This code review gave me eye cancer.

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

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

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

My eyes.

My eyes.

MY EYES.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

function somefunction {
----stuff
}

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

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

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

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

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

And brilliantly un-reachable code blocks, like:

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

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

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

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

But this was PRODUCTION CODE.

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

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

I gave up after the first 100 lines.

Gave up.

I washed my eyes out with bleach.

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

PM: You know that screen that pops up at the start of the app asking for permission to access health data?

Me: Yeah the iOS HealthKit permission screen. What about it?

PM: Can you take that out. I don't think people are going to agree to it. I want people to use the app.

Me: Well we can't do that, apple says if we want to use HealthKit we have to ask for permission. We shouldn't be touching that data without permission anyway.

PM: Oh no permission is fine I get that, but is it not implied by downloading the app, its clearly a health app. I really don't want people to download it and then uninstall it because they don't like this.

Me: Not really, not everyone will know what data is needed, some of it might be sensitive to them.

PM: Nah I don't buy into that. I asked 5 of my friends on the golf course at the weekend and 3 of them said they wouldn't agree to it, thats 60% of our user base, we can't have that.

Me: ... ok, well I don't agree that your 5 friends is a fair sample to judge the whole world by, either way we have no choice.

Pm: No this isn't going to fly, can we not build our own HealthKit that doesn't have this kind of permission screen? Maybe we could start our own, and invite our partners to use it?

Me: ... no

Pm: why not? We'll have legal draw up something we put in the terms and conditions.

Me: ... it will take months to build for all the different types of devices we have, if they even let us get access to them, and then we will have a different standard to everyone else.

Pm: ... no your not seeing the big picture, i'll run the idea up the ladder.

**It was approved up the ladder, and subsequently cancelled when they realised the scale of the work involved which is both a "thank god" and a "wtf" moment**

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.

CEO "If you make costs to build a home office for covid, please be aware that you can fully declare your bills, and you'll retain ownership over the ordered goods. Please all buy some good desk chairs and keyboards, so you can work ergonomically"

6 months later, CFO: "Bittersweet, why did you try to declare €35000? What are these invoices even? Concrete rebar?"

Me: "CEO told us to build a home office. I got permits from the town to dig a souterrain layer under my house. This is just for the foundation, the bills for drainage pumps, sheetpiling, geothermal heat exchangers, insulation, flooring, electricity and of course desk & chair will follow later"

CFO: 😳

(To be fair, I really did make those costs, but was just trolling by uploading all the material bills)

HR sent around updated contracts asking everyone to sign them since the company changed its name, fair enough.

In the contract it stated "Your normal place of work will be X" - only X was many miles away, and I'd never worked there, never planned too. Assumed it was a mistake, sent it back. HR refused to change it, stating that the "normal place of work does not need to be the place where you normally work."

A lot of back and forth entailed, I refused to sign, I was reprimanded for not doing so, I was asked what my problem was as it made no material difference, and then I eventually replied with:

"Angela, I'm refusing to sign this as it's factually incorrect. No further explanation is required. I'll maybe consider signing this if you sign a piece of paper declaring you believe the moon is made of cheese, and you're the cow the milk came from to make it."

A very strongly worded email came back about how this was going on my record, I needed to offer a formal apology, etc. - all cc'd to my manager. I replied back, again copying my manager in, stating that this was ok, as I couldn't remain at a company who forced employees to sign dodgy contracts anyway.

Problem was (for them), I was a *massive* single point of failure for them at this point owing to some others leaving with no handover - hence I knew I wasn't going to be the casualty here. My manager flipped the lid at HR, got the CEO involved on threat of *him* leaving, and the whole thing massively blew up. Happy ending in that the HR person in question was fired, everyone else's contracts also had to be redone (I assumed everyone else just signed without looking which is worrying), and I actually got a pay rise out of it when higher ups realised the massive single point of failure I was.

But damn, I would've walked over crap like that. Walked pretty soon after anyway!

Story time:

I was once working on a project that dealt with incredibly sensitive financial data.

We needed a client’s database to do a migration.

They wouldn’t send it over the internet because it was too big and they didn’t think it would be secure.

They opt to send it in the post on an encrypted usb drive.

(Fair enough thinks I)

USB drive arrives.
Is indeed encrypted.

MFW there’s a post it note in the envelope with the password on.

MFW this is a billion dollar multinational petrochem company.

MFW this same company’s ‘sysadmin’ and ‘dba’ once complained because a SQL script I sent them didn’t work - they’d pasted it twice and couldn’t work this out from the fucking “table already created” error message management studio was throwing at them.

Swift, oh my god, why do you have to be like this?

I'm looking to write a simple for loop like this one in java

for(int i = 5; i > 0; i--) {
// do shit
}

Thats it, simple, go from 5 to 1 (inclusive), I saw that to iterate over a range in a for loop (increasing ordeR) I can do this

for i in 0...5 {
// do shit.
}

So I thought maybe I could do this to go in reverse (which seems logical when you think about it doesn't it?)

for i in 5..<0 {
// do shit
}

But no, this compiles FINE (THIS IS THE FUCKING KICKER IT COMPILES), alright, when you the code runs you get a fucking exception that crashes the mother fucking application, and you know what the problem is?? This dogshit, shitStain of a language doesn't like it when integer that the for loop starts with is larger than the integer that the for loop ends with MOTHERFUCKER ATLEAST TELL ME THAT AT COMPILE TIME AS A MOTHERFUCKING WARNING YOU PIECE OF SHIT!!

Alright *deep breathing*, now we can't just be stuck on this raging, we're developers need to move forward, so I google this, "Swift for loop in reverse" fair enough I get a straight forward answer that tells me to use the `stride` functionality. The relevant code for it

for i in stride(from:5 to:1 by:-1) {
// do shit
}

Wow looks fine and simple right?? (looks like god damn any other language if you ask me, no innovations here piece of shit apple!) WRONG BITCHES !!! In the latest version of Swift THE FUCKING DEVELOPERS DECIDED TO REMOVE STRIDE ALTOGETHER, WITHOUT ADDING IN A GOOD REPLACEMENT FOR THAT SHIT!

Alright NOW IM FUCKING MAD, I got rage on stackoverflow chat, a guy who's been working on ios for quite a while comes up n says and I quote
"I can sort of figure it out, but besides that, iterating in reverse is uncommon enough that it probably hasn't crossed anyone's mind."

Now hope you guys understand my frustration, and send me cookies to calm me down.

Thank you for listening to me !

A client called today because their email wasn't arriving at the receipants inbox but bouncing back with a 'poor MTA rating' error.

Checked about every blacklist I know and our server was definitely not blacklisted. Must be the receipants host which for some reason was blacklisting his specific email address.

Told the client that it wasn't a problem on our side and that he had to request a whitelist himself (we'd do it but it wasn't a specific server problem so we're not going to spend time on that).

Fair enough, he'd do that.

Calls back. "Well, the other party says that your server definitely has a poor rating, it's on your side!!"

Alright, this is getting annoying. Gave him a few blacklist checking sites links and told him to run his domain AND our server IP through it. Indeed came back completely clean.

"But the other party said it's poor rating on your side so I'd think tha........"

YEAH WHY DON'T YOU SHOVE THAT OTHER PARTY UP YOUR FUCKING ASS. I'VE SHOWN YOU PROOF THAT IT'S DEFINITELY NOT ON OUR FUCKING SIDE, EXPLAINED IT TO YOU AND SO ON. MAYBE, FOR ONE FUCKING SECOND, TAKE INTO CONSIDERATION THAT THE OTHER PARTY IS FUCKING LYING?!?!?

FUCK OFF.

Job interview goes really well. Senior Dev 90-100k.

Ok, so for your "test" write up a proposal for a web based bulk email sending system with its own admin panel for building list, tracking emails, and with reporting.

I write up an estimate. Low ball the absolute fuck out of it because I'm trying to get a job. Know a few good libraries I can use to save some time. Figure I can just use sendmail, or PHPMailer, or NodeMailer for the emailing, and DataTables Editor for a simple admin CRUD with reporting. Write the thing up. Tell them they can have it in LAMP or Node.

Come in at 36 hours.

Then these fucking wanks told me they wanted me to actually do the project.

My exact response was:

"I bill $50 an hour, let me know"

They did not let me know.

Young devs, jobless devs, desperate devs. I've seen a fair amount of this. And for the right job I might go as high as maybe 4 - 6 hours of unpaid work for some "programming test". But please be careful. There are those who will try to exploit lack of experience or desperation for free work.

At an internship we had to make something and appearantly I learned php quite wrong at study so they decided that I'd have to pick a framework to program with.

Fair enough, a little research and I found one.

Held a presentation about the progress and mentioned the framework I used and everyone seemed quite impressed.

After the project someone came to me and asked me to take another look at that framework.

It appeared to be veeery fucking old, hardly documented and quite shit actually.

"so why did you choose it again?"

😁

Before anyone starts going batshit crazy, this is NOT a windows hate post. Just a funny experience imo.

So I was tasked with installing ProxMox on a dedicated server at my last internship. The windows admin was my guider (he could also do debian). (he was a really nice/chill guy)

So we were discussing what VM's we wanted and the boss (really cool dude by the way) said he wanted a VPS for storing some company stuff as well. Fair enough, what would we use? I suggested debian and centos. Then we started discussing what we'd do if the systems would fuck up etc (at installation or whatever).
So I didn't wanna look like a Linux Nazi so I suggested windows. Then the happy/positive guider/windows admin suddenly became dead serious (I was actually like 'woah' for a second) and said this:
No. We're not going to fucking use windows for this. For general servers etc sometimes, fair enough but we're talking about sensitive company data here. I don't want that data to be stored on a proprietary/closed source system, hell what if there's some kinda fucking backdoor build in, who can fucking verify that? We're using Linux, end of discussion.

😓

I was pretty flabbergasted as he's a nice guy and actually really likes windows!

Linux it became.

Why are job postings so bad?
Like, really. Why?

Here's four I found today, plus an interview with a trainwreck from last week.
(And these aren't even the worst I've found lately!)

------

Ridiculous job posting #1:
* 5 years React and React Native experience -- the initial release of React Native was in May 2013, apparently. ~5.7 years ago.
* Masters degree in computer science.
* Write clean, maintainable code with tests.
* Be social and outgoing.

So: you must have either worked at Facebook or adopted and committed to both React and React Native basically immediately after release. You must also be in academia (with a masters!), and write clean and maintainable code, which... basically doesn't happen in academia. And on top of (and really: despite) all of this, you must also be a social butterfly! Good luck ~

------

Ridiculous job posting #2:
* "We use Ruby on Rails"
* A few sentences later... "we love functional programming and write only functional code!"

Cue Inigo Montoya.

------

Ridiculous job posting #3:
* 100% remote! Work from anywhere, any time zone!
* and following that: You must have at least 4 work hours overlap with your coworkers per day.
* two company-wide meetups per quarter! In fancy places like Peru and Tibet! ... TWO PER QUARTER!?

Let me paraphrase: "We like the entire team being remote, together."

------

Ridiculous job posting #4:
* Actual title: "Developer (noun): Superhero poised to change the world (apply within)"
* Actual excerpt: "We know that headhunters are already beating down your door. All we want is the opportunity to earn our right to keep you every single day."
* Actual excerpt: "But alas. A dark and evil power is upon us. And this… ...is where you enter the story. You will be the Superman who is called upon to hammer the villains back into the abyss from whence they came."

I already applied to this company some time before (...surprisingly...) and found that the founder/boss is both an ex cowboy dev and... more than a bit of a loon. If that last part isn't obvious already? Sheesh. He should go write bad fantasy metal lyrics instead.

------

Ridiculous interview:
* Service offered for free to customers
* PHP fanboy angrily asking only PHP questions despite the stack (Node+Vue) not even freaking including PHP! To be fair, he didn't know anything but PHP... so why (and how) is he working there?
* Actual admission: No testing suite, CI, or QA in place
* Actual admission: Testing sometimes happens in production due to tight deadlines
* Actual admission: Company serves ads and sells personally-identifiable customer information (with affiliate royalties!) to cover expenses
* Actual admission: Not looking for other monetization strategies; simply trying to scale their current break-even approach.

------

I find more of these every time I look. It's insane.
Why can't people be sane and at least semi-intelligent?

DO NOT let employers demoralize you into staying with the company.

I've been with this one company for about 2 years. Everything was great, despite being underpaid, and having a lot of responsibility (I was the only front-end developer maintaining 4 big eCommerce sites).
One day about 2 months ago, I got a better offer. Better pay, more freedom, and way less stress (Customers screaming in your ear vs. no customers at all).

I talked to my team lead since I wanted my company to have a fair chance to counteroffer - I was fairly comfortable after all, and I felt like it would be a nice gesture.
If my team lead had just said "No, sorry, we can't counter that offer", there's a big chance that I would have stayed with them anyway. Instead, I got a fairly uncomfortable and personal rant thrown back at me.

He basically said that I should be happy with my salary, that he didn't feel like I had much responsibility, and that "I wasn't the type of person companies would hire for that salary".
He ended by saying I might as well stay, as there was no going back if the new place didn't work out - basically trying to tempt me with job security.

I told him that I would think about it. The worst part is that I actually did, since his rant really made me feel somewhat worthless as a developer. Luckily I came to my senses, and sent my resignation the next day.

I talked to an old coworker today, and they are still unable to find a developer who wants to take the job. I see that as justice :)

tl;dr: If a company tries to make you stay by demoralizing you - Run.

The Orange Juice Saga ....

I've just come off one of the stupidest calls ever.

Firstly, I am not in tech support, I'm a software developer - read the below with this in mind.

My client called up to say the system I created as been compromised. When he attempts to login, he is logged off his Windows machine.

He'd also apparently taken his PC to ***insert large UK computer superstore here***, who took £100 plus to look at the machine and conclude his needs to buy a new PC.

I remoted into his computer to see WTF was going on.

As he described, visiting my login form did log you out. In fact, whenever you pressed the "L" key you were logged out. Press the "M" key, all windows were minimized. Basically, all Windows hotkeys appeared to be active, without the need to press the Windows key.

Whilst connected to his PC I spent a good 30 minutes checking keyboard settings and came up short.

After asking all the normal questions (has anything changed on your PC, have you installed stuff lately etc.) without any useful answers I got nothing.

I then came across an article stating several presses of the Windows in quick succession will solve the issue.

I got the client to try this, pressed the "L" key (which would have logged me off previously) and the issue was resolved.

Basically, the Windows key was "stuck", which oddly makes your PC kind of useless.

I asked the client if they'd split anything on the keyword whilst working. His exact word were simply lol:

"Oh yer, yesterday, I was trying to drink a glass of orange quickly and split some in the corner of keyboard. I did clean it up quickly though".

Yep, the issue was due to the client spilling orange juice on their keyboard , which in turn made the Windows key stick.

Disaster averted.

A call that started with the client stating I made a system that was easily compromised (i.e. my fault), morphed into a sorry saga of cold drinks.

The client did ask why the ***superstore name*** charged him money for that and recommended a new machine. That is a good question and demonstrated some the questionable tech support practices we see nowadays, even at very large stores.

To be fair to the client, he told me to bill him for half a days work as it was his own fault.

When I'm able to stop myself involuntarily face palming, I'm off for a swim to unwind :)

Well, here's the OS rant I promised. Also apologies for no blog posts the past few weeks, working on one but I want to have all the information correct and time isn't my best friend right now :/

Anyways, let's talk about operating systems. They serve a purpose which is the goal which the user has.
So, as everyone says (or, loads of people), every system is good for a purpose and you can't call the mainstream systems shit because they all have their use.

Last part is true (that they all have their use) but defining a good system is up to an individual. So, a system which I'd be able to call good, had at least the following 'features':
- it gives the user freedom. If someone just wants to use it for emailing and webbrowsing, fair enough. If someone wants to produce music on it, fair enough. If someone wants to rebuild the entire system to suit their needs, fair enough. If someone wants to check the source code to see what's actually running on their hardware, fair enough. It should be up to the user to decide what they want to/can do and not up to the maker of that system.
- it tries it's best to keep the security/privacy of its users protected. Meaning, by default, no calling home, no integrating users within mass surveillance programs and no unnecessary data collection.
- Open. Especially in an age of mass surveillance, it's very important that one has the option to check the underlying code for vulnerabilities/backdoors. Can everyone do that, nope. But that doesn't mean that the option shouldn't be there because it's also about transparency so you don't HAVE to trust a software vendor on their blue eyes.
- stability. A system should be stable enough for home users to use. For people who like to tweak around? Also, but tweaking *can* lead to instability and crashes, that's not the systems' responsibility.

Especially the security and privacy AND open parts are why I wouldn't ever voluntarily (if my job would depend on it, sure, I kinda need money to stay alive so I'll take that) use windows or macos. Sure, apple seems to care about user privacy way more than other vendors but as long as nobody can verify that through source code, no offense, I won't believe a thing they say about that because no one can technically verify it anyways.

Some people have told me that Linux is hard to use for new/(highly) a-technical people but looking at my own family and friends who adapted fast as hell and don't want to go back to windows now (and mac, for that matter), I highly doubt that. Sure, they'll have to learn something new. But that was also the case when they started to use any other system for the first time. Possibly try a different distro if one doesn't fit?

Problems - sometimes hard to solve on Linux, no doubt about that. But, at least its open. Meaning that someone can dive in as deep as possible/necessary to solve the problem. That's something which is very difficult with closed systems.

The best example in this case for me (don't remember how I did it by the way) was when I mounted a network drive at boot on windows and Linux (two systems using the same webDav drive). I changed the authentication and both systems weren't in for booting anymore. Hours of searching how to unfuck this on windows - I ended up reinstalling it because I just couldn't find a solution.
On linux, i found some article quite quickly telling to remove the entry for the webdav thingy from fstab. Booted into a root recovery shell, chrooted to the harddrive, removed the entry in fstab and rebooted. BAM. Everything worked again.

So yeah, that's my view on this, I guess ;P

Stop it with the Linux shilling already.

I'm 27 years old and I love Linux and git and vim just as much as the next guy (yeah fuck you emacs!). I have discovered this place as a room for discussion, advise, humor and rants of course, and I had my good share of giggles.

But lately it seems that every other Post is "look at me I installed Linux" or "hurr durr he doesn't use git" or "windows omfg kill it with fire". And to some degree, those rants have a good point and are absolutely right. However, most of them are not.

This is why you're part of the problem. Constantly shaming and ridiculing any technology that's not hip in nerd culture, regardless of the circumstances. This makes you look just as bad as the peoples you look down upon for writing their code in notepad++ on windows xp with McAfee installed. Even worse, from a professional point of view, it absolutely voids your credibility.

How am I to take you seriously and presume a fair amount of experience and out of the box thinking if all you do is repeat catchphrases and ride the fucking hype train. And yes, I know there are a lot of minors or peoples who are just getting started in the industry. But I have seen enough self-righteous hateful spews from peoples who claim not to be.

Anyway, this is getting long and I think I have made my point. Maybe I am just too old to be joking around that shit all the time anymore. But from what I have seen, I wouldn't hire the biggest part of you. Not because you are bad at what you're doing, but because what you say makes you look absolutely unprofessional.

But then again, this is devrant and I love you all. Have a great week everyone!

First day on the phone as a support guy!
Before the first call came in I thought like 'please no email related issues as that's the one thing I suck at!'

Fair enough, first call:
Me: hello, how can I help you?
Customer: well, we've got this email problem...
Me thinking: MOTHERFUCKING FUCKING FUCK WHY ME 😭
Me: what seems to be the problem?

Damn, really?!

My lead developer left on vacation for a week. Without notice to my boss and/or myself.

Well to be fair we did have the minimum which is a 2 day notice....

So what did we do? Well the boss and I acted like absolute adults and did what any other adult would do.

Me sticky noted the fuck out of his desk and screens.

4 screens full of sticky notes.

Phone is full of sticky notes too. And geez man....everything is sticky notes....so...many....sitcky...notes

Well today I got a fantastic surprise (truthfully). We hired a dev some months ago, who was on 6 months probation and, to put it politely, he was not going to pass it.

*side note: for details of some of the above, read my last 10 or so rants. They are pretty much all him.

Anyway, management put him on an improvement plan to make sure everything was fair, it wasn't working out, but they said we had to finish it to be fair.

So we had another 2 weeks left when he announced last night he's leaving for a new junior role, technical but not a dev.

Months of stress, heartache, bewilderment, late nights and weekends all just came to an end.

The English language fails me to express my overwhelming joy at this moment. The only way I can come close to it is to say that when he made his announcement, a colleague told me I should stop smiling as it could be taken as being rude.

I'd like to take this moment to thank the community for supporting me over the past few difficult months. Without you I probably would have tried to kill him with my dev rant stressball.

Thanks,
practiseSafeHex

Me, a 19 year old student at a meeting with a "potential new project" today:

Her: So, we would like a website where people could rent a conference room, and pay for it on the website. After they have paid, we want automated emails to go out to us and the person that rents the room. We basically want an automated rental system.
Me: Sounds fair, what kind of budget do you have in mind?
Her: Well because you are a student and you still live at home, we have a budget of about €200 (~$220). We thought it'd be fair because you don't really need an income yet.

At that point I slowly tried to fade away from the meeting... Please help me 😭

Had an interesting time these past few days. Had a customer who, when I left for vacay, was complaining that he couldn't get access to our private package registry. Get back, this issue is still active.

We'd granted access to his github enterprise, and for some reason he wasn't getting the activation email. We spent about 22 hours of customer support time on his failing to help himself before he finally escalated to the standard 40 person IT enterprise tantrum/come to jesus meeting.

Long story short, he had somehow ignored repeated attempts (35 email replies to the ticket chain, 4 phone calls) to get him to check his spam folder. In which, as it was revealed to all the hollywood squares in attendance, there were no less than 35 activation emails from github granting him access. Of course, none of this was his fault. And while screensharing his big brain to god and everyone he decides the problem is now actually Microsoft because their office 365 spam email filtered his emails incorrectly. We of course agreed with his big brain, smoothed over his bruised ego and went about our day.

I mean, fair enough, it's kind of dumb that Microsoft ever spam lists github, but still. I was just a fly on the wall, and he burned all his paid support tickets on the issue, so hopefully we won't be dealing with him again this year.

Also, this is an edge case with our new product line, most of our customers are painless.

Conversations I've genuinely had at work:

Me: "Do you want some advice understanding that function?"
Dev: "Yeah, please!"
Me: "Get a plastic bag and some super glue..."

Dev: "I think I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel!"
Me: "It's just the train of mental bitchslaps coming in the other direction."
... Some time later
Dev:"You were right... "

Dev: "If the system is so unstable, how does it keep working?"
Me: "Do you see any goats in the office?"
Dev: "Uhm no... Why would there be goats?"
Me: "There aren't, now, we ran out."
Dev: "The hell are you talking about?"
Me: "We just sacrifice our own blood to Cthulhu these days, it's cleaner and we didn't have to pay to have all the goats blood and waste matter to be cleaned up. That and it was needlessly cruel to the poor goats and that is why there is no goats and despite conventional logic the app continues to work."

Dev: "So what language is the web app written in?"
Me: "You need to understand I inherited this project, I had nothing to do with it's spawning..."
Dev: "OK, that sounds ominous... How bad is it?"
Me: "Java..."
Dev: "..."

Dev: "So what's it like working on this project? What should I expect?"
Me: "You'll call your grandmother during your lunch break just to know there's a world beyond this project. You'll go home, nose bleeding and you are gonna sit in the shower and rock back and forth, holding yourself and feeling like you're suffering imposter syndrome. You'll question why you joined this team and it'll get inside your head til it's all you think about..."
Dev: "Damn man, why are you still on it?"
Me: "Stockholm syndrome, it's too late for me..."

PM: "You're such a dark person, we're not gonna find you hanging from the lights one day are we?"
Me: "Impossible, we use those industrial fluorescent strip lights, there's no cord to hang from."
PM: "That really wasn't the comforting answer I was looking for."

Head of department: "So I need to apologize, you were never meant to be left on your to manage the product on your own, it's something someone way more senior should have been doing and we reassigned him. It wasn't professional of us, it wasn't fair of us, we're sorry. Truth be told,we're impressed you've not gone mad."
Me: "I think I have. Wibble."

A card goes round work for a sick member of staff I've never met.
Me: "How would you describe her condition?"
Dev: "She said that she 'survived' the surgery."
Me: "Yeah, I'm not great at being appropriate but even I think writing 'glad to hear that you are not dead' in a get well soon card isn't the done thing."

I don't want to write clean code anymore :(

I read Clean Code, Clean Coder, and watched many uncle bob's videos, and I was able to apply best practices and design patterns
I created many systems that really stood the test of time...

Management was kind enough to introduce me to uncle bob clean code in the first place, letting us watch it during work hours. after like one year, my code improved 400% minimum because I am new and I needed guidance from veterans...

That said, to management I am very slow, compared to this other guy, they ask me for a feature and my answer would be like "sure, we need to update the system because it just doesn't support that right now, it is easy though it would take 2 days tops"

they ask the same thing for the other guy : "ok let me see what I can do", 1 hour later, on slack, he writes : done. he slaps bunch of if-statement and make special case that will serve the thing they asked for.

oh 'cool' they say -> but it doesn't do this -> it needs to do that -> ok there is a new bug,-> it doesn't work in build mode-> it doesn't work if you are logged in as a guest, now its perfect ! -> it doesn't work on Android -> ok it works on android but now its not perfect anymore.

and they feel like he is fast (and to be fair he is), this feature? done. ok new bugs? solved. Android compatibility ? just one day ... it looks like he is doing doing doing.

it ends up taking double the time I asked for, and that is not to mention the other system affected during this entire process, extra clean up that I have to do, even my systems that stood the test of time are now ruined and cannot be extracted to other projects. because he just slaps whatever bools and if statements he needs inside any system, uses nothing but Singleton pattern on everything. our app will never be ready-for-business, this I can swear. its very buggy. and to fix it, it needs a change in mentality, not in code.
---------------

uncle bob said : write your code the right way, and the management will see that your code generates less errors, with time, you will earn respect even though they will feel you are slow at first.

well sorry uncle, I've been doing it for a year, my image got bad, you are absolutely right, only when there is no one else allowed to drop a giant shit inside your clean code.

note: we don't really have a technical lead.
-------------------
its been only two days since my new "hack n' slash" meta, the management is already kind of "impressed" ... so I'll keep hacking and slashing until I find a better job.

I'd love to finish a few projects I'm currently working on:

- An add-on which gives a middle finger to websites which use services/products ran by companies which are known to be integrated within the biggest mass surveillance system ever created (US powered). Not because just fuck those websites but because I think (@PonySlaystation came up with this idea) that its only fair that people get to know which websites 'sell them out'. Oh and "but not everyone cares about that" - you don't HAVE to install the addon.
(will be open sourced)

- Notes service with a fun thing.

- PHP based server/website/whateverthefuckyouwant monitoring system which is pretty much module based and works with json files as configuration. (kinda works but still loads of bugs to solve and gotta improve the module system a lot).
(will be open sourced)

- PHP based pihole alternative which suits my needs (will be open sourced)

- Forgot one 😅

I’m a .NET desktop fullstack dev these days… Never worked web unless for my own small needs/personal projects.
I started using tech one way or the other by the time windows was version 3.1 and been through quite a bit ground-breaking changes in the industry of software development and the internet but if there’s one thing I cannot understand of it all, no matter how much thought I put into it is: How the fuck did we manage to make it so fucking complicated to develop anything these days?
I remember like it was yesterday that you could stand a website with HTML, CSS and JS, three fucking files and you’ve made yourself a single page site. Then came the word “Responsive”, “Responsive” written everywhere. Fair enough, grid system popped up. All of the sudden jQuery was summoned… and everything that happened after this point has been a fucking circus of high-pitched teens talking on conferences about fucking libraries and frameworks to make integration with real time, highly scalable, eco-friendly, serverless, data driven, genome aware, genderless, quantum technologies to interact with bio dynamically generated organisms, namely fucking users.
Every fucking bit of the process of building a mobile/web application seems to be stopped by yet another incredibly dumb attempt to suicide a developer. Can you go from starting an app and publishing an app without jumping through a thousand VERY specific hoops? No, fuck no.
I fucking hate it… It’s a bit hard to get Desktop dev jobs these days but for as long as I work on IT I will continue to stick to that area, until someone for the love of life comes up with a fucking solution to all this decadent circus of bureaucratic technocracy.
Fuck big industry, fuck tech giants, fuck javascript and webassembly, fuck kids putting ASCII art on console applications that I DON’T FUCKING NEED to install dependencies THAT I DON’T FUCKING NEED to extend functionality on frameworks that I DON’T FUCKING NEED… oh wait, I do need all this because YOU FUCKING MADE IT MANDATORY NOW! FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOU!!!

I just got told on a video meeting that I am far too pretty to be a developer.

To be fair, I am well aware of this, most devs I have met on the wild are some ugly ass motherfuckers.

I is a pretty ass mfker.

Today @ 4pm:

New dev: I need help with this issue, i've been stuck on it all day.

Me: ok let's look ...... ok, and did you try google this?

New dev: ... no

Me: ... why?

New dev: well this is clearly my issue, why would I google it? I only google for things I don't know

Me: ... ok ... we'll do you know what this bug is then?

New dev: haha ok, fair point, I'll give that a try. Thanks for the tip.

Seriously, should I be worried? I feel worried

So this is going to be one hell of a FUCKING rant.
Just heard from a friend (doing the same exams I passed, it was going to happen in two groups and he was in the second) that he failed the first out of three phases. And why?
I NEARLY FUCKING FAILED THE FIRST FUCKING PHASE. I GOT A FAIR CHANCE TO MAKE IT RIGHT AND I TOOK THAT CHANCE.
BUT.
MY FRIEND MADE THE SAME MISTAKE. HE MISSED A FUCKING DOCUMENT AND ASKED FOR OVERTIME, WHICH HE GOT AND THEN HE ASKED THE EXAMINOR VERY NICELY IF HE COULD TELL HIM WHAT DOCUMENT HE MISSED (for the record, it was bad documentation and it was not clear that it had to be a seperate document) AND WHAT DID THAT FATHERFUCKING COCKSUCKER SAY?
Hmm hmm hmmm.... nope, that's your responsibillity

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? HE HELPED ME BUT NOT HIM? I KNOW YOU LIKE ME MORE THAN HIM BUT IS THAT A MOTHERFUCKING REASON TO LET HIM FUCKING FAIL?!?!?!?

I AM MOTHERFUCKING FUCKITY FUCKING FURIOUS.

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

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

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

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

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

We had a client visit our PH office to "hang out" and see the progress in this educational type game we were building for their private school (apparently, it's the one that Obama's kids went to).

Manager oversold the progress and actually guaranteed some features that we were still working on and estimated to finish in the next 3 sprints (2 week intervals).

Client was due to be in the office in 2 days.

PM pushes back and says we need to manage client expectations properly.

CEO got wind and sat the dev team down. Dev lead, two seniors, and junior me. He sat us down and asked us what we think.

Lead says we can do it.

Now to be fair, I know this guy to be very competent and an INCREDIBLE programmer. He is the person I consider to be the first real mentor I ever had but I really thought we were fucked here.

Next day and half was hell--for me, at least and I really couldn't see how this was all possible.

But then the fucker came through. This beautiful, majestic meganerd and the two other guys shat out 6 weeks of code in ~30 hours.

And the crazy part was it was all working. Bugs were caught in the next few days for sure, but the demo went flawlessly.

I never doubted this guy again.

Years later, I'd meet up with him and would talk fondly about those days and all he could say was "I don't really remember". He remembers the project and that we had a demo but he couldn't remember anything around those days.

Two of the most stressful days of my life and to him it was a fucking Wednesday. What a fucking champ.

I just want to add my 2 Cents to the all this GDPR chaos. Because I feel lots of you are missing the point here.

When reading here about GDPR I hear all kinds of fair statements of how flawed it is and how it's mainly hurting the small companies etc etc.

I agree, at this state GDPR might actually be doing more harm than good.

However, I don't think that is what it is about. It's about going in the right direction. If you read/look over the course of history we've had several technological revolutions. Industrial, renaissance. They all start the same:

"This technology is going to change everything, it's going to solve all our problems!" It's something holy. Something that shouldn't be touched or regulated, only embraced.

But as we all know it wasn't all that pretty.

Industrial revolution was hard super underpaid, dirty work. Children had to work too. People were getting sick. Lots of alcoholism, depression.

And what made the factories start taking better care of their employees? Regulation.

Once fines start to come, companies will have to adapt.

We have to learn and understand that these systems like government, company, capitalism. They're built for reasons. They all exist for reasons. And only when it is in balance, things will flourish.

So I encourage you all to stay as critical as you are, but to give it a chance. To have a bit of faith.

It might just turn into something worthwhile!

Thanks for reading!:)

Android, you fucking cunt!

Battery saving, yes it's an important thing. So first you want applications to display a big-ass notification when they're running in the background. Fair enough, it can be hidden away by the user if they want to.

But now there's a big-ass notification and the applications STILL get force closed?!! If I'm browsing Tor and I have Orbot running, don't you think that I might want to KEEP IT RUNNING?!! Or better yet, if I'm connected to my VPN server and the application is actively using the VPNService API, DON'T YOU THINK THAT THAT SHOULDN'T BE CLOSED?!!!

But yeah, ARTIFICIAL FUCKING INTELLIGENCE is doing some leety-ass fucking battery saving. MY FUCKING ASS CAN DO BETTER BATTERY SAVING!!!

The goal of one of my CS assignments was to learn about makefile, and during the last minute - literally while I was waiting for the professor to come over - I was just making everything presentable and getting rid of noise. I figured putting rm -r *.* in clean would be a good way to get rid of all the debug output.

To be fair, my project folder was indeed pretty clean afterwards.

In this episode of "office drama", we have the head secretary asking me if I want to contribute to the gift for the baby of some guy I don't know well. (I'm new to the office btw)
When I refuse, saying that I don't know him well enough to want to contribute, she says "that's okay, but we won't be collecting for a gift for you once you have a baby. We want to be a '''team''' ".

😐

I just said "that's fair", but maaaaaaaan! Since when is it okay to demand that someone participates in a gift, while ignoring their social or financial circumstances? 😤

Update: went to her office to talk about this "being a part of the team" and clear things up. She said, and I quote "I don't have time for this". And by that, swords have been unsheathed. I guess there is no pleasing some people.

Somebody put milk in the tea kettle.

To be entirely fair, I'm sure nobody from here has ever seen a kettle, let alone used one.

A few weeks ago I stepped onto the grounds of lovely Canada. Back then - coming from Europe - I was surprised. Free WiFi everywhere without all the bells and whistles of creating an account and such.

Well ... at least I thought so ...

Today I went to a location where they actually charge you for their wireless services - fair enough the coverage area is pretty huge - and provide you with an access coupon. All good my optimistic me told me but once the login page loaded...

There are a lot of things about UX I could rant about but let's put that aside. The coupon came from the office where they KNEW all your contact details but it required you to create an account with all of them again to redeem the coupon.

Not only that but it asked for things like the phone number - obviously asking for a Canadian landline number since hell who uses mobiles anyway with numbers longer than ten characters?! - and even though it had a nice country selection it kept the states field there even when selecting a country that doesn't have states ...
Oh, and on a regular phone screen (which would be the target user for WiFi on a campground I suppose) the input fields for state and zip were occluded by the margins of the input rendering the content invisible.

And if that weren't enough after creating your account they made you watch an ad as if the personal data and the 4$ you paid them wasn't enough for the lousy 400 KB/s you get for 24h ...

Gets better though! After creating the account they display your password to make sure you remembered it ... over a non-secured WiFi network ... and send you an email afterward ... password via unencrypted mail via an unencrypted WIRELESS connection ... not that it protects anything that would matter anyways you can just snoop the MAC of your neighbor and get in that way or for that sake get their password but oh well ...

Gosh, sometimes I just feel the urgent need to find the ones responsible and tell them to GTFO of the IT world ...

Is it just me feeling like this about crappy UI/UX design? Always wondering...

Storing passwords in plain text.

To be fair, it was a feature requested by the client, but still...

At least encrypt it man.

One of the biggest barriers to the wide(r) scale adoption of functional programming languages like Haskell, F#, and Scala is how snooty and condescending your average FP developer is. And beginner-unfriendly.

Ask them a question about an intermediate topic (in my case, the Free monad) you're likely to get a whole torrent of category theoretic rubbish in return.

This is a common pattern I see when "experts" answer questions.

Now, it didn't bother me much because I've studied a fair amount of category theory and can usually follow such answers, but, for the sake of the general case, I'd like to shove these rules into the heads of everyone writing an answer to a question (not just FP):

1. If you can't illustrate a concept clearly without going into verbal diarrhoea with phrases like "monad homomorphism" and "just a monoid in the category of endofunctors" then you clearly haven't understood it properly (unless, of course, the answer absolutely requires it). An answer is not the place to show off your knowledge of a topic.

2. Please remember that everyone was a beginner at some point. Including you. Understand that some concepts can be extremely frustrating at first and yet incredibly simple after you grok them (eg. monads).

3. If the person asking the question is a beginner, using complex concepts in an answer just because it's a more "elegant" way to explain it doesn't really help them. They are more likely to get confused and drop the topic.

(Kudos to those people who give highly relevant, insightful, simple, and intuitive answers, you guys are the best).

PM: Ok Android, i've reviewed the latest build, you are good to release. Waiting on iOS's build to test.

Me: ... are we not holding all builds until we hear back from backend about that bug?, as we likely have to change something on our side?

PM: Which bug?

Me: ... the only one we discussed yesterday in the team meeting.

PM: How many customers is it affecting?

Me: that we know of, one ... the CEO of our company

PM: oh that one, yeah were not doing that anymore.

Me: WHAT? i've been waiting all day / night to hear back. Why are we not doing this?

PM: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ... Everything is too messy at the minute anyway, the release plan is changing every day. Need to keep it back in line.

Me: ... the plan has changed exactly once. We had a plan at the start of last week for the last release, we changed it YESTERDAY to include 2 critical bug fixes. The only issue with the plan changing is nobody telling us these aren't bugs anymore

PM: We can discuss tomorrow in the team meeting.

CEO: oh hey guys, yeah we pulled that bug fix. Its not really a bug, more like a missing feature. No way it will get done before xmas. Going to live with the way it works for now and fix it properly next year.

Me: Ok, fair enough, but we really need to be told these decisions.

CEO: sure, sorry, didn't think anyone was blocked by this. What was the blocker?

Me: ..... you asked me yesterday to get this bug fix in the build ... you asked for the final build to be made today so we can go through the app store review. As we all discussed yesterday, today is kind of the last day we can really do this.

CEO: ok, its late, we can discuss this tomorrow in the team meeting.

Me: ..... ..... ..... ..... sure

!rant

Today I bring happy news. First company I interviewed at clicked so well, both personally and technically, and they expressed an eagerness to hire me on the spot. I figured we might as well talk salary to compare them against other interviews. The offer they made me was so good I decided to sign there and then. They said they participate in a fair wage program but for me this is absolutely the dream. I get lots of nice perks to boot. And they've already mailed me some tech documentation to go over so I can prepare, as I'll be working with the latest front end stuff and of course my trusty .NET (and yes I asked it'll be C#, haha).

I can't even begin to express how great this is. The last decade I've been unemployed for several years in total, and vastly underpayed when I was employed. I've worked in some toxic environments, been falling behind on tech and wrote a lot of rubbish code as a result of that. But it seems that somehow all the hard work I did put in paid off by taking a chance when it presented itself and go in accepting I might fail horribly. And I did bomb the tech questions actually. But they let me explain myself and come to answers together and saw beyond the black and white.

In short I feel like I've won the work lottery and will start 2018 in style. Part of me is still scared though, that there will be a mistake or a catch or even somehow I'll ruin everything. But that is the risk in life and I'm just going to have to deal. What I can control and will do is my very best, because I want to keep succeeding and have a great future career. And I hope I can inspire others in the same boat with my actions too.

So... Some fake accounts on Twitter claimed to be Elon Musk and to give shitloads of Bitcoin to those who sent a little amount first. They stole... Wait for it... 180 grand.

That's basically your everyday 419 scam. Existing since before the internet, done with the names of Gates, Buffet, Bush, Obama...

They say "the big bad evil criminals and the poor little innocent victims" I say natural selection. Sorry, in those lion vs gazelle scenarios I always thought that it was fair, no matter how it went.

Just when did humanity get so brainless? Have we always been, is the internet just a catalyst for stupidity?

Just why the fuck must I be an infosec sheepdog instead of a wolf? Man, I could live the life, drink beer and smoke herb while working... Get up at 12, don't give a shit, no boss, no taxes, no social security payments that I don't see jack shit from, and the pay would be better to.

Damn.

First junior software dev job, asked what I wanted for hourly pay, replied “I need at least $13/hour to survive.” (This is in US, 2007, I was almost done with Bachelor in CS, single mom with two little kids, was also in the army national guard at the time)

I grew up poor, and was very ignorant about salary negotiations. So of course they offered $13/hour. I accepted, thinking it must be fair, and was glad to be making more than minimum wage. Six months in, I’m doing the same work as their devs with 2-4 years experience, find out they are billing clients $100/hour for my work. Then, to top it off, the COO makes a joke in a meeting about how it’s not a big deal for their “technical assistant” to be doing lackey work because he’s only paid $13. Fuuuuuuuuck. That comment still makes my blood boil.

I had a nice manager at the time that explained how salary negotiations worked, but I still think it’s lame as hell. I ended up getting put on salary, $50k/year, after threatening to leave.

Here's my current setup. Needs a bit of improvement still.

A few years back I thought getting two big touchscreens would be amazing to use for making music. I rarely touch them. They get dusty all the time. They are too reflective. The border around them is way too thick. They are too big to be useful in this configuration. I'll be replacing them with normal screens and probably go for a vertical arrangement instead.

As you can see, there's a fair bit of stuff on my desk. There's a USB sound interface that could be rack mounted but I've been too lazy to buy or make anything to house it. I have a pair of headphones, a wireless headset and a Rift hanging off of the microphone stand. I rarely use the microphone and guitar at the moment (considered trying some voice acting, not particularly good at guitar!)

The desk was originally 2 desks from an Internet cafe that was being refurbished. I cut the ends off them and joined them together to make a desk to fit the space I had and stuck some metal legs onto it (used to have a big ugly brown metal frame). Oh and made some holes to add cable grommets and it has an IKEA cable tray underneath.

There's also a slide out music keyboard underneath (made from some bits of wood and a drawer runner, it's quite clunky and I'm tempted to use some rack rails instead).

The drawers were to store stuff from my desk in but I just replaced that stuff with other stuff...

* Recruiter says he has a nice proposition

* I say that I'm not comfortable switching jobs yet, but I'd be up for a short phone interview to hear him out, out of pure interest

* Recruiter explains a lot about the company, and then asks if I am up for "a short Teams introduction with the team lead to hear more"

* I say yes, though still stating that I do not intend on switching, but want to know more in case of a future possibility

* Recruiter says I need to send my full CV / Resumé plus grades from every school I ever intended (including the early ones that doesn't even matter)

* I say no since 1) I'd have to dig them out from the basement, 2) I am not looking for a job right now, and 3) This request is absurd to me, and NOT a norm in my part of the world when I am not applying.

* He says I HAVE to, since I could be lying
(I am mostly self-taught and have very little actual education, so this logic made NO sense to me)

* I continue to say no, stating that it's simply not worth the time finding the old grades in the basement for a job I will not be taking, and that I am mostly self-taught so grades wouldn't matter

* He starts getting angry, accusing me of "purposefully wasting his time", and says he'll warn the company about me.

Fair point. I'll warn my contacts about you then. Have a nice day, you f*cking prick :)

Tl;dr younger people on here, especially passionate ones, don't worry about comparing yourself to people who appear to have tremendous laurels, those people are probably completely full of shit.

I say kids because you may be like me and more likely to underestimate your ability or more likely to be modest about your accomplishments, and you're too young to know you're doing that.

Either way. I've been doing a web development boot camp the last six months. It's been quite good with the teachers, and some of the classmates. Hell career services is now run by this woman who really actually seems like she knows what she's doing. It's pretty awesome.

That said, my teammates on the group projects have been a different story. I've primarily stuck with some of them out of loyalty and friendship. But one guy in particular has pissed me off to no end. He said he was a computer scientist going for masters. I thought I could learn from this guy. Now I wonder if he's a pathological liar.

Our first project he made one commit. Ripped straight from the homework. It was a simple api mash-up so alright. Fair enough. Next project was when he really started to piss me off.

He didn't do shit the first week and a half. No PM, no design, no programming. Nothing. Comes in two days before project is due, and me one other guy are fucking scrambling. Because of course no one else is there.

I live significantly further than my teammates mind you. We're busting ass. This fucking guy, this dumbass pick who is convinced he's a genius that will work in higher academia clobbers our whole fucking repo.

Why you ask? To put in an unrelated commit that replicated homework from the week before. Why you ask, again? Because this person is a borderline sociopath trying to appear busy in the commit logs.

We're onto the third project now. I spend days designing something original. Side note: I fucking hate design.

So I design my heart out come up with something awesome. This fuck ass, disappears. And another group member. This was the end of November, I hear from this prick last week about refactoring to ES6. But here's the kicker-fucker, our shit ALREADY WAS IN ES6!

I go in Saturday, slack a message I'll be late. I see this fucking "genius dedicated computer scientist" leaving the fucking university shadily checking to see who was watching. He saw me see him. Coward tried to shrug it off.

Here we are, end of semester. He gets the same certification as I do. The difference? I actually know what I'm taking about, I haven't paid in full to fail.

So never, ever fucking ever take what someone says on their resume or LinkedIn as truth. The better it sounds, the more full of shit they may very well be.

And as for our presentation on Saturday? I plan on handling that but letting him do all of the talking. Let's even see if he knows what the project is about :).

"I keep telling you, I'm not a pilot"
"and I keep telling you, you fly boys crack me up!"

I'm not a developer, but I'm doing some complex things and I need the benefit of computers to work things out, so I know enough programming to get me by. Recently one of the uppers decided that all the amateur spaghetti python programs I'd quickly slapped together should be developed into tools that the clients engineers can use!

"How long do you need!."
" I have no idea how to make something like that",
"but it's all just maths right! you can figure it out",
"probably, given long enough bu.. "
"okay get started and we'll check in in a couple of weeks" "hold o.." "I'll give your pride and joy to the graduate to fuck up while you're working on that" "wai.. " "anyway got take this call, good luck"
┗|｀O′|┛

So here I am.. I have no idea what I'm doing.

So since I have a working knowledge of python, fortran and VBA, someone suggested I learn nim, which was not what he sold it as. Then a software engineer that went to the same uni as me, suggested RUST! you can't mess up rust, and look at this I created (shows me a decent looking desktop application) "I'll help you out". But it wasn't really that easy.

Then I asked some questions... that was my first mistake, that's not acceptable until you know what you're doing apparently. Especially when the answers are in the docs you can't find in a topic you don't understand for a version you're not using solved with a tool you've never heard of for an operating system you forgot existed. Look at this moron asking a question.

Okay to be fair, I went through the rust docs and it was well written, and I do really like this language. But I do not have a degree in computer science, and so many docs for crates are just written with an expectation of a certain level of knowledge. As soon as there's a build error, it's at least 3 -4 days of me faffing about trying to decipher hieroglyphics.

..and the graduate is about to unwittingly commit manslaughter..

I'm sure whoever needs to fix this mess in the future will post a rant about this train wreck.

Fuck startups.

Back when I was an wee lad I interviewed for an startup, not knowing that startups are not real companies. The scumbag interviewer, who was also the owner of the outfit, asked me what I was looking in a company. I said "fair wages, a non-antagonic environment and projects with real roadmaps".
He asked me to elaborate. I said, "You know, if today your product is a sales platform, I do not want to come into work next week and discover it is now an air travel tickets marketplace, or come back the very next day and discover it is now an automated pizza factory, or in the next day and it is now a crypto exchange..."

The scumbag looked PISSED. "Sorry, but we are looking for someone who likes the challenges of a dynamic environment (read: we do not have a business model and we hate the very idea of trying to make money out of our company), and you do not fit the profile"

Startups are not real companies, i.e. they do not systematically charge money in exchange for goods or services in amounts that exceed the cost of providing said goods or services. Most startups are just tax fronts for money laundering schemes. The rest are just playthings for rich assholes who can't get a real output-producing job. Those two categories are not mutually exclusive.

Take Facebook, for example. The poster child of startups. The Zucker that owns it just announced they are setting impossible performance targets on purpose, not even attempting to hide the fact that it is just a way to lay off large quantities of employees without using the words "massive lay offs". Companies, real thin-margin, lots-of-regulation profit-driven companies do not do that. They are not some sort of "capitalist woke", real CEOs just know that if their companies largely miss performance targets on their tenure, purposely or not, next it will be their neck on the chopping block. Because they can be fired if the KPI charts say they suck. But the Zucker cannot be fired, not even after commanding their beanbag and tap beer offices to be heated exclusively by burning hundred dollar bills.
So the Zucker is not interested in performance. Not even in lay offs as expense cutting measures - investors are an infinite source of free money for startups. The Zucker just wants to project power, especially now that engineers are not so confident in the stability of they high-paying jobs.

So are irrelevant 500-souls-or-less self-aggrandizing startups. Their owners are there because it is in vogue to have a startup or ten. And will have that startup pivot to whatever sounds fancy that season. After all, only poor people care about things like EBITDA and profit margins repeatability - A.K.A. "getting more money".

Fuck startups.

This is the state of desktop computing: When a web browser uses twice more RAM than a full virtual machine.

To be fair, I did have 5 windows with >10 tabs each, but still...

Amdy's story.

Amdy didn't have it easy. He's just a little APU and was already outdated when he was manufactured. But it got even worse! He didn't do anything wrong, but upon assembly, they lasered a different part number on him.

He didn't think much about it, but then they denied him all the goodies his brothers got: a nice printed box, a cooler, a leaflet, and a sticker.

Amdy didn't get any of that and wasn't welcome in the boxed camp. Instead, they stuffed him into a shoddy tray cardboard box with just some ESD foam for the pins.

Amdy was disappointed. That was just not fair! He was capable like his brothers. To add insult to injury, not even the manufacturer wanted to give warranty on the poor ugly duckling. They didn't listen to his complaints and shipped him to an unknown fate.

Then our roads crossed because Amdy was 10 EUR cheaper than the boxed ones at that point. Little Amdy breathed heavily when he finally got out of the mini box and seemed a bit disoriented. Poor little sod, what did they do to you?

Then he spotted the cooler. He had never seen anything like this before, so much better than the coolers his boxed brothers had received! And even top of the line thermal paste!

Amdy decided to be as good and fast a processor as a small Zen+ APU could possibly be. What was that software stuff? Didn't look like Windows. Ooohhh - Amdy rejoiced when he figured out that he was supposed to run Linux!

And that's how a despaired and unhappy APU finally found a life full of goodness.

DELETE FROM Invoices;

I am on test, right? OH SH!T

had a recent backup tho and no data were lost.

Happened once and never again. I was still pretty much junior in a senior position to be fair 😅

DISCLAIMER: I swear to god this is true. This is a completely unfabricated anecdote.

Soon we are moving to a new office space, and my department have been delegated the responsibility of moving all of the computers from the old work space to the new one. I was a little confused at first, because I'm a software developer, not a removalist.
It gets better.

We just had a meeting the other day, and my manager had advised us that we were to be moving the machines on a Saturday. I confirmed whether we were being paid overtime, simply because I had never worked a Saturday before. My manager replied (this is paraphrased but ultimately accurate) - "It's unpaid. Because you get paid a salary, you're expected to do unpaid overtime here and there. We have christmas parties and nights out, all of which come out of the companies pocket. Not all companies do this, so it's only fair you give back".

I honestly couldn't believe it. I was being asked to spend basically the majority of my day off moving computers from one site to another, for free, purely because it's "expected". Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy?

Long story short, I went home and started updating my resume.

I recently left a job after a few years of intense work and long hours. After leaving, I left a critical but fair Glassdoor review. Since then, I have received multiple emails from the CEO of my former employer asking me to remove the review and including (what I perceive to be) threats of the industry being “small” and mentioning my new manager by name.

I had seldom spoken to the CEO before these emails – a bit of small talk here and there in the office – and his notes to me contained details about personal and family struggles (as justification for poor leadership and mistreating employees?) that I thought verged on inappropriate. I had also delivered all of the feedback in my review throughout my tenure at the company – and, of course, had not received any interest from leadership in discussing my thoughts until I made them public.

What is the best way to respond here? As an attempt to diffuse the situation, I sent a kind email back acknowledging that working there was at times difficult, but also expressing my gratitude for all I learned and the opportunities I had. After that email, he again asked that I remove the review and made reference to the “small community” of the industry.

Should I remove the review? Is he really going to tell my new boss that I left a critical (but truthful) Glassdoor review? If he does, will my new boss even care, or will he see this as a weird and inappropriate overstep from my old employer?

TL;DR: If you make a contest where people get to vote online fucking make it right!

And here's the story: I play in a local coverband to make some cash on the side and because I love making music. We entered a contest hosted by a local radio-station. The first round was determined by judges and now 5 bands remain and of those 5 only 3 get to be voted into the final round. In the final round every bands wins something: 3rd place 250€, 2nd place 750€ and first place 5000€.
Now that stupid dipshit of a web-designer of that radio-station made a website where you can vote and it only fucking sets a cookie. You can delete it and vote again. You don't need no E-Mail and nothing. It doesn't even block multiple votes from one IP. It doesn't do shit.
Even my bandmates (who don't work in IT) where smart enough to figure out that you can just delete the cookies...
I think that now every band except for one is cheating. (we have over 5000 votes and combined all bands have like 4000 FB-Likes and sometimes and Band gets like 400 more votes in an hour) This is such a fucking messup and I don't know what to do. Maybe they'll look into stats but if they're so stupid to make a contest like this in the first place, maybe they won't. And even if they look into the stats it wouldn't be fair to kick out a band with much votes because how the fuck would they know if the band themselves cheated or if it was a fan of the band or even an enemy of the band just to get them kicked out.
I'm afraid of talking to the radio-station as a part of one band because maybe the web-designer there just gets frustrated and bans us from the contest entirely.
This is just fucking frustrating.

Wtf bs is this? Can't governments just stop trying to control the internet?

It's literally the closest thing we have to a free and fair society on the planet and that's with all the tracking and abuse of information going on. I think we need to start applying our minds to creating a decentralised network with p2p discovery routed through our phones if we want to keep any semblance of freedom of speech or privacy around for our kids. Routing traffic wouldnt use more than 50-100mb of ram and would probably use a lot less battery than Google does listening to our conversations or transmiting our location data so we wouldn't even notice. If only we could find a cable free decentalized way to get data across the ocean no one would be able to control it again, I doubt we would be able to shut it down either.

Always back up your data.

I came to my computer earlier today to find it on my Linux login screen. This could only mean one thing: something went horribly wrong.

Let me explain.

I have my BIOS set up to boot into Windows automatically. The exception is a reboot or something horrible happens and the computer crashes. Then, it boots me into Linux. Due to a hardware issue I never looked into, I have to be present to push F1 to allow the computer to start. The fact that it rebooted successfully, without me present, into *Linux*, could only mean one thing:

My primary hard drive died and was no longer bootable.

The warning was the BIOS telling me the drive was likely to fail ("Device Error" doesn't really tell me anything to be fair).

The massive wave of panic hit me.

I rebooted in hopes of reviving the drive. No dice.

I rebooted again. The drive appeared.

Let's see how much data I can recover from it before I can no longer mount it. Hopefully, I can come out of this relatively unscathed.

The drive in question is a 10 year old 1.5 TB Seagate drive that came with the computer. It served me well.

Press F to pay respects I guess.

On the bright side, I'll be getting an SSD as a replacement (probably a Samsung EVO).

Most awkward recruiter interaction was probably when I had to tell a staffing agency that I didn't want to work for them because I had already worked for them and left.

I got into IT by working for a staffing agency and I was contracted out to a large company's IT call center. Doing the usual sort of level-one tech support stuff. After my contract term ran out (and upon reminding my boss that she wouldn't be my boss for much longer if she didn't hire me away from the staffing agency), I was hired on full-time.

Six months later I left the call center and moved on to a cloud server development job in the same company. Not long after that, I got a message on LinkedIn from the staffing agency, offering to hire me on as a contractor working for one of their largest partners in the area.

I responded asking for more details, just for fun. The company I'd be working for, etc. Then I had to inform them that I had in fact previously worked for their firm, and now worked at the company that they were offering to contract me out to, and earning a fair bit more money than they were offering.

They didn't even look at my employment information on LinkedIn before sending the InMail. Just glanced over my skills, saw the magic buzzword "devops," and sent me a message.

`npx create-react-app blah`
`cdls blah && npm audit`

63 vulnerabilities.
good fucking job.

To be fair, they're all minor, but they're all *exactly* the same, caused by the same freaking package. Update your dependencies already!

------

`npm i --save formik && npm audit`
68 vulnerabilities, three of them critical.

ugh.

I just had a chat with the CEO (I'll call him John) of the company I work at. I was trying to get a real alignment on what I need to do to be a valuable resource to this company. They promoted me (without a raise in pay) to a different (management) role, and I do not know what I need to do to be the best in this role.

During the discussion, the CEO failed to provide any usable metrics, or a way to track those, except for phrases like "higher productivity" and "higher quality". How to track? No idea.

So, at this point, me being the idiot I am, wanted to make things explicit:
*Me: Okay, so what if I request for a 20% raise six months from now, what metrics will you look at to decide whether to give me the raise.

(My last raise was a big one, more than 100% or so, more than a year ago. That was a dev role, and I was paid 2 cents earlier, so the doubling to 4 cents wasn't really a big deal.)

John went on a long rant on how people just expect raises every year, inflation, etc. All good and fine.
But then he mentioned something strange.

*John: ...and you know, for the last three years, there has been a race to retain resources. During this race, many companies, including us, had to pay people WAY MORE THAN THEIR VALUE to retain them. These people are going to be the first to be fired during cost-cutting as they are the most expensive resources at the company without any proven value. These people should not expect raises to come soon, and if they do expect that, they need to prove the value themselves.

Now, I, being a simpleton, am wondering how is it fair for an organization to pay someone "more than their value" to retain them once so that they can just be fired two years later. How did the company decide the value of such employees to begin with?

And all this is ignoring the fact that in the company there are no metrics, no KPIs, and performance of a person is how much the CEO likes that guy. How TF the people who joined a year ago and never interacted with the CEO prove their worth?

Developers are building PowerPoints and configuring JIRA/Confluence/Laptops of Sales team, project managers are delegating management to developers and decision-making to the CEO, Technical architect is building requirements documents, Business Analyst is the same person as the QA team lead (and badly stretched), and the Release Manager is the Product Technical Admin that cannot write one sentence in English. And then we got 3.8 hours in meetings every DAY. Why TF are Dev Managers in "QA KPI Meeting"? Why are "developers" writing documentation on "How to create meeting notes at <company>"?
And, in this hell-storm, how does one really demonstrate one's value?

Flexible working hours, Home Office, fair compensation, working on a greenfield product 🥰.

I was in a bad spot two years ago jobwise and I don't regret jumping the ship for a second.

I would never have guessed that flexible hours and WFH would be so beneficial to my mental health!

Not everything is perfect all the time, but it gets pretty damn close all things considered.

Doing a distribution center job right now just to pay the bills and had to do voice order picking (with a headset and voice commands etc) today. Well, that didn't go ideal:
*girl walks by and gives me a tip/hint*
Me: *puts headset back on*
Headset voice: you've logged off. Truck could not be located by provided ID.

😓😮

I said "fair enough, thanks!" 😐

So we have Oncall system. Every month I get one working weekend.

Now senior engineers and lead are assholes. They think they can bully us. They are putting their Oncall work on our heads.

I refused to do it. But my partner in Oncall agreed to take up their weekend Oncall and in return they would do our weekday. I don't see how that is fair enough.

I refused to do it still. My partner apparently ended up doing it alone this weekend.

I don't FUCKING need to lick anyone's ass here! I don't FUCKING need to do these things to be in their good books! Waiting for the time when I saw GOODBYE TO THESE FUCKING ASSHOLEZZZZ

Hello World! First post here. I'm literally done with frontend stuff. I want to design code, not to code design. Unless it's Processing. I find it cute. So.. I have a somewhat handy grasp on C++ because of a class in electronics course, Python seems quite easy to catch. I'm totally new to programming. I'd like to get into software, game development and android development (but I would like to do things cross-platform).
Which paths, resources, languages, useful books, videos, or just anything would you recommend?

To be fair, I have no coding friends so mentorship or simply finding code buddies would be great. 💜

devRant already replace SoundCloud as my orange app in the main screen...

To be fair, SoundCloud was just there to complete the rainbow.

Rant: this app told me that my rant would be safe if I closed the Post Rant window (since I can't post more than one rant per hour or something) but it didn't save my awesome tags! I feel betrayed.

It's starting again. I can feel it.

You had a decent job, but you had to think otherwise. Then you had to go to that coffee shop tell some people you're the fucking bee's knees, didn't you?

Well, you know that's how the band plays.

Yeah, but now you'll have to live up to the hype, my friend. And you know pretty well that the pocketknife on your belt won't cut it anymore.

I can always learn as I go...

Sure you can. Except this time stakes are higher. They'll be expecting you to deliver on all your bloody greatness. They'll be relying on you. Not only them, but also the person who chose to be with you. And you know you're not enough, for neither of them. Now you'll fuck it up and let all those people down.

But I could build things little by little, lay out a solid groundwork and build up from that. Just like that other time when...

Of course you can. But can you make beautiful sparkly things? Can you make them sexy?

No... But I can make them resilient. I can follow best practices and intelligent design patterns.

Right. Cause design patterns win contests and prizes. Sure.

Well, it'll make things work better. And then when someone else comes along...

They'll say your work smells and let everybody know how it should've been done, because they need to prove themselves. You know that's what people do.

But that's just not fair! Solid work is solid work!

And a fraud is still a fraud. And that's what you are.

Oh, boy, do I hate recruiters...

So today I attended a Job fair, which mentioned it will be 'walk-in' interview for every company present there, only to find out they were mass recruiters, FUCK ME.

1. Write answers on the back of your resumes.
2. Group interview

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK!!!

On point number 2, HOW THE FUCK DO YOU ANALYZE SKILL OF A FUCKING CROWD OF 20 PEOPLE ALL TOGETHER!!!!???

Top of that I paid for this shit! I can hope for only the best now.....

My ex-cat stretching out. This should be in a vanity fair issue for cats

So I have this 13 year old cousin who's pretty determined to follow my footsteps as a developer someday. He really likes gaming and all internet stuffs. His future plans makes me happy since I may finally have a relative that is a developer. But darn it! He's kinda weird coz he still throws tanrums. One of his major tantrums(which happened again last night) is that he wants the wireless Karaoke machine to be turned off because he thinks that it's slowing down the internet. It was his sister's birthday party and the guests are partying. I've told him many times that the signal for the karaoke is different from that of the router which has nothing to do with the internet slowing down. It must be caused by q device that is updating some apps or whatever. We live in the philippines and our internet provider is quite fast but it has this stupid fair usage policy that caps our bandwidth to a minimum speed if we reach a certain amount of data usage. Since he goes to youtube everyday in 480 and 720p, I explained it to him that it was one of the causes.
Last night, I almost got triggered because I wanted him to believe about the wifi being different to that of the karaoke machine's radio and that it is not connected to the wifi and not using data. I also told him about different kinds of wireless signals which I studied as a Software Engineering student back then and yet he still doesnt believe me. And what almost triggered me is that i saw his steam client updating while watching youtube. I told him that was it. But instead of agreeing, he refused to believe me and just told me that steam is just updating and he's not downloading anything which made me think why he keeps going to youtube, because...he's not downloading. Oh God! Good luck to this kid. 😂

Look, I've given Microsoft and Windows a lot of shit, but I just have to be fair and say the one piece of hardware that I absolutely covet is the Surface Pro... If that is the direction Microsoft is heading in the coming years I'll have a lot more respect for them...

I was interviewed for a brand new startup, which is now worth +$20m, and I really liked the idea and founder behind. When I met with her, I was blindsided by another developer, who was gonna ask the questions (which is fair!) - I simply weren't informed.

The meeting went on, and seemed great, however we started talking about bug tracking, and I mentioned that I liked "New Relic" (no more!!) and he, the developer, obviously did not, as the mood suddenly changed and he started bitching about it being expensive, and that there were better alternatives.. The meeting endes shortly after, and I was told by the founder that she'll contact me.. Never happened. However I was told by the developer who was hired instead of me, that "another application was rejected due to personal preferences"..

May be small problems to anyone but me, but I just find it disgusting, and it's typical developers to be so high and mighty about their choises ("X language sucks, you should use Y")

I don't blame the founder at all, and I've supported their company since (minus ranting about the shitty product that they ended with)

I have been a frontender for a long time. I recently showed interest in backend development, and said to my boss that that is what I would like to pursue. He said that was never going to happen and I would only be a frontender in this company.

A lot of horrible things happened, some of the Lead Developers bailed and another developer flatly out committed industrial spionage on the company.

Then because of shortage of staff, gave me backend tasks, which all I completed within deadlines with few exceptions of course.

My project manager was very impressed about it.

Then I noticed the project management didn't concern themselves with ongoing projects, they became more focused on customer support and management of unhacking etc.

I noticed a wide gap that made it so all projects went past due the time because lack of coordination and planning

I stepped in because I was annoyed that this was common practice in the company.

While my two bosses were on vacation, they nominated me to be the "boss" of the company.

I earn close to minimum wage, and I felt this wasn't fair if I was to continue to do what I have done. So when our boss called us into a meeting and he said that he was going to move slowly away from the company, he said we should keep the reins of the company.

I didn't say much then, because I didn't feel like taking on so much responsibility I knew I wasn't to gain anything from more than knowledge.

I confronted him today and told him how I have felt throughout a long time. He basically said I hadn't proven myself and because of my young age, I didn't deserve to have more right now.

I was annoyed, he said he expected the same from every coworker and that I wasnt special or unique and that I could easily be replaced.

Not to mention I never got to finish a sentence without him interupting me or raising his voice to deafen out mine.

Have you ever had this experience and how did you feel? I feel terrible to be honest..

I'm sick to death of hiring people from other companies and explaining GitFlow and why its useful (what are you people doing?).

Then watching them doing it wrong, pointing out its easier to use something like sourcetree. Which leads to "... well see, the terminal is just more efficient, tools like sourcetree are bloated".

Ok fair enough, well heres the deal i'll make with you, while using your "efficient tool", stop breaking our workflow and i'm fine for you to keep using it. Otherwise, stop being a dick and be a team player.

Why me. Why is it always me who has issues with Windows. (The OS)

I HAVE to use windows for a specific thing right now. Fair enough, I have an old system lying around somewhere with not the best specs ever but it'll do. Windows 7, clean install.

Firstly, let's boot up! Booting goes fine, login goes well... "Installing device drivers" (keyboard and mouse combi). I connected this set a gazillion times before so no clue why windows would need to download the drivers YER AGAIN. But, fine, it works.
Let's connect a USB webcam and to to the hardware testing website to see if my setup is right!

(I mostly don't blame this part on windows)

The webcam drivers install successfully, good. Although the page says it isn't working, it displays the live cam footage well so whatever.
Installed Chrome (not chromium too badly) to see if it shows fine there but chrome doesn't detect ANY cam/mic combination at all, not even the integrated one(s).

Annoying so let's reboot and see if it works normally with all checks okay on Firefox.

Rebooted.... aaaaand the USB webcam driver installation fails. I'm weirded out since the drivers were installed BEFORE the reboot already. Firefox now does not display any can/mic.... until it does after a few reloads. Windows is still saying that the driver installation failed.

The testing webpage, however, still says its not working while I'm literally seeing my ugly smug on screen. I contact support which does a remote check and says all is good but there was probably "a glitch with Windows" while the checks are still mostly red, I take a copy of the chat log just to be sure.

Now, I kinda want to shut this system down until the time I'll need it but I'm rather afraid that Windows is going to throw driver conundrums yet again and I simply *CANNOT* have this right now. So, I'm leaving this system on until I need it, and I'll pray windows plays along well.

24th, Christmas: BIND slaves decide to suddenly stop accepting zone transfers from the master. Half a day of raging and I still couldn't figure out why. dig axfr works fine, but the slaves refuse a zone update according to tcpdump logs.

25th, 2nd day: A server decides to go down and take half my network with it. Turns out that a Python script managed to crash the goddamn kernel.

Thank you very much technology for making the Christmas days just a little bit better ❤️

At least I didn't have anything to do during either days, because of the COVID-19 pandemic. And to be fair, I did manage to make a Telegram bot with fancy webhooks and whatnot in 5MB of memory and 18MB of storage. Maybe I should just write the whole thing and make another sacred temple where shitty code gets beaten the fuck out of the system. Terry must've been onto something...

Applied to a Jr. Dev job and was hired as a Digital Marketer — I can deal with this, I’m AdWords & Analytics certified. What I can’t abide is that I spent the last year working my ass off learning to code and the person next to me with the Jr. Dev position only uses DIVI and has zero inclination to study, learn or write basic HTML & CSS—much less PHP. I’m not an expert by any means but I love programming, I love the problem solving, the challenges and the culture of it all. So far, and these are only two examples, I’ve shown him how to use the target attribute to open a page as a new tab, and how to register a nav in the functions.php file to create a menu but he is unwilling to even attempt it. Rather, he told me that I was too technical and that no one would be using code in this day and age.

For the record, I think DIVI is a cool platform, it’s clear that my boss knows nothing about code to be fair and I love my job— this is my only issue so far😂 I just needed to rant.

A morbid realization (I am just wasting your time keep scrolling)

Unless someone takes a stand for the user, and their comfort and requirements, unless someone looks a client straight in the eye and says "no, I will not do that, and neither will my team" and denies them their request, nothing will change, good devs will keep losing their spark to save themselves frustration, good people will walk away and the tyranny that we face daily grows... unless someone stands up, someone who cannot be knocked down, or reprimanded and told they're wrong for fighting for what's right.. unless someone stands up for what is right and fair... nothing changes... and nothing ever will... poor programs, bad games and content, lower standards, frustrated users, annoyance that you don't matter as a user or a dev will never go away... unless someone says enough. But no one will, money is the boss, morality a liability, and people an abundant resource. This world is backwards, devs are carrying the blame and no one who is able, cares enough to say "that's enough!".

*The Fearless Leader*

I get a call to check up on a robot that has been exceeding weight limits at certain points of its movement (Crashing). As I get to the pendant (robo-game controller thingy I like to call it) and look over the alerts and warnings I notice some oil around the main power box of the Robot.... Nothing around this has oil.. so I start looking around and it turns out that the issue wasn’t a crash at all! It was an oily shorted out wire that kept sparking mad heavy when that servo was called on.. causing a large servo failure that required a full restart of the power box. I called our fearless leader and showed him only to find out that there was a motor leaking oil from the electrical end... My fearless leader runs both the Maintenance and Robotics department. When the motor was eventually fixed we overheard the technicians say that our fearless leader knew about this a week ago and decided to leave it that way.... with oil... coming out of an electrical cable..... *sigh* well Anyway after all the wires were fixed and motors changed. He comes up to me and says that he can’t believe that I didn’t call maintenance and fill a report on negligence of technicians for failing preventative maintenance....

I lost my cool a little, firstly that’s not my job, I’m literally one of the lowest ranking here. I called my next in command to figure out what I should do. Secondly the technicians told me that you told them to leave it like that! So if this place caught on fire this would have been on you!

Later I found out that he was trying to fire a technician and wanted me to do the dirty work.. I’m not going to be the reason another man loses the means for him to feed his family. The technician is a pretty cool and fair guy too!

Our fearless leader was a forklift driver and has no experience in robotics or maintenance... I don’t know how this happens or even why but all I know is this man is running both departments to the ground and management loves him.....

I left my country (France) because of the working conditions that are absolutely terrific in software engineering.

Basically, 80% of the time you will be hired by agencies which rent you in a dishonest way to other companies. Half of the later use the agencies services because they are scared by the work code, which is tough but fair, and the other half can’t hire because the agencies put a lot of money to get the engineers and make money by renting employees.
Most of the companies you will work in in France will have outdated stack, and an awful bureaucratic hierarchy.
Your boss will suspect you do nothing.
There is also an untold competition taking place in every companies : who will stay the longer in the office, sometimes taking place until 8pm.

I moved to the UK, the country is absolutely awful, but the working conditions for engineers are a way better, more realistic.

Might be more of a self-rant.. We’re developing an application with token-based authentication.
It’s a big an complex authentication model and flow, which we wrapped up a month ago. All of us very proud of it.

All of a sudden none of it worked.
We debugged for days, there were no errors or anything to trace what was happening.

Today we realized that we set the expiration of the token to 20 years.
Aaaand the expiration time is later on converted to epoch.

Guess what happens when you try to use a value > 2 147 483 647 in C#? Stuff blows up, cuz that’s the limit of an int32.

So yeah, feels good having prepared for the Y2K38 bug already, even though we’ll be replaced by AI writing better software than my dumb ass by then.

(To be fair, it was hidden in Microsoft Owin, which could use some error handling and/or proper messages..)

This sucks. I'm on a call in < 1 minute, but my technical team guy c n take 25 minutes to call in to tell us that he'll be ready to help in another hour.

How is this fair to my customers?

Me: "You could try using Redis, cache that baby and try and squeeze some speed"
Dev: "Hun?! Should I use it on the front end or the back end?"

Well... Webdev is not his thing to be fair!

Man, I'm sure there are a million of these posts right now but...

The hiring market and hiring culture nowadays is so damn frustrating. I have a decade of experience in multiple senior/lead/principal roles at both big name companies and high-growth startups, along with a very well-written resume.

Even with this, I can barely get an interview these days. I'll apply to a role that lists qualifications for which I'm an exact fit, and either get a quick auto-denial or just never hear back at all. It doesn't matter if I custom-craft my resume and cover letter to match the job description or just send my standard resume and cover letter. We all love those pandering and patronizing "We know that this isn't the news you wanted to hear, but keep trying! Maybe you'll be good enough for us someday!" auto-denial email.

Sometimes I'll receive a denial, look back at the job posting, that they needed somebody with NLP experience or something, and say to myself "Fair enough, that makes sense." Other times, I'll look at the posting and say "Oh come on, I check every single box." It makes you wonder "What the fuck are you actually truly looking for?"

Sometimes I'll look at the company's current employees and see that almost every single one is ex-FAANG, indicating that the company will almost only hire other ex-FAANG employees (despite there being thousands of other well-qualified candidates out there who are just as talented and skilled as those ex-FAANG candidates.)

Other companies seem to be "brand shopping" for ex-FAANG employees after all the recent FAANG layoffs, hoping to land a bargain on an ex-Google engineer so they can brag that their product was built by the same people who built Google.

Then there's the question of even making it past the ATS and in front of an actual human's eyes. The hiring culture seems to be an ATS SEO game nowadays. God forbid that you didn't include the super secret magic keyword in your resume, else you'll automatically be filtered out and denied.

It's just incredibly frustrating and makes you wonder what kind of candidate you need to be to even get a first round interview nowadays. Do we all need to have a glowing personal recommendation from the ghost of Steve Jobs in order for a 50-person startup to even open our resumes?

Exams of two weeks starts tomorrow. We'll be doing a project. Only, 70 percent will be documentation :/. I'm trying to keep my nerves, fair of failure and everything else as low as possible but that's not particularly working anymore 😞

Attention Software Engineers!

Quit shooting yourselves in the fucking foot! And this ESPECIALLY goes to new grads. I get that you have just finished school. I get that you need a job! But don't fucking settle for a $30-$40k salary because you're "entry level"! The only reason why there are employers who offer that type of salary is because they know that there are enough idiots who will settle for it!

On average, an entry level software engineer's salary is between $50-$60k at the very least! For Senior developers, it is at least $80K/year (although an argument can be made for why they shouldn't settle for less than $100k/year).

Each time a moron low balls his/her salary, that brings down the market value for that talent. And keep this in mind! They don't have a choice but to hire you. They could choose to outsource their work to poorer countries but they don't want to do that due to obvious quality-related reasons so they HAVE TO hire you if they need the work done. And since the ball is in YOUR COURT, demand your fair salary. You went to school for 4 fucking years. You dealt with that stress for 4 fucking years. Why settle for a salary that you could've made without going to school?

My best code review experience?

Company hired a new department manager and one of his duties was to get familiar with the code base, so he started rounds of code reviews.
We had our own coding standards (naming, indentation, etc..etc) and for the most part, all of our code would pass those standards 100%.

One review of my code was particularly brutal. I though it was perfect. In-line documentation, indentation, followed naming standards..everything. 'Tom' kept wanting to know the 'Why?'

Tom: 'This method where it validates the amount must be under 30. Why 30? Why is it hard-coded and not a parameter?'
<skip what it seemed like 50 more 'Why...?' questions>
Me: "I don't remember. I wrote that 2 years ago."
Tom: "I don't care if you wrote it yesterday. I have pages of code I want you to verify the values and answer 'Why?' to all of them. Look at this one..."

'Tom' was a bit of a hard-ass, but wow, did I learn A LOT. Coding standards are nice, but he explained understanding the 'What' is what we are paid for. Coders can do the "What" in their sleep. Good developers can read and understand code regardless of a coding standard and the mediocre developers use standards as a crutch (or worse, used as a weapon against others). Great developers understand the 'Why?'.

Now I ask 'Why?' a lot. Gotten my fair share of "I'm gonna punch you in the face" looks during a code review, but being able to answer the 'Why?' solidifies the team with the goals of the project.

Just received a test for a job I'm interviewing for. I was interviewing for a C++ position. Practice test: Create an REST API using SpringBoot, Spring Data, document with Swagger and implement continuous integration testing.

To be fair, I also mentioned I'm fluent in Java. But I've never touched SpringBoot or done any backend webdev, since my intention was to never get near it.

Deadline: Sunday. Game on...

why do i feel like sOfTwArE cErTifiCaTiOnS are the biggest scam in the world

literally zero prediction of the quality of work you will produce, cuz you could float through them anyway

i guess even more 🤡 is companies that request certain "certifications"

correct me if i'm wrong; are there certifications of the equivalent rigor like the fundamentals of engineering (fe) exam? in this sense, our industry is far behind... though to be fair 90% of software is non life / operational critical like building a freaking bridge is

Actually I feel I am prety lucky about the relationship between my yamily and me being a dev. My dad is a developer as well (in fact, he was the one who taught me most of what I know today; not as in general coding, but good and bad programming practices, tips what to do next ...) and my mom just started learning Python.
So they know prety well what it means to be a dev and have quite realistic image of what to expect.
To be fair, I am still the one who usualy fixes broken printers and replugs unplugged ethernet cables. but that is because I enjoy doing that. I take it as a challenge for myself to figure out what/how/when went something wrong. Most of the times I try to figure that even without touching the broken things.
Anyway, getting off topic.
Alltogether I don't think that they have too unrealistic expectations, but if I had to chose one, it'd be my learning capabilities. I can't learn complete java in 2 days ...

Project manager, who i've complained in the past is neglecting critical things that he doesn't want to do, decided today to cancel our weekly planning meeting, to have the below conversation with me 1:1. Its very long, but anyone who has the will to get through it ... please tell me it's not just me. I'm so bewildered and angry.

Side note: His solution to the planning meeting not taking place ... to just not have one and asked everyone to figure it out themselves offline, with no guidance on priorities.

Conversation:

PM: I need to talk to you about some of phrasing you use during collaboration. It's coming across slightly offensive, or angry or something like that.

Me: ok, can you give me an example?

PM: The ticket I opened yesterday, where you closed it with a comment something along the lines of "as discussed several times before, this is an issue with library X, can't be fixed until Y ...".

"As discussed several times" comes across aggressive.

Me: Ok, fair enough, I get quite frustrated when we are under a crunch, working long hours, and I have to keep debugging or responding to the same tickets over and over. I mean, like we do need to solve this problem, I don't think its fair that we just keep ignoring this.

PM: See this is the problem, you never told me.

Me: ... told you what?

PM: That this is a known issue and not to test it.

Me: ..... i'm sorry ..... I did, that was the comment, this is the 4th ticket i've closed about it.

PM: Right but when you sent me this app, you never said "don't test this".

Me: But I told you that, the last 3 times that it won't be in until feature X, which you know is next month.

PM: No, you need to tell me on each internal release what not to test.

Me: But we release multiple times per week internally. Do you really need me to write a big list of "still broken, still broken, still broken, still broken"?

PM: Yes, how else will I know?

Me: This is documented, the last QA contractor we had work for us, wrote a lot of this down. Its in other tickets that are still open, or notes on test cases etc. You were tagged in all of these too. Can you not read those? and not test them unless I say I've fixed them?

PM: No, i'm only filling for QA until we hire a full time. Thats QA's job to read those and maintain those documents.

Me: So you want me to document for you every single release, whats already documented in a different place?

PM: ok we'll come back to this. Speaking of hiring QA. You left a comment on the excel spreadsheet questioning my decision, publicly, thats not ok.

Me: When I asked why my top pick was rejected?

PM: Yes. Its great that you are involved in this, but I have to work closely with this person and I said no, is that not enough?

Me: Well you asked me to participate, reviewing resumes's and interviewing people. And I also have to work extremely close with this person.

PM: Are you doubting my ability to interview or filter people?

Me: ..... well a little bit yeah. You asked me to interview your top pick after you interviewed her and thought she was great. She was very under qualified. And the second resume you picked was missing 50% of the requirements we asked for ... given those two didn't go well, I do think its fair to ask why my top pick was rejected? ... even just to know the reason?

PM: Could you not have asked publicly? face to face?

Me: you tagged me on a google sheet, asking me to review a resume, and rather than tag you back on 2 rows below ... you want me to wait 4 days to ask you at our next face to face? (which you just cancelled for this meeting)

PM: That would have been more appropriate

Me: ..... i'm sorry, i don't want to be rude but thats ridiculous and very nit pick-y. You asked my opinion on one row, I asked yours on another. To say theres anything wrong with that is ridiculous

PM: Well we are going to call another team meeting and discuss all this face to face then, because this isn't working. We need to jump to this other call now, lets leave it here.

!dev

Whoever the fuck wit coded the entire system for the university/college application information portal over here in my country needs to be hung, shot, hung again and shot.

It's **ABSOLUTE FUCKING GARBAGE** on the design. First we have the search box. It literally takes a good 20 seconds to query 1000 entries at low traffic and 3 MINUTES at high traffic. Bad enough? Because it would also take that long to give you a table of search result which is, I shit you not, identical to the drop-down results you get while typing except rendered inside a <table></table> with some overlay!

Oh, did I mention it didn't have partial match? Yea, IT DIDN'T. For example, "John Hurr Doe City" would not match "John Hurr Doe city" just to piss you off. And then we have the fuckers that do this:
- University A John Hurr Doe city
- University B JHD City
- University C JHD city
That and no partial match. Yea. It's BS.

Also. if you wanna search again after view a school, you have to press "Back", the physical "Back" of the browser. Fair, it's good, but if you press anything other than that button, welll, you're fucked although lightly.

The cherry on top of the rant cone? The whole thing is made by the studentfucking Ministry of Education and Training, the mother of overlord of students. Yea. The fucking Ministry itself. Really. You wanna go "catch up with the world and master the 4.0 Industrial Revolution" and yet you can't fucking code the site properly. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck your horse you're riding and probably fuck you as well.

Sorry for getting slightly political at the end, the damn page is getting on my nerve.

There's so much hype and bullshit around Machine Learning (ML). And if I have to read one more crappy prediction of who survived on the Titantic, I'll go postal.

So, what real-world problems are you using it to address...and how successful has it been? What decisions have you supported using ML? What models did you use (e.g. logistic regression, decision trees, ANN)?

Anyone got any boringly useful examples of ML in production?

And don't say you're using it to predict survival rates for the design of new cruise ships...although, to be fair, that might be quite interesting...

This happened 3 years ago in my previous company. It was a small start up company and we worked on PHP stack. One of the its ex-founders had written Windows Mobile App which now had to be upgraded with new features. So we hired this new dot net guy. I always thought dot net guys were ELITE coders and was excited to see how they work.
While I played Xbox and had fun, our dot net guy stuck to his workstation furiously working. My boss who was casually strolling out of his office for a stretch saw dot net guy working hard and suggested we all developers should take him as an example.
20 days went by and each day the dot net guy did the same. He came, he silently worked on his workstation, he left in the evening. In those 20 days my boss asked twice to the dot net guy if he has finished features he was assigned but he said he did not. After a month when he said the same negative answer and had nothing to show for the work he has done he was fired.
I was so curious to see what code that ELITE coder had written for a month but could not deliver a feature(Maybe some error he could not fix?). So I open the code repo on which he worked and I see 30 commits from that guy to it. He had made a single commit each day(Fair enough he wants to commit everday before leaving). It was time to check his commit diffs to see his ELITE code. What do I find? In every fucking commit he either added a blank line to the DocBlock or removed the same. Nothing less nothing more! So much for the hyped not-so-ELITE dot net guy...

Regarding Article 13 (or 17 or wherever it moved to now)… Let's say that the UK politicians decide to be dicks and approve the law. After that, we need to get it engineered in, right? Let's talk a bit about how.. well, I'd maybe go over it. Been thinking about it a bit in the shower earlier, so.. yeah.

So, fancy image recognition or text recognition from articles scattered all over the internet, I think we can all agree.. that's infeasible. Even more so, during this lobby with GitHub and OpenForum Europe, guy from GitHub actually made a very valid point. Now for starters, copyright infringement isn't an issue on the platform GitHub that pretty much breathes collaboration. But in the case of I-Boot for example, that thing from Apple that got leaked earlier. If that would get preemptively blocked.. well there's no public source code for it to get compared against to begin with, right? So it's not just "scattered all over the internet, good luck crawling it", it's nowhere to be found *at all*.

So content filtering.. yeah. Nope, ain't gonna happen. Keep trying with that, EU politicians.

But let's say that I am a content creator who hates the cancer of joke/meme because more often than not it manifests itself as a clone of r/programmerhumor.. someone decides to freeboot my content. So I go out, look for it, find it. Facebook and the likes, make it easier to find it in the first place, you dicks. It's extremely hard to find your content there.

So Facebook implements a way to find that content a bit easier maybe. Me being the content creator finds it.. oh blimey! It can't be.. it's the king of freebooting on Facebook, SoFlo! Who would've thought?! So at that point.. I'd like to get it removed of course. Report it as copyright infringement? Of course. Again Facebook you dicks, don't make it so tedious to fill in that bloody report. And look into it quickly! The videos those SoFlo dicks post is only relevant in the first 48h or so. That's where they make the most money. So act more quickly.

So the report is filled, video's taken down.. what else? Maybe temporarily make them unable to post as a bit of a punishment so that they won't do it again? And put in a limit to the amount of reports they can receive. Finally, maybe reroute the revenue stream to the original content creator instead. That way stolen content suddenly becomes free exposure! Awesome!

*suddenly realizes that I've been talking about the YouTube copyright strike system all along*

… Well.. maybe something like that then? That shouldn't be too hard to implement, and on YouTube at least it seems to be quite effective. Just imagine SoFlo and the likes that are repeat offenders, every 3 posts they get their account and page shut down. Good luck growing an audience that way. And good luck making new accounts all the time to start with.. account verification technology is pretty good these days. Speaking of experience here, tried bypassing Facebook's signup hoops a fair bit and learned a bit about some of the things they have red flags on, hehe.

But yeah, something like that maybe for social media in general. And.. let's face it, the biggest one that would get hurt by something like this would be Facebook. And personally I think it's about time for that bastard company to get a couple of blows already.

What are your thoughts on this?

One would assume that "view conditions and accept" shows the fucking conditions and then lets you accept them if you want to. No. By clicking this button I automatically accepted it, and then got them shown for me. Which meant that I had to pay a fucking fee, because the conditions said so. That would be fair if I had seen the fucking conditions before accepting them. Fuck off everybody, I don't have time for dealing with this, I was sick the other day and now I have to work extra hard while still recovering to make up for it and now I have to deal with your crappy support just because you can't design a fucking ui? Whats wrong with you!!!

I'm feeling like writing this down...

So today I got told off by my boss. Why? Because my job bores me.

My current title, "webmaster", is quite similar to "plumber" where I work. I fix holes on our websites, and I tell "qualified" people (external providers) how a project should be made. Nothing exciting, nothing creative, boring.

So I got told off today for being "laid-back" in a newsletter project (GDPR, looking at you) and not being thorough in my procedures of testing and configuration. Fair enough, I didn't care and I admitted it. It's a boring drag-and-drop done in literally 5 minutes, there's no added brain-value here. Plus I got told off by my IT Manager because our Exchange server would not let me receive test emails. Still doesn't work after a day. Yay.

Then she said "we're doing exciting things here, it's not always the case anywhere else you'd work". And I'm like: "really? I love writing code, seeing things coming alive, investigating why things don't run smoothly, writing efficient code (both in performance and in readability)". I hear many friend devs telling me they're doing that and what they do during their "dev-day"... All I'm doing here is "maintenance" (a.k.a boring) stuff that apparently is "exciting". Adding a <script> to handle google tag manager is hell fun, going through compiled CSS and change color values is also thrilling, finding out if a PDF handler application can handle PDF files, re-plugging a computer monitor to make it work...

I think she meant that I'm not at my place here.

Didn't want to tell her that I have no motivation in doing things I don't enjoy making, i.e, my job.

Good thing I have an interview in two weeks

tl;dr - install ‘Pop!_os’ and try it out if you haven’t yet, it’s pretty damn good!

Heavy Micro$haft user here, have tried using ubuntu a bunch of times in the past and fucking regretted it every time. Ran into issues with stupid shit like the apt cache growing exponentially until the drive was full, or something like the the system python getting borked.

To be fair, I’m 120% certain my dumb-assery is what caused the problems. I’m definitely not trying to blame the OS. But my experience was shitty, even if it was at my own hands lol.

Started playing around with Pop!_os from the system76 team. And I’m seriously in freakin’ love with this OS. It’s clean, is performant, feels way less buggy or just feels more stable somehow. I know it’s based on ubuntu, but I’ve had a great time thus far using it. I’ve got ansible, docker, aws toolkit, aws cli, sam-cli, vscode, dynamodb-local, serverless, npm, brew, and working on steam now.

Everything has been a breeze and again the system feels really fast and snappy. It feels a lot like mac on the smoothness scale, but snappy like a windows box with beefy hardware specs.

I’m still just in the testing phase on a VM, but I’m seriously thinking about blowing away my windows install for Pop!_os.

(I’ll try arch someday when I’m up for some hardcore masochism)

porra; caralho; toma no cu.

this fucking shit xamarin. I wish the ass who programed the xamarin vs2017 integration to go fuck off.

srsly, I just want to fucking code this fucking fucker VS2017 keep shitting all around me

first I was gonna install it. didn't install because no memory left. fair enough, my fault there.

cleaned 35 gbs.

finish installing VS, with xamarin. FIRST GOD DAMN TIME I create fucking project, 2 fucking errors and 3 warnings. I DIDN'T EVEN TYPE A COMMA.

ok, tried fucking it. it seems to be conflict between version of Android and xamarin forms. fucker you it shouldn't be like this. anyway.

tried downloading the updated Android version.

it failed at 80%! what error you ask? missing fucking space ok, fuck that thing is huge, ok, my fault again. uninstalled all programs I was not using, all projects I'm not current working on. more fucking 30GB free. tried again. ANDROID IS TOO FUVKING HUGE CAN'T INSTALL IN 30GB!!!

Ok. instead of updating android, gonna downgrade xamarin, can't downgrade. ok gonna remove and install an early version.

unistalled. CAN'T FIND XAMARIN DLLS.

I was like, fuck this project, gonna start a new one. ok, all seems fine, for some weird reason. Except no. I try adding a new page, ops, APPARENTLY VS2017 CAN'T LOAD A GODDAMN .XAML

Ok, I can create a .cs page. done, except now I get a fucking timeout error. fuck.

I search the internet for a workaround, see a guy saying I could manually add a .xaml + .cs by creating this files and then adding them to the proj file.

did it. I go again, everything seems fine. but now I can't freaking reference the damn page.

I'm fucking losing my mind here.

In the mean time I have to turn in this project at the end of the week AND I CAN'T FUCKING OPEN THE GOD DAMN FREKING PROJECT PROPERLY!

FUCK. MY. LIFE.
FUCK XAMARIM AS WELL
FUCK VISUAL STUDIO
FUCK MICROSOFT
FUCK THAT DAMN SSD
FUCK THAT BOSS WHO THINK THAT A 128GB SSD IS ENOUGH
FUCK IT ALL...

What happened to the warm welcome that new users received back in the day? Now when someone posts their first rant people bash on details and give them no chance. I remember posting half-dumb rants, but no one gave me shit for that. It takes time to grow into a community, you can't just expect people to behave identically to the rest. Makes me a bit disappointed to be fair.

So, according to my customer, the internal app I just released is "far too aggressive and not overly polite to users".

After querying this the client was referring to validation error messages.

Where I've wrote "Set a payment method before creating the order", the client would prefer it to be ""Please set a payment ...".

I guess it's a fair enough observation, but the client's phrasing made me chuckle :)

(I'll give some context before the rant: I'm part if the IT department of a manufacturing company (actually I'm 1/2 of the department), and all the applications (old an new - except the ones used on production line) used in the company are my responsibility, that including most of databases too... Also, English isn't my native language so there will be some words or phrases that I'll probably write wrong... Sorry for that, if there are any corrections, I'll be glad to hear them)

So...

There will be an implementation of new "control point" on the "shipping department" which consists on a electromechanical equipment controlled by a PLC. And despite the original concept was a collaboration between 2 departments (we, IT, and Production Control), I was never taken in consideration about anything of the project... To be fair, I forget about its existence until two weeks ago.

So, a few days I learned that there are a huge delay regarding the original deadline (mainly because the supplier was delayed with the delivery of their system), and since two weeks (less, actually, because some holydays in between) I'm learning how to integrate that "P.o.S" into an existing application on a PC using a serial communication (not the main problem, as I've done that before... With another brand of PLC's) while avoiding buying any additional software (to get the communication done and in a easy way) and that sort of things... But discovering in the process that it will be necessary to acquire such additional SW in order to finish the job ASAP.

When suddenly I get the "news" that it's almost all my duty (and responsibility) to meet the original deadline, because it doesn't matter how the other departments screw all the schedule, it's the job of IT to get the shit done in time... And what is worst: they didn't said that in such straight manner, no, the implied it while making a quick test with the general manager.

I mean, WTF? Besides doing a "respectable" number of "user support" activities in a dialy basis, I also need to manage the activities of other departments? And also fix their screw ups on a schedule that I just learned days before?

And also there is a coworker (one of whom screwed up) that, almost every time she see me, is asking "how much until you'll finish?"

As I read on a meme years ago: "please, give patience, because if you give strength, I'll need bail money too..."

Damn... I don't know of the benefits of this work are worth all this nonsense

To be fair, it's not really unprofessional. But two weeks ago we recorded a theme song for our company in an empty office room. Though I shouldn't complain, I love doing those kinda things :)

!rant
Looking for advice, serious advices.

I work in C.
Also, I work in Python.
I have worked for a couple of year in C++.
I have a fair knowledge of the Data Science workflow, and some experience in Machine Learning.
I have tinkered with some other languages (Java, Ruby, Go, JS among the others, nothing serious nor professional)

I'm the kind of person who needs constant problems to face in order to keep engaged, satisfied, happy. And I need to learn new stuff, or refining my knowledge constantly, or I stagnate. I believe that this is true for quite a share of people here.

I would like to spend some spare time (I seldom have) in a project. Personal projects are rarely good enough to improve one's cv, so I thought I could partecipate in some Open Source projects.

Does anyone here have some suggestion about some interesting and satisfying OSProject, or some general suggestion on the matter?

It would be so apreciated.

Accepted a feature request that practically doubled the workload without asking for more money, on account of trying to be fair to a customer who was working through a translator.

Only to get stiffed on 3/4 of the money agreed to in the first place.

Only saving grace was everything was on my servers, so I took him down for non-payment.

In only I were 1.15 times faster or had better planning (why didn’t I use the Saturday Sunday at the end of the first week 🤦🏼‍♂️), things would’ve happened differently. I think I’m becoming stupid and my tolerance levels are going down too.

So this happened a while back ..

I was given a code base which didn’t have any changes in the last two years and I was asked to add a feature to this. This was my first task in this new group I was part of. I had two weeks to do this starting on a Monday.

Partway through implementation I realised that the code base is a pile of shit and I wasn’t doing myself or anyone else any favours by shitting on it.

It’s Wednesday. I’ve dealt with many other codebases before but the urge to rewrite this particular one was just unlike anything else. And so I started changing code and before I realised, I modified almost all the important files.
I got sick of this mixed up code and started a rewrite from scratch. It was Friday and I finally had just the basic mechanics of the whole thing working. Now I needed to add all the functionalities and also my new feature.

It should be noted that at no point did I tell any of the superiors I was doing this fearing what they might say and also fearing going back to adding shit to shit.

By the end of the second week, the rewrite was complete and I only had the new feature to add. The rewrite was significantly smaller, compartmentalised and well commented because I did the bloody commenting (where it was not obvious from the code). So on Friday, I was asked about the progress and I told them that it needed some more work and that I need a couple more days. And I got shit for it. I was told it was a mistake giving this task to me and that I am not competent enough. One of the superiors told the other superior about perhaps giving me something more suited to my level. To be fair to them, they were expecting the work in the two weeks to be for the new feature.

And in two days’ time, on Monday (I worked on Saturday and half of Sunday), I finished the whole thing and gave it to them. New feature was working. And I still did not tell them what I did. The tool worked fine so they had no idea what happened because this project had no version control and I pointed them to a new directory with the new code with a first commit.

You asked for it--here it is.

It was a regular day in November--I was taking my dog out for a walk. We were walking past an elementary school when my dog started barking at a rock. I went to have a closer look at the rock when suddenly it vanished into thin air. "How strange" I quietly thought to myself, called out to my dog and carried on walking.

The next day at around the same time, at the very same place--next to the elementary school, my dog started barking at a log which lied in the exact same spot as the rock had occupied the day before. I did the same as I had done a day earlier--walked up to the log to check it out, but it vanished into thin air. We kept on walking.

The third day I decided we'd pick another route. This day, nothing interesting happened.

The fourth day went the same as the third.

The fifth day, went the same as the fourth.

On the sixth day, God was almost done with his works, for that reason we celebrated by going to the movies--me and my dog. To be fair, the only interesting thing that happened on that day was the movie, which was shit.

On the eight day when I got out of my bed I fell, broke my neck and died. And that's when I ate my code to make it shorter.

I was reading a book and came across this :
"
What if you were a doctor and had a patient who demanded that you stop all the silly hand-washing in preparation for surgery because it was taking too much time? Clearly the patient is the boss; and yet the doctor should absolutely refuse to comply. Why? Because the doctor knows more than the patient about the risks of disease and infection. It would be unprofessional (never mind criminal) for the doctor to comply with the patient. So too it is unprofessional for programmers to bend to the will of managers who don’t understand the risks of making messes.
"
It's fair point but at the same time we have to comply with the manager in order to have a raise/promotion. What do you think guys ?

I fucking hate people who report somebody else's work as their own successes so much.

I've written a fair amount of perf tests for our project so far (actually I'm like the only person doing that). Some fucker from another team asks me if I could write one more. I agree, because why not. I spend a few hours, making sure to cover all cases and commit the test. Then the same fucker runs it and reports it as HIS PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENTS.

0 credit given to me. Fuck you, I just wanted to be helpful and you used this.

I'm still quite young and tend to fall for shit like this, but getting more and more grumpy because of those people.

So a few weeks ago, our PO really scolded my team for not letting him in on our release planning meeting. His rant went on for about 30 minutes, just one long monologue about why he should be invited in the future.
Apparently he wanted to know details since there were some important fixes in the release, which I suppose is fair (though the rant is really not necessary).

Fastforward 2 weeks, we invite him again. He accepts, but never shows up. We decide to start the planning anyway, since we don't want the release branch blocked because someone didn't show up.
Immediately after the meeting, we write him with the new release plan. And he starts ranting again about "planning without him" -.- ..

1) Stop yelling at the team you're supposed to work with. Talk with the team about it - I'm sure they'll listen.

2) If you demand being in meetings, show up - or at least decline in advance.

3) You have no right to rant about "not being part of the planning" when you were literally invited for a planning meeting 2 weeks in advance. No meetings were overlapping, so there's literally no excuse..

Will be having first experience as a interviewer.
I pledge that I will ask practical and fair questions and pull the best out of the candidate.

Today in some onboarding meeting i was laughing my ass off.

We were setting up the development machines that we got from the client to work on via citrix.

You guys probably know, that when you put your npm projects too nested into your filesystem, that packages randomly start not behaving because of too long file names or path names and stuff like that. That seems to be a problem with all OS (to be fair i havent actively looked for a solution, but it happened to me on Windis and Linux, so i'm just assuming here)

but even more so for some packages on Windis, when the project is not running on the same fucking drive letter than where your OS is running on. Like... wtf?

Had two UI5 projects pulled, both of them on D:. The first npm install went through flawlessly, the second one has a number of random errors, me and the other dev didn't know what they were. So what i suggested is to move this project onto C: and try it again. Turns out that was exactly it. Et voila, npm install ran through without any hiccups..

Customer: Does your program do everything I specified in that mail from 2 months ago?
(btw the mail was 5 sentences...)
Me: Yes.
Customer: And does it do xyz?
Me: No, but to be fair, you did not specify that!
Customer: But that's what I've got you for! You should have known that!

🤦🏻‍♂️

Guys seriously why would you buy a macbook if apple will support it for like 7 years then you won't be able to upgrade to newer OSX versions? whereas a good laptop machine could run Linux for a lifetime, you could even change distros if you got bored.

Let me dive into it, If I buy a brand new macbook and use it rarely, its condition will barely change however one day I will get the message you need a greater version to install X app, seriously apple?

Real life scenario: I have an ipod touch 5 i rarely use it, one day i decided to install an application and boom no you can't buddy you need to upgrade the iOS however the currently version of iOS is the latest version i could get for that ipod touch model, so the thing is, I have a perfect condition product that is unusable unless for some music playing and what i already installed as apps, does it look fair to you? I have the same issue with an ipad mini, its condition is perfect, battery life is decent, I can't receive anymore updates, the youtube app stopped working, im stuck again with a product that i can use only to read some ebooks or use youtube through the browser, apple wants me to buy a new ipad which is absurd.

I will never buy an apple product again

Fuck you Apple

I agree with many people on here that Front-End web development/design isn't what it used to be.

Things used to be simple: a static page. Then we decoupled design from description and we introduced CSS; nice, clean separation, more manageable - everything looks nice up to this point.

Introduce dynamic pages, introduce JavaScript. We can now change the DOM and we can make interactive, neat little webpages; cool, the web is still fun.

Years later, we start throwing backend concepts into the web and bloating it with logic because we want so much for the web to be portable and emulate the backend. This is where it starts to get ugly: come ASP, come single pages, partial pages, templates,.. The front-end now talks to a backend, okay. We start decoupling things and we let the logic be handled by the backend - fair enough.

Even later, we start decoupling the edge processes (website setup, file management, etc.) and then we introduce ugly JavaScript tools to do it. Then we introduce convoluted frameworks (Angular,..). Sometimes we find ourselves debugging the tools themselves (grunt, gulp, mapping tools,..) rather than focusing on the development itself (as per ITIL guidelines; focus on value), no matter how promising today's frameworks claim to be ("You get to focus on your business code"; yeah right, in practice it has turned out differently for me. More like "I get to focus on wasting copious amounts of time trying to figure out your tangled web").

Everything has now turned into an unfriendly, tangled web (no pun intended).

I miss the old days when creating things for the Web used to be fun, exciting and simple and it would invigorate passion, not hate.

<my cents="2"></my>

More of a rave than a rant.

My Dad was having some trouble with a game disconnecting on the PS4 and he read somewhere that it might be a problem with our home router. I didn't think it would be, as every other game works fine. But there was no talking him out of it. And to be fair the current router WAS kind of old.

So I have a look at the one he's decided to buy and it's some massive triple-antenna beast for well over a hundred pounds. I felt like such a weapon might be overkill for 2 people in a house, but did say that it would definitely help with connection issues in some rooms and I kind of wanted to play with it.

So he got it and oh am I glad he did. It has so many fun toys, including a built in VPN. Right now I live abroad so there's a few services I used at home that I can't access, I was literally just considering buying a vpn the other day. I found this while setting up port-fortwarding for my Raspberry Pi to run a discord bot I'm building. I had condisered putting a VPN server on the Pi but this works too!

It also has built in DDNS from ASUS, which IS cool, but our IP hasn't changed in years so I'm not sure we'll need it. I set it up anyway just in case though!

!dev

Guys, we need talk raw performance for a second.

Fair disclaimer - if you are for some reason intel worker, you may feel offended.

I have one fucking question.
What's the point of fucking ultra-low-power-extreme-potato CPUs like intel atoms?

Okay, okay. Power usage. Sure. So that's one.

Now tell me, why in the fucking world anyone would prefer to wait 5-10 times more for same action to happen while indeed consuming also 5-10 times less power?

Can't you just tune down "big" core and call it a day? It would be around.. a fuckton faster. I have my i7-7820HK cpu and if I dial it back to 1.2Ghz my WINDOWS with around lot of background tasks machine works fucking faster than atom-powered freaking LUBUNTU that has only firefox open.

tested i7-7820hk vs atom-x5-z8350.

opening new tab and navigating to google took on my i7 machine a under 1 second, and atom took almost 1.5 second. While having higher clock (turbo boost)

Guys, 7820hk dialled down to 1.2 ghz; 0.81v
Seriously.
I felt everything was lagging. but OS was much more responsive than atom machine...

What the fuck, Intel. It's pointless. I think I'm not only one who would gladly pay a little bit more for such difference.

i7 had clear disadvantages here, linux vs windows, clear background vs quite a few processes in background, and it had higher f***ng clock speed.

TL;DR
Intel atom processors use less power but waste a lot of time, while a little bit more power used on bigger cpu would complete task faster, thus atoms are just plain pointless garbage.

PS.
Tested in frustration at work, apparently they bought 3 craptops for presentations or some shit like that and they have mental problems becouse cheapest shit on market is more shitty than they anticipated ;-;
fucking seriously ;-;

so... while this may not be *my* code, I do have to claim a fair share of the responsibility for allowing it to exist. o.o

I'm busy fixing it now though.

> note: proprietary names have been blurred, naturally.

Ok everybody, listen up.
For a long time, even before I knew devrant, I failed an exam and had to retake it. It was, and I think this is fair to say without exageration, the worst thing that had happened to me. Put me deep into an anxiety crysis that it was very difficult to escape from. Months of hard work, at the sacrifice of many other valuable things, helped me to climb out of this hole. It was a struggle, but I finally made it. Earlier today I retook the exam. It was great. Thank you for standing by in this difficult time of my life. We live in a post-thisfuckingexam-time. Many of my rants on here were influenced by this issue. Now they probably wont ever be again. Thank god, and thank me for keeping it up.

Tldr: i wrote an exam today.

!rant

Sometimes I feel weird because the homeless people on the subway asking for money look more put together than me.

To be fair, those who aren't on the subway look very homeless.

Neither take credit cards though.

I'm just confused.

Lying recruiters really make my shit itch.

A couple of months ago a recruiter got in touch on linked in as he’d seen my cv on Indeed or somewhere.

He asks what I’m looking for and I tell him I want to move to a more development focused role rather than mosh mash of support, admin and Dev that I do at the moment.

He’s says he’s got just the role at a fairly local software company, and that the role would be at least 90% development blah blah blah.

So I set up a video call, and it immediately becomes clear that they want someone to do support/admin who might get to do a tiny bit of dev (they mainly asked about my experience with HTML) and I could tell they lost interest when I said I was more interested in backend development etc.

They didn’t want to progress the application as I wasn’t what they were looking for, which is fair enough they weren’t what I was looking for either.

But, do recruiters intentionally set out to lie to applicants about what a job is/entails or do they either get duff info from clients, or just not understand the job specs they are given?

I mean it wasted my lunch break (not including calls with the recruiter) and an hour of time for the CEO and Dev from the company.

“You know what is not fungible, scarce and valuable to me? My time! So if you wish to persuade me NFT are a good thing, you should pay me a fair amount of real money to make me listen your bullshit”

From now on this will be my standard reply to NFT harassment.

Feel free to use, edit and share with others.

So I met this person via a social platform.

They were absolutely silly and weren't able to hold a conversation. So I, like a normal person, just stopped trying to keep things alive.

Over the years, I have realised and learnt that if a person is interested in being friends, they'd put in efforts and I alone will not have to drag things on my shoulder.

I started cutting out people right, left, and center who I felt were taking advantage of me or using me in some way or another.

I ended up saving a lot of time and energy. I no longer feel drained or anxious about something not working out. Not dragging saved me from draining.

Anyway, they reach out to me again after few weeks and I was like let's give it a try to establish a friendship, because befriending people is my weak point.

The cycle repeats. At first I thought it must be because of the asynchronous nature of the platform so I drop my Telegram Id in case they preferred an IM approach.

I swear in the name of sweet lord, the retard does the same behaviour. So, I stopped communication.

And one fine day, the person tells me that they lack social skills and want to learn how to make friends and stuff.

Very fair point. So, me being me, gave them a few tips and critically pointed out their behaviour on how they reply with a one liner after every 2 or 3 business days.

Absolutely no change in their behaviour. They kept texting me the same.

At this point, I was like why am I doing it? I could find better people easily. Because for me, communication is everything. I cannot function without a good communication between two living beings.

So, I asked them why are they even trying to learn social skills when they barely implement it and don't want to change to which they reply saying that so they can use it to befriend people and network to getter better job opportunities.

I fuck them off.

And fuck such people who have intentions, are not clear enough about it, and play people for their own selfish gains.

And this where another learning I got from @scout is have boundaries.

Why do all good people in my life leave? Damn it! I need those good people back and be friends with them and not retards who cannot even communicate beyond one liner.

My foolishness of giving into an almost impossible dream seems to be finally setting in.

So the client, who is also my relative is launching an hotel. He wanted a website for the hotel with booking facility. The budget was plenty for that requirement and I was okay. In my calculations 20% of the proposed budget seemed fair to charge.

Few months in, it turns out he now wants a hotel booking platform where other hotels can also be listed. The reasoning was he wants to avoid the commissions charged by popular booking sites and also feature his own hotel in the booking platform that was about to be build.

I was skeptical about his intentions and my skills in developing it. I was also concerned whether he understood the responsibilities and overhead costs of running such a platform. He talked like it'll be fine. I calculated my billing to about 50% of the budget. I left the other 50% intentionally because I knew it would need for keeping up the site.

Time goes by, i am now 90% into completion of the new requirement.

Few weeks ago, i had informed about server pricing and I quoted a starting price of $15 per month. He seemed quite shocked. His reaction shocked me too and I got concerned whether I would even get rest of the payment ( already got 10% of proposed budget ) as advance.

Just few days ago, he now has a new requirement. He wants to show the hotel pricing from the booking site in Google Maps search. I tried to understand him that those are Ads and I was pretty sure price of running those ads are beyond his budget and probably negate any savings he is trying to make by competing popular booking platforms. Signing up for Hotel Ads as a booking platform is quite challenging. I don't think it'll happen.

I am now concerned he might bail on the project, so I have not informed yet. I just hope I get paid for the work I done and I'll inform then. :P

Anyways, the journey of it's development was quite insightful and challenging experience. I fell in love with a language I knew existed but never really bothered about and a framework whose only thing I knew was that it's name sounded cool to say.

!rant

Yesterday someone asked the similarity between political science and IT. Fair enough as a call like that is always subjective. But I think I finally have a sufficient answer.

Uneducated users, fuck up untold numbers of things because they think they know everything. Average users argue about nuance only experts would understand due to anecdotal experience. They can be really similar, I think.

Thank you for getting those interestimg thoughts in my head.

Got this in Slack from the owner of the firm I work for...

I mean, you already pay me half of the average salary I should be making, but yeah, let me get right on that...

To be fair, I work with this guy because he is a really good guy to work for, is very hands-off (no micro-managing), doesn't expect me to work on the clock or any overtime and lets me make all the calls with our directions in development. Plus he pays me all he can afford, so it's not like he's trying to screw me (he shares the books with me to prove it).

But still, the dude has to realize you get what you pay for. You don't go to McDonalds if you want a gourmet burger...

In a meeting, we made some pretty major adjustments to a dev server. We broke it. Under pressure, I cracked and I randomly forgot the syntax for a sql update statement that might’ve at least got it back semi-online. To be fair, it’s been several years since I’ve needed any sql. Thank goodness I grabbed a snapshot as soon as I realized things were about to get edited. Saved. 😁

So, this incident happened with me around 2 years ago. I was pentesting one of my client's web application. They were new into the Financial Tech Industry, and wanted me to pentest their website as per couple of standards mentioned by them.

One of the most hilarious bug that I found was at the login page, when a user tries logging into an account and forgets the password, a Captcha image is shown where the user needs to prove that he is indeed a human and not a robot, which was fair enough to be implemented at the login screen.

But, here's the catch. When I checked the "view source" option of the web page, I saw that the alt attribute of the Captcha image file had the contents of the Captcha. Making it easy for an attacker to easily bruteforce the shit outta the login page.

You don't need hackers to hack you when your internal dev team itself is self destructive.

I've heard about some of the ridiculous requirements that some companies have in job postings and always thought that they're probably over exaggerating a bit.

Holy shit was I wrong.

I've taken a look at the positions that they have posted for my coop program and while I understand that my college was not the only one posted to for these, they seem pretty extreme at times. There were a few postings that required several mountains of web frameworks and experience that unless you did a lot of self study prior or had previous professional work experience would have been impossible.

We're students, a lot of us have never touched an IDE prior to our program so to ask us for in some cases years of experience in a language or tool that I have never even heard of, nor have even been even vaguely mentioned by profs, seems a bit much. I have had years of experience in a fair variety of tools and languages but even for me this seemed a tad bit unreasonable. Not all of the postings require this much prior experience in the field so I can apply to some.

The professor teaching the preparation course says they can't understand why people apply for the coop program then don't apply to positions. While I understand there are people who might not apply due to laziness or an overflow of assignments, I feel like a good chunk just can't find any positions that they may be partially qualified for.

TLDR;
How much do you earn for your skill set in your country vs your cost of living?
BONUS;
See how much I & others earn.

Recently I became aware of just how massive the gap in developers earnings are between countries. I'd love to calculate a fixed score for income vs cost of living.

I know this stuff is sensitive to some so if you prefer just post your score (avg income p/m after tax / cost of living).

I'm not shy so I'll go first:

MY RATES
Normal Rate (Long term): $23
Consulting / Short term: $30-$74
Pen Test: $1500 once off.
Pen Test Fixes: consulting rate.
Simple work/websites: min $400+
Family & Friends: Dev friends are usually free (when mutually beneficial). Family and others can fuck off, even if they can pay (I pass their info to dev friends with fair warning).

GENERAL INFO
Experience: 9 years
Country: South Africa
Developer rareness in country: Very Rare (+-90 job openings per job seeker).
Middle class wage in country: $1550 p/m (can afford a new car, decent apartment & some luxuries like beer/eating out).
Employment type: Permanent though I can and do freelance occasionally.
Client Locality: Mostly local.
Developer Type: Web Developer (True web dev - I do anything web related from custom HTTP servers to sockets, services, advanced browser api's, apps & more).

STACKS / SKILLSETS

I'M PROFICIENT IN:
python, JavaScript, ASP classic, bash, php, html, css, sql, msql, elastic search, REST, SOAP, DOM, IIS, apache

I DABBLE WITH:
ASP.net, C++, ruby, GO, nginx, tesseract

MY SPECIALTIES:
application architecture, automation, integrations, db's, real time data, advanced browser apps/extensions (webRTC, canvas etc).

SUMMARY
Avg income p/m after tax: $2250
Cost of living (car+rent+food): $1200
Score: 1.85

*Note: For integrity when calculating my cost of living I excluded debt repayments and only kept my necessities which are transport, food & shelter.

I really hope you guy's post your results, it would be great to get an idea of which is really the worst / best country to be a developer in.

Once mentored a high school student for a science fair relating to robotics. It was definetely interesting having to relearn many things so I could teach them well but it was definetely worthwhile! I couldn't be prouder of the work my student (mentee, pupil, ??? Idk how else to say it lmao) achieved. He won several awards for the project, even some scholarships!!

To be fair I'm actually grateful for Windows 10! If it had never frustrated me the way it did I wouldn't have seriously tried out any linux distro as a daily driver 😂

300 global variables.. THREE HUNDRED FUCKING GLOBAL VARIABLES?
Are you for real?

Now let me check the line numbers again..

hmm.. line 97 to .. yep line 410, just a few new lines to seperate some of them or.. group? Idk, I've given up on trying to understand those.

Now you may ask "But ThatPerlDeb, where did you see this and what was the intention?"
Low and behold, take a chair and I may explain this to you.

First of all: Fuck the dev that wrote this!
Second: Fuck all the devs that kept up with this practice or whatever you want to fucking call this!

Now, the application is our POS system that our customers can use for a monthly fee (That this piece of garbage even requires payment is disgusting) but anyway..
The global variables sometimes are declared for labels, sometimes for some frames, sometimes just for random values to be there.

We're using Perl for the POS system and Perl ain't the best at OOP, so in the dev's defense I can understand why you'd use a few global variables, but not fucking 300!! FUCK OFF WITH THIS BULLSHIT!!

So now I'm going through this torture slowly but surely deleting globals and putting them into some sort of scope and always MANUALLY test if something broke. Again, this company sucks ass and there's nothing that could even be considered a "unit test" or something like that, so fuck that, too.

After two hours I've brought down the count of global variables to about 260, so there's progress being made..

But then, there comes more!

"But how???" you may ask, and you're right, I've asked that myself.

Now to resolve the global stuff in each file some of the initial globals are used, we got about 20-30 files which do different stuff, all fair and square, at least there was an attempt at seperating functions but god this mess is so fucking fucked up. So in order to "safely" delete a global variable I have to check if any of the variables are used in another file, and if so, in which scope and how they are used.

Spaghetti would be a compliment for this fucking disgusting piece of utter bullshit.

Let alone the code quality of this "code"
Indendation? Dafuq is dat?
Scope? Nah, we got everything global anyway
Function size? Well, some are 5 lines, some are 900 lines, who cares anyways, right?

I'm so fucking glad once I leave this shithole, for real.

Not a dev!rant,/but certainly a rant. Long post ahead.

First of all I MISSED YOU ALL

Had my fair issues of shit these months. And for that, FUCK EVERYTHING. End of rant for now. I am still managing somehow to do - slowly as fuck, but who cares at this point - like finally going to uni, finding a psychologist and not a psycho, unraveling a fuckton of previous trauma (hi abuse) and ~drums~ buying my new desktop! Not exactly a nasa server but a middish level workstation/gaming place. I am shopping right now. The previous days have been shaky with all the flashback business and emotional rollercoaster of death, but I feel like going the right way somehow. Is it true? Who knows! But after enduring several issues of suicide planning and luckily only one serious-bugged attempt epically hilariously failed, the slightest hope is a victory. I like p2p, so feel free to torrent and seed this little joy. If it is mine it can be yours. Take it!

Also, you know how much autistic I am, but I'd really like to make some friends. I make attempts but honestly I am awkward errrr.... I don't know how many dude/ttes I can count on. For friend I mean simply someone that honestly likes me somehow, is loyal, and has interest in sharing they like to do or think! (And if they want to give me tips on security/sysadmin/dev stuff, even better, but not required obviously).

Also, I may have some projects in mind. Will publish in the projects section when the roughest idea is finished.

Maybe I deserve an updoot. In real life.
(Which is also here....)

🎶🎶🎶🎶

ZNC shenanigans yesterday...

So, yesterday in the midst a massive heat wave I went ahead, booze in hand, to install myself an IRC bouncer called ZNC. All goes well, it gets its own little container, VPN connection, own user, yada yada yada.. a nice configuration system-wise.

But then comes ZNC. Installed it a few times actually, and failed a fair few times too. Apparently Chrome and Firefox block port 6697 for ZNC's web interface outright. Firefox allows you to override it manually, Chrome flat out refuses to do anything with it. Thank you for this amazing level of protection Google. I didn't notice a thing. Thank you so much for treating me like a goddamn user. You know Google, it felt a lot like those plastic nightmares in electronics, ultrasonic welding, gluing shit in (oh that reminds me of the Nexus 6P, but let's not go there).. Google, you are amazing. Best billion dollar company I've ever seen. Anyway.

So I installed ZNC, moved the client to bouncer connection to port 8080 eventually, and it somewhat worked. Though apparently ZNC in its infinite wisdom does both web interface and IRC itself on the same port. How they do it, no idea. But somehow they do.

And now comes the good part.. configuration of this complete and utter piece of shit, ZNC. So I added my Freenode username, password, yada yada yada.. turns out that ZNC in its infinite wisdom puts the password on the stdout. Reminded me a lot about my ISP sending me my password via postal mail. You know, it's one thing that your application knows the plaintext password, but it's something else entirely to openly share that you do. If anything it tells them that something is seriously wrong but fuck! You don't put passwords on the goddamn stdout!

But it doesn't end there. The default configuration it did for Freenode was a server password. Now, you can usually use 3 ways to authenticate, each with their advantages and disadvantages. These are server password, SASL and NickServ. SASL is widely regarded to be the best option and if it's supported by the IRC server, that's what everyone should use. Server password and NickServ are pretty much fallback.

So, plaintext password, default server password instead of SASL, what else.. oh, yeah. ZNC would be a server, right. Something that runs pretty much forever, 24/7. So you'd probably expect there to be a systemd unit for it... Except, nope, there isn't. The ZNC project recommends that you launch it from the crontab. Let that sink in for a moment.. the fucking crontab. For initializing services. My whole life as a sysadmin was a lie. Cron is now an init system.

Fortunately that's about all I recall to be wrong with this thing. But there's a few things that I really want to tell any greenhorn developers out there... Always look at best practices. Never take shortcuts. The right way is going to be the best way 99% of the time. That way you don't have to go back and fix it. Do your app modularly so that a fix can be done quickly and easily. Store passwords securely and if you can't, let the user know and offer alternatives. Don't put it on the stdout. Always assume that your users will go with default options when in doubt. I love tweaking but defaults should always be sane ones.

One more thing that's mostly a jab. The ZNC software is hosted on a .in domain, which would.. quite honestly.. explain a lot. Is India becoming the next Chinese manufacturers for software? Except that in India the internet access is not restricted despite their civilization perhaps not being fully ready for it yet. India, develop and develop properly. It will take a while but you'll get there. But please don't put atrocities like this into the world. Lastly, I know it's hard and I've been there with my own distribution project too. Accept feedback. It's rough, but it is valuable. Listen to the people that criticize your project.

Fellow Deviants, I need your help in understanding the importance of C++

Okay, I need to clarify a few things:

I am not a beginner or a newbie who has just entered this community...

I have been using C++ for some time and in fact, it was the language which introduced me to the world of programming... Before, I switched to Java, since I found it much better for application development...

I already know about the obvious arguments given in favour of C/C++ like how it is a much more faster and memory efficient than other languages...

But, at the same time, C/C++ exposes us and doesn't protect us from ourselves.. I hope that you understand what I mean to say..

And, I guess that it is a fair tradeoff for the kind of power and control that these languages (C/C++) provide us..

And, I also agree with the fact that it is an language that ideally suits our need, if we wish to deal with compilers, graphics, OS, etc, in the future...

But, what I really want to ask here is:

In this age and times, when hardware has advanced so much, where technically, memory efficiency or execution speeds no longer is the topmost priority... These were the reasons for which C/C++ was initially created...

In today's time, human concept of time matters more and hence, syntactical less complicated languages like Java or Python are much more preferred, especially for domains like application development or data sciences...

So, is continuing with C++, an endeavour worth sticking with in the future or is it not required...

I am talking about this issue since I am in a dilemma about the use of C++ in the future...

I would be grateful if we could talk about keeping AI, Machine Learning or Algorithms Optimisation in mind... Since, these are the fields in which I am interested in...

I know that my question could have been posted in a better way.. But, considering the chaos that is present in my mind, regarding this question doesn't allow me to do so...

Any kind of suggestion or thoughts would be welcome and much appreciated...

P.S: I currently use C++ only for competitive programming or challenges...

!rant

TL;DR one year on as a react dev, I want to go at it self employed, humbly seeking advice as this community seems to have its fair share of knowledgeable freelancers.

I have 1 year professional experience now as a Meteor, React and Apollo developer

The dream is to become self employed. I figure a good market would be small businesses that want a website that are more featureful than a diy wix site.

Only I am more of a developer than a designer, so rely heavily on things like Bootstrap or Material ui. So I wonder if Upwork, Fiverr or simply my own freelance website would be better.

As you guessed javascript is my biggest strength, not sure if nodejs is the best backend for small businesses as hosting prices are more than eqv php stack.

Also want to build own projects on the side to monetize. Bigger dream would be to be client-less and develop and sell personal projects.

Seeking advice from those who are self employed. Am I dreaming too big?

Shall I keep the office job for a bit longer then take the plunge? Or do you think I can just go for it. Are there lucrative areas I am missing?

Thanks in advanced

> be me
> studying 1.5 years liberal arts stuff and general education class at community college
> transfer to a 4 year university.
> realize I need a major
> Realize I also I wanted to 9ne day have a family.
> realize family would need money
> "struggling actor" not a great choice
> pray about what I should be doing
> get distinct impression that instead of attending the session on majors at the college of fine and performance arts to go to session with the college of Science and engineering.
> hear pitch for computer science.
> signup for introduction to programming taught with c++.
> A couple semesters down the line take 3 classes all at once Discrete Math 1, Linear Algebra, and database design and administration.
> around week 6 realize that all 3 classes revolved around sets and set logic and set math.
> realize rdbs's are "applied" set math and that Each class a little more "applied" than the former.
> Be genius at SQL and set math
> havereally smart database teacher mentored me
> get introduced to the recruiter at the career fair.
> get interviews
> get flown out for 2md interview
> get internship
> do work, and get project back under budget
> a job offer
> finish senior year
> start as a "real" developer supporting business data and analytics.
> ???
> profit.

Hey everyone!

TL;DR I'm looking for a way to make a webapp for iOS.

I am developing an app for iOS devices. I am more familiar with JS, CSS and HTML, not to mention I have already created a fair chunk of the app. So it would be great if there was a solution that worked like UIWebView/WKWebView. I've had numerous issues with both of these widgets. UIWebView worked the best, most like a normal browser renderer, however still has some very annoying anomalies. For instance the input box could be covered up such so that you could still type but not see what you were typing, no other web browser does this. I've had plenty of issues that I have had to find hacky workarounds for. Is there a better way? I've heard of Titanium by Appcelerator, however I wanted to get as many opinions as a can.

Thanks!

A fellow student decided to apply to the federal police, after talking with then at a job fair on the campus. The police strongly stated that they had a high demand for new people.
He did not get an answer for the next two months - not even an acknowledgment - so he quickly found another job in the mean time.

After the two months he got an answer stating that the application deadline was over now and it would be great if he'd come for a job interview. Unsurprisingly he declined..

!rant

Coworker: I yelled at Sony for the PS3 having 7 USB ports... I said that devices only need 2 USB ports. But now, I have this laptop here that has two USB ports and I'm yelling at it! So who's the hypocrite?

Me: You?

Coworker: Sony. Though to be fair, this laptop was made back before we really needed a lot of USB ports. Keyboards and mice were PS/2.

Me: What about printers?

Coworker: They have printer cables....

Me: WHICH ARE USB!

Coworker: ....Oh yeah...

Human-robot studies suck.

Like, why do I even have to compare dumbass humans to computers? Or why should I even make my robot human friendly? Why can't humans be robot friendly? Example: Robot says beep, you get out of the way. Why should the poor robot do so much planning because humans are too stupid to move out of the way? How is this fair?

I think I'm getting burnt out.

I've been constantly exhausted lately, making little to no progress at work. Eve simple tasks that I was able to do months ago are giving me trouble, but I hardly care anymore.

Today, my boss told me he "wanted to see some progress" on one of the projects I'm working on (fair since I've been extremely slow here). Unfortunately I'm just more stressed now which makes it even harder to do anything.

I feel like I'm spiralling. I'm not productive lately so I get stressed about missing deadlines, which stresses me out and makes me less productive...

I'm ready to just quit honestly, but not sure I'd be able to find as good a job anywhere else

Is it fair to say that my professor is unprepared to teach if he refuses to use visual studio 2017 in favor of 2010, which may be unable to open my 2017 projects? I'm guessing not, since it's his class, but the Syllabus doesn't mention the class using such shitty technology. I honestly refuse to download VS 2010 until my grade depends on it.

!dev

Is there any other place in this world besides Switzerland where you get a fucking fine of ~ $40 for driving ONE bloody km/h too fast??? It’s about 0.7mph.. (after subtracting tolerance to be fair)

In other countries I drive they wouldn’t fine at all because it’s not worth the effort..

Am I the only one bothered by the way devRant ( and to be fair also Twitter) previews images?

It just kinda crops some unknown up front amount of edges. It's annoying in and of itself, but also directs viewer focus to some arbitrary part of the picture, and you can't unsee it even after opening the whole thing...

Is there really no better way to handle the issue of size? How can that be a good UX ??

If you're working on close to hardware things, make sure you run static analysis, and manually inspect the output of your compiler if you feel something's off - it may be doing something totally different from what you expect, because of optimization and what not. Also, optimizations don't always trigger as expected. Also, sometimes abstractions can cost a fair amount too (C++ std::string c/dtor, for example, dtors in general), more than you'd expect, and in those cases you might want to re-examine your need for them.

Having said all that, also know how to get the compiler to work for you, hand-optimization at the assembly level isn't usually ideal. I've often been surprised by just how well compilers figure out ways to speed up / compactify code, especially when given hints, and it's way better than having a blob of assembly that's totally unmaintainable.

Learnt this from programming MCUs and stuff for hobby/college team/venture, and from messing around with the Haskell compiler and LLVM optimization passes.

Argh! (I feel like I start a fair amount of my rants with a shout of fustration)

Tl;Dr How long do we need to wait for a new version of xorg!?

I've recently discovered that Nvidia driver 435.17 (for Linux of course) supports PRIME GPU offloading, which -for the unfamiliar- is where you're able render only specific things on a laptops discreet GPU (vs. all or nothing). This makes it significantly easier (and power efficient) to use the GPU in practice.

There used to be something called bumblebee (which was actually more power efficient), but it became so slow that one could actually get better performance out of Intel's integrated GPU than that of the Nvidia GPU.

This feature is also already included in the nouveau graphics driver, but (at least to my understanding) it doesn't have very good (or none) support for Turing GPUs, so here I am.

Now, being very excited for this feature, I wanted to use it. I have Arch, so I installed the nvidia-beta drivers, and compiled xorg-server from master, because there are certain commits that are necessary to make use of this feature.

But after following the Nvidia instructions, it doesn't work. Oops I realize, xrog probably didn't pick up the Nvidia card, let's restart xorg. and boom! Xorg doesn't boot, because obviously the modesetting driver isn't meant for the Nvidia card it's meant for the Intel one, but xorg is to stupid for that...

So here I am back to using optimus-manager and the ordinary versions of Nvidia and xorg because of some crap...

If you have some (good idea) of what to do to make it work, I'm welcome to hear it.