Just got a job offer for a SysAdmin job at CERN! :D

A big fuck you to the italian philosophy of hiring newly graduated students with shitty contracts and a big win for a simple student that wants to learn from the best :)

TL;DR I'm fucking sick and tired of Devs cutting corners on security! Things can't be simply hidden a bit; security needs to be integral to your entire process and solution. Please learn from my story and be one of the good guys!

As I mentioned before my company used plain text passwords in a legacy app (was not allowed to fix it) and that we finally moved away from it. A big win! However not the end of our issues.

Those Idiot still use hardcoded passwords in code. A practice that almost resulted in a leak of the DB admin password when we had to publish a repo for deployment purposes. Luckily I didn't search and there is something like BFG repo cleaner.

I have tried to remedy this by providing a nice library to handle all kinds of config (easy config injection) and a default json file that is always ignored by git. Although this helped a lot they still remain idiots.
The first project in another language and boom hardcoded password. Dev said I'll just remove before going live. First of all I don't believe him. Second of all I asked from history? "No a commit will be good enough..."

Last week we had to fix a leak of copyrighted contend.
How did this happen you ask? Well the secure upload field was not used because they thought that the normal one was good enough. "It's fine as long the URL to the file is not published. Besides now we can also use it to upload files that need to be published here"
This is so fucking stupid on so many levels. NEVER MIX SECURE AND INSECURE CONTENT it is confusing and hard to maintain. Hiding behind a URL that thousands of people have access to is also not going to work. We have the proof now...
Will they learn? Maybe for a short while but I remain sceptic. I hope a few DevrRanters do!

Long rant ahead.. so feel free to refill your cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂

It's completely useless. At least in the school I went to, the teachers were worse than useless. It's a bit of an old story that I've told quite a few times already, but I had a dispute with said teachers at some point after which I wasn't able nor willing to fully do the classes anymore.

So, just to set the stage.. le me, die-hard Linux user, and reasonably initiated in networking and security already, to the point that I really only needed half an ear to follow along with the classes, while most of the time I was just working on my own servers to pass the time instead. I noticed that the Moodle website that the school was using to do a big chunk of the course material with, wasn't TLS-secured. So whenever the class begins and everyone logs in to the Moodle website..? Yeah.. it wouldn't be hard for anyone in that class to steal everyone else's credentials, including the teacher's (as they were using the same network).

So I brought it up a few times in the first year, teacher was like "yeah yeah we'll do it at some point". Shortly before summer break I took the security teacher aside after class and mentioned it another time - please please take the opportunity to do it during summer break.

Coming back in September.. nothing happened. Maybe I needed to bring in more evidence that this is a serious issue, so I asked the security teacher: can I make a proper PoC using my machines in my home network to steal the credentials of my own Moodle account and mail a screencast to you as a private disclosure? She said "yeah sure, that's fine".
Pro tip: make the people involved sign a written contract for this!!! It'll cover your ass when they decide to be dicks.. which spoiler alert, these teachers decided they wanted to be.

So I made the PoC, mailed it to them, yada yada yada... Soon after, next class, and I noticed that my VPN server was blocked. Now I used my personal VPN server at the time mostly to access a file server at home to securely fetch documents I needed in class, without having to carry an external hard drive with me all the time. However it was also used for gateway redirection (i.e. the main purpose of commercial VPN's, le new IP for "le onenumity"). I mean for example, if some douche in that class would've decided to ARP poison the network and steal credentials, my VPN connection would've prevented that.. it was a decent workaround. But now it's for some reason causing Moodle to throw some type of 403.

Asked the teacher for routers and switches I had a class from at the time.. why is my VPN server blocked? He replied with the statement that "yeah we blocked it because you can bypass the firewall with that and watch porn in class".
Alright, fair enough. I can indeed bypass the firewall with that. But watch porn.. in class? I mean I'm a bit of an exhibitionist too, but in a fucking class!? And why right after that PoC, while I've been using that VPN connection for over a year?

Not too long after that, I prematurely left that class out of sheer frustration (I remember browsing devRant with the intent to write about it while the teacher was watching 😂), and left while looking that teacher dead in the eyes.. and never have I been that cold to someone while calling them a fucking idiot.

Shortly after I've also received an email from them in which they stated that they wanted compensation for "the disruption of good service". They actually thought that I had hacked into their servers. Security teachers, ostensibly technical people, if I may add. Never seen anyone more incompetent than those 3 motherfuckers that plotted against me to save their own asses for making such a shitty infrastructure. Regarding that mail, I not so friendly replied to them that they could settle it in court if they wanted to.. but that I already knew who would win that case. Haven't heard of them since.

So yeah. That's why I regard those expensive shitty pieces of paper as such. The only thing they prove is that someone somewhere with some unknown degree of competence confirms that you know something. I think there's far too many unknowns in there.

Nowadays I'm putting my bets on a certification from the Linux Professional Institute - a renowned and well-regarded certification body in sysadmin. Last February at FOSDEM I did half of the LPIC-1 certification exam, next year I'll do the other half. With the amount of reputation the LPI has behind it, I believe that's a far better route to go with than some random school somewhere.

Back in the day, I joined a little agency in Cape Town, small team small office with big projects, projects they weren’t really supposed to take on but hey when the owner of a tech business is not a tech person they do weird things.
A month had passed and it was all good, then came a project from Europe, Poland to be specific. The manager introduced me to the project, it was a big brand - a segment of Lego, built on Umbraco (they should change the name to slowbraco or uhmmm..braco somewhere there) the manager was like so this one is gonna be quite a challenge and I remember you said you are keen on that, I was like hell yeah bring it on (genuinely I got excited) now the challenge was not even about complexity of the problem or code or algorithms etc you get my point… the challenge was that the fucking site was in polish - face palm 1 - so I am like okay code is code, its just content, and I already speak/familiar with 13 human languages so I can’t fail here ill get around it somehow. So I spin up IIS, do the things and boom dev environment is ready for some kick ass McCoding. I start to run through the project to dig into the previous dev’s soul. I could not relate, I could not understand. I could not read, I could not, I could not. - face palm 2 - This dude straight up coded this project in polish variable names in polish, class names in polish, comments in freaking polish. Look, I have no beef with the initial guy, its his language so why not right? sure. But not hey this is my life and now I should learn polish, so screw it, new tab - google translate, new notes, I create a dictionary of variables and class etc 
3 days go by and I am fucking polish bro. Come at me. I get to read the previous devs soul through his comments, what a cool dude, his code wasn’t shit either - huge relief. So I rock on and make the required changes and further functionality. 

The project manager is like really, you did it? I am like yeah dude, there it is. Then I realise I wasn’t the first on this, this dude done tried others and it didn’t go down well, they refused. - face palm 3 -

Anyway, now I am a rock star in the office, and to project managers this win means okay throw him in the deep - they move me to huge project that is already late of course and apparently since I am able to use google translate, I can now defeat time, let the travelling begin. - face palm 4 - I start on the project and they love me on it as they can see major progress however poland was knocking on the door again, they need a whole chunk of work done. I can’t leave the bigger project, so it was decided that the new guy on Monday will start his polish lessons - he has no idea, probably excited to start a new job, meanwhile a shit storm is being prepared for him.

Monday comes, hello x - meet the team, team meets x

Manager - please join our meeting.

I join the meeting, the manager tells me to assist the new dev to get set up.

Me: Sure, did you tell him about he site?

Manager: Yes, I told him you knocked it out the park and now we just need to keep going

Me: in my head (hmm… that’s not what I was asking but cool I guess he will see soon enough -internal face palm 5 - )

New dev is setup, he looks at the project, I am ask him if he is good after like an hour he is like yeah all good. But his face is pink so I figured, no brother man is not okay. But I let him be and give him space.

Lunch time comes, he heads out for lunch. 

1hr 15mins later, project manager is like, is the new dude still at lunch.

We are all like yeah probably. 

2hrs pass 

3hrs pass

Now we are like okay maybe something happened to him, hit by a car? Emergency? Something… 

So I am legit worried now, I ask the manager to maybe give him a ring. 

Manager tries to call. NOTHING, no response. nada.

Next day, 8am, 9am, 10am no sign of the dude. 

I go to the manager, ask him what’s up. 

Manager: he is okay. However he said he is not coming back. 


TLDR someone in my team took credit for work he didnt do;

I know teamwork is a good thing and when everyone does their share of the work, it is.

I submitted a computer science project to an event in the UK called the Big Bang fair, I was in a group of 3. We had been meeting every week after for the past 10 months. During these sessions me and uke have been meeting for 1h 30m where as oon could only meet for 1h because "he had stuff to do" and he never saw the point in staying longer. Oon had also been a massive distraction whilst the time he was there as he did no work and messed around on cookie clicker.

Anyway we found out last week that the Big Bang fair was coming very soon and we had not written a write up or done any preparation for the presentation we had to do. Me and uke set up a google doc and started adding stuff to it (as we only had a few days left at this point). Whereas oon did nothing.

I ended up staying up till 3am in the morning finalising the write up over the weekend with uke helping. We asked oon to help but he said he didnt want to stay up late so didnt help.

Then the most stressful 2 days come round. I devoted all of my free time towards the project, uke devoted most of his time and oon devoted 1 hour after school on one day. He said that he couldn't do one lunchtime but I found him in the ICT room playing games :/.

This didn't matter THAT much but what pissed me off is that he started boasting to all his friends about all the work I did and credited it as his own. At the actual event he said nothing during the presentation because he knew nothing about the project. HE DIDNT EITHER BOTHER TO READ THE WRITE UP HE WAS BOASTING ABOUT. What do people get out of taking credit for work other people did.

We didn't win anything and I wonder why

wow thanks for reading all this you deserve a sticker

Our team makes a software in Java and because of technical reasons we require 1GB of memory for the JVM (with the Xmx switch).
If you don't have enough free memory the app without any sign just exits because the JVM just couldn't bite big enough from the memory.
Many days later and you just stand there without a clue as to why the launcher does nothing.
Then you remember this constraint and start to close every memory heavy app you can think of. (I'm looking at you Chrome) No matter how important those spreadsheets or illustrator files. Congratulation you just freed up 4GB of memory, things should work now! WRONG!
But why you might ask. You see we are using 32-bit version of java because someone in upper management decided that it should run on any machine (even if we only test it on win 7 and high sierra) and 32 is smaller than 64 so it must be downwards compatible! we should use it! Yes, in 2019 we use 32-bit java because some lunatic might want to run our software on a Windows XP 32-bit OS. But why is this so much of a problem?
Well.. the 32-bit version of Java requires CONTIGUOUS FREE SPACE IN MEMORY TO EVEN START... AND WE ARE REQUESTING ONE GIGABYTE!!
So you can shove your swap and closed applications up your ass but I bet you that you won't get 1GB contiguous memory that way!
Now there will be a meeting about this issue and another related to the issues with 32-bit JVM tomorrow. The only problem is that this issue only occures if you used up most of your memory and then try to open our software. So upper management will probably deem this issue minor and won't allow us to upgrade to 64-bit... in 20fucking19

Me - Yeah great so you say it's big data we are gonna be analyzing and having to store, are you currently utilizing a service and aggregating any of it into smaller manageable segments?

Client - well yeah it's lots and lots of data, we can share it with you if you sign a nda.

Me - ok... sure, how are you gonna share it with me.

Client - oh I can email you the spreadsheet.

Me - .... Spreadsheet ... Um... Ok... 'Stands up and walks away to tell this as the most interesting meeting of the month, to some one that will get it'

--

Buzz word for the win!

Big rant.
Just finished my first year of uni. I took an extra course on c# (mvc, entity framework) and android development in java. We learned a lot of stuff and at the end of the semester they held a contest. We had to develop an app respecting their specifications and add something from ourselves for extra points. Problem was that we were supposed to work on the project during our finals, which we didn't, finishing uni is on the first place. But we had a week after finals to work on it. I, like many others, slept very littlre during that week, only to work on that app, I worked for more than 13 hours a day to finish it (it was a pretty big app) and I was pretty happy with the end result. Today they were supposed to announce the apps that made it to the final. They just announced that no app deserves to be in the final. They know that we had finals, but that we could still do better. They just peed on our work, probably threw our code away, fucking +13 hours a day, 5-6 hours of sleep everyday, almost no fun for a whole week after finals, and they think no one deserves to win. Fuck them, fuck their shit contest. Fuck you essensys, I hope your devs read this, fuck you bell ends.

some people are fucking idiots.

i remember one time - i made a website which ended up having a slightly major security flaw.

the big isnt the point though. this guy told me to just "write secure code."

i consequently told him, "how about you go fuck yourself?"

well, he was a painter, so i then told him "maybe you should fucking draw better," and promptly left.

well, here i present what that would be like if other people were told shit like that.

depressed person - "just be happy"

teacher - "just make your students smarter"

homosexual - "just like the opposite sex"

presidential candidate - "just win the election"

homeless person - "just get a house"

idiot - "just stop being my client" (sorry had to vent)

well you get the idea.

devs should be treated as functioning members of society.

Alright, this my fucking rant right here. Distraction? This whole company is a distraction! Boss decided to throw us all in an open work environment doing jobs that require careful concentration. Straight outta college I'm getting handed vague ideas, (make a desktop app that helps our customers put data on the internet, make an iPhone app) with out so much as an inkling of what technologies to use, just make it work.
Ok I will but when you hit a roadblock with very little resources to draw in it's hard to stay focused.
On top of that since I worked in support for a year I'm our senior support person! But sometimes support just doesn't use their brains and I'm using my time to solve very basic problems.
That brings me to my next point, the goddamn piece of shit that is our telephone. Fuck that thing when it rings it's never good. Moreover, since I don't want to get roasted for not being responsive I have the motherfucker forward to my personal cell. So I answer every fucking call and I get so many spam calls!
Not to mention I'm mainly running the hardware show around here. Shits broke I'm the one fixing it. Need new shit I'm putting the order together.
Tried to get a new guy to be the sys admin, ordered a 6th gen board with a 7th gen proc, had to pull 3 machines apart to get that sorted. Then he left bc family issues, and has been gone for weeks.
The other devs are also slam up busy, and the main product is about 15 people's piss on a plate of garb age spaghetti. (I got a lot of shit going on but at least I'm the only one pissing in my spaghetti) it's a constant run around if who does what with a code first plan later mentality causing confusion and delay.
Nobody wants to help anybody because they are also annoyed with this setup and are getting bitched at by customers or management.
Sales is mostly composed of a bunch of crackhead yes men and women who just want a commission and only half know the shit we sell and have sold 15 new features that had not been discussed. But management always says make it happen. In what priority? It's all a priority they say! Wtf.
So yea, then it brings me to me, dealing with this much chaos at work makes it seem like a high amount of chaos in my life is normal. I'm just now learning to control this.
I've had to do a lot of growing up as a person and as a developer. I've went from being the most junior to about the 3rd most seniors and I've no doubt my efforts have contributed to the growth of the company.
I'm a big believer in coding flow, and that it takes at least 15 mins to get in that flow and about 5 seconds to break it. There is no do not disturb on the company chat, everything always on fire it seems.
So fuck a lot of this, but I've done the research and where I'm at is the best opportunity in a 100 mile radius. So I am thankful for this job. Plus I usually win the horror story contest.

So TL;DR the biggest distraction is every fucking thing in this god forsaken place.

just received an email about a "hiring tournament", didn't know that was a thing... soo disgusting

"Hello John

How are things going in your career? Are you interested in remote work, at challenging projects in big companies such as Google, Pinterest, Udemy, eBay, and groundbreaking startups within a warm and continuous improvement environment?

BairesDev is holding an exciting hiring tournament, an online competition where you will fight against other developers for the chance to get hired and win incredible awards with the opportunity to be a part of great projects. We would love to see you there!

It will take place on Saturday, November 28th" (but the image says 12th 🤪🤪)

So you are "fighting" other developers for the chance to get hired, what the heck

We had a blind auction at work. Selling off 'redundant hardware'

Most of it was old crap but a bit a couple of bids in for shits and giggles. Also, I'm a desktop man but we have rolling blackouts so an older laptop for the simple sake of having something bigger than my phone to browse definitely has some appeal.

So there was an old HP Elitebook 8540W. A chonky boi if ever I did see one.

Spec sheet as listed
4GB DDR3
i7 M 640 @ 2.80 Ghz
128GB SSD
Win 10 Pro
"not booting up/ power button flashing"

So bid R100. Now for context, a petrol is R22 a liter. A Big Mac is R43, a Big Mac meal is R90

So basically I big so I could harvest the SSD. And I won.

Much to my surprise, I simply attached the correct charger and it boots fine. The drive was empty though but that's fine cause I was gonna chuck Ubuntu on it anyway. Also found it was in fact 8GB of RAM. It also has a blu ray drive

So in summary, for the price of 1.1 Big Macs I got:
Full 1080p 15.6"
128GB Samsung SSD
8GB ram
First gen i7
Blu ray player

I'm most not sad about the 900x that I bid on as well. It was a cute little thing, my plan was to steal the ram and ssd out of this thing and put it in that, then boom ultra portable little machine for R400. Oh I also got an old monitor with a feint line down the screen for a grand total of R1

Similar to other countries if you work in international projects and companies.

If you work for big government related / small domestic company projects you can meet with comments and variables named in native language instead of english.

Just because there are probably only 2-3 companies who win every government project, they take all money and pay shit to developers.
To meet requirements they mostly hire fresh graduates to do the job.
CEO of one of those most famous quote is: You can replace every developer with finite number of students.

Ahh it's been a while since I've posted.. My skills with python are getting better (I'm a beginner) and I know for everyone else it's probably nothing but my first big project/idea I came up with was to program a simple rock paper scissors game that prints if you win lose or tie. I got the input and random output right without having to look anything up and that actually makes me proud of myself which is rare but for the printing out you win, lose, or tie I looked it up but I'm noticing that I'm getting better.

Then today I made a coin flip script that returns heads or tails in like 2 minutes and the only reference I used was my own code!!

Thanks if anyone actually read it I envy a lot of you for doing it for a living and I can't wait to do it too :)

Tired of hearing "our ML model has 51% accuracy! That's a big win!"

No, asshole, what you just built is a fucking random number generator, and a crappy one moreover.

You cannot do worse than 50%. If you had a binary classification model that was 10% accurate, that would be a win. You would just need to invert the output of the model, and you'd instantly get 90% accuracy.

50% accuracy is what you get by flipping coins. And you can achieve that with 1 line of code.

Big win today. Set up a custom motion capture pipeline for Unity using my Vive/controllers today. Quote a bit of scripting but I went from nothing to complete animation reel for our character model in a single day.

Successful day for once. I can sleep well tonight.

Can someone help me understand?

I subscribed to a nifty IT-releated magazine, and on its back, there's an ad for "Dedicated root server hosting", nothing unusual at a first glance, but after I read the issue, I decided to humor them and see what it is that they offered, and... It just... Doesn't make sense to me!

An ad for "Dedicated Root Server" - What is a dedicated root server first of all? Root servers of any infrastructure sound pretty important.

But, the ad also boasts "High speed performance with the new Intel Core i9-9900K octa-core processor", that's the first weird thing.

Why would anyone responsible enough want to put an i9 into a highly-reliable root server, when the thing doesn't even support ECC? Also, come on, octa-core isn't much, I deal with servers that have anywhere between 2 and 24 cores. 8 isn't exactly a win, even if it has a higher per-core clock.

Oh, also, further down the ad has a list of, seeming, advantages/specs of the servers, they proclaim that the CPU "incl. Hyper-Threading-Technology"... Isn't that... Standard when it comes to servers? I have never seen a server without hyperthreading so far at my job.

"64 GBs of DDR4 RAM" - Fair enough, 64 gigs is a good amount, but... Again, its not ECC, something I would never put into a server.

"2 x 8 TB SATA Enterprise Hard Drive 7200 rpm" - Heh, "enterprise hard drive", another cheap marketing word, would impress me more if they mentioned an actual brand/model, but I'll bite, and say that at least the 7200 rpm is better than I expected.

"100 GBs of Backup Space" - That's... Really, really little. I've dealt with clients who's single database backup is larger than that. Especially with 2x8 TB HDD (Even accounting for software raids on top)

This one cracks me up - "Traffic unlimited"
Whaaaat?! You are not gonna give me a limit to the total transferred traffic to the internet for my server in your data center? Oh, how generous of you, only, the other case would make the server just an expensive paperweight! I thought this ad was for semi-professionals at least, so why mention traffic, and not bandwidth, the thing that matters much more when it comes to servers? How big of a bandwidth do I get? Don't tell me you use dialup for your "Dedicated Root Server"s!

"Location Germany or Finland" - Fair enough, geolocation can matter when it comes to latency.

"No minimum contract" - Oooh, how kiiiind of you, again, you are not gonna charge me extra for using the server only as long as I pay? How nice!

"Setup Fee £60" - I guess, fair enough, the server is not gonna set itself up, only...

The whole ad is for "monthly from £55.50", that's quite the large fee for setup.

Oh, and a cherry on top, the tiny print on the bottom mentions: "All prices exclude VAT and are a subject to..." blah blah blah.
Really? I thought that this sort of almost customer deceipt is present only in the common people's sphere!

I must say, there's being unimpressed, and then... There's this. Why, just... Why? Anyone understands this? Because I don't...

!rant

I would like to present you the story that I tell everyone who is afraid of expectations, stressed to impress interviewers etc. Story about how I got my first job.

A little of backstory:
I always was good with computers, not like expert, but good. Of course parents were against giving me admin rights, so I just played games or such. When time came to choose my path throgh life, I've chosen to go medicine-related way, and chosen high school with such profile. I did my exams terribly, cause I never cared about marks, so I applied to uni for Information and Communication Technology course. I've learned basics of coding there, much stuff I don't really need right now, but in the end it was the best choice I've made.

With that way too long prologue...

I had to do internship for my uni and decided to try and find some year earlier. There was a lecture about multiplatform coding held by company my uni had partnership with. I've filled a questionare and few weeks later they invited me for assessment - event where they will choose who is good enough.
Of course I didn't believe in my chances to win an internship (1st place got full time job). There were 3 stages:
- solo coding (C/C++ own implementation of list)
- group designing (UML and presentation according to specification)
- interview (talking about code from stage 1, some questions, theory)

I failed 1st stage miserably... so I decided to don't give a shit and bravely presented our group project. A guy asked why we did not included a thing on UML, so I told him that it was not in specification - he was suprised but took it as big +. We "won" that part. When it came to interview... I was myself, cool headed, admited when I don't know things.

I thought that was it.

Few weeks later I received email - they invited me for internship.

They put me into Python project, language that noone in our trainee team knew. Told us 2/4 will be hired. At first I was not interested, wanted to finish my degree. But they convinced me. Now I'm here +2 years.

I am aware there are not many companies like that. Here, the people matters - you don't have to know everything, as long as you are getting along with others.

My tip for you though is: BE YOURSELF, NO MATTER WHAT THEY SAY 🎶

And I wish us more companies like that.😉

After I cured my depression with Vortioxetine which was prescribed to me because of pure luck, I can notice that something has changed.

I can't tell if I like or don't like something anymore. It doesn't matter now which food to eat, what music to listen to, I just can't see the difference. I dropped all my side projects, quit my job and got another, much easier one. I don't see the big picture of things anymore. I also lost my ability to reverse-engineer problematic outcomes and find solutions.

I used to be an architect but now I can't design anything, I just forgot how to do what I could do without thinking. I forgot Lisp and Clojure, functional programming is too hard for me now. I just don't understand it.

My iq also significantly dropped.

Summarizing all that, and also remembering that liking or not liking something implies that you have a personality, I can only see one reason – I probably don't have a personality anymore.

Here's a summary of my experiences from when I was depressed:

depression makes you dumb
you struggle with simplest tasks
you only eat and go to the bathroom because sometimes your basic instincts win
depression takes your power of will – the most valuable thing you have
society doesn't understand and shames you
you can't think
you can't focus
you can't study
you need money but you can't make it
you don't have that save space inside your thoughts anymore
you don't have dreams
your sleep schedule is fucked
every night there's a nightmare and you can't wake up
you can't cry
they prescribe you one neuroleptic after another and they only makes it worse, turning you into a vegetable
you feel nothing but shame and irrational infinite guilt

Gods are always looking out for me.

I got up at 4am to finish the work.
The meeting is at 9am.
So Gods turn the power off at 6am.
They want me to learn my lesson.
They just want me to plan ahead, manage my time and task wisely.
They just want me to become a better being.
They keep teaching me at every possible opportunities.

Yes, I understood. Yes.
But you know what, Gods?

Fuck you. Big fat ugly smelly fuck you. I can't tell you all to go die because you all are immortal and shit. So fuck you. I will never manage my time. I will always work at anytime anyhow I like. You think you can teach me? LMFAO. LOL. ROFL. You will never win. I will survive all the pain and shit. I will do what I like. So fuck you.

So the story is true and this is what we have to deal with now..

My friend and I started to build a Web Application for a Roleplay Community. The project was for a client mainly and they don't mind if we try to sell this project to the public. All goes well except the shitty design, which is the one our client asked for. So after 6 months of work we planned to switch our backend to Nodejs, the switch look quite easy in our brains [PHP => NODEJS] because we already use Nodejs for instant functions without reloading the page.

So during the planning we earn a client which is one of the member of the clan, but he pay for another clan which is 6x bigger then the one we're in. So we continue to develop and think about the switch. We learn a news about a new competitor, this one sucks, we tried their App and it's not worth the money they ask. A few days after another competitor enter the market, this one is a big challenge for us. "Sit down tight, yea you reading this"..

The competitor use BUBBLE to create their shit, they earned 10 clients in one week and just punch us with "THE ROCK" hand, they release a lot of feature each week, they're 6 devs on that (if we can call them devs), we're 2 programmers (True Programmers). What we do in 1 week they do it in 5 hours with Bubble, the switching to Nodejs was a badluck, you couldn't add feature because of this switch during 2 weeks, this made us later and second in the race. My friend (at the same time my employee and back-end programmer) move into another appartment which obligate him to work full-time. At this time I'm f****, I'm only a Front-End Programmer vs 6 Wannabe Devs with a mother**** tool of *** (#Bubble).

This is where I am, in this beautiful opportunity to win this market but with this bad luck occuring = the opportunity is low, but our advantage is we don't have made our project public yet so they're the only good option for the communities to get that kind of web app, the others are not included and only a copy of this (Their Product) or just a big junk made with Wix.

At this time I'm working hard to make this opportunity happen, I have my math which I have to finish to have my High School diploma to do, a part-time job to get if I want to stay with an internet connection and finally I have to find a way to still be able to make my dream come true (Working on my Business at full time & Make money from it) and continue to be a Front-End Programmer/CEO of an enterprise.

Run dual boot Mac Catalina and Win 10. Got a bunch of Razer shit from wife for Bday... super stoked. Big mat, mouse, keyboard.

Works like a charm on Win.

Works for fuck all on Mac. The app to manage device is no longer supported.

Went waaay down the rabbit hole trying to sniff the packets that were being sent to the devices via USB to sync their colors and patterns.

Finally give up that route.

I have now built a VM for windows to run synergy... then a VM for Linux for Polychomatic because the keyboard is older and not supported by synergy.

And I found if I boot them both then quit them both the settings for the peripherals stay until the next reboot.

But JFC... I literally have to boot three operating systems to pull it off.

Talk about some gift of the magi shit... I was so happy with the gift and at this point it has wasted dozens of hours.

Fuck fucking Razer. Looks cool. Doesn’t work.

In several occasions I run rm -rf * in the wrong folder (or wrong server!!).
No big deal so far, but I had to spent more time to redo my work since Linux has no fucking recycle bin like Win!
So I created this helper function to give my brain a few seconds to think before my finger hit Enter.

delete_all_files()
{
echo "WARNING:Delete all files? Type fluffycat to proceed"
read x
if [ "$x" = "fluffycat" ]
then
echo "Deleting all files..."
rm -rf *
fi
}
alias myrm=delete_all_files

Hehehe... I am a genius 😎

Just wrote an email to Rocket Chat with subject "Dear commercial hungry bastards" and complimented them with raping the f out of one of the best chat applications there is. With decent apps and stuff. For people who don't know, Rocket Chat is a Slack-variant. Once almost the same. But it was completely self hosted and under YOUR control. Now, if you host it locally, you get a screwed up design that you can unlock by paying.. If two users register on y our rocket chat instance, you get a commercial message of them regarding the growing team. Also, i have by default some remote user of them named rocketcat in my chat. Wtf, who wants that ffs? And again! SELF HOSTED SERVICE. Imagine, they have servers under their control and don't even have to do the hosting. A big win-win for them I guess.

Idiots found themselves a marketing team apparently.

So another rant inspired me.
Tell me one fact or detail about your favorite programming language, other devs not using it, might not know about.

I go with: In Delphi you don't have garbage collection, unless you use interfaces the right way.

So here I am coming to the end of the week after getting The Porcupines big web project into production. Pulled a 38 hour straight from Sunday to Monday chopping wood to make the thing fly. Pulled in other programmers and content creators to get the site full of something we did not have a week before. The fun part was having the account manager right there for 30 plus hours and actually seeing what it take to save a project when the client just thinks "it's just code". Now the boss has is asking for a list of all the work out of spec as they are bitching about the extra cost. These were the clients who did not read the functional spec and raked me over the coals after release that the home page did not match the design (the home page matched the design). I warned my team this would happen. They get all swept up in the hype and We can win! frame of mind and you can bet when the bitching starts it will come back to the paperwork you did at the beginning and the change requests and productions systems reports so you can wave it in front of ungrateful clients and not end up sad. Make sure you keep notes and document all of the requests and changes from internal and external even if you do not have to. one day it will save your ass and you will be able to whip it out and be a smiling motherfucker.

Story of my first successful project

Being part of a great team, I've shared in a lot of successes, one I am particularly proud of is my first attempt to use agile methodologies in a deeply waterfall-managment culture.

Time was June/July-ish and we applied for a national quality award where one key element in the application stated how well we handled customer complaint resolution.
While somewhat true (our customer service is the top-shelf good stuff), we did not have a systematic process in resolving customer complaints. Long story short,
the VP lied on her section of the application. Then came the 'emergency', borderline panic meeting (several VPs, managers, etc) to develop a process to better manage
complaints before the in-house inspection in December.
As most top priority projects go, the dev manager allocated 3 developers, 2 DBAs, and any/all network admins we would need (plus all the bureaucratic management that wanted their thumb in the pie).
Fast forward to August, after many, many planning meetings, lost interest, new shiny bouncing balls, I was the only one left on the project. The VP runs into the dev manager in the hallway and asks "Is my program done yet? If its not ready before December with report-able data, we will not win the award."
The <bleep> hit the fan...dev manager comes by...
Frank: "How the application coming along? Almost done?"
Me:"No, haven't really started coding. You moved Jake and Tom over to James's team, Tina quit, and you've had me sidetracked helping other teams because the DBAs are too busy."
Frank: "So, it's excuses. You really think the national quality award auditors care about your excuses? The specification design document has been done for months. This is unacceptable."
Me: "The VP finished up her section yesterday and according to the process, we can't start coding until the document is signed off."
Frank: "Holy f<bleep>ing sh<bleep>t! No one told you *you* couldn't start. You know how to create tables and write code."
Me: "There is no specification to write to. The design document is all about how they plan on reporting the data, not how call agents will be using the application to serve customers."
Frank: "The f<bleep> it isn't. F<bleep>ing monkeys could code against that specification, I helped write it! NO MORE F<bleep>ING EXCUSES! This is your top priority from now on!"

I was 'cleared' to work directly with the call center manager and the VP to develop a fully integrated customer complaint management system before December (by-passing any of the waterfall processes that would get in the way).

I had heard about this 'agile' stuff, attended a few conference tracks on the subject, read the manifesto, and thought "I could do this.".

Over the next month, I had my own 'sprints' and 'scrums' with the manager (at the time, 'agile' was a dirty word so I had to be careful of my words and what info I shared) and by the 2nd iteration had a working prototype.
Feature here, feature there (documenting the 'whys' and 'whats' along the way), and by October, had a full deployed application.

Not thinking I would get a parade or anything, the dev manager came back from a meeting where the VP was showing off the new app to the other VPs (and how she didn't really 'lie' on the application)

Frank: "Everyone is pleased how well the project turned out, except one thing. Erin said you bothered him too much with too many questions."
Me: "Bothered? Did he really say that?"
Frank: "No, not directly, but he said you would stop by his office every day to show him your progress and if he needed you to change anything. You shouldn't have done that."
Me: "Erin really seemed to like the continuous feedback. What we have now is very different than what we started with."
Frank: "Yes, probably because you kept bothering him and not following the specification document. That is why we spend so much time up front in design is so we don't waste management's time, which is exactly what you did."
Me: "We beat the deadline by two months, so I don't think I wasted anyone's time. In fact, this is kind of a big win for us, right?"
Frank: "Not really. There was breakdown in the process. We need better focus on the process, not in these one-hit-wonders."

End the end, the company won the award (mgmt team got to meet the vice president, yes the #2 guy). I know I played a very small, somewhat insignificant role in that victory, I was extremely proud to be part of the team.

Decided to start learning Swift as I became a Mac user back when I was in college (and I'm a Linux fan so win win?).

I went to college for Web design and development but think I should definitely be putting a big focus into app and game development/programming.

I also have a backlog of programming languages I'd like to at least familiarize myself with...

So back to Swift...anyone use it regularly here for app and/or game development?