The worst career choice I ever made was walking away from a six figure salary software development job with benefits to focus on the small startup I co-founded just a few years earlier. My wife and I had two small children at the time and my wife was also nearly 8 months pregnant with our third. It resulted in an approximate 70% reduction in income, prematurely cashed out 401k and loss of existing health insurance.

To be fair, it was also simultaneously the best career choice I ever made. Three years later I make more now than I originally walked away from. The raw roads of stress, anger, fear and complete uncertainty have aged both me and my wife at an accelerated rate but we have grown closer to each other than we would otherwise be. We have relied on each other, and she has been unbelievably supportive with all the late nights and required traveling. We discovered what we are capable of. In one day it will be October. In one day it will be the month that we finally pay off our last batch of credit card debt that resulted from that career choice.

I cannot recommend following in our footsteps as from where I’m sitting there are much better, more calculated ways of going about it. Logically, what we did was beyond stupid. Luckily for us, we were still young enough to not grasp the full magnitude of stupidity and we also refused to fail. It’s also crucial to have stellar business partners who are just as crazy and just as determined. We have all labored tremendously and we have each played critical roles in our success. The hard times of fear and uncertainty aren’t over. I don’t think they will ever be, to be honest. But, it sure has been one hell of a ride. I wouldn’t change a thing.

> be me
> want to write troll "viruses" to fck arround with frieds
> write batch files
> shit everyone can see what I do
> google 'how to make exe'
> install VS
> google 'make exe with vb.net'
> spend 3hr/s copying the Internet
> send friend exe
> blocked by antivirus
> write other bullshit
> actually learn stuff
> shit I'm kinda good at this
> keep going
> 4 years later
> be system administrator / devop / web dev / app dev / desktop dev
> get paid
> inb4 wants to troll friend - finds dream job instead

AUTOEXEC.BAT

Oh man, when a simple prank goes out of control.

Tl;dr incompetent IT don't know their shit and want to shut down server because of a simple batch file.

Long story time;
For the last day at my side job I thought it would be funny to run a small batch script on one of the PC's (that is not even connected to the internet...).

All it did was echo some random russian characters to the screen, ping itself for a couple of bytes, and echo "success" at random intervals. Ofcourse in the classic green/black CMD...

Pressing any key would stop this, and I didn't do anything to prevent it from being closed/stopping.

Now this was running for a couple of minutes when a colleague spotted it and completely freak out, literally. He ran to the floor chief, who took a look, freaked out, and called in IT...

Now our IT section isn't exactly what I'd call competent, as I've ranted about before... So he turned up, failed at comprehending what was going on, told everyone to not touch the computer and directly went full fucking retard and wanted to shut down the entire server.

OhFuck.jpg this is escalating quicker than I thought.

Fortunately for him he didn't have the rights to do that himself, so he ran off to call his chief to do it.

My floor chiefs knows I do also do programming so he came up to me asking if I could take a look at it to figure out it was doing, so I walked up "took a look" and told him I can probably stop this. Hit the enter key to stop it, deleted the batch file and shut off the computer.

Told my chief this should work as a temporary solution but IT should do a full check of their systems.

Fast forward a couple of hours and head of IT is still trying to figure out what happened and checking their systems.. luckily he wasn't dumb enough to actually shut everything down

Around 2009 or earlier, I began the long grueling process of creating my own batch AI (yes batch as in Windows Batch , kill me for not knowing there were better languages around). Looking back at it, it is THE messiest thing I've ever created. Mostly because of how many unnecessary files were created to make the entire thing work. However, I’m still proud of it to this day because of the dedication I had put into creating the entire thing.

I would create diagrams on the mirrors in my room; of course I would be scolded for this. But I was mad with thought working through the entire thing.

I would scribble and type whenever I had the chance, trying to create the functions that would allow the thing to talk back to me. Finally, when it opened its eyes and spoke its first words I quickly started creating the functions that would allow it to learn new inputs. Over time and with some elbow grease I was able to polish it up to my liking.

The entire program branched off some of my more earlier programs in batch, they mostly ranged from the medial to the crazy; i.e. turning my computer on and off at certain times of the day, and multithreaded migration of files to new disks

It's not as sophisticated as other AI that were being built at the time, but at the age of 16 and with no experience in real programming at all, I'd say it was my first stepping stone towards more sophisticated programs, and ultimately, my decision in Computer Programming at all.

We were all 16 once right? When I was 16, my school had a network of Windows 2000 machines. Since I was learning java at the time, I thought learning batch scripting would be fun.

One day I wrote a script that froze input from the mouse and displayed a pop up with a scary “Critical System Error: please correct before data deletion!!”. It also displayed a five minute countdown timer, after which the computer restarted.

I may or may not have replaced the internet explorer icon on the desktop with a link to my program on the entire student lab of computers. Chaos.

TL;DR: I have been changing stuff on a school computer and found various workarounds to do things that were blocked by the sysadmin and my classmates think I am a hacker.

I guess war has officially been declared between me and my school's sysadmin.

It all started about two weeks ago. I was bored while writing a report on a school computer, so I decided to lauch Chrome and pressed F12. Nothing happened, so I closed the window and opened Firefox. It worked there, and a few classmates started to scatter around me. They thought I was hacking a website so that changes would be permanent.

But what really matters in this story is that a few days later, nobody could start Firefox anymore, a message popped up saying the administrator blocked the application. Somebody must have reported it.

I also tried executing a Batch file, not succesful of course. But surprisingly enough .cmd files could be executed. But this has also been fixed a few days after.

So today I managed to remove Chrome's settings folder and the console popped up this time. Again, this was hacking from my classmates' point of view, so right now I am waiting for Chrome to be blocked. There are no other browsers currently installed, so let's see what happens.

My OS professor just said that next week we'll be learning about bash scripts, which is fine for me except for one simple thing. We're using Windows 10 and the instructions he provided us with confirm we'll write Windows batch scripts.
I asked him about that and he shouted at me for "thinking I'm smarter than someone with a PhD in computer science".

Also the whole semester apparentyly we won't even hear about Linux, since "only hackers and some servers use it". FML.

How did I learn programming?
When I joined college I was literally the dumbest in the class... I didn't even know what is a char and what is a String.. Our lecturer made fun of and humiliated me in front of the whole class....also my parents barely afforded my college tutotion fed...
So one night I sat with myself and reevaluated myself and decided that no matter how hard it is gonna be, I must become an excellent programmer....spent restless nights and days learning the core of programming in c++ then switched to Java *best day in my life* and also learned Android development.. And later JavaScript "mostly worked with jQuery and AngularJs*
In my final year project I built an Android web browser that even the lecturer that made fun of me was impressed by..and my app was rated the best project of that batch.
Now I'm working as a Java web dev and made a promise to myself that I'd learn something new every day.

I just want to say FUCK YOU to the guy who had the great Idea of putting the EDIT button 10 pixels away from the DELETE button on this internal batch processing scheduler tool.

Vacation in Delphi

Prolog:
After a basic cup of java, I wanted to go to the c and meet Ada, who cured her common lisp with a batch of elixir. On the way, I had a swift Smalltalk with Pascal, who has a brainfuck, because he is a wyvern enthusiast.

I also found a shell with a perl in it, but it had a scratch. This reminded me of my friend Ruby, who has a pet python and loved a good scheme à Shakespeare.

I then started my laptop, which already collected rust on its logo of a maple, and browsed the web for groovy songs. I found a song by Julia, performed in a very high octave in F#.

You retarded cunt. Yeah, you. No, don’t stare at me like you did nothing.
I fucking wrote 3/4 of your stupid script because you put batch in PowerShell and don’t know what a fucking anonymous object is, and you take credits without acknowledging I helped the shit out of you. Do it one more time and I’ll bomb your hard drive with a fucking hammer.

Useless fuck

Next Level Thinking

So today I got really triggered when i hear this guy say that coding is cancer. I stand up and instantly the first thing going through my mind is that it's the battle of the nerds. He says he tried ALL of the programing languages out there and they were shit. I asked if he tried C# and he still says coding is cancer even though he has never even heard of any C# syntax. I asked if he used Batch as a started language and he still says it. So I just decided to roast him by saying "did you put .bat at the end of the file when you were saving? Oh wait never mind, I forgot your lazy ass doesn't have the intelligence to understand how to save"
Surprisingly everyone was silent and most likely didn't understand what I had said. So I just left wondering if he even bothered to get a guide on syntax for any of the languages he would have liked.

To those that think they can't make it.
To those that are put down by those that don't understand you.
And to those that have never had a dream come true.

Not a rant, but the story of how I got into programming

I've always been into tech/electronics. I remember being told once that when I was 3, I used to take plug sockets to pieces. When I was 7, I built a computer with my dad.
There isn't a thing in my room that hasn't been dismantled and put back together again. Except for the things that weren't put back together again ;)

When I was 15, I got a phone for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy phone, the LG P350 (optimus ME). But I loved it all the same.
However I knew it could do a lot more. It ran a bloated, slow version of Android 2.2.
So I went searching, how can I make it faster, how to make it do more. And I found a huge community around Android ROMs. Obviously the first thing I did was flashed this ROM. Sure, there were bugs, but I was instantly in love with it. My phone was freed.

From there I went on to exploring what else can be done.
I wanted to learn how to script, so over the weekend I wrote a 1000 line batch (Windows cmd) script that would root the phone and flash a recovery environment onto it. Pretty basic. Lots of switch statements, but I was proud of it. I'd achieved something. It wasn't new to the world, but it was my first experience at programming.

But it wasn't enough, I needed more.
So I set out to actually building the roms. I installed Linux. I wanted to learn how to utilise Linux better, so I rewrote my script in bash.
By this time, I'd joined a team for developing on similar spec'd phones. Without the funds to by new devices, we began working on more radical projects.
Between us, we ported newer kernels to our devices. We rebased much of the chipset drivers onto newer equivalents to add new features.

And then..

Well, it was exam season. I was suffering from personal issues (which I will not detail), and that, with the work on Android, I ended up failing the exams.
I still passed, but not to the level I expected.

So I gave up on school, and went head first into a new kind of development. "continue doing what you love. You'll make it" is what I told myself.

I found python by contributing to an IRC bot. I learnt it by reading the codebase. Anything I didn't understand, I researched. Anything I wanted to do, google was there to help me through it.

Then it was exam season again. Even though I'd given up on school, I was still going. It was easier to stay in than do anything about it.
A few weeks before the exams, I had a panic attack. I was behind on coursework, and I knew I would do poorly on exams.
So I dropped out.
I was disappointed, my family was disappointed.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do. I set out to get a job as a developer.

At this stage, I'd not done anything special. So I started aiming bigger. Contributing to projects maintained by Sony and Google, learning from them. Building my own projects to assist with my old Android friends.
I managed to land a contract, however due to the stresses at home, I had to drop it after a month.
Everything was going well, I felt ready to get a full time job as a developer, after 2 years of experience in the community.

Then I had to wake up.
Unfortunately, my advisors (I was a job seeker at the time) didn't understand the potential of learning to be a developer. With them, it's "university for a skilled job".
They see the word "computer" on a CV, they instantly say "tech support".
I played ball, I did what I could for them. But they'd always put me down, saying I wasn't good enough, that I'd never get a job.
I hated them. I'd row with them every other day.

By God, I would prove them wrong.

And then I found them. Or, to be more precise, they found me. A startup in London got in contact with me. They seemed like decent people. I spoke with their developers, and they knew their stuff, these were people that I can learn from.
I travelled 4 hours to go for an interview, then 4 hours back.
When I got the email saying they'd move me to London, I was over the moon.
I did exactly what everyone was telling me I couldn't do.

1.5 years later, I'm still working with them. We all respect each other, and we all learn from each other.

I'm ever grateful to them for taking a shot with me. I had no professional experience, and I was by no means the most skilled individual they interviewed.

Many people have a dream. I won't lie, I once dreamed of working at Google. But after the journey I've been through, I wouldn't have where I am now any other way. Though, in time, I wish to share this dream with another.
I hope that all of you reach your dreams too.

Sorry for the long post. The details are brief, but there are only 5k characters ;)

Overheard this today.

Client: I've tried running it but the batch file isn't working.

Tech: You're a batch file.

TLDR: In defense of Powershell - the rant:

I don’t get the Powershell hate.

You don’t hate a screwdriver for not being able to turn a nut, you just *don’t use a screwdriver to turn a nut*

Once you recognize what the tool is good for and you don’t try to use it like Bash, it’s wildly powerful, and satisfying to use in a way Cmd.exe never was.

Cygwin or a Linux Subsystem can only go so far on a Windows computer. You’re dealing with two fundamentally different OS architectures. It makes sense you’d need different tools.

And like it or not, Microsoft owns the non-tech-user desktop , corners the non-tech server business market, and Active Directory is THE tool for managing Windows desktops on a large scale - So Wanblows is not going away anytime soon.

Automation without some weird ass sysVol batch login script is finally possible. Anyone who knows .Net classes can leverage their methods from directly within Powershell. Remote management of headless Windows servers is now a reality. If you have an Office 365 Exchange server you can literally Powershell remote to it for management, just like your favorite cloud hosted Linux distribution.

No one said Windows is a better OS, but an object based shell on an object based OS *makes sense*. It’s useful for its environment. Let it be.

So yesterday was a regular old day where I came into the office and began my work. My office mate that sits next to me happens to be having an issue with her batch script. It wasn't running correctly so she had decided to call in IT and have them take a look at it. What she was trying to do was process some images through a dedicated super-computer located on site.

So as you can imagine with both of them standing right next to me it was hard not to listen in on their conversation. The IT guy decided to go through a barrage of different troubleshooting methods to figure out what was happening with her script. And soon enough they discovered what was wrong. It happened to be an issue with how Windows decides to deal with new line characters. FYI it looks like this shit "\n \r"

The fucking \r looked like a directory to Linux. So it would squeal to a halt every single time she tried to run.

How this happened was due to her using notepad to edit her batch file.

At this point, I made a comment about her use of Notepad.
"Oh, you're using notepad? I've had similar issues like this in the past when I've used notepad. I really hate notepad." I said with a slight chuckle.

And that was pretty much the end of our encounters. However, at the end of the day, she decided to speak up about this.

"I don't appreciate you making comments about my use of Notepad. That was a form of microaggression towards me, and I don't want you to do it again."

Completely taken aback I replied.
"I'm sorry you took it that way, it was a joke and wasn't meant to be taken personally."

"Well, your intent does not change impact. And by the way, I take pride in my code and scripting. I don't need your commentary about my code nor your micro-aggressions." She said in a huff.

"Well again, I'm sorry you feel that way," I replied back

*I'd like to say that this situation is loosely paraphrased, but the essence of what happened is still there.

At this point, this is what I have to say about this situation. Why the FUCKING FUCK are you using notepad to program anything. There ARE A SHIT TON of differing programs that are available for your use and you decide to use fucking notepad?!?! $%&*@#$^

You could use notepad++, you could use Sublime, you could use every-fucking-thing except Notepad!!! If anything I think I had every right to make a comment about your stupid use of notepad. And darling, your script not working was well deserved, I hope you run into more errors like this because you deserve nothing less for your arrogance. So you can take your opinions and shove them up your fat-ass because at the end of the day I don't give a FUCK about your opinions on my micro-aggressions that you're spouting off about.
I suggest the next time you feel attacked about your code perhaps you should take a cold hard look at yourself before thinking that I'm the one that is the FUCKING problem.

A friend of mine once went into a library and opened a cmd on one of the computers, to run a little batch rename script on his usb stick. 5 minutes later he got kicked out because they though he was hacking the computer 😅

Terminate batch job (Y/N)? N

*terminates*

"Do you want to terminate the batch task? (Y/N)"
"N"
*it terminates*

@angular/cli are you maybe a girl?

My friend typed "hack" into a .bat file on our school network and got an after-school detention and his account disabled for like a week because he simply had the intention of trying to hack the network....

Today I ran a Killer-Batch-Script on a School-PC.
After I run it, the PC instantly started to lag af and stopped working.
So after about 1 minute, I force-shutdown'd the PC.
But when I restarted it, it didn't boot.
(Boot-Disk was somehow not found)
I quickly stood up, went to another PC and pretended like nothing happened...
Never (NEVER) do that with you own PC.
Here's the script if you are interested:

Give some personality to your CMD!
1. Make a file called i.cmd and add the following text to it:
@echo off
echo me too
2. Move the file to somewhere in the system path (e.g. C:\Windows)
3. Enjoy!

Around 2009 or earlier, I began the long grueling process of creating my own batch AI (yes batch as in Windows Batch , kill me for not knowing there were better languages around). Looking back at it, it is THE messiest thing I've ever created. Mostly because of how many unnecessary files were created to make the entire thing work. However, I’m still proud of it to this day because of the dedication I had put into creating the entire thing.

I would create diagrams on the mirrors in my room; of course I would be scolded for this. But I really couldn't stop thinking about my program and working through the entire thing.

I would scribble and type whenever I had the chance, trying to create the functions that would allow the thing to talk back to me. Finally, when it opened its eyes and spoke its first words I quickly started creating the functions that would allow it to learn new inputs. Over time and with some elbow grease I was able to polish it up to my liking.

The entire program branched off some of my more earlier programs in batch, they mostly ranged from the medial to the crazy; i.e. turning my computer on and off at certain times of the day, and multithreaded migration of files to new disks

It's not as sophisticated as other AI progrmas that were being made at the time, but at the age of 16 and with no experience in real programming at all, I'd say it was my first stepping stone towards more sophisticated programs, and ultimately, my decision to enter into Computer Science at all.

When I thought I hacked Facebook.

I somehow managed to "inspect element" and changed a couple of the words on the page. I reloaded the page and all my work was gone... I tried it again and again then googled how to hack. I then learned how to make batch scripts. the rest is history.

Server room horror story time!

So I went into my little server room yesterday and heard a lot of noises that were like someone was cutting metal. So I started looking and hearing from where the sound came, ended up being a DELL PowerEdge 2950 from which all 6 drives were failing.. got lucky to back everything up, had to use the deepfreeze method though.. so guys learn from this mistake and don't put disks from the same batch in your server unless you have a good backup solution. Feel free to share your horror stories down in the comments ;)

I just ran a batch rename script in the console. What's so bad about this? I forgot that I had closed the previous console, which caused Win+4 to open a new one at the default location. Which is my home folder.
"Desktop"? Nah, you mean "file4.png". "Downloads"? No, that's "file6.png". "rclonesync-V2-master"? That's "file19.png" now.
Luckily I was able to restore it all, except for one folder, containing unreadable files with names like "data_0". I hope I didn't need that. And luckily it skipped all hidden files and folders.

When I started programming Batch Files I decided to go big and and make an Batch Program with a fully functional UI system. Just when I had finished the first menu I kept getting a "goto was unexpected at this time" or something like that. I did everything I could to see about debugging until I finally cleared my calender and spent the next week debugging. A week of debugging goes by and I see someone coding in color rather then black and white at my school. I walk up to him and ask. "What language is that?" To which he replies "Batch". I asked him how he got Notepad to be in color and he simply pointed to the top left of the screen and it said Notepad++.
I get home later that day and look up "Notepad++" and download the first thing I see. I install the .msi file and I see a language bar at the top of the screen. Set it to batch, and drag my .bat file into the program to see six of my dividers are red bars. I look this up and see there's another spacing option "echo.", I replace my current spacers with this and the whole thing starts working. Fml, that's a week I'm never gonna get back

Story #1: So I took a month of parental leave. And was planning to extend it a little longer to deal with my final exams. I was planning to spend lots of quality time with my wife and newborn son. Little did I know... It turns out that out of 5 OoO weeks I was looking forward I actually had 3 at most. The rest I've spent working remotely as I was insisted to deploy a brand new and poorly tested feature to PROD 2 days before my paternity leave. So I spent 2 weeks debugging things in PROD. Remotely. Needless to say that did suck.

Story #2: After story #1 I've learnt my lesson. This summer I took 3 weeks annual leave to renovate my apartment. I asked to not to be disturbed unless there's an emergency. And an emergency it was. One of our app users had a planned hi-load batch job lasting for 2-3 months. Hundreds of thousands of items had to be created and processed. It turns out the _processing_ algo had some flaws and was acting out. I was called out and asked to assist. I knew this sort of debugging is going to take a lot of my time so this time I put my conditions on the table: I will assist but I'll extend my leave by 1.5 the time I spend working now. They took the deal. Instead of 3 weeks I had 5 weeks of vacation!

I don't care that much about my salary. I prefer to exchange it for my time off hence I didn't ask for compensations.

Bottom line: NEVER EVER underestimate or undersell your time and effort. You are a valuable asset and if the team/client needs you on your day off -- make it count. Your time off is YOUR time. Never forget it.

In highschool we pasted a shutdown batch script in someone's startup folder. Never seen someone more confused than when his pc force shutdown every time he restarted. All fun and giggles until system admin walked in

This is something that happened 2 years ago.

1st year at uni, comp sci.

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

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

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

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

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

2 weeks into development, Project manager issues requirement changes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yesterday, my girlfriend caught a virus. There were 5+ running programs, in program files, program files x86, system32, basically everywhere. The virus modified chrome, firefox, edge (and even installed a false uc browser assuming we had one), there are many entries at startup programs, also running daemons, once you kill one of them, the others detect it and replicate their killed fellows. Tried to run a linux live usb disk for a cleanup, but the computer hibernates instead of shutdown, making modifications on disk risky.

I spent hours trying to suppress the processes, do a manual cleanup and antivirus search. It looked all cleaned up, then I reinstalled chrome, and now it switches its homepage everytime I open it, it also injects batch arguments to desktop link forum chrome (deleting it manually does not help, it comes back). I'm a linux guy, and in a few hours, I hated windows more than ever.

If anybody knows the authors, I *really* want to meet them. I promise I'm not going to punch them, but kneel down, bow my head in respect, and say "teach me master."

LONELINESS IS REAL
I am a freshman in a university ( about to complete my first year ) with a girl to boy ratio of around 1:10. During my first semester I was spending a lot of time with friends, chatting up with people and making connections. Due to this my productivity as a dev, if I am even capable of being called that decreased ( I was not a developer before joining , but I had an aim of being one , esp at least the best in my batch ) after 1st year. In retrospect I did nothing productive till 3 months out of 4 in my first sem and the guilt hit me hard . During the last month I had to catch up with my much neglected studies and all I had done was a little bit of html and css, and barely scratched the surface of js( please don't judge me for this :) , I had to start somewhere < although I learned a little bit of C++ > ). BUT I WAS A HAPPY CUNT, and had no sign of lonelines. Now during this sem , I had made progress ( learn js with es6 syntax and still learning, did c++ and extended my knowledge ) . Currently I am working on my Vue full stack app ( along with express and some websocket library , TBD ) < yeh I learnt some backend too > , and increasing my knowledge of dsa using clrs. Although my productivity has increased manifolds but I know feel the need of closure. I am kinda happy with the fact that I know a lot of people around here ( thanks to my extroverted 1st semester ) but sometimes it hits me hard at night when I don't have a monitor to drown my eyes and thoughts in. I have increased my academic performance too but I need someone to share and express my feelings with. I could have made a girlfriend earlier but now most of them are taken and I have lost touch. But believe me, all I want is a companion to spend these lonely days and night ( not talking about as a friend ). Staying away from home isnt easy you know...m :(

KUDOS TO DEVRANT FOR DEVELOPING A COMMUNITY WHERE PEOPLE LIKE ME CAN FEEL SAFE IN OUR NATURAL HABITAT. I COULDN'T HAVE EXPRESSED MY FEELINGS ANYWHERE ELSE EXCEPT IN A PERSONAL BLOG ( where no one would have read it )

PS1: I apologise if I sounded arrogant about any of my skill, I didn't mean that way. I ain't even that good, just kinda proud of myself a little for achieving something I couldn't have thought.

PS2: Any type of suggestions and help is much appreciated ( considering I am a college student who went into some serious development 4 months ago , I am pretty impressionable ;) )

PS3: Please don't confuse this with depression. I am HAPPY BUT LONELY

PS4: Is there a way so that I can change my username?

Once the system "lost" a user_id var that says who started a batch, but it was a mandatory field that was filled at the beginning of the process.

I tried to find the reason, failed, called a senior for help, he also failed to find the reason.

After a couple of hours I looked to him, he looked back and I said,
"Let's call it a solar flare bit flip?"
"It's the only logical explanation"

So it became a bit flip issue to the PM, we had a good laugh, we send as "system instability" to the client.

The bug never happened again, no one ever found the true reason, maybe it was really a bit flip 🤔

I got the following question from the client:

After last batch of changes the name of the downloaded file is now `<file name > (2).pdf`, can it be like before, without `(2)`

!dev
!!vodka!
!batch files. because they're stupid.

Preface: I may be drunk. If not, I'll keep trying ~

Update: no, i'm already kinda wasted.

I told @AlexDeLarge that I would try Reyka today and let him know how it is. So, let's have at it!

At the recommendation of a friend, I tried Deep Eddy (vodka) a few weeks ago. It's extremely smooth and very good. Totally recommend. I can drink it straight, or with a tiny bit of water.

The same friend also recommended Reyka, which I bought earlier today (among quite a few other things, because alcohol). Here's what I discovered:

With Reyka, I was expecting something extremely smooth and almost tasteless, but tasteless it is not. Reyka tastes halfway between vodka and a good gin, like Bombay Sapphire. It actually has a *lot* of flavor, but the vodka itself is actually pretty high quality. I haven't found anything to mix with it yet, and I don't really like it straight. I might try lemon or lemonade next.

If I was to recommend vodkas, it would be either Tito's, or Deep Eddy. (Reyka is kind of strange, so I don't know if I can recommend it yet.)

Tito's is smooth and tasty -- absolutely not a gross vodka flavor, but ... nice. All alcohols have different effects and make me feel different. Grey Goose makes me tired, Tito's makes me happy.

Deep Eddy is incredibly smooth, and has almost no taste at all. It's wonderful.

UPdte: I took awhilfe to wrte this and... I'm getting a little tooo drunkt o conitinue so i thnkg oin going to nd this rannt here. ssorry! ^^

Friend : I know how to program!
Me : Cool! What language do you program in?
Friend opens notepad and names file program.bat
You have disappointed me

When the university finds out you're a pentester:

Usual underclassmen: Can you hack my bf/gf? I think they're cheating on me.

Delusional underclassmen who think they know everything: I can hack too! Who's your master? I learned how from master jimmy *runs a batch script that has "tree" on loop. See? What batch script do YOU have?"

The IT teachers: can you show us how a payload works?

Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.

When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.

I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.

At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.

At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.

I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.

And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

Okay, Google. I can see why you want me to check those boxes with cars. And I'm also fine with you telling me to do it on a different picture if the first one didnt had any, just to check. But WHAT I AM FUCKING NOT OKAY WITH, IS ME SOLVING CAPTCHAS FOR 10 FUCKING MINUTES REPETEDLY SAYING PLEASE TRY AGAIN AND THEN TELLING ME THAT I AM NOT EVEN ABLE TO TRY AGAIN BECAUSE OF AN DETECTED ATTEMPT OF BOTTING? WHO ARE YOU? AN AI QUESTONING MY HUMAN IDENTITY? JUST BECAUSE IM USING LINUX YOU DECIDE TO GIVE ME ANOTHER NOTHERFUCKING BATCH OF STREET SIGNS? YOU CAN STICK THOSE STREET SIGNS UP YOUR ASS! FUCK OFF!

tl;dr: i got banned from solving recaptchas the second time this week. lets hope its just *another* timeout.

I'm investigating PRs for a super legacy codebase. Someone else already approved the PRs -- somebody who has never even run the code or had the project set up before.

The codebase hasn't been touched in two years, and it hasn't been updated in four. It's using CoffeeScript, Node v0, Electron v0.30, and Angular 1.x. I obviously don't have a dev environment anymore, either, and my previous dev env was on Windows, so I'll have to translate my custom build utilities from batch to bash (or much more likely: node).

To make matters worse: the PRs break both the initial project setup and the project itself (NPM can no longer find some installed packages, among other problems). And. someone already merged them into master. So: fuck.

I'm going to yell at the author and tell him to fix his shit. Why? Because when I check out my last commit prior to his PRs, everything works perfectly. Surprise!

I was so done with this project two and a half years ago. I'm still so done with it. I just don't want to maintain this anymore, or honestly even look at it. I would happily rebuild the project from scratch, but updating it from the days of IE8? No way.

It is once again that time of year when we say farewell to our current interns and say hello to a brand new batch.

The two groups overlap for a few days. During this time the old interns show the new interns the ropes, while the mentors silently weep in the lunchroom having realized that nothing that they've said over the last 12 months has had any effect whatsoever.

Some choice quotes:
---
New Intern: It says 'uncaught exception'.
Old Intern: Oh don't worry that will fix itself on production.
---
OI: Did you pull the code?
NI: Yeah, but I have all these weird brackets everywhere... [merge conflict]
OI: Oh yeah that happens sometimes, just delete them.
---
NI: It says "push to master rejected". [we enforce code reviews]
OI: Ohh that means the server is broken. You should tell someone, they have to reboot it.
---
NI: Where did that file save to? [we use ONLY macOS and Linux]
OI: C:\Users\<your name>\My Documents\...
---
OI: You can use either pgAdmin or MySQL Workbench. I like Workbench better but I couldn't get it to work, it kept giving me errors.
---
And of course...
---
OI: No, we don't use Linux. We use CentOS.
---

I did the math today. Only 35 more years and I can retire.

Why you should always test your batch jobs

!dev，

I have a baby. He doesnt like sleeping. He has GERD (reflux).

He rarely sleep more than 2 hours at a time (probably 1 a week).

The best he has ever slept in his 11month of living was 5 hours. That day he was sick and he ended up in hospital.

All good， he is still alive and well.

But he goes down at 7pm and wakes every 2 hours if not less.

Somestimes he is easy to put down and thongs are bearable， but many times it can take up to 30-45 minutes to out him down.

I dev during the day but i am longing to have nights where i can completly concrntrate. But my partner has been survivjng on broken sleep for about a year now.

She lets me have longer stretches but i either stay up late and havr to feed the baby and jiggle him， which breaks concentration and has pbliged me to get an extra desk and screento be put into an uncomfortable place so i could code at home (my orfice is a rent out 10msquare batch in the garden).

Or sometimes i just get up at 3 or 4am so that he can sleep on me 2eme i can jiggle him when he wakes.

I cant deal with being woken every 2 hours. I throw tantrums like im a 7 year old.

Ive rarely had such a sucking life quality as now.

Its a good things babies a cute i tell you that!!!!

Created a batch script to write some filenames to a text file using a loop.

Missed out the echo command, the script tries to open 100+ zip files on a production/potato server (I feel like prodtato should be a word).

Server cries and crashes
Dev cries and crashes

Few years ago a girl from our HR was hitting on my co-worker. She was asking all kinds of personal and professional favours just so he would come by her place, etc. One time she asked him to send her few C/C++ questions that she could use to thin the crowd of potential candidates before inviting them for the formal interview that he'd conduct later on. Obviously she wouldn't know if the answer is good or not but hell with it, he was ready to storm that pink fortress! So he came up with some mind twisters. She left two days later before he even reached the drawbridge. Sad.

So about six months ago he got fed up with some bullshit and left the company. Yesterday we had dinner. He was interviewing for quite some time being picky about which offer to accept and, surprisingly, during his last interview he got asked very familiar set of questions. He answered each. Then he couldn't resist and asked if the girl works there. The guy confirmed and, without a warning, called her. As if it wasn't awkward enough this is how I was told the conversation went:

- "Joan! You won't guess who I've got here! Your very good friend, Peter! Nope. Yeah, that one - how did you kn... Uh-huh. Oh? Yeah. Are you sure? I mean, I wouldn't. Deal!"

Then he turned out to Peter and said:

- "You know what? I wasn't going to hire you for shit because in my opinion your knowledge on the subject matter, how to put that gently, sucks ass... But apparently Joan here says you're professional and can handle everything we'll be able to throw at you. So when can you start?"

Needless to say he took the job. The fortress fell soon after and he wanted to meet to ask if I'm coming for the bachelor party. I'm ordering t-shirts with "batch mode off" in monospace.

Tl; dr: I used to be an immature little stinker

So... Back in middle school we had those super low level IT classes (like an hour a week or so). We've been using MS Excel and I thought it'd be an awesome idea to write a batch script that would open a green terminal (so hacker wow), echo something like "you've got hack'd pal" then sleep for a couple of seconds and do shutdown -p. Then I replaced the launcher in Excel folder with that script... I know it was immature AF but still funny as it took the teacher a good while to figure it out.

So I'm trying my hand at home brewing beer. I started my first batch 2 weeks ago, and finally bottled it last night. It should be ready in another 2 weeks! I can't wait to try it; it smells delicious 🍺

[Begin Rant] When you show your senior manager your REST Web Service and he says "Oh no nooo... I don't wanna see no code"... Me: Code?? That ain't code you fat silly fucker it's the command line output data which I spent a week parsing, batch processing, and storing into the database! [End Rant] :[

Cracking old recovery CDs for the 9x/2000/XP era shines some light into how companies operated and when concepts came to be in that time:

Packard Bell: An EXE checks that you're running on a Packard Bell machine and reboots if it's not. How do we bypass it? Easy: just fucking delete it. The files to reinstall Windows from scratch come from...
...
C:?
Yup. Turns out Packard Bell was doing the recovery partition thing all the way back to the 9x era, maybe even further. Files aren't even on the restore disc so if your partition table got fucked (pretty common because malware and disk corruption) you were totally fucked and needed to repurchase Windows. (My dad, at the time, only charged at-cost OEM prices for a replacement retail copy. He knew it was dumb so he never sold PB machines.)

Compaq:
Computer check? Nope, remove one line from a BATCH file and it's gone.

Six archives, named "WINA.ZIP" through "WINF.ZIP" (plus one or two extras for OEM software) hold Windows. Problematic? Well... only because they never put the password anywhere so the installer can't install them. (Some interesting on-disc technician-only utils, though!)

Dell:
If not a Dell machine, lock up. Cause? CONFIG.SYS driver masquerading as OAK (the common CD driver) doing the check, then chainloading the real OAK driver. Simple fix: replace the fake driver with the real one.

Issues?

Would I mention this one if there weren't?

Disc is mounted on N:. Subdirectories work, but doing anything in them (a DIR, trying to execute something, trying to view shit in EDIT.COM) kicked you back to the disc root.

Installer couldn't find machine manifest in the MAP folder (it wanted your PC's serial before it'd let you install, to make sure you have the correct recovery disc) so it asked for 12-digit alphanumeric serial. The defined serials in the manifest were something like "02884902-01" or similar (8-2, all numbers) and it couldn't read the file so it couldn't show the right format, nor check for the right type.

Bypassing that issue, trying to do the ACTUAL install process caused nothing to happen... as all BATCHes for install think the CD should be on X:.

Welp.

well that was fun. Now to test on-real-PC behavior, as VBOX and VMWare both don't like the special hardware shit it tries to use. (Why does a textmode GUI need GPU acceleration, COMPAQ?????)

Chili cook off aftermath.

Final batch turned out great. Many mouths were burnt.

I'm going to troll some friends whit this VBScript that create and run silently a batch

Dear anyone who has never tried writing a batch script in Ms paint,

Try it.

It's really fun to do (especially when other people are watching and they are like "wtf? How did you write a program with paint??)

<end of random post>

Welcome to the dark side..

OMG I just accidentally deleted hundreds of hours of work permanently ... F*** ME 😱😱😱😨😨😱😰
THIS IS WHY I DON'T FUCKING USE AUTOMATED BATCH SCRIPTS.

Two years ago I started a small online business. It was not a long term investment and it literally ended up being a one man business. The idea was to provide a service to a small group of people who will benefit from my idea and to offer it to them at a very cheap price. (It being the cheapest helped its popularity a lot).

However, never once did it actually make any profit. (and i never wanted it to make a profit) I wanted it to be self sustaining business and it was.

This was a project for my University by the way, I started off in my first year because of my extensive knowledge in the particular matter, and I only sold to people on campus.

Now that its been 4 years, my batch is graduating, and so there aren't many people to spread the word about this project. It's finally the time to actually say goodbye to this project.

I leased a dedicated server two years ago, and I am finally saying goodbye to that too (can't afford to keep it live anymore). And seriously, it feels sad to shut this machine down haha, I've had so much fun playing around with the configurations (even though it was a production server).

It's clear that this downsizing will continue and I will be closing the service in the near future.

We have an API available for our customers to integrate our software with their Webshop.

A client and their developer complained because not all of the products came through. I checked the products, the validation, the parameters, the database .. everything looked fine and I was scratching my head why these articles wouldn't come through (but it did work at my end).

After some time, I checked the request logs..
Apparently it wasn't quite clear for them that a loop is required with the 'skip' and 'take' parameters to create an offset for pagination.They only synchronised the first 500 products.. everytime..

We have a limit of 500 products per batch (take) for performance reasons.

They asked if we could increase this limit, because they have "a large range of products" (not really, only 800 or so and we have clients with more than 2mil. products..) Oh pls.. I've sent them a link to the PHP manual for a basic 'while' loop..

They laugh at me when I'm still using windows batch scripts.

I ask them how to check the cpu architecture within a batch, to check whether administrator rights are present and if not, enabling the default windows admin and create another admin over the default admin. I ask them how they'd set a registry key within a batch...

They don't have any idea...

That moment when the instructor is explaining array in Java, and you are the only one in the batch having 4 Years of Experience, and Certification by Oracle

When I cost the company half a million.

We recently got incubated and signed up for an accelerator programme, it was a life changing moment for me especially after having worked with my startup unpaid for almost a year. So naturally, it meant a lot to me.

But my friends / colleagues had to leave for a trip leaving me to work along side this other startup in the same batch. They needed a front end guy for their web stuff so we naturally offered our services except they needed me to work on Angular and I didn't know jack shit about it but pretended I did.

I couldn't reach out to my friends for help because I felt bad and wanted to prove my worth, and I pressured myself to the point where I called the client our batch mate brought on board making him leave.

I lost credibility as a professional, trust as a friend and my place at the office because it's gotten extremely awkward to go back there.

I fucked up my one way ticket out of my current certain household circumstances and realized I'm just a shitty developer who's all talk and no show.

I """""accidentally"""'" found some security holes in my school's Windows public computer setup.

Every student and teacher has a personal Active Directory, obviously they should be able to only see their own right?
oh wait the directory up button in explorer shows me all of them and I have r/w access to teacher and student ADs.

That's cool.

Also, the command prompt, Run prompt ad Explorer path bar are disabled...

...but batch scripts work.

Sweet.

Surely I can't do something dumb like--- oh, regedit's blocked but not the reg command.

They use the-- WHY IS GPEDIT NOT BLOCKED

Well what the fuck.

(All of this was responsibly handled by emailing the tech department. They have an email just for this! ...got a bounceback "this person is no longer employed at XYZ School.")

this is university class. can you believe it? this lecture is not supposed to be in this level.

Well I FUCKING FINALLY managed to build a program that makes my dad's printer print automatically.
Have ranted about this on my previous rant.
My recent approach was actually overengineered all over the top. I was using pyautogui to simulate the mouse that would call the settings window on Windows, which would print a nozzle test (the translation for "Düsentestmuster" according to google?). The more I worked with it, the more I would have had to care about edge cases when calling the settings and god knows what else...😖
So I left the idea.
What I came up with was a python script with some copy-pasted code of an example from the win32print api that printed an image that I specified, so it would use all inks. Somehow it works perfectly...
After that I used the win32api. ShellExecute() with ghostscript to print a PDF for the PGBK ink.
Finally a batch script to run this python script on the task scheduler. No converted .exe as dependencies and whatnot let it all go to hell.😒

It's not quite what I had originally anticipated as a solution but IT FINALLY FUCKING WORKS!!
...😪 It took way longer than expected and although I somehow couldn't manage to print all on 1 paper, I'm still satisfied that it really works.

That's all, had to vent my frustration and share this personal success.

So I'm wrapping up for the day and right before I leave a coworker comes up to me with a problem. Our company uses barcodes to track some of our products through their development and we recently switched over to a new system for producing them. The barcodes for this particular product are supposed to have 8 digits, but the last 200 we printed have 9.

I immediately panic because I wrote the script that generates the bar codes and there had been a bug in the past where the script would add extra leading zeroes that weren't supposed to be there. I scramble and check the database, it would be a huge headache if our production database had been compromised with junk barcodes. Nope, all the new barcodes there have the right number of digits.

Next place to check is in the code that writes the barcodes to a text file for staff to print the physical labels from. Nope that's all fine too.

I ask the person who printed out the recent batch of labels to show me how the printing software reads from the text file. She seems confused by my question and shows me how she manually enters in the barcode range to the software. As she does this I watch her add an extra zero to the numbers. 🙃

Even worse there was an option to import all the codes from a text file literally RIGHT BELOW the manual option.

TLDR; Thought my script had screwed up our database, ended up being the fault of a coworker who didn't know how to import text files.

I HATE it when SCHOOL TEACHERS OF ALL PEOPLE Suspect me of hacking because I am coding probably in batch because I don't have admin privileges

Translation:
"Artificial intelligence for homework?
I want to program a artificial intelligence that can do my homework. I can sell it then. As language I would like to use either batch or HTML. Does anyone know good tutorials?"

This is hilarious!

Many of you who have a Windows computer may be familiar with robocopy, xcopy, or move.
These functions? Programs? Whatever they may be, were interesting to me because they were the first things that got me really into batch scripting in the first place.

What was really interesting to me was how I could run multiples of these scripts at a time.

<storytime>
It was warm Spring day in the year of 2007, and my Science teacher at the time needed a way to get files from the school computer to the hard-drive faster. The amount of time that the computer was suggesting was 2 hours. Far too long for her. I told her I’d build her something that could work faster than that. And so started the program would take up more of my time than the AI I had created back in 2009.
</storytime>

This program would scan the entirety of the computer's file system, and create an xcopy batch file for each of these directories. After parsing these files, it would then run all the batch files at once. Multithreading as it were? Looking back on it, the throughput probably wasn't any better than the default copying program windows already had, but the amount of time that it took was less. Instead of 2 hours to finish the task it took 45 minutes. My thought for justifying this program was that; instead of giving one man to do paperwork split the paperwork among many men. So, while a large file is being copied, many smaller files could be copied during that time.

After that day I really couldn't keep my hands off this program. As my knowledge of programming increased, so did my likelihood of editing a piece of the code in this program.

The surmountable amount of updates that this program has gone through is amazing. At version 6.25 it now sits as a standalone batch file. It used to consist of 6 files and however many xcopy batch files that it created for the file migration, now it's just 1 file and dirt simple to run, (well front-end, anyways, the back-end is a masterpiece of weirdness, honestly) it automates adding all the necessary directories and files. Oh, and the name is Latin for Imitate, figured it's a reasonable name for a copying program.

I was 14, so my creativity lacked in the naming department >_<

University Coding Exam for Specialization Batch:
Q. Write a Program to merge two strings, each can be of at max 25k length.
Wrote the code in C, because fast.
Realized some edge cases don't pass, runtime errors. Proceed on to check the locked code in the Stub. (We only have to write methods, the driver code is pre-written)
Found that the memory for the char Arrays is being allocated dynamically with size 10240.
Rant #1:
Dafuq? What's the point of dynamic Memory Allocation if you're gonna fix it to a certain amount anyway?
Continuing...
Called the Program Incharge, asking him to check the problem and provide a solution. He took 10 minutes to come, meanwhile I wrote the program in Java which cleared all the test cases. <backstory>No University Course on Java yet, learnt it on my own </backstory>
Dude comes, I explain the problem. He asks me to do it in C++ instead coz it uses the string type instead of char array.
I told him that I've already done it in Java.
Him: Do you know Java?

Rant #2:
No you jackass! I did the whole thing in Java without knowing Java, what's wrong with you!

I used to screw around with the school computers, nothing much, a few batch files here, a few html scripts there. But once, they took away my use of the computer for, "Tampering with very important parts of the computer." Yeah.
Don't do html in school, kids.

Being a polyglot programmer stuck in a SysOps / Tech Advisor job sucks huge hairy balls.

My job consists of making enterprise shit work, designing the deployment, integration and network setup of new systems, being an advisor in the same projects implementing the said systems.

I ALSO do a shit ton of scripting, API-integrations to move shit between systems, kneading piles of shitty data into useful nuggets for our management to act on using various languages and techniques, but according to some people I am not a programmer.

Sure, I don't know all the latest bits of front-end fuckery, nor do I know most of the correct pronunciations of the occult incantations known as modern Java (I was certified on Java 2SE 1.4), but I fucking know how to program.

Why is it that those doing the hiring blind themselves to specific languages, rather than the higher level knowledge that applies across most languages?

I got a pop quiz from a full-time Java dev the other day where he showed me a piece of problematic code that his team had worked hard to optimize from running over several hours, down to minutes. The quiz was "How did we do it?".

I looked at the code for a couple of minutes, and told him that I would have used a HashMap or similar to cache DB data and batch the saves/updates. They were originally looking up data two times, and saving once for each iteration of a for-loop with over a million items.

The point is, I don't know Java that intimately that I'm able to code it up in 5 minutes, but give me the time I need to google the current syntax and I'll at least have a working implementation relatively fast.

I'm familiar with SOLID, DRY, DDD, TDD and most of the acronyms they throw around these days. Just because my job title is not "Code monkey", it does not imply that I'm a fucking novice.

This shit is what keeps me from actually landing another fucking job as a "pure" dev as well... Oh, and coding projects done outside work does not count, as well as code not part of some sort of application... Fuuuuuuuu.....!

Got an email from IT saying that a new anti ransomeware software is being installed company wide, but it doesn't play well with visual studio. His suggestion is that each time we need to compile, we run a batch file, reboot, compile, run another batch script, then reboot.

...he's in IT?

Created a batch file to modify some system files on our embedded system.

Accidentally double clicked it in my development main machine :(

Man, fm fucking l

I was checking out this wk139 rants & thinking to myself how does one have a dev enemy.. o.O Well TIL that maaaaybe I have one too..

Not sure if ex coworker was a bit 'weird & unskillful' or wanted to intentionally harm us and thank god failed miserably..

I decided to finally cleanup his workspace today: he had a bad habit of having almost all files in solution checked out to himself, most of them containing no changes whatsoever... I reminded him on many occasions that this is bad practice & to only have checked out files he was currently working on. And never checkin files without changes.. Ofc didn't listen.. managed to checkin over 100 files one time, most of which had no changes & some even had alerts for debugging in them.. which ofc made it to the client server.. :/

On one or two occasions I already logged in and wanted to check if files have any real changes that I'd actually want to keep, but gave up after 40 or so files in a batch that were either same or full of sh..

Anyhow today I decided I will discard everything, as the codebase changed a lot since he left an I know I already fixed a lot of his tasks.. I logged in, did the undo pending changes and then proceed to open source control explorer.

While I was cleaning up his workspace, I figured I could test what will happen if I request changeset xy and shelveset yy, will it be ok, or do I have to modify something else & merge code.. Figured using his workspace that was already set up for testing would be easier, faster & less 'stressful' than creating another one on my computer, change IIS settings and all just, to test this merge..

Boy was I wrong.. upon opening source control explorer, I was greeted by a lot of little red Xes staring back at me... more than half the folders on TFS were marked for deletion.. o.O

Now I'm not sure if he wanted to fuck me up when he left or was just 'stupid' when it comes to TFS. O.O

So...maybe I do have a dev enemy after all.. or I don't.. Can't decide.. all I know for sure is tomorrow I'm creating another workspace to test this and I'm not touching his computer ever again.. O.O

I once ran a batch import job to stress test with much more data than usual in staging... so I thought.
I sshd into prod by accident. History search can be a bastard at times...

The moment I realized what I was doing was crazy. I was shivering and thought I get fired if anything went wrong.

fortunately I just duplicated the original data for the test, and the system was built to ignore unnecessary updates... so the data was correct and nothing went wrong.

Not an active stupid dev choice but still something I will remember for a while.

Why is the fucking Print option is just right above the Run as Administrator on right clicking on a batch file???
I just printed the fucking runall script for the 4th time today....

Network Security at it's best at my school.
So firstly our school has only one wifi AP in the whole building and you can only access Internet from there or their PCs which have just like the AP restricted internet with mc afee Webgateway even though they didn't even restrict shuting down computers remotely with shutdown -i.
The next stupid thing is cmd is disabled but powershell isn't and you can execute cmd commands with batch files.
But back to internet access: the proxy with Mcafee is permanently added in these PCs and you don't havs admin rights to change them.
Although this can be bypassed by basically everone because everyone knows one or two teacher accounts, its still restricted right.
So I thought I could try to get around. My first first few tries failed until I found out that they apparently have a mac adress wthitelist for their lan.
Then I just copied a mac adress of one of their ARM terminals pc and set up a raspberry pi with a mac change at startup.
Finally I got an Ip with normal DHCP and internet but port 80 was blocked in contrast to others like 443. So I set up an tcp openvpn server on port 443 elsewhere on a server to mimic ssl traffic.
Then I set up my raspberry pi to change mac, connect to this vpn at startup and provide a wifi ap with an own ip address range and internet over vpn.
As a little extra feature I also added a script for it to act as Spotify connect speaker.
So basically I now have a raspberry pi which I can plugin into power and Ethernet and an aux cable of the always-on-speakers in every room.
My own portable 10mbit/s unrestricted AP with spotify connect speaker.
Last but not least I learnt very many things about networks, vpns and so on while exploiting my schools security as a 16 year old.

Got bored in class so I did what anyone would do: make a batch file to make a 1gb .txt file

Just recently I found myself in the position I never thought I would. I was at work and my boss said, "Hey could you pickup *Item* from *sister location*? So I went to *sister location* I knew what I was looking for but I couldn't remember what they were called. So I asked one of my coworkers," Hey, I'm supposed to pick up something here." She didn't know what I was talking about. I told her I could remember what they were called.

Her response: "If you don't know what the were called, why do you EVEN come over here?" The rudeness in her voice was unmistakable.

In retrospect I could have been rude right back but there where people nearby and I had already decided I didn't like her. She is the kind of girl that you assume spends her paycheck on outfits. (or maybe she just dresses well I can never be sure, but I digress) Eventually I found what I was supposed to do. By the time I had to go to back for the second batch of *items*, I get sent back to my boss's office. To my surprise, my boss had overheard what happened.

Apparently one of the people nearby thought SHE was being rude and REPORTED HER.

It was incredible; someone was offended FOR ME?!!!

I have no idea how you even go about doing that where I work. I went back to work and I saw her walk though the door to the boss's office. I actually felt a bit sorry for her.

I've been developing an Android app for a specific model of a handheld barcode scanner (almost 3 months) for our customers.. We are finally going live with this application so my boss ordered a new batch of devices. Bought the newer, fancier model instead of our test/dev model...

*Fatal error galore, different storage type, different barcode reader, deprecated functions,..*

Oooh the joys..
(Needs to be finished by tomorrow)

So there's that project with my coworker. We splitt up the classes, 10 to be implemented by him, 10 by me.

Fast Forward to 4 weeks before deploy.
Coworker: Your stuff logs a lot of stuff. It's not very clear and a liiittle to verbouse. 5 entries per second? Too much!
Me: Okay, you're right. Let me fix that.

2 Days later I look at his logs at runtime. He logs EVRY SQL statement and their results! In a batch that processes a 10'000 of customers!
He points out: That's useful stuff and it's not that much. It's needed for debuging.

My face: 😦

What's up with almost every other site having invalid ssl certs, even though they are signed with a future date and by LetsEncrypt, did chrome again distrust a batch?

Soo my dad has a food printer he uses to print edible images on cakes our customers order. The food printer needs to run at least once a week (regularly) to kinda guarantee not to get fucked up with its ink, as that can damage the printer when it's dry. My dad though doesn't have regular orders...
The printer has a standard function to test all colors.
My dad asked me how this task could be managed regularly, as I'm the IT guy 🙄. His idea was to log all the dates on paper.

Now I'm trying to automate this task via Windows so we don't have to care about papers to manually log when the next test must run. On Windows the printer settings can be accessed to run this color check.

... I've got a feeling this will be another one of those tasks that I will overengineer over the top😅. I've already done my research with automated batch jobs (never done batch before) but the normally proposed code for a "Düsentestmuster", so the color check, prints a different overview I was not expecting, which doesn't fit the purpose.
Now I'm here and, as I currently see no way of simplifying it, I have to kinda simulate a person that opens these settings and runs this check. With Python, pyautogui and Tesseract OCR, to prevent the program from clicking anything wrong. Although I'm sure there should be an easier way for this, I haven't found it, so I guess I have to proceed on this path and take the experience I gain as a bonus...

Windows 10 likes to set my Temp variables back to C after an update, as well as enabling Superfetch and Prefetch. I made a batch file fixing all that shit...

There seems to be a lot of people protesting and coming together in support of net neutrality.

The rant here, where the fuck were all of you during the election? That was the time to come together and do something, now your efforts are futile.

What's worse, I'll wager net neutrality gets overturned and next election the same batch of assholes get voted in.

What can you actually do to solve the problem? Peer to peer internet similar to tor but fast enough to support considerable traffic. Platform needs to be like tor with encrypted decentralized DNS.

Start an ISP. This would also help.

Get cracking, smart people.

Just created a batch file to delete a directory so that I don't have to right click and move my mouse all the way to delete and click it.

A server application pulled off some sort of listings as table. Problem was, it crashed with some thousand data files after one and a half hours. I looked into that, and couldn't stop WTFing.

A stupid server side script fetched the data in XML (WTF!) and then inserted shit node-wise (WTF!!), which was O(n^2) - in PHP and on XML! Then it converted the whole shebang into HTML for browser display although users would finally copy/paste the result into Excel anyway.

The original developer even had written a note on the application page that pulling the data "could take long". Yeah because it's so fucking STUPID that Clippy is an Einstein in comparison, that's why!

So I pulled the raw data via batch file without XML wrapping and wrote a little C program for merging the dumped stuff client-side in O(n), spitting out a final CSV for Excel import.

Instead of fucking the server for 1.5 hours and then crashing, shit is done after 7 seconds, out of which the actual data processing takes 40 bloody milliseconds!

Personally I like a shot of small-batch, fresh, locally-sourced cocaine.

Dude, I know you want to improve your scripting skills, and I will spend an hour with you to explain 5 lines if I have to.

But damn, don’t write 25 scripts that call one after the other, mixing PS and Batch (come on, a batch for loop in a .ps1 file...) and then ask me to do it properly after that you fucking raped the console’s butthole.

Cunt.

My worst collab/group project experience definitely has to be my final semester project during my undergrad.

We were a team of 4 including myself and would meet every day to work and every day:

1. My teammates would show up late
2. One of my teammates’ girlfriend lived in my apartment and shed just show up every day and waste our time and make him never contribute (He LITERALLY never did any work and got by with no effort)
3. The other 2 on the team didn’t know anything and never made efforts to learn

I literally did the entire project on my own (Code the full project, make presentations for all the reviews, and teach the other 3 every step of the way).

TLDR: I topped my batch and got 199/200 whereas everyone else were 190 or below, and I went on to publish that project in a Science Journal (Again, with no efforts from the team)

I finished a bunch of coursework yesterday and turned them in so that I could have some time to work on my side projects or self study for a few days before focusing on class again.

Today was gonna be my first day to enjoy this.

I recieve an email with the second batch of coursework thats due in a week. 7 quizzes, two exams, and 7 project labs.

Yeah, fuck you, too.

Yes, I have to admit, sometimes Linux is a F*KING B*TCH.

I was supposed to fucking format a pc for a close friend of mine, cause he produces music and win 10 fucked his machine up with its broken updates.

Knowing the guy is a talent I promised that by 7PM the pc would be fixed.

Not really, I'm feeling the stupidest guy in this fucking earth, cause I've been here for 2 hours, fucking trying to extract an ISO image, and nothing on this fucking planet seems to work.

Tried the graphical archives, none open de ISO, tried 7z, it gives me an error, tried fuseiso, which is recommended in Arch Linux' documentations. Doesn't work. Tried mount - o my file.iso /mnt and it says /mnt isn't in the fstab file which makes me even angrier cause I always mount everything there without editing shit. So I installed 7-zip for windows in wine, it extracts until 90% and freezes. Now I'm trying hsuebrirbwkwpxjhw9shrbejejwke and my mouth is foaming and my ear is bleeding my brains out and I don't need you shit.

Fuck you, Fuck your goddamn ISO and Fuck this faggot ass spell checker, that changes Fuck to duck and assign to asset.

Fuck it, I ain't gonna format anyones pm anymore.

Does anyone work on a team with multiple stacks?

For example we have batch jobs in Java but also have a JS front-end and APIs.

How do you divide the developers and the work across these projects?

Currently everyone does everything but I feel like this is inefficient and hard to develop expertise. And different people or even the same person will make the same mistakes over and over again because they don't know how to do X or they forget or overlook some quirk. When I switched Beck to JS took me like a week to get a Promises nailed down again. And this morning someone else had a production bug and couldn't figure it out. But when I looked at the code I could pretty much see where an issue could be (uncaught exception in a promise)

Also the testing frameworks are very different and there's a lot of infrastructure technical debt, things that really should've been done a long time or fixed but no one had the time or expertise to do it or notice it (until it causes a production issue and then everyone is like WTF is happening??!!!!).

I'm not the manager but I always feel that the team needs to be split along the language lines and specific people need to own these projects to review and code changes for all these common newbie errors. And also developer enough expertise to foresee problems before it becomes a production issue.

When Idiots discovered "shutdown -i" and you're the poor guy without admin rights:

@echo off
:start
shutdown -a
goto start

This year I'm remaking my chatbot, a new improved chatbot.

I mean it's not new. But it's something I've always wanted to do personally since the advent of my original Chatbot (poorly written in batch).

If you know me at all, then you know that the actual reason for me getting into programming was because I made my own chatbot using windows batch (I was 14 and didn't know a lick about programming or available programming languages...)

Anyways, I'm wanting to dive back to my roots and build something from the ground up, but this time build it with all the knowledge I've accumulated since I've designed my first program.

Not really a rant (?)

I started my first programming job in January this year. I went there staight after Highschool, so i had no real experience, knew only the basics of software development and my written code was quite a mess. So one of my first real tasks (after 2 months) was to write a business logic for batch handling (for a warehouse management system). I invested quite some time to develop a suitable architecture, talked with some other developers and wanted to cover the whole thing with unit tests (which really nobody at the company uses). So I spent about 3 weeks to write the whole thing, test it and improve it many times. It worked perfectly and I got pretty good feedback from the code-review.

1 month ago - the code worked perfectly and was multiple times testet (also by the client) - the client came with some totally new requirements for the batch handling. I tried to impelemt them, but soon found out, that the architecture doesn't supported them, it was not build for the required handling and would soon become a totally mess, if i tried to make it work.

So I was pretty mad, because I had to change the whole fucking thing, but I also wanted to make it better. I hab gained some experience and decided (with some help of a senior dev) to make a completely new try with a different architecture, that can be easily expanded, if needed. I build my concept, wrote and tested the whole new code in 3 days. Fucking 3 days compared to the initial 3 weeks, and it worked, better and even faster.

I was quite pissed to delete the old code, and especially that i had wasted 3 weeks for it and had to struggle with many different things. But I lerarned so much from it and also in the months between, that I was also really glad that I had the opportiunity to write it again.

This whole thing made me now realize that this is, what I really like to do and what I'm good in. I really enjoy learning new things and for me, programming is the best and easiest way to do it. Despite alle the cons and annoying side effects of it, I really found my dream job here.

Prof introducing a batch of non-programmers to JavaScript.

Me: Ha! I'm going to ace this class.

Disclosure: Its an Art school, We're studying Multimedia Arts, and we have a couple of Web Development classes that focus on html, css, js, and php. (and I have been a web developer for 4 years)

Trying to develop Java applications in Windows...

sed s/Java applications/anything/g

'sed' is not recognized as internal or external command, operable program or batch file

*sigh*

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....

In the third month at my first job, a batch processing script I wrote DDOS'ed my company's API servers on a saturday and caused hours of client-facing issues

At the age of 10 I got interest in ''changing computer'' things. I started to watch over the shoulder (I don't know if you can say that in English ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) of my dad. He programmed I2C and other microcontroller.
I started with little batch files and Visual Basic. I think we all know the ''Virus'' with shutdown 😂
At school in the computer lesson we learned a few other languages. I was the only one who learned these languages at home too. The biggest problem is that you think ''I learn at school and at home I can play games''.
Some day I started to learn PHP and Java at home. I came to Java with Minecraft. Yes, Minecraft. You can learn so many things (like the structure of a network packages from the server) and you can visualize everything with blocks.
Since the professional colleague we learn C# and Python which I use in some projects at home too, for example for the rasperrypi.
Now I'm 17 and I can C#, Visual Basic, PHP, JS, Python, JS and HTML

I kinda started programming back in the day, by breaking 2 school servers using a simple batch "virus"... it effectively opened tons of porn videos, threw the mouse cursor to the top right corner of the screen and shut down the PC after 15 seconds.
I masked the file and made sure it looked like internet explorer (since my school, back in the day, didn't use chrome and didn't allow the installation of chrome)
It was meant to troll my friend but all computers shared files with each other which meant even the private PC's of my teachers got my "virus"
Eventually it landed in the startup folder and messed everything up. I got snitched out, and I had to fix it
(I literally just wrote another batch file to delete my so called virus... because of the 15 seconds time limit I had)

TLDR: coworkers are worst than clients on delivery

The endless script last part, or where I want to rip the vocal chords out of my coworker’s throat.

Delivered “quickly” last Friday night as he was stressing me, because it was urgent, because he started shit I had to refactor, because I have better shit to get done.
It’s also important to note that this “senior” sysadmin wrote requirements as follows : told me orally what he needed between a gasp and another and drew me something that looked like a diagram but without real sense. I told myself -Well, let’s get this pile of cow shit together.

Anyway, it required some amount of time to put his giant shit mix of powershell and batch together, also it was quickly but it was tested and it worked on different conditions that I specifically wrote out and designed to have menus where you can’t do shit (like putting a string on a number input).

Today he comes to me and asked if it was ready and I told him it was usable. He tries it, doesn’t know how to use it, abandons it. Then he tells me he doesn’t work how “required” and after 5 Minutes on telling Shit I tested on the exact same server, he said “well my version was ok but you know I could have been more precise”

YOU INORGANIC PILE OF PIGEON SHIT. THE FUCKING SCRIPT IS WORKING, IS REFACTORED AS IT SHOULD AND YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND A CRAP ABOUT THE FUCK YOU’RE EXECUTING.

Seriously, come tell me that you can’t see what happens. I did explicit every fucking command out for you, I even bothered to put fucking Write-Host everywhere with Colors just for your fucking sake taste.

Go fuck a pillow with your biker sunglasses.

And no, the way you cut your beard doesn’t make me think you’re 15 years younger, it makes me think you’re the kind of guy I would not accept candies outside a school.

P.s.: don’t accept candies even if the guy looks nice.

So for a while I have wanted to build a raspberry pi cluster. In the spirit of shia labeouf I got started last saturday.

I had two pies lying around so I figured I'd run some experiments before I invested in a lot of hardware. After about a day I had turned the two pies into a shared cluster when disaster struck....

I had completely ignored the fact that you cannot run 32 or 64bit software on an arm processor (I know... I'm a java developer). So when I booted my service and the load balancer, I found that nothing worked. So pretty bumbed out, I quit the project.

Later that day I found a crazy guy who had bought a batch of 400 small form factor PSUs (300W) and internally I laughed at him a little. I mean, who's gonna sell 300W irregular power supplies. Then, just as I was about to go to bed I found this guy, he was selling from a batch of CPU-onboard motherboard for 10 bucks each and everything clicked!

I did some quick calculations and decided I could probably gather enough cash to get: 10 motherboards, 10 2GB ram dimms, 10 Sata disks and 14 PSU (in case some fail) and some misc hardware for networking and such.

So... Long story short, I am going to build a cluster computer, the first version is going to have 10 nodes and I am waiting for delivery right now!

I am usually lurking in here since I never really worked as a Software Developer, but until I start going to the University, I thought I might also find myself a job in Software Development.

Well... I don't know where to start.

Someone in here heard of JBoss? Me neither... we're using it... It is a Framework to deploy fortified Java Web Applications. My first day was very chaotic and was dedicated to get this fucking shit to work. I got JBoss 7.5 from my colleagues and started deploying the hello world program...

So. Many. Things. Gone. Wrong...

After like 5 hours of troubleshooting, I had to install/setup a new wrapper with my own batch scripts, install SPECIFICALLY jdk 1.7_17 (anything else won't work) and downgrade JBoss to 7.2.

Yeah that's the first thing. Let's continue about JBoss. Version 7.2 uh? What's the newest one though? Oh it's now known as WildFly... huh... FUCKING HELL, THE NEWEST ONE IS VERSION 10.1??? AND EVEN 10.1 IS 1 YEAR OLD? WHAT THE FUCKING FUCKK AAAAAAHH...

So yeah, after that, without any expectation, I had a look at our codebase. Unit tests huh? I couldn't find a single self written one to test the applications functions... I asked my fellow devs and they told me that "it is too time consuming and we have to focus on new features, the QM Team will just manually test the application". Ever heard this bullshit? A big fat ass codebase with shittons of customers and not a single unit test...

So last but not least, since it is a web application, it also got a site. Y'know RichFaces? The deprecated front end library for Java Webpages? Where you got like 150 Tables per page everyone with a random id everytime you reload? Yeah I don't think I have to explain that to you guys...

So now YOU tell me? Is this a place to be 😂😂😂

finally decided to move to another company after 7 months of thinking.

Been working for 3+ years at my current company, I am their first batch of employee as well. third people hired in their engineering team. Everything goes well just wanted to work on bigger things while maybe I sacrifice my privilege about having much bigger influence

I'm really not sure. When I was 7-8 years old, I liked to view source in IE, then I somehow managed to use Javascript in the browser. First only some dumb opening of windows. And I liked Batch, so I made some files for copying, backup and stuff.

Then I got to PHP during the years from some online tutorial about making dynamic websites. My website was more static than stone, but yeah, I did page loading with PHP! Awful experience anyway, because I had to install Xampp, get it work and other stuff. 11 years old or so. (and I used Xampp only as a fileserver between laptop and desktop later, because.. PHP4... just no.)

As 12 years old or so I experienced my first World of Warcraft (vanilla) on a custom server in an internet cafe and I thought it's a singleplayer game. When I found out that no, I googled how to make my own server (hated multiplayer back then and loved good games with huge storylines). Failed miserably with ManGOS, got something to work with ArcEMU. There I learned some C++ basic stuff, which I hoped would helped me to fix some bugs. When I opened the code I was like: "Suuure." and left it like that. I learned what a MySQL database is, broke it like four times when I forgot WHERE and still rather played with websites i.e. html, css, js and optionally php when I wanted to repair a webpage for the server. With a friend we managed to get the server work via Hamachi, was fun, the server died too soon. Then I got ManGOS to work, but there wasn't really any interest to make a server anymore, just singleplayer for the lore. (big warcraft fan, don't kick me :D )

I think it was when I was 13y.o. I went to Delphi/Pascal course, which I liked a lot from the beginning, even managed to use my code on old Knoppix via Lazarus(Pascal). At this age I really liked thoae Flash games which were still common to see everywhere. So I downloaded .swfs, opened and tried to understand it. Managed to pull some stuff from it and rewrite in Pascal. Nope, never again that crap.

About the same time I got to Flash files I discovered Java. It was kind of popular back then, so I thought let's give it a try. I liked Flash more. Seriously. I've never seen so much repetitiveness and stupid styling of a code. I had either IDE for compiling C++ or Pascal or notepad! You think I wanted my code kicked all over the place in multiple folders and files? No.

So back to Pascal. I made some apps for my old hobby, was quite satisfied with the result (quiz like app), but it still wasn't the thing. And I really thought I'd like to study CS.

I started to love PHP because of phpBB forums I worked on as 15 y.o. I guess. At the same time I think there was an optional subject at school, again with Pascal. I hated the subject, teacher spoke some kind of gibberish I didn't really understand back then at all and now I find it only as a really stupid explanation of loops and strings.

So I started to hate Pascal subject, but not really the lang itself. Still I wanted something simpler and more portable. Then I got to Python as hm, 17y.o. I think and at the same time to C++ with DevC++. That was time when I was still deciding which lang to choose as my main one (still playing with website, database and js).

Then I decided that learning language from some teacher in a class seriously pisses me off and I don't want to experience it again. I choose Python, but still made some little scripts in C++, which is funny, because Python was considered only as a scripting lang back then.

I haven't really find a cross-platform framework for C++, which would: a) be easy to install b) not require VisualStudio PayForMe 20xy c) have nice license if I managed to make something nice and distribute it. I found Unity3D though, so I played with Blender for models, Audacity for music and C# for code. Only beautiful memories with Unity. I still haven't thought I'm a programmer back then.

For Python however I found Kivy and I was playing with it on a phone for about a year. Still I haven't really know what to do back then, so I thought... I like math, numbers, coding, but I want to avoid studying physics. Economics here I go!

Now I'm in my third year at Uni, should be writing thesis, study hard and what I do? Code like never before, contribute, work on a 3D tutorial and play with Blender. Still I don't really think about myself as a programmer, rather hobby-coder.

So, to answer the question: how did I learn to program? Bashing to shit until it behaved like I desired i.e. try-fail learning. I wouldn't choose a different path.

I was frustrated with how The programs in my computer (not) worked, so i wanted to change that. I started with Windows batch files and completely drifted off. I told my dad about it and he gave me a book about python. I learned JavaScript somewhere along the way and touch the basic of java. Now I am mainly a python and JavaScript guy.

That member of staff* that decided to write a batch script with calls to SVN, and named it svn.bat

*me

My mom was a data analyst in the Army when I was a kid. At around 10 I remember her teaching me batch scripting. Just seeing code and working with the machine was amazing to me and since then I've tried to learn all I could.

I spent a long time not doing this kind of work and finally in the last few years decided to follow that passion. So for me 20 years of my own private passion has turned into a skilled and profitable career I wasn't expecting.

When you were clever and improved the data quality of the address database by using your companies web service in a batch job for 10M records just to find out that each call costs 10 cents...

One thing my dev years have showed me through various systems:
The world is held together by masses of scripts. And most of them are horribly bad, unmaintainable, extremely complex and usually not replaced on requirement changes, but extended by other terrible scripts to get the desired behaviour.

Windows is based on tons of shitty batch scripts, powershell madness, WSH bullshit and VBS absurdity.
GNU/Linux is build upon trillions of incomprehensible shell scripts, heaps of python gizmo and perl mysteries.
Every complex system I've seen uses batch or shell scripts to fire up its runtime.

And it doesn't seem to get any better, so let's face it, we're doomed.

Back in grammar school we started programming in TI-Basic on a TI89 Titanium as it was part of math class (calculus and geometry). I didn't really understand much because the teacher thought it was a great idea to start with recursively calculating GCD (and we were in a sort of "linguist profile", nobody had ever touched a line of code in their lives before). I still liked it though and by some coincidence I got an old Win95 compaq notebook to play with from a friend.

I started playing around with the CMD prompt and batch files and could apply some of the things I had learned on the TI, like GOTO or If statements. I still didn't know what I was doing of course, and so it happened that I used the > file pipe when trying to compare two values. Suddenly there was a file with some code fragments and I started to get what I had done. I put the file pipe into an endless GOTO loop and was amused how those few lines filled up the whole desktop with nonsense files. I went on to refine this a little so I could control it with another file that acted as a kill switch when present. Over the next weeks I played some more with it and made it write out and start another batch file that would check whether the original script was still there and recreate it if not.

That notebook was so large and heavy I could not bring it to school, so I wrote all code by hand on paper and typed it in when I got home, that way I could still code in class when I was bored and no one would notice.

So my first ever "program" that I wrote myself was some lousy malware.

I give software support to Rugged handhelds in a company and everyday some IT support moron comes to me with a crazy request. The day just started and...

IT Tech: "Hello, C, can you improve the touchscreen sensibility? It's not so responsive and sometimes we have to click more than one time to something work"

**breath in**

Me: "That's ok, the rugged ones that you have are very old, besides they have resistive screen, so your fingers won't do a good job"

IT Tech: "THERE'S NO WAY TO FIX IT? I guess I'll open a ticket for you to study more calmly about the issue"

**NGGGGGGGGGHHHH**

Me: "If it's not a software thing, I can't do that, I don't have hardware skills, I guess you'll have to call our provider about that, but, before you do something, try to recalibrate your handhelds, the majority of the users don't do that at the system's start and the touch experience really can become a mess"

IT Tech: "Hmmm, I'll try that, otherwise I'll back to you, thanks!"

OMFGGGGG

I am open to suggestions of a magic batch file/ .NET CF 2.0 software that will turn their handhelds into a Galaxy S6 touch experience. THANKS!

Someone posted a rant about pseudo HTML devs (I’m not gonna say who... @Alice). While she’s right I think there are two worse groups: Batch and Visual Basic wannabe devs

It's funny cause I started web development using pure XML on one of those easy website building sites back when Symbian was still a thing. Oh how proud I was when I did the marquee effect. Ofourse I was only 12 and by the time my dad bought a laptop in 2007 I was already teaching him how to use it.

But I suppose my real exposure to computers was when I wrote a batch file to play an explosion sound whenever someone at my local internet cafe would open up Internet Explorer instead of Firefox. I didn't even know how to program in batch.

I was pretty fucked up back then. Still am.
(¬º-°)¬

I once accidentally pranked myself with a simple batch file that opened explorer windows on .25 second intervals.

The best part is that I was testing the timeout function and thought opening an explorer window would be the best way to gauge its success.

9000 internet cookie points to whoever figures out this shit:

I'm trying to import a secret gpg key into my keyring.
If I run "gpg2 --import secring.gpg" and manually type each possible password that I can think of, the import fails. So far, nothing unusual.
HOWEVER
If I type the same passwords into a file and run:
echo pwfile.txt | gpg2 --batch --import secring.gpg
IT ACTUALLY FUCKING WORKS

What the fuck??? How can it be that whenever I type the pw manually it fails, but when I import it from a file it works??
And no, it's not typos: I could type those passwords blindfolded from muscle memory alone, and still get them right 99% of the time. And I'm definitely not blindfolded right now.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!!

Suppose my pwfile.txt looks something like this:

password1
password2
password3
password4
password5
password6

Now, I'm trying to narrow it down and figure out which one is the right password, so I'm gonna split the file in two parts and see which one succeds. Easy, right?

$ cat pw1.txt
password1
password2
password3

$ cat pw2.txt
password4
password5
password6

$ echo pw1.txt | gpg2 --batch --import secring.gpg
gpg: key 149C7ED3: secret key imported

$ gpg2 --delete-secret-key "149C7ED3"
[confirm deletion]

$ echo pw2.txt | gpg2 --batch --import secring.gpg
gpg: key 149C7ED3: secret key imported

In other words, both files successfully managed to import the secret key, but there are no passwords in common between the two!!
Am I going retarded, or is there something really wrong here? WTF!

I had the "pleasure" of working with someone who though that it would be a good idea to create random strings and check if they were in a database, to ensure they are unique. What's even better, is that this was being used for batch generation of up to 100 such strings at a time!

I made a shortcut to get into C:\ on the school computers because Win+R was disabled and it didn't show in file explorer. And, a batch file could have been made to get in too.

I wonder now, is there any way to block direct access to C:\?

Why the fuck can't ls have the size listings like Windows' DIR command?

Why can't there be a simple command scripting solution, like BATCH, without it being as potentially complicated as SH to set up?

Goddammit, even though Windows sucks dick, they did do some things better...

Tl;Dr Im the one of the few in my area that sees sftping as the prod service account shouldn't be a deployment process. And the ONLY ONE THAT CARES THAT THIS IS GONNA BREAK A BUNCH OF SHIT AT SOME POINT.

The non tl;dr:

For a whole year I've been trying to convince my area that sshing as the production service account is not the proper way to deploy and/or develop batch code. My area (my team and 3 sister teams) have no concept of using version control for our various Unix components (shell scripts and configuration files) that our CRITICAL for our teams ongoing success. Most develop in a "prodqa like" system and the remainder straight in production. Those that develop straight in prodqa have no "test" deployment so when they ssh files straight to actual production. Our area has no concept of continuous integration and automated build checking. There is no "test cases", no "systems testing" or "regression testing". No gate checks for changing production are enforced. There is a standing "approved" deployment process by the enterprise (my company is Whyyyyyyyyyy bigger than my area ) but no one uses it. In fact idk anyone in my area who knows HOW to deploy using the official deployment method. Yes, there is privileged access management on the service account. Yes the managers gets notified everytime someone accesses the privileged production account. The managers don't see fixing this as a priority. In fact I think I've only talk to ONE other person in my area who truly understands how terrible it is that we have full production change access on a daily basis. Ive brought this up so many times and so many times nothing has been done and I've tried to get it changed yet nothing has happened and I'm just SO FUCKING SICK that no one sees how big of a deal this. I mean, overall I live the area I work in, I love the people, yet this one glaring deficiency causes me so much fucking stress cause it's so fucking simple to fix.
We even have an newer enterprise deployment. Method leveraging a product called "urban code deploy" (ucd) to deploy a git repository. JUST FUCKING GIT WITH THE PROGRAM!!!!..... IT WAS RELEASED FUCKING 12 YEARS AGO......

Please..... Please..... I just want my otherwise normally awesome team to understand the importance and benefits of version control and approved/revertable deployments

I did it! I learnt vim!

...

Oh wait, how do you exit again?

This is how it feels with me and vim, every time I think I know it, it turns out there's a whole batch of shortcuts I had no idea existed :"(

My childhood basically. Saved up all my money to buy Pokémon games. I had one that was red tho. The amount of hours I spent on this thing... If not thousands of hours... Tens of thousands...

Then moved to Minecraft, and that's how I got coding 😇 (batch but still)

So I tried to use Opera a few times at a time with different IP addresses(Opera has a VPN but normally only one connection) ...
I decided to copy the portable version
Via CMD to create a few Profiles(6 GB) and create a launch.bat
Now I have Opera running about 50 times and now my Computer starts making noise because I have a total of over 400 Processes running
CPU & RAM love it

I first wanted to be a black hat hacker so I opened cmd.exe and run help to see which commands I could use to make batch programs and then I taught myself the rest of batch. Afterwards, I drifted to DHTML (HTML+CSS+JS) where I made some basic snippets while teaching myself JS

Note to self:
Close off ALL ways things could go wrong..

Long story short; I released a new feature, to be able to better follow up on any stock moves, their amounts, locations and even expiry dates. An older tool just bypassed that very verification and nothing was logged or taken out of stock.

~

Taking out an amount for a certain orderline has a shortcut in place to mitigate some of the mandatory steps that pickers need to take in order to verify what's being taken. This little tool only available, visible and possible for a very few select users.

I assigned some orders to one of these people, which made him think it was an urgent batch. It's only one product, for multiple orders, so he went to the location, took out the amount needed and then used the tool to quickly be able to prepare them for shipping.

This bypassed the new methods to check if the location actually had stock to take, which I had just enabled for 1 account.

Luckily I caught the miss-hap as I was monitoring that product first-hand and noticed the batch of orders was collected but the stock amount didn't update.

It was 5min before I was leaving work, so I investigated and then ran to the person in question to ask what he did; which was "I used that tool"

I facepalmed myself internally while blaming myself, as he couldn't know that it wasn't ready to use for that purpose.

The tools to fix this up are there already.. so I used that to fix some missing stock-takes manually.. Though I'll need to close that little tool for these kind of orders for sure, asap, probably when I get home, at least until I bring over its new logic to it.

Happy Tuesday? (:

Weekly Rant-

My best office prank by far was at my high school. First, I bought a USB rubber ducky and programmed it to backdoor my friends school computer with netcat and a batch file that ran in the background so that I could connect to his computer any time inconspicuously. The next day, I injected his computer with the drive when he went to turn in some papers.
You should've seen the look on his face when his computer started having conversations with the teacher.

Rant

I was working a very hard project the VP of engineering asks me what he can do to help. I said find 5 more guys like me who can do the work. He laughs.

He then hires a guy. Who can't do any of the work.

I fire him in 3 months time cause he sucks.

The boss man then complains and says I can't fire all the guys. So I just ban the dum ones from charging my program.

So I get three interns next cause you can't fire coops I figured it would be easier to teach them then to watch a guy peck at a keyboard.

Now those interns just replace all the dum ones and I am happy. Rather work with them. Now everyone else wants my internship to work for them. They all get taken away to work with other teams.

Now I'm sad.
Stop stealing my interns

Hey new batch of interns.
Let's see what they know

I feel like writing or telling people about the time I jumped from Windows 7 Ultimate and jumping to Windows 10. (I'm not against 10, but I'm never updating after what had happened to me)
It all starts when none of my games will play due to a possible issue with my graphics card. I look up "3D source game bug" and not many results pop up. I go on Microsoft's Qna areas and ask this question but to my surprise nothing they say would make sense. "Clean the pins of your graphics card, make sure you verify the games on Steam". I verified the games and they checked out as perfectly fine. I don't have access to my graphics card because this is a laptop, sadly not a tower.
Two months pass and my computer is already showing signs of stress, like it didn't want to live in a sense. It was three times slower than when I was on Windows 7 and it was unallocating areas of my main hard drive where I could make virtual hard drives.
Instantly I start looking up Linux distros and find Linux Mint. 17.3 was the current version at the time. I downloaded it and burned it onto a DVD-rom and rebooted my computer. I loaded into the disc and to my surprise it seemed almost like Windows 7 apart from the Linux part. I grab my external hard drive and partition it to hold the Linux distro and leave it plugged in incase Windows 10 does actually fail.
On December 19, a few months after Windows 10 had released. I start my laptop to try and continue my studies in video game development. But to my surprise, Windows 10 had finally crashed permanently. The screen flickered blue and black, and an error box saying Loginui.exe failed to start. I look at it for a solid minute as my computer had just committed suicide in a sense.
I reboot thinking it would fix the error but it didn't. I couldn't log in anymore.
I force shutdown the laptop and turn it back on putting it into safe mode.
To my surprise loginui.exe works and I sign in. I look at my desktop, the space wallpaper I always admired, the sound files, screen shots I had saved.
I go into file explorer and grab everything out of my default hard drive Windows was installed on. Nothing but 400gb got left behind and that was mainly garbage prototypes I had made and Windows itself. I formatted my external hard drive and placed everything on it. Escaping Windows 10 with around 100GB of useful data I looked at the final shutdown button I would look at.
I click it and try to boot into normal Windows 10. But it doesn't work. It flickers and the error pops up once more.
I force it to shutdown and insert the previous Linux Mint disc I made and format the default hard drive through Linux. I was done. 10 gave me a lot of shit. Java wouldn't work, my games has a functional UI but no screen popped up except a black abyss and it wouldn't even let me try to update my graphics card, apparently my AMD Radeon 5450 was up to date at the AMD Radeon 5000's.
I installed Linux Mint and thinking the games would actually play I open steam and Launch Half-Life 2 to check if Linux would be nicer to me than Windows 10 had been.
To my surprise the game ran. The scene from Highway 17 popped on screen and the UI was fully functional. But it was playing at 10-15fps rather than the usual 60-70fps. Keep look at my drivers and see my graphics card isn't in use. I do some research and it turns out I have a Hybrid Laptop.
Intel HD Graphics and an AMD Radeon 5450 and it was using the Intel and not the AMD. Months of testing and attempts of getting the games to work at high frame rates pass and the Damn thing still functions at a low terrible fps. Finally I give up. I ask my mom for a Windows 7 disc and she says we can't afford it. A few months pass and I finally get a Windows 7 installation disc through money I've saved up. Proudly I put it into my optical disc drive and install it to my main hard drive deleting Linux completely. I announced to all my friends my computer was back in working order and I install everything I needed, Steam, Skype, Blender, and Unity as well as all my games. I test Half-Life 2 and it's running exceptionally smoothly, I test Minecraft at max settings and it's working beautifully. The computer was functioning properly once again and my life as a developer started as I modeled things and blender, learned beginners C# and learned a lot of Batch. Today the computer still runs at a great speed and I warn others of what happened to me after I installed Windows 10 to my machine if they are thinking of switching from 7 or 8 on an older machine.
Truly the damage to my data cannot be undone. But the memory of the maintenance, work, tests, all are a memory of how Windows 10 ruined me and every night before the one year anniversary of Windows 10's release, I took out the battery of my laptop and unplugged it from the a.c. power, just so Windows 10 doesn't show it's DLLs, batch scripts, vbs scripts, anything on my computer. But now, after this has happened and I have recovered, I now only have a story to tell

I had a problem with too many backups from our personal data (Photos,videos etc.)
Always I had 1-2 hard drives to backup all important files every time.
Too many duplicates!!

So I created a batch file that for every image-video file type in my backup , will move only one in a new folder, sorted by daytime taken and in a folder of that year, then it renamed all with the datetime of the file.

Now I have a great backup sorted by year in folders since 2003. Just saved me from 2 terabyte duplicates and I have now 600gb sorted backup files!

I am here late on a freaking Friday night before a holiday weekend doing some stupid conversion for a company. They have to have it done before Monday ( the holiday) as they plan to go live then.

Did I mention that they asked for this 2 days ago? I had to write the entire system to upload their batch of accounts into our system and return to them the corresponding new accounts. In 2 STUPID DAYS! Not to mention nobody was here to code review it today, so I had to run over it with one of the it guys before merging it myself.

Good thing I didn’t have a conference tonight that I paid money to go to. Oh wait, I do. Luckily it only started 2 hours ago so I might just make the final keynote, if I am lucky.

Earlier I used to help my college batch mates and juniors in coding and development stuff. Sometimes I used to do some projects with them myself to help them learn. Sometimes I used to go beyond limits to debug their errors, even spending hours with them physically or through TeamViewer.

But now I have realised that I had been no more than just stackoverflow.com to them. They just call me when they need me and don't even care about me as a friend.

So that's it. Now I have stopped helping such people. I don't care if that's rude or arrogant. I just don't want to do this. If they still are a friend, well and good otherwise they can leave. I don't care anymore.

For fuck sake why can't people implement instant payment charges when you order something and not when it gets shipped!

Ordered a board game for about $150 AUD about 3 months ago and my batch was just finished so I just got charged... It's not like a have a fucking trip to Melbourne with some mates this weekend .-.

It can't be that hard guys, charge people when they order and not when it's ready -.-

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.

> *CTRL+C*
> *Server stopped*
> Terminate batch job? No
> Too late! *terminated*

#cmd #logic

Working for unappreciative fucktard clients who believe they know more about dev than a seasoned professional and try to give me advise on how to approach my work and or solve programming issues. FUCK Sake if you know it then don't hire me you fucktard client.

My best experience is working for a small company and bridging their disconnected systems together using an array of programming languages such as Go, PHP, VB, Batch Script, Javascript and C

I wish I could do aliases on windows like doing on linux. I would alias shutdown with a fork bomb.

So I was glad that I finally completed the project for my bachelor's degree after fixing random bugs.
Here came this shocking news which left me stunned.

Some other batch bought a similar project from a project centre(lifeline for noobs to pass university project by buying projects made by someone else).

Head of the Department sent me a message that the project done by my team(95%me) is rejected as the other batch also has a similar project. He's aware that they bought it from a project centre. He's defending them that their money would go in vain as they bought it already.

I was like WTF!! Srsly? Do you even know what it takes to make a project functional? I've no idea what I'm going to do now.
#doublestandards

It might seem simple but my coffee grinder is my favourite thing. each morning I grind up a fresh batch to brew. without this the days would be dark indeed.

So a friend / batch-mate in our accelerator asked me if I was okay with installing a monitoring software for a client our startups are collaborating for. And the said client was ranting how I've been appearing offline to him since morning...

Bitch I'm already letting you monitor my shit from morning to night, I don't need your French ass snooping around what I'm doing outside of office hours.

Fucker.

I learned to code by trying too automate things. I started out with Windows batch and moved up to Java before I discovered the magic of C, C++, Python, and now Swift

Spent the better part of the last hour banging my head on the wall to get a regex pattern to match scraped content in a batch of files. Turns out my pattern was good all along, the files' structures were inconsistent.

My head has recovered but the wall will never be the same...

How much does it cost to order a small batch of oem smartphones, port a decent os like Minix to them and develop some stuff like gui and necessary apps. I just need a device whose ui DOESN'T FUCKING LAG on quad-core cpu and IT DOESN'T FUCKING TRACK EVERY MOVE I MAKE

Rails, React, React-Native, Docker, Kubernetes, Openstack, Jenkins, AWS, Microservices, Realm, MongoDB, PostgresQL, GraphQL (list goes on...), and I'm not even done yet.

6 months was spent learning all of the above because I found a Rails-only monolith on Heroku unsettling. My first batch of containers was just deployed and I couldn't be happier. Love my job.

You can find so many tutorials, learning paths for C#, C++, python, angular, jss, java, etc.
But literally none for batch file programming (if that's even what it's called) so little documentation on cmd.exe and writing .bat files :'(

Can someone please please help?
Just point me in the right direction?

inb4 google it

I wanted to create a software to calculate some electricity related formulas ... So I learnt C++, best decision ever.

file: lol.bat
"start lol.bat"

WIndOwS Has EncOuNTEred A PRoBleM aNd MuST ResTaRt

Wondering for half an hour why the 7zip batch commands are not working.

Realized I was using 7zip instead of 7z :(

Ok..now its up to you guys. I couldnt find any answer on google that could help me..
SSH : is that only like a dos or batch command line (simply script language) , to go with?
I see often the "$" sign , for what does it stand for?

Might be a minority here... But I really like Kdevelop for almost all of my programming needs.... Bash, Windows Batch, C, Java, Python.. You name it... Kdevelop's got my back! :)

My life has not been changed by coding ; technically, it has changed with an anime series I loved, Code Lyoko. While it was still airing, I joined some fan forum and met someone who's now my best friend. He helped me writing my "epic games" in Batch and taught me VB.NET.
Now, I think about most stuff in my life with more rationality and people sometimes ask me how they could optimize their time (I should try to tell them to bubblesort their shelves just to see their reactions).

Wanted to make a script for batch downloading lyrics for the mp3s on my phone
✔️Read ID3 tags to get title and artist
✔️Scrap a lyrics website
✔️Add a USLT frame to store lyrics within
✔️Lyrics show up on Clementine/Amarok/Whatever
❌Lyrics show up on my phone stock music player

Why the ffffffuuuuuuck!!! As if the ID3 lyrics tag were documented enough, now my phone gets picky and can't find them...

Wise people of devrant, I need career advice:
I got offered a contract by a french consulting company for my first job, but they also told me that they probably won't have a project for me untill April (because they have enough juniors for now and new positions probably won't open untill they get a new batch of projects.)

Needless to say I'm angry at myself for being such a noob but they are right :/

What would you do? I am still looking for other possibilities atm, but nothing too concrete has popped up yet besides these french guys: I got an offer for an unpaid intership that is waiting for a geen light, and a couple of other job interviews lined up for the next few weeks.

Also I currently live in denmark, so I would need to relocate to france come April.

I would be inclined to sign the contract anyway and return their kindness, as they could have just told me to fuck off and come back in 6 months, (at least they like me) but I don't know what is best in this situation...

Should I stick with them and wait, perhaps training myself in the mean time? Or do you think it would be better to pursue other options?

Everything works great on Ubuntu!
Hell yeah let's install it everywhere.

3rd hard drive dead in 6 months.

But I blame the brand, TeamGroup, or the batch was bad ( all 3 of them were bought at the same day from the same shop)

While everyone is hating proper programming languages... Let's talk about quotes in batch files.

What the actual fuck did Bill smoke while developing this boolshit?

"Good ideas rarely come in bunches. The designer who voluntarily presents his client with a batch of layouts does so not out prolificacy, but out of uncertainty or fear. " - Paul Rand

Recently joined a company (as a fresher), don't even know java spring but have been assigned user stories to be done in java spring batch. I know how to do my story normally in java but in batch it's like a nightmare.I am just unable to do it and today on my way back home,I started questioning if i am good at coding or not....Never felt so low about myself...

I played around on the school computers, creating "viruses" and stuff to log my friends off their computers, or open command prompt infinitely 😂 I also tried to make a Jeopardy game with batch for a project. Let's just say I should have used PowerPoint

You know it's bad when you've planned a word addon thats sole purpose is to do mail merges.

I've done guides and shown people how to do them. Still comes to me the bloke in IT to do a simple mail merge because googling it is too complex.

It's going to be epic it will hold their hands let them know they are bestest cupcake out of the whole batch.

The progress bar will be a rainbow and each button will sparkle. Because If I get taken of my dev work to do another fucking mail merge I'll probably quit on the spot.

And I do not have the savings readily available to hold me over until I got a new job.

Knob sockets the lot of em.

It started when i was about 10 old.
My uncle showed me how to display something in dos-prompt using the echo command in a custom batch-file.
A few commands later, i was able to "program" a flip-book of an ascii ski-driver. Each ascii picture was separated by pressing any key and cls ^^
Aaaaah. Sweet childhood memories!

Later on i used a programming-language for beginners in windows.
This language gave you control of a triangle called "turtle".

My first high-level programming language was Delphi.
Since i had no idea of databases, i created a pseudo database of magic the gathering play-cards. Each card had it's very own windows formular filled up completely with an uncompressed image object displaying the chosen card modally. *sigh*
I scanned each card by using a feed scanner.
Finally, my application consisted of 200 cardimages and forced my PC to swap the required memory from my harddisk.
Boy o boy. I was such a noob! ^^

Over the years i discovered and felt in love with a lot of languages (jsp, java (script), c#, php, ...) and concepts (mvvm, mvc, clean-architecture, tdd, ...)! ;)

Started by seeing an example of script in Batch and trying to recreate it, then I learned HTML, some CSS and JS and made HTA programs, then a little Visual Basic because I liked the idea of desining your own GUI in Visual Studio so easily, then I started High School and forgot almost all I learned. Sad story...

bat files
saves lots of time.

Hey guys, I just discovered that an instance of internet explorer is actually set to open on startup on Windows.

Try going into your task manager and look for "explorer.exe".

If you want to kill it without finding it, you can also just use the BATCH command `kill /I explorer.exe`

Apparently batch converting SVG to PNG is harder than it seems.

1) Had to fix severe bugs in a dynamic UI (configuration-driven forms) component.

Recognized undocumented Copy/Paste/Modify/FuckUp driven variations of the same component all over the project. Unsurprisingly, the implementations covered 99% of the antipattern catalog on wiki.c2.com and could compete with brainfuck in regard to human-readable code.

Escalated the issue, proposed a redesign using a new approach, got it approved.

Designed, Implemented, tested and verified the new shared and generic component. Integrated into the main product in the experimental branch. Presented to tech lead/management. Everyone was happy and my solution opened even more possibilities.

Now the WTF moment: the product with the updated dynamic UI solution never has been completely tested by a QA engineer despite my multiple requests and reminders.

It never got merged into baseline.
New initiatives to fix the dynamic UI issues have been made by other developers. Basically looking up my implementation. Removing parts they do not understand and wondering why the data validation does not work. And of course taking the credit.

2) back in 2013, boss wanted me to optimize batch processing performance in the product I developed. Profiling proved that the bottleneck ist not my code, but the "core" I had to use and which I must never ever touch. Reported back to him. He said he does not care and the processing has to get faster. And I must not touch the "core".

(FYI: the "core" was auto-generated from VB6 to VB.Net. Stored in SourceSafe. Unmaintainable, distributed about a bunch of 5000+ LoC files, eye-cancer inducing singlethreaded something, which had naive raw database queries causing the low performance.)

My first project was a batch/visual basic script that could do a few things. Open and close CD trays, show a fake virus pop-up, log off, and some other misc stuff.

My second script was a 1 line batch script with vbs generated from itself. It would fuck up your system, put itself in startup, try and replace Explorer.exe with itself, show stuff on screen, reboot it, put itself in strange places so it could be run of the user did something like access Windows features. Never used it but it was fun to make

So... My brother got his computer when I was 6 years old... It was a 286 with the new 64mb HD and the screen had 16 gray scale color...
Latter it was given to me when my brother got his 486dx2 and I did a course in ms-dos and batch scripting.
That's it, lots of sfigher, puzzle bubble, Dina blast, wolfeinstein 3D...

There were two of them, not sure which was completed first. One was malware, the second one -- admin tool.

These were the early XP days

1. A batch [windows] script to ease system users' mgmt. Nothing fancy, just multiple calls to usercontrol. My dad needed it for work, and there, it was born. To extend further I made it into an exe file w/ some icon. I felt very proud of it :)

2. I have already told a story of this one at dR. Anyway, it was also a batch script. Except that it was more advanced. Basicaly it was a trojan. Once executed it discovered all that computer's ip addresses and uploaded them to an ftp. Then - pulled a headless radmin installation and initiated a silent install of radmin server. Added radmin server's executable to autolaunch list so that it would come up after reboots. Once done - uploaded SUCCESS status to my ftp. And then all I had left to do - pick an ip from my ftp and enter it into radmin client's CONNECT window. I had a full controll of over a dozen of pcs

When I was about 11 years old I got my my own laptop and got interested in learning about computers. Started learning batch and could make some pretty fun text based games. Then as I got into my teens I stopped paying attention to the computer. But now that I'm older I see a bright future with Java development, with it being so multi-platformed. I'm now restating my passion for code and learning java. :)