if the pointy headed wankers hadn't got involved."

"It's the fuckery with https and screwing with certs that make it utterly shite without that, it would merely be irritating."

So I work for an IT consulting firm (web development) and was hired by a customer 7 months ago for coaching Git, implementation of VueJS on the front-end and fostering teamwork with devs who'd been in their solo comfort zone for the last 15 years.
I asked for confirmation multiple times on whether they were sure they wanted to go through with a bigger investment in front-end. Confirm they did, multiple times.

After half the team's initial enthusiasm faded (after 1 month), the 'senior' of them who's worked there for 18 years on a single -in the end, failed- project got a burn-out after half a week of showing up (without doing actual work) from the stress, and started whining about it with management that has no technical clue whatsoever. This and other petty office politics lead to the dumbest organizational and technical decisions I've seen in my short 5-year career (splitting a Laravel app that uses the same database in two, replacing docker container deployment with manual ssh'ing and symlinking, duplicating all the models, controllers, splitting a team in two, decreasing productivity, replacing project management dashboards with ad-hoc mail instructions and direct requests).

Out of curiosity I did a git log --author --no-merges with the senior's name on the 2 projects he was supposed to help on, and that turned up... ZERO commits. Now the dept. hired 3 new developers with no prior experience, and it's sad to see the seniors teach them "copy paste" as the developer's main reflex.

Through these 7 months I had to endure increasingly vicious sneers from the IT architect -in name only- who gets offended and hysterical at every person who dares offer suggestions. Her not-so-implicit insinuation is that it's all my fault because I implemented Vue front-end (as they requested), she has been doing this for months, every meeting at least once (and she makes sure other attendees notice). Extra background: She's already had 2 official complaints for verbal abuse in the past, and she just stressed another good developer into smoking again.

Now I present her my timesheet for January, she abuses her power by refusing to sign it unless I remove a day of work.
Earlier this week I asked her politely to please stop her unjust guilt-tripping to which she shouted "You'll just have to cope with that!", and I walked out of the room calmly (in order to avoid losing my nerves). She does this purely as a statement, and I know she does it out of bad faith (she doesn't actually care, as she doesn't manage the budgets). She knows she wields more power over me than the internal devs (I am consultant, so negative reviews for me could delay further salary raises).

I just don't know how to handle this person: I can't get a word in with her, or she starts shouting, and it's impossible to change her (completely inaccurate technological) perception.

All this small node modules in the npm repository that is a fork of another with a name that sounds almost like the other. It's a jungle. Then things are abandoned or changing name. How much i like coding nodejs based projects I really feel bad of the total mess with that repo. Freedom and a lot of projects are good. But the mess is like the flat of a young student that hasn't been cleaned in a year.

I wish companies stopped doing interviews n just stuck to "u have X days to finish this test-project" and judge me by the code/design/architecture

Im a deer to headlights when it comes to interviews -_- I'd even forget my own name on a bad day ffs

I need guidance about my current situation.
I am perfectionist believing in OOP, preventing memory leak in advance, following clean code, best practices, constantly learning about new libraries to reduce custom implementation & improve efficiency.
So even a single bad variable name can trigger my nerves.

I am currently working in a half billion $ IT service company on a maintenance project of 8 year old Android app of security domain product of 1 of the top enterprise company of the world, which sold it to the many leading companies in the world in Govt service, banking, insurance sectors.

It's code quality is such a bad that I get panic attacks & nightmares daily.

Issues are like
- No apk obfuscation, source's everything is openbook, anybody can just unzip apk & open it in Android Studio to see the source.
- logs everywhere about method name invoked,
- static IV & salt for encryption.
- thousands of line code in God classes.
- Irrelevant method names compared to it's functionality.
- Even single item having list takes 2-3 seconds to load
- Lag in navigation between different features' screens.
- For even single thing like different dimension values for different density whole 100+ lines separate layout files for 6 types of densities are written.
- No modularized packages, every class is in single package & there are around 100+ classes.

Owner of the code, my team lead, is too terrified to change even single thing as he don't have coding maturity & no understanding of memory leak, clean code, OOP, in short typical IT 'service' company mentality.

Client is ill-informed or cost-cutting centric so no code review done by them in 8 years.

Feeling much frustrated as I can see it's like a bomb is waiting to blast anytime when some blackhat cracker will take advantage of this.

Need suggestions about this to tackle the situation.

I was in charge of updating the dependencies on a microservice we have. Everything was at least 3 years old. Nice. How bad was it gonna be?

Jesus Christ, I have never felt so wrong.

A certain dependency I will hide under the name w******js allowed custom functions for a feature that accepted three arguments: paramA, paramB, paramC. The old installed version, 1.x.x, did what was intended, but for some dumb reason, 2.x.x calls the function with paramA as paramB and paramB as paramA!

It took me a god damn while to find out why shit wasn't working as expected. Who thought this was a good idea?

I've been thinking:
Looking for a job is so equal to dating!

- I don't want to date a random company/girl just to have one.
- I don't want to go on speed dates with a thousand companies/girls and see which one I can get along with.
- I want to go one by one and be exited and into her so that I know at least her name and what she does (company/girl) 😂

But this last strategy is proving bad to find a partner... (company/girl) 😢

What are your thoughts? Should I/we just go for whatever and not really like it or keep looking for a better one? 🤔

Well, at least they're honest about their involvement with intelligence agencies...

is soo cool when people is up to joke around with my bad jokes.

-- Talking with a coworker about a new button in a results table --

dude: hey jhon, I'll name the button 'SHOW RESULTS' and the endpoint will be named that too. cuz there is a 'SHOW STATS' already

me: dunno, use something more meaningful, this is about unparsed results, right? so what about...

me: unparsed results ? unparsed stats ?

me: another one bites the dust? show must go on?

me: innuendo?

me: pick one 8D . But I think innuendo is pretty descriptive

dude: ok

me: seriously, 'show unparsed stats'

dude: got it

-- then the dude sends me the screenshot --

me: LOL, 8D

me: you got my respect man (_ _)

v0.0005a (alpha)
- class support added to lua thanks to yonaba.
- rkUIs class created
- new panel class
- added drawing code for panel
- fixed bug where some sides of the UI's border were failing to drawing (line rendering quark)

v0.0014a (alpha) 11.30.2023 (~2 hours)
- successfully retrieving basic data from save folder, load text into lua from files
- added 'props' property to Entity class
- added a props table to control what gets serialized and what doesn't
- added a save() base method for instances (has to be overridden to be useful beyond the basics)
- moved the lume.serialize() call into the :save() method on the base entity class itself
- serialized and successfully saved an entities property table.
- fixed deserializion bugs involving wrong indexes (savedata[1] not savedata[2])
- moved deserialization from temp code, into line loading loop itself (assuming each item is on one line)
- deser'd test data, and init()'d new player Entity using the freshly-loaded data, and displayed the entity sprite

All in all not a bad session. Understanding filing handling and how to interact with the directory system was the biggest hurdle I was worried about for building my tools.

Next steps will be defining some basic UI elements (with overridable draw code), and then loading and initializing the UI from lua or json.

New projects can be set as subfolders folders in appdata, using 'Setidentity("appname/projectname") to keep things clean.

I'm not even dreading writing basic syntax highlighting!

Idea is to dogfood the whole process. UI is in-engine rendered just like you might see with godot, unity, or gamemaker, that way I have maximum flexibility to style it the way I want. I'm familiar enough with constructing from polygons, on top of stenciling, on top of nine-slicing, on top of existing tweening and special effects, that I can achieve exactly what I want.

Idea is to build a really well managed asset pipeline. Stencyl, as 'crappy' as it appeared, and 'for education' was a master class in how to do things the correct way, it was just horribly bloated while doing it.

Logical tilesets that you import, can rearrange through drag-n-drop, assign custom tile shapes to, physics materials, collisions groups, name, add tag data to, all in one editor? Yes please.
Every other 2D editor is basic-bitch, has you importing images, and at most generates different scales and does the slicing for you.

Code editor? Everything behavior was in a component, with custom fields. All your code goes into a list of events, which you can toggle on and off with a proper toggle button, so you can explicitly experiment, instead of commenting shit out (yes git is better, but we're talking solo amateurs here, they're not gonna be using git out the gate unless they already know what they're doing).

Components all have an image assignable to identify them, along with a description field, and they're arranged in a 2d grid for easy browsing, copying, modifying.

The physics shape editor, the animation editor, the map editor, all of it was so bare bones and yet had things others didn't.

I want that, except without the historic ties to flash, without the overhead of java, and with sexier fucking in-engine rendering of the UI and support for modding and in-engine custom tools.

Not really doing it for anyone except myself, and doubt I'll get very far, but since I dropped looking for easy solutions, I've just been powering through all the areas I don't understand and doing the work.

I rediscovered my love of programming after 3-4 years of learning to hate it, and things are looking up.

Why the fuck are there so many utterly useless programming blogs? I have to implement DES in C++ for our college project. After coding most of it step by step, I decided to swallow my pride and check for an implementation online to save time because I was confused in the XOR part. Now most programming blogs had the same code copy pasted. To top that, NAME YOUR FUCKING VARIABLES PROPERLY YOU MORONS! I decided I'm better off resolving my confusions the hard way.

!rant

So I have bought a new laptop and this time instead of straight up booting linux I had an idea of giving micro$oft a try, so I have decided to use only their services for 2 weeks.

To be honest, I really did not expect windows to use do much cpu and hdd during updates and background tasks, but after a day it was ok and windows feels snappier than during my last encounrer (maybe cause the new hw?).

I was even so dedicated that I started to use cortana and I have to tell, that she is dumb as fuck, since she fails to understand even the basic tasks and if u want something advanced, she refers to the next update. But boy, tell her to open Visual Studio and she asks if you want VS Code or Visual Studio, which seems great. But my response was 'Code' then she insisted that I said Coke. Im like OK, Im not native english speaker, lets try Visual Studio Code, where she told me that there is no such thing and Spelling VS - Code ended me in bing search for Unesco :/

I really want to like Cortana, she has nice name, nice history, but she is like that A girl from class, who looks gorgeous, has great voice, but then u reallise that she just eats a book before exam and after that she is that dumb basic hoe.

I also gave a shot to Bing and Edge. Bing is something between Google and DuckDuckGo, since it gives you a liiitle less results from search history, yet if you want to find something in different language its even possible to tell you that what are you trying to find does not exist.

But I have to tell, that I like Edge and I mean it. Like... Its fast and has some good features, like pushing all your open tavs away, so you can open them Later. It also does not have that stupid ass feature that lets you control tab from left to right, not by chronological order, so you wont end up in infinity loop of 2 tabs. And even if people make fun of M$ trying to convince you to use Edge by being too aggresive. God go on edge and try to use some Google Service(You still dont use chrome?!).

I also tried to play with .Net core and I have to tell that against java they are a bit further. I liked some small features, but what I just simply loved was rhe fucking documentation. You basically dont need google, sincw they give you examples and explain in a human way.

What I didnt quite get was the 'big' Visual Studio. Tje dark theme to me feels strange(personal and irrelevant). Why the hell I do need to press 2 shortcuts to duplicate line?! Why is it so hard to find a plugin to give me back my coloured brackets and why the fuck it takes like a second to Cut one line of code on a damn i7?!

Visual studio Code was something different. It shows how dark theme should be done, the plugin market is full of stuff and the damn shortcuts are not made for octopi. So I have to recommend it ^^.

I even gave a shot to word and office as a whole and fuck I never knew that there are so many templates. It really made my life easier, since all you need to do is find the right one in the app, instead of browsing templates online, where half of them are for another version of your text editor.

Android Launcher was fast, had a clever widget of notes and the sync was pretty handy to be honest so I liked that one as well.

What made me furious was using the CLI. Godfucking damn what the fuck is ipconfig?! :/

Last thing what made me superbhappy was using stuff without wine and all of the addional shit. Especially using stuff like Afinity Designer and having good looking apps in general. I mean Open source has great tools l sometimes with better functionality. But I found out, that what is pleasure to look at, is pleasure to work with.

To Summarize a bit.

It wasnt that bad as I expected. I see where they are heading with building yet another ecosystem of It just works and that they are aiming at professionals once again.

So I would rate it 6/10, would be 7 if that shit was Posix compatible.

I know that for Balmer is a special place in hell... But with that new CEO, Microsoft at the end may make it to purgatory..

I did something potentially extremely stupid today

In 2020 when I was a teenager I suggested my uncle who ran a family business with my father to start a e commerce website. I did lot of stupid stuff doing this too. Planned to use AWS free tier to host the website and used Godaddy for domains IIRC. Setup godaddy email forwarding to his gmail account too IIRC

I registered a AWS account with my email(bad idea since my uncle's debit card was the payment method). I then setup a EC2 instance but instead of using the free instance I used some other instance because I didn't read what instance was free and setup his debit card as the payment method.

Setup woocommerce on it and pointed the domain to instance's static IP. We didn't do a lot of stuff on the website but next month on AWS we got a bill but it was a small amount. Uncle paid the bill and I terminated the EC2 instance IIRC. Next month there was a very small bill I don't remember what I did after it.

Today I remembered about it logged in to AWS and paid the bill. The problem is I used the default billing address which is in my uncle's name and the address of the family business. IIRC we didn't give them tax details of the business so we can't claim tax credit on it.

But still since there is a bill with the address of the business which Amazon probably reported to the government there could be tax discrepancies. Bill was due 4 years ago so maybe it will affect his 2020 returns which could be painful. The bill was also paid by me not from my Uncle's account so that might complicate things.

Thankfully the surprise AWS bill had basically zero affect on my relationship with my uncle.

The year was 2006. During the first half of my career, I use to work in the NOC. This was before I made my transition to software engineer. I worked on the third shift for a bank services company. The company was on a down turn. Just years earlier they just went public, and secured a deal with a huge well known bank. Eventually they entered a really bad contract with the bank and was put into a deal they couldn't deliver on. The partnership collapse and their stock plummeted. The CEO was dismissed, and a new CEO came in who wanted to "clean things up".

Anyway I entered the company about a year after this whole thing went down. The NOC was a good stepping stone for my career. They let me work as many hours as I liked. And I took advantage of it, clocking in 80 hours a week on average. They gave me the nick name "Iron Man".

Things started to turn around for the company when we were able to secure a support contract with a huge bank in the Alabama area. As the NOC we were told to handle the migration and facilitate the onboarding.

The onboarding was a mess with terrible instructions that didn't work. A bunch of software packages that crashed. And the network engineers were tips off, as they tunnel between our network and the banks was too narrow, creating an unstable connection between us and them. Oh, and there were all sorts of database corruption issues.

There was also another bank that was using an old version of our software. The sells team had been trying to get them off our old software for over a year. They refuse to move. This bank was the last one using this version, and our organization wanted to completely cut support.

One of the issue we would have is that they had an overnight batch job that had an ETA to be done by 7 AM. The job would often get stuck because this version of the software didn't know how to fail when it was caught in an undesired state. So the job hung, and since the job didn't have logging, no one could tell if it failed unless the logs stopped moving for an hour. It was a heavily manually process that was annoying to deal with. So we would kill the JVM to "speed" the job up. One day I killed the JVM but the job was still late. They told me that they appreciated the effort, but that my job was only to report the problem and not fix it.

This got me caught up in a major scandal. Basically they wanted the job to always have issues everyday. Since this was critical for them, all we needed to do was keep reporting it, and then eventually this would cause the client to have to upgrade to our new software. It was our sales team trying to play dirty. It immediately made me a menace in the company.

For the next 6 months I was constantly harassed and bullied by management. My work was nitpicked. They asked me to come into work nearly everyday, and there was a point I worked 7 days with no off days. They were trying to run me so dry that I would quit. But I never did.

On my last day at the company, I was on a critical call with a customer, and my supervisor was also on the line. My supervisor made a request that made no sense, and was impossible. I told her it wasn't possible. She then scalded me on the call in front of customers. She said "I'm your supervisor, you're just a NOC technician, you do what I say and don't talk back". It was embarrassing to be reprimanded on a call with customers. I never quite recovered from that. I could fill myself steaming with anger. It was one of the first times in my adult life that I felt I really wanted to be violent towards someone. It was such a negative feeling I quit that day at the end of my shift with no job lined up.

I walked away from the job feeling very uncertain about my future, but VERY relieved. I paid the price, basically unable to find a job until a year and a half later. And even was forced to move back in with my mother. After I left, the company still gave my a severance. Probably because of the supervisor's unprofessional conduct in front of customers, and the company probably needed to save face. The 2008 crash kept me out of work until 2009. It did give me time to work on myself, and I swore to never let a job stress me out to that degree. That job was also my last NOC job and the last job where did shift work. My next few jobs was Application Support and I eventually moved into development full time, which is what I always wanted to do.

Anyway sorry if it's a bit long, but that's my burnout story.

Need a team name for Google Hashcode, please suggest something bad.

!dev
Please enjoy this customer review I intercepted. Guess the company type and name that requested the feedback.

"______ drivers liberally show how bad it is to work for these companies.
Three quarters of all packages arrive damaged.
They park wherever they want.
No regard for traffic, people, property nor parcels.
Redefining rock bottom.
Not this delivery. Always. Everywhere. For a strong decade now."

I have just slept for a minimum of 5 hours. It is 7:47 PM atm.
Why?
We have had a damn stressful day today.
We have had a programming test, but it really was rather an exam.
Normally, you get 30 minutes for a test and 45 minutes for an exam.

In this "test" we have had to explain what 'extends' does and name a few advantages of why one should use it.
Check.
Read 3 separate texts and write the program code on paper. It was about 1 super class and 1 sub class with a test class in Java.
Check.
Task 3: Create the UML diagram of the code from above. *internally: From above? He probably means my code since there is no other code there. *Checks time*. I have about 3 minutes left. Fuck my life.*
Draws the boxes. Put the class names in each of them. A private attribute for the super class.
Teacher: Last minute!
Draw the arrow starting starting from the sub class to the super class.
Put my name on each written paper. And mentally done for the day. Couldn't finish the last task. Task 3.
During this "test", I heard the frustrations of my classmates. Seemed like everyone was pretty much pissed.
After a short discussion with the teacher who also happens to be the physics professor of a university nearby.
[If you are reading this, I hope that something bad happens to you]
The next course was about computer systems. Remember my recent rant about DNS, dhcp, ftp, web server and samba on ubuntu?
We have had the task to do the screenshots of the consoles where you proof that you have dhcp activated on win7 machine etc. Seemed ok to me. I would have been done in 10 minutes, if I would be doing this relaxed. Now the teacher tells us to change the domain names to <surnameOfEachStudent>.edu.
I was like: That's fine.
Create a new user for the samba server. Read and write directories. Change the config.
Me: That should be easy.
Create new DNS entries in the configs.
Change the IPv6 address area to 192.168.x.100-200/24 only for the dhcp server.
Change the web server's default page. Write your own text into it.
You will have 1 hour and 30 minutes of time for it.
Dumbo -ANGRY-CLIENT-: Aye. Let us first start screenshotting the default page. Oh, it says that we should access it with the domain name. I don't have that much time. Let us be creative and fake it, legally.
Changes the title element so that it looks like it has been accessed via domain name. Deletes the url and writes the domain name without pressing Enter. Screenshot. Done. Ok, let us move to the next target.
Dhcp: Change lease time. Change IP address area. Subnet mask. Router. DNS. Broadcast. Optional domain name. Save.
Switches to win7.
ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew
Holy shit it does not work!
After changing the configs on ubuntu for a legit 30 minutes: Maybe I should change the ip of the ubuntu virtual machine itself. *me asking my old self: why did not you do that in the first place, ass hole?!*
Same previous commands on win7 console. Does not work. Hmmm...
Where could be the problem?
Check the IP of the ubuntu server once again. Fml. Ubuntu did not save when I clicked on the save button the first time I have changed it. Click on save button 10 times to make sure it really is saved now lol.
Same old procedure on win7.
Alright. Dhcp works. Screenshot.
Checks time. 40 minutes left.
DNS:It is your turn. Checks bind9 configs. sudo nano db.reverse.edu.
sudo nano db.<mysurname>.edu.
Alright. All set. It should work now.
Ping win7 from ubuntu and vice versa. Works. Ping domain name on windows 7 vm. Does not work.
Oh, I forgot to restart the bind9 server on ubuntu.
sudo service bind stop
" " " start
Check DNS server IP on win7. It looks fine.
It still doesn't work. Fuck it. I have only 20 minutes left. Samba. Let us do this!
10 minutes in. No result. I don't remember why. I already forgot why I have done for it. It was a very stressful day.
Let us try DNS again.
Oh shit. I forgot the resolver!
sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf
The previous edits are gone. Dumb me. It says it in the comments. Why did not I care about it. Fuck it.6 minutes left. Open a yt video real quick. Changes the config file. Saves it. Restarts DNS and dhcp. Closes the terminal and opens a new one. The changes do not affect them until you reopen them. That's why.
Change to win7.
Ping works. How about nsloopup.
Does not work.
Teacher: 2 minutes left!
Fuck it.
Saves the word document with the images in it. Export as pdf. Tries to access the directories of the school samba server. Does not work. It was not my fault tho. Our school server is in general very slow. It feels like they are not maintained and left alone like this in the dust from the 90s.
Friend gets the permission to put his document on a USB and give the USB to the teacher.
Sneaky me: Hey xyz, can you give me your USB real quick?
Him: sure.
Gets bombed with "do you want to format the USB?" pop-ups 10 times. Fml. Skips in a fast way.
Transfers the pdf. Plug it out. Give it back.
After this we have had to give a presentation in politics. I am done.

Our QA is acting like a customer, or even more... Pushy, demanding, some times rude... you name it

On the flip side, we have a real (cruel) world scenario in testing. Not too bad I think?

Some humans are calm and thoughtful, some annoyingly complicated, while others with behaviours too difficult to comprehend.
I got a call from the office (former from 6 months ago) and it's from the G.M herself.

** Phone rings **
Hmm see who's calling...

Me: * Picks up phone and set it on loud speaker, so my partner can also listen *

Me: Hello Ma

G.M: Hey (calls me by my full name)

Me: It's really nice to he...

G.M: Why would you move the YETI server hosted on AWS to Azure! We have been faced with lots of challenges ever since and that has cost the company a lot.

Me: Pardon me Ma, but that...

G.M: That is a very bad and unacceptable behaviour from you and I can have the company sue you for this.

Me: Excuse me Ma, but...

G.M: I have spoken with the director of C.M.D quaters (A sister company) and explained the situation on ground about what you did before leaving without having any prior permission. What nonsense!

** At this point my partner let's call her "CC"... was more confused than me**

CC : **Panicking** Who's that? What did you do? I thought you said you no longer work at that firm, what's going on?

Now I'm confused cus I don't even know who to reply.

Me: **Signals CC to calm the fuck down**

G.M: ** Still talking and spitting out millions of threats to the guy who left the company with evil deeds in mind...**

CC who literally hates suspense and also a half cool and half crackhead kind of person... Tries stealing the phone from me so she could pour out whatever is on her mind to the caller because of how disgusted she felt, mostly for reasons I quite understood but nevertheless i kept the phone far from her reach while we both enjoyed the suiting voice of *a threat giver*

Honestly at this point my closest guess was "Joe, who must have fucked up big time" because Joe is the company's SysAdmin and has a lot of fucked up records (One time Joe tried to convert all system OSes to Linux even with our hydra servers with pre-installed windows running smoothly, his action caused a noticeable server down-time all for the reason of Joe being a Linux freak). He and only he has the power to transfer/switch/off/on servers at will. I really don't know what Joe must have done but sure thing is there is a fuck up somewhere.
Talking about me, I was only a developer enthroned only within his desk and secondly I no longer worked there. Who fucking calls a retired soldier about a lost battle after six freaking months later! Just fucking sink with your ship captain!

But how can I explain all of this to G.M without implicating Joe and also not look like snitch, I thought to myself.

While I was pondering within myself and the call which has long been disconnected, CC broke the silence.

CC: Giddy, Can you honestly explain me why your old company is calling talking about lawyers and suing you? Have you been lying to me about your work?

Me: *Explained the situation to CC*

CC: But why was she that saucy and acting a bitch? You should have spare me a minute with her.

Me: She wouldn't let me speak but we good CC. We good.
The woman that just called is the G.M. of the firm I had formerly worked with and she's also the wife to the M.D of the same firm which was my former direct Boss whom I respect a lot. Having a disjunct with the wife can also affect the relationship with the husband, which I don't want to lose. So we cool!

Maybe I should text her or maybe not... But before then
** Another call comes in **
It's her again.

GM: Hello Giddy (Sounding calm)

Me: (WTF. She called me by my first name and also sounds cool... More confused than a stray dog) ...Yeah Hello

GM: I just called to let you know that my accusation was wrong because I was misinformed. Joe Nosa was in charge on Systems but why didn't you correct me on that during our last conversation?

Me: ... 😲

CC: (Drags the phone) Hello and Good morning whosoever...

G.M: Sorry who am I speaking with?

CC: (Introduced herself) I overheard your last conversation with Giddy, and I demand you appogise to him both in written and in verbal because not only did you accused him falsely, you also almost bridge the trust between us which may have cost the relationship.

Me: ...
** Long awkward silence **

G.M: Hey Giddy, I'm sorry. Just angry about what went down recently.

Me: All good ma'am

CC: ** Hangs up **

So a while back I had found a hole in a website's security, one that I has used pretty frequently. I was able to change my cookies and become any user I wanted. The only caveat was that I had to log in as a user in order to get things started. But once I was in I could basically be anyone I wanted to be just by changing a few numbers in the user ID of the cookie. They also did all of their user processing on the client side. Even password checks.

A couple weeks back I decided to go back in to see if anything had changed since then. It did! But not in the way I had thought.

So these guys decided that instead of fixing their security hole, they would have users just contact their people directly in order to get a new account.

Wow that's so much fucking overhead for basically being a lazy shit and not fixing the security holes. I mean how bad is your architecture if you can't go in and fix this?

Not only that I found that they actually stripped all of the users of their original subscriptions. So now if you want to get back on your subscription you'll have to fork over another $399. So that means going to their shitty form filling out your name, your number, email, and just hope that someone contacts you via phone call.

I'm glad I dropped this service. They clearly can't get their shit together.

Alright fellow sweaty programmers, mama Kiki is here to teach you the basics of hygiene.

TEETH
- If you have a toothpaste prescription, use it.
- Every single whitening toothpaste is a scam. Don’t use them.
- Every single over-the-counter toothpaste that decreases sensitivity does work. If your teeth are sensitive, use it.
- Otherwise, buy the cheapest name-brand toothpaste.
- Use dental floss. As long as it’s flat and waxed, the cheapest one will do.
- When flossing, never move the floss back and forth as if you try to saw through your gums. Just put the floss in, then out. Repeat if necessary.
- Don’t put your toothpaste on your toothbrush. Put a small amount of it directly in your mouth with a bit of water. Close your mouth and spread toothpaste all over your teeth using a rinsing motion, as if it was mouthwash. Now your teeth are completely covered.
- When brushing teeth, don’t use -90°/0°/90° angles. Use -35°/35°. This way you will spend less time while getting better cleansing. Bristle ends should touch where your teeth meet your gums.
- Get yourself a tongue scrubber. Scrub your tongue until what comes off of it is clean. Dirty tongue is why your breath smells bad, not dirty teeth.
- After you’re done, don’t rinse! Spit the toothpaste out, but let its residue stay there. The remineralization process is now started. If you follow the routine, you don’t need mouthwash at all.
- Drinking/eating sugary things, not washing your teeth and going straight to bed is the best way to get cavities ASAP. In your mouth, sugar quickly turns into the kind of acid that we use for soldering. It can strip the oxide layer off of copper. Do you know how after you drink Coke, your teeth become almost squeaky clean? That’s this. If you like sugary drinks, carefully drink them using a straw. Rinse immediately after you’re done drinking & eating.

SHAVING
- Get yourself an old-school safety T-razor, the one that takes suicide blades. It will last a lifetime. Mühle and Merkur are good manufacturers (not affiliated). Once you have it, for the rest of your life, you will only buy blades. This is the most environmentally friendly way to get a clean, close shave. Electric razors save water, but they often contain batteries.
- Because of how violently electric razor’s blades hit hair while cutting it, they chip your hair. This leads to your freshly grown hair being sharp, rough and unpleasant to the touch. The manual razor, on the other hand, produce clean edges. When your hair grows back, it will be softer than what you get with an electric razor.
- Feather brand blades (not affiliated) are the sharpest in the world. The sharper the blade, the less traumatic it is. Watch T-razor tutorials on YouTube. There are different shaving techniques that will get you a killer shave.
- T-razor blades last considerably longer than their modern soyboy single-use counterparts.
- Because of a single blade construction, T-razor almost never leaves irritation.
- Basically, modern single-use plastic blades are horrible for the environment, and they’re almost a scam for how much you get for your money. They’re only rivaled by printer ink. Use them only for intimate shaving, as they’re considerably handier down there.
- Always shave after hot shower.
- Before shaving, dry the skin surface. Apply shaving foam on dry skin only, as it contains chemicals that make your hair softer. When diluted, they’re not as effective, and shaving unsoftened hair is almost always unpleasant and dangerous.
- After applying the foam, wait about a minute for the foam to work. If the skin gets irritated, don’t wait for as long, or perhaps try a different foam brand.
- Before shaving, thoroughly clean your razor with hand sanitizer or ethanol. Ideally, it should be sterile. Using boiling hot water is also a good option, just be careful with it.
- After shaving, rinse off foam, immediately dry your skin with a clean towel, then apply aftershave. After applying it, don’t touch your skin until it completely dries. If you follow this routine, your skin won’t get any pimples, guaranteed.
- Scrubs won’t help you. Don’t use them.

More in the comments!

When you spend 3h trying to fix a procedure on MySQL and the problem was a f***** variable name. I felt so bad and sad :'(

On This Episode of Ghetto Medium..

Posted after midnight for extra spooky effects. Read in the dark at your own risk. You've been warned.

So my mother has been on a binge watching shows like long island medium (apparently the taller your hair the closer you are to god or something), and every time we talk she begins at length to talk about, you guessed it.. 'ghosts.'

Now don't get me wrong, I've had some 'spooby' shit occur in my lifetime, the sort that will tighten your sphincter faster than bill cosby asking you if you want some koolaid or grape drank, but I digress.

The ghost talk is tiring. Lately theres been a *flood* of these new shows, purportedly showing mediums and people who can 'look into the other side' and I realize just how vapid and ridiculous it's all become, as if they all are being personally haunted by the ghost of John Edwards burnt out husk of a career. Theres long island beehive big-hair medium, celebrity medium, allison DuBois (the inspiration for that one sappy show *medium*) whos red hair and vacant stare speak of glimpses into centuries past like an intimate unseen horizon. or maybe she forgot to unplug her curling iron in a hotel one time and has been rendered permanently catatonic. And who can forget *Beyond With James Van Praagh* (everyone) whos face, as measured by the width of his mustache, appears to be expanding at a constant rate like a bad image macro edit thats been memed and repasted a thousand times. Then theres Chip Coffee, whos name is about as believable as his teaching degree on the show *Psychic Kids* where he mentored, again, you guessed it, *psychic kids*. Of course theres Tyler Henry, a youthful, uh, "flamboyant" medium for celebrities with ghost problems. Never trust a man with two names, this ones no exception, he looks so clean cut hes either secretly mormon, or secretly gay, maybe both. I'm not judging, but I am saying if I ever saw his clean cut, smooth, wrinkless (seriously, how tyler? how?), all american face, say smiling that subtle smile outside my kitchen sliding glass door at 3 am, his face watching me from the pitch dark outside, I wouldn't at all be surprised, except for the hospital bill I'd have to pay after shitting a brick and needing anal surgery.

At this rate we have mediums popping out left and right, like clowns at one of them R.L Stein nightmare carnivals, or beggers outside a methodone clinic. Geez, they're coming out the wood work, like those painting you see with hidden faces in them, or wheres-waldo posters, only you're trying to find the non-waldo guy amongst all the characters because they're ALL waldo: goofy acting, goofy dressing, and just all around goofy looking.

At this rate I'm fully expecting "pet medium" (starring a character named Stephen King and his marital problems, played by johnny depp eating way to much corn), and "haunted objects medium", and "car medium" (it's just seinfeld in a car, talking to psychics instead of other people), and "ghetto medium."

Today on this episode of "Ghetto Medium"..

Medium: Teneesha, aw yeah girl, u *definitely* ded gurl, uh huh! You WAY to white too be alive, you done passed over gurl!

And in the next episode of Ghetto Medium, one man claims "every time I bend over I can hear "wOoOoOoOoO!, Is my asshole possessed? Find out is it real or fake, and what our verdict is in Ghost Medium, episode 3: A Haunting In My Nether-regions."

Cut commercial break.

"Jerry Springer: One women asks, 'jerry, is my unborn child's foreskin haunted? And later today we ask the crowd, would you have sex with a ghost?"

Welcome to American television 'programming' in 2019.

Yes, it's all brainwashing.

fuuuuuuuuuuck. found this site with rant in the name so i decided to rant. fuck the system fuck politics fuck everything. IM A FUCKING 16 YO. I just want people to hear my voice and listen to me. i want to make a change but because im 16 everything i say is invalid. the school system sucks. i want to change that. oh wait first i have to change the people who manage that. well dang to do that i gotta change that part. before long its the entire fucking system. for fucks sake cant anyone do anything. i just want to be happy in this shitty world. maybe the world ending wouldnt be so bad. just fuck it all to hell. i mean jesus christ everything is screwy. we live in an outdated system in a modern world. when are things going to change to keep up with the times. we donbt need machines to work in factories like the school system makes. we dont need politicians who are so old they cant keep up with whats going on in the world. we need people that can keep up with current events and work to make a change so that the place can be better. just fuck it all. no one is willing to put in the work needed to get that. i say we should just destroy all humans and start anew.

finally picking up React JS. When setting up webpack I fucked up on the last step in the tutorial I was using which wasn't even needed it just made requiring CSS modules not need style!CSS! Infront of the file name.. everything prior was working beautifully and I was ready to start setting up React. after attempting to be more efficient I couldn't even get webpack to run and thus the test project failed to run on local host. Now to re watch bad tutorials that assume you know everything because they're still more detailed than the others I've found. :| ugh

My best friend has been working to learn python and I guess he hasn't see control flow statements.

The problem is we have a girl name "elif" in Turkish and it's his ex's name (+4 yrs, bad ending)

What should I do :D

The moment when you accidentally delete the final product instead of the experimental one because they have the same prefix and the shell's completion choose the final product when you type the name.

That happened to me today. I accidentally deleted a postfix calculator that I wrote in Scala instead of the sbt one (Which does nothing) because both of them have the same prefix (nimtha is the program's directory name, and nimtha-sbt is the sbt one). I don't notice that until I go back to the project directory and don't see the program's directory. I tried to recover it with TestDisk, but it can't. All because of fish's shell completion, and also because of me.

At least that was a pretty small project so I don't feel very bad.

Seriously getty images, what is wrong with you. Usually it is bad enough that sign in forms say username or email and then only accept one of those two options. Getty images only allows for the username, so i enter that. Doesn't work. I use the forgot password function, have to enter username and email, doesn't work. Turns out the username is the email adress and what I entered was only the display name. Seriously, how stupid is that? What is the point of a username when you have a separate display name and just set it to the account email adress?

I had fever for 2 days and finally after resolving my assigned issues/tickets yesterday, I called my PM for a MC today - my fever is still quite bad.

My name was still called a few time in group chats asking for updates, by the same PM, as if I am working from home.

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. (:

so... either its justified and i should be reporting for harassment or i am overreacting to a water cooler talk, please help me decide next action:

we are in morning standup zoom call. boss (AVP) comes, jokes about who's birthday is coming next month, no one says a thing, then i joked Gandhiji's. his reaction : "ugh bro why do you always have to ruin the friday mood?" and I also laugh "well..." topic changes.

^--- this part is all good. he is AVP, He rarely joins the call and is a cool fun (but strict) guy. the problem happens in a side teams chat room

so we have an "emotional support android" group. we just named it that to prevent scrutiny, its really just a group where everyone is usually ranting and bitching. however it just includes us android devs.

so while i am making this joke in teams, one guy messages there about what a stupid statement that was + 2 abuses (hindi abuses, there translation would loose the impact)

i am all in for bitching and everything , but i felt bad for this. this group does include the word "android" and android folks, some of which are not even here. if this was a personal chat, i had ignored it, but i am trying to make a name as a dev and this undermines my statements in general.

furthermore this guy is 6 months old in team and i have been here for more than 1.5 years. he is 2 years older than me, but we are always cool and we often help each other in tasks

I am angry for the public humiliation and feel like reporting to my TL, HR or even the AVP. he is not even realising that he hurt me. actually the office environment has gone so toxic that the tl is herself threatening and scolding for every basic things and we are all but bitching to each other about it. he is mostly my guy, always taking my side and i take his, but i feel like my dignity is being impacted

or am i stupid to get hurt at this?

"For Product projects *company name omitted* uses a combination of Waterfall and Agile methodologies".

Wow. Nice they're actually admitting they're doing it. But the paper that explained what Waterfall was spent most of the time explaining why it was a bad idea.

This is the situation:

I worked on a small project on freelance.mx: The project name is: "A Grid System with Bootstrap and Hover.css | Fontawesome Combination"

By the time I finished it, the client changed almost half of the requirements and told me that I didn't complete the work as It was supposed to and asked me to change it. He wanted that grid system to work as a sidebar as well...

He asked me then to make some modifications and adapt the code to fit the new requirements. I said: "I would do that but I would need to charge you more for that since a grid system and a sidebar are two distinct things and also these are new requirements"

Today is 7 days since I haven't heard anything from him and I sent him a message. He said that I didn't finish the work properly and marked the work on the platform as "Incomplete".

What should I do? This is unfair... Is there any way I can get the payment from this guy?

This is the first job I have on freelance.mx and it will make me have bad reputation.

Any advice?

holy shit I swear taxes are like the government trying to tell you you're a peasant to them

my medicare card is about to expire and FOR SOME REASON now the process to renew is a fucking interrogation about various documentation the government has given you. before it was just your damned name, date of birth, and a new photo for the card.

evidently they were supposed to send you snail mail 3 months before expiration. evidently also the only way to renew is get this said snail mail.
and evidently I have to go through this "catchall" change your address with everything in the government process
which is a little ironic
because
to use this service you need to give them something called a notice of assessment, which is when the government accepts your taxes they send you back one of those
well I haven't had access to my tax portal for years. I keep filing them and getting excess money back but I can't actually see any of my returns.
so I tried this time
12 pages of verification and more verification... you do one step, it says wrong info because if you have to write in 2,474 well turns out the , fucks it up and your info doesn't match what's on file and if you fail more than 3 times you'll be locked out. repeat. page after page. how many fucking pages are there? what format are they expecting? nobody fucking knows. you'll get to find out if you pass just this one more!
after about 4 hours of this shit
and they have 2 factor authorization now?! wtf.

then this next step is id verification or we snail mail you a code (WHICH AGAIN IS IRONIC)

I chose id. health card doesn't count, it notifies me later. thankfully I have a passport. bad news, passport expires this September so guess who is gonna be having more fun later
the app of course can't use my camera in the browser I have, so I start downloading fucking other browsers and finally hit one that works
also they lied. they also want a selfie. then it tells me I failed to look like myself. if you fail to look like yourself 3 times you are denied.

ok. so I try snail mail. the page says if I revoke consent to id I can go do the snail mailed code. they lied. if you revoke consent it exits the whole wizard. you enter all the verification steps again.

I try to get them to snail mail me the code. they want some basic info they asked me like 16 times now, and a postal code. ironic. well this is the tax people, so by this point I found all my previous sent in tax returns (though I can't access the government's replies). checked. yep. address all the same. put in the postal code. nope. somehow it's wrong. 3 times I put all this random info in in different ways. 5 times and I'm locked out.

now fucking what.

THE FUCKING IRONY OF
I NEED TO CHANGE WHERE I LIVE SO YOU CAN SNAIL MAIL ME SOMETHING
AND TO CHANGE WHERE I LIVE I HAVE TO CONFIRM WHERE I LIVE SO YOU CAN SNAIL MAIL ME SOMETHING FUCKING ELSE

the government just fucking dunks on you

guess we're all not having fucking medical cards anymore. all we do is pay taxes, and can't even see the paperwork to those taxes we pay.

When Do You Stop Taking Responsibility?

Let me clarify by describing four scenarios in which you are tasked with some software development. It could be a large or small task. The fourth scenario is the one I'm interested in. The first three are just for contrast.

1. You either decide how to implement the requirements, or you're given directions or constraints you agree with. (If you hadn't been given those specific directions you probably would have done the same thing anyway.) **You feel accountable for the outcome**, such as whether it works correctly or is delivered on time. And, of course, the team feels collectively accountable. (We could call this the "happy path.")

2. You would prefer to do the work one way, but you're instructed to do it a different way, either by a manager, team lead, or team consensus. You disagree with the approach, but you're not a stubborn know-it-all. You understand that their way is valid, or you don't fully understand it but you trust that someone else does. You're probably going to learn something. **You feel accountable for the outcome** in a normal, non-blaming sort of way.

3. You're instructed to do something so horribly wrong that it's guaranteed to fail badly. You're in a position to refuse or push back, and you do.

4. You're given instructions that you know are bad, you raise your objections, and then you follow them anyway. It could be a really awful technical approach, use of copy-pasted code, the wrong tools, wrong library, no unit testing, or anything similar. The negative consequences you expect could include technical failure, technical debt, or significant delays. **You do not feel accountable for the outcome.** If it doesn't work, takes too long, or the users hate it, you expect the individual(s) who gave you instructions to take full responsibility. It's not that you want to point fingers, but you will if it comes to that.

---

That fourth scenario could provoke all sorts of reactions. I'm interested in it for what you might call research purposes.

The final outcome is irrelevant. If it failed, whether someone else ultimately took responsibility or you were blamed is irrelevant. That it is the opposite of team accountability is obvious and also irrelevant.

Here is the question (finally!)

Have you experienced scenario number four, in which you develop software (big as an application, small as a class or method) in a way you believe to be so incorrect that it will have consequences, because someone required you to do so, and you complied *with the expectation that they, not you, would be accountable for the outcome?*

Emphasis is not on the outcome or who was held accountable, but on whether you *felt* accountable when you developed the software.

If you just want to answer yes or no, or "yes, several times," that's great. If you'd like to describe the scenario with any amount of detail, that's great too. If it's something you'd rather not share publicly you can contact me privately - my profile name at gmail.com.

The point is not judgment. I'll go first. My answer is yes, I have experienced scenario #4. For example, I've been told to copy/paste/edit code which I know will be incomprehensible, unmaintainable, buggy, and give future developers nightmares. I've had to build features I know users will hate. Sometimes I've been wrong. I usually raised objections or shared concerns with the team. Sometimes the environment made that impractical. If the problems persisted I looked for other work. But the point is that sometimes I did what I was told, and I felt that if it went horribly wrong I could say, "Yes, I understand, but this was not my decision." *I did not feel accountable.*.

I plan on writing more about this, but I'd like to start by gathering some perspective and understanding beyond just my own experience.

Thanks

How was I able to fix this bullshit report generator task?

Simple bitch. I am that fucking good. Matter of fact. I am more than good. Sit the fuck down and listen.

That fucktard you have over there acting as a faculty member teaching kids about code and security? Blame that bitch for the horrible code that was NOT working since he wrote that with absolute disdain for software engineering and without taste or finesse.
Yeah I was able to troubleshoot his monster of an app. His ass is the reason why people hate php, giving the lang and community a bad name and shit.

Pleased to meet you btw.

I am Alex. Your new rockstar.

To my manager: i got it babe don't worry. I'll be your huckleberry.

I am out.

Portfolio websites...are they good, bad, or meh?

As I’m already contemplating making a move from my current (first) dev job due to the fact I’m a glorified data entry clerk, I got thinking about creating a personal/portfolio website.

I already have a domain name, I registered it years ago and just keep renewing it. So I’ve pointed that to my GitHub pages site, and will do some work on this over the weekend.

My question is, are they worth the effort? Would a prospective employer bother to take a look if it was on my cv or linked in?

What pitfalls should I avoid?