!rant

I was in a hostel in my high school days.. I was studying commerce back then. Hostel days were the first time I ever used Wi-Fi. But it sucked big time. I'm barely got 5-10Kbps. It was mainly due to overcrowding and download accelerators.

So, I decided to do something about it. After doing some research, I discovered NetCut. And it did help me for my purposes to some extent. But it wasn't enough. I soon discovered that my floor shared the bandwidth with another floor in the hostel, and the only way I could get the 1Mbps was to go to that floor and use NetCut. That was riskier and I was lazy enough to convince myself look for a better solution rather than go to that floor every time I wanted to download something.

My hostel used Netgear's routers back then. I decided to find some way to get into those. I tried the default "admin" and "password", but my hostel's network admin knew better than that. I didn't give up. After searching all night (literally) about how to get into that router, I stumbled upon a blog that gave a brief info about "telnetenable" utility which could be used to access the router from command line. At that time, I knew nothing about telnet or command line. In the beginning I just couldn't get it to work. Then I figured I had to enable telnet from Windows settings. I did that and got a step further. I was now able to get into the router's shell by using default superuser login. But I didn’t know how to get the web access credentials from there. After googling some and a bit of trial and error, I got comfortable using cd, ls and cat commands. I hoped that some file in the router would have the web access credentials stored in cleartext. I spent the next hour just using cat to read every file. Luckily, I stumbled upon NVRAM which is used to store all config details of router. I went through all the output from cat (it was a lot of output) and discovered http_user and http_passwd. I tried that in the web interface and when it worked, my happiness knew no bounds. I literally ran across the floor screaming and shouting.

I knew nothing about hiding my tracks and soon my hostel’s admin found out I was tampering with the router's settings. But I was more than happy to share my discovery with him.

This experience planted a seed inside me and I went on to become the admin next year and eventually switch careers.

So that’s the story of how I met bash.
Thanks for reading!

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

I'm 20, and I consider myself to be as junior as they come. I only started programming seriously in June 2016,and since then, I've been doing mainly Android Work, and making my own servers and backends(using AWS/Firebase nd stuff).
For the first time in life, I was approached by a recruiter for a company on linkedIn. They "stumbled upon" my Github profile and wanted to see if I was interested in an internship opportunity. This company is an early stage start up, by that I mean a dude with an idea calling himself the CEO and a guy who "runs a tech blog" and only knows college level C programming (explaination follows).

So they want me to make the app for their startup. and for that, I ws first asked to solve a couple problems to prove my competence and a "technical interview" followed.
They gave me 3 questions, all textbook, GCD of 2 numbers, binary search and Adding an element to the linked List, code to be written on a piece of paper. As the position was that of an Android Developer, I assumed that Java should be the language of choice. Assumed because when I asked, the 'tech blogger' said, yeah whatever.
But wait, that ain't all, as soon as I was done, Mr. Blogger threw a fit, saying I shouldn't assume and that I must write it in C. I kept my cool (I'm not the most patient person), and wrote the whole thing in C.
He read it, and asked me what I've written and then told me how wrong I was to write 2 extra lines instead of recursion for GCD. I explained that with numbers large enough, we run the risk of getting a stackoverflow and it's best to apply non recursive solution if possible. He just heard stackoverflow and accused me of cheating. I should have left right then, but I don't know why, I apologized and again, in detail explained what was happening to this fucktard. Once this was done, He asked me how, if I had to, I'd use this exact code in my Android App. I told him that Id rather write this in Java/Kotlin since those are the languages native to Android apps. I also said that I'd export these as a Library and use JNI for the task. (I don't actually know how, I figured I can study if I have to).
Here's his reply, "WTF! We don't want to make the app in Java, we will use C (Yeh, not C++, C). and Don't use these fancy TOOLS like JNI or Kotlin in front of me, make a proper application."
By this I was clear that this guy is not fit to be technical lead and that I should leave. I said, "Sir, I don't know how, if even possible, can we make an Android App purely in C. I am sorry, but this job is not for me".
I got up and was about to leave the room, when we said, "Yeah okay, I was just testing you".
Yeah right, the guy's face looked like a howling monkey when I said Library for C, and It has been easier for me to explain code to my 10 year old cousin that this dumbfuck.
He then proceeded to ask me about my availability, and I said that I can at max to 15-20 hours a week since my college schedule is pretty tight. I asked me to get him a prototype in 2 months and also offered me a full time job after I graduate. (That'd be 2 years from now). I said thank you for the offer, but I am still not sure of I am the right person for this job.
He then said, "Oh you will be when I tell you your monthly stipend."
I stopped for a second, because, money.
And then he proceeded to say 2 words which made me walk out without saying a single word.
"One Thousand".

I live in India, 1000 INR translates to roughly $15. I made 25 times that by doing nothing more than add a web view to an activity and render a company's responsive website in it so it looks like an app.

If this wasn't enough, the recruiter later had the audacity to blame me for it and tell me how lucky I am to even get an offer "so good".
Fuck inexperienced assholes trying shit they don't understand and thinking that the other guy is shitsworth.

Currently trying to write a dark theme solution for the security blog in pure JavaScript (no jquery).

This is way easier than I thought!

* Go to sleep at reasonable times
* Watch some of those anime I never quite finished
* Read more books
* Become more proficient with rust
* Replace go with rust at work
* Setup a weeb media center I can remotely
* Finally make a personal webpage/blog without overthinking things, to actually get it done
* Find or make a storage solution for all the memes I sto- I mean collected, where I can add tags to find them more quickly. Would love to have them have the tagging be done automatically with machine learning, but I don't think we're quite there yet.

I hate that trend of making things more lax in terms of implementation quality while writing it off with a simple but stupid "oh computers are faster now, users have the RAM, yadda yadda". Yeah but back in a day things were actually running pretty damn fast in comparison while doing it on hardware that is totally potato in comparison to what's used now. This trend eats away ANY gains we get in terms of performance with upgrades. It deprecated the whole notion of netbooks (and I kinda liked them for casual stuff), since now every goddamn one-page blog costs you from several megabytes and up to tens of megabytes of JS alone and lots of unnecessary computations. Like dude, you've brought in a whole Angular to render some text and three buttons, and now your crappy blog is chewing on 500 MB of my RAM for whatever reason.

Also, Electron apps. Hate them. Whoever invented the concept, deserves their own warm spot in Hell. You're doing the same you would've done more efficiently in Qt or whatever there is. Qt actually takes care of a lot of stuff for you, so it doesn't look like you'll be slowed down by choosing it over Electron. Like yeah, web version will share some code with your desktop solution but you're the whole reason I'm considering your competitor's lack of Electron a huge advantage over you even if they lack in features.

Same can be said pretty much about everything that tries to be more than it should, really. IDEs, for example, are cancerous. You can do 90%+ of what you intended to do in IDE using plain Vim with *zero* plugins, and it will also result in less strain on your hands.

People have just unlearned the concept of conscious consumption, it seems.

Not specifically dev related other than being hired as a dev, more a corporate thing.

I have medical issues that mean I can be a bit variable in my starting time. Company was aware and floated flexible hours as a possible solution, but never said it *was* a solution, and just left it there really breezy.

Nailed this down with my line manager a couple weeks later after HR lost their shit, apologised and thought nothing of it.

Few days later I read a blog post about IP clauses in contracts that reminded me I intended to ask, as mine didn’t have one.

Asked HR, no response for like an hour, then “we’ll get back to you on that”

Following week, pulled into a sudden meeting. “Sorry for short notice of meeting, but we’re terminating your employment effective immediately for ‘lack of commitment’”.

Utter. Bullshit.

The day before, the company literally had a company day where they banged on about their values and how they wanted to support their employees and foster an environment for good health and good mental health.

No disciplinary proceedings. My line manager found out 5 minutes before I did.

I emailed a few colleagues afterwards and apologised, and they were stunned it had gone down the way it did.

I was so blindsided and angry in the meeting, especially after I believed I’d found a company that was actually different and cared.

And I did my work, I stayed late quite often, even produced a couple internal devops tools in my time there.

The kicker is that it was within the probation period, so I have literally no recourse for any action against them.

What’s the most bullshit corporate clusterfuck you’ve been through devRant?

what kind of dumb fuck you have to be to get the react js dev job in company that has agile processes if you hate the JS all the way along with refusing to invest your time to learn about shit you are supposed to do and let's add total lack of understanding how things work, specifically giving zero fucks about agile and mocking it on every occasion and asking stupid questions that are answered in first 5 minutes of reading any blog post about intro to agile processes? Is it to annoy the shit out of others?

On top of that trying to reinvent the wheels for every friggin task with some totally unrelated tech or stack that is not used in the company you work for?

and solution is always half-assed and I always find flaw in it by just looking at it as there are tons of battle-tested solutions or patterns that are better by 100 miles regarding ease of use, security and optimization.

classic php/mysql backend issues - "ooh, the java has garbage collector" - i don't give a fuck about java at this company, give me friggin php solution - 'ooh, that issue in python/haskel/C#/LUA/basically any other prog language is resolved totally different and it looks better!' - well it seems that he knows everything besides php!

Yeah we will change all the fucking tech we use in this huge ass app because your inability to learn to focus on the friggin problem in the friggin language you got the job for.

Guy works with react, asked about thoughts on react - 'i hope it cease to exists along with whole JS ecosystem as soon as possible, because JS is weird'. Great, why did you fucking applied for the job in the first place if it pushes all of your wrong buttons!

Fucking rockstar/ninja developers! (and I don't mean on actual 'rockstar' language devs).

Also constantly talks about game development and we are developing web-related suite of apps, so why the fuck did you even applied? why?

I just hate that attitude of mocking everything and everyone along with the 'god complex' without really contributing with any constructive feedback combined with half-assed doing something that someone before him already mastered and on top of that pretending that is on the same level, but mainly acting as at least 2 levels above, alas in reality just produces bolognese that everybody has to clean up later.

When someone gives constructive feedback with lenghty argument why and how that solution is wrong on so many levels, pulls the 'well, i'm still learning that' card.

If I as code monkey can learn something in 2 friggin days including good practices and most of crazy intricacies about that new thing, you as a programmer god should be able to learn it in 2 fucking hours!

Fucking arrogant pricks!

Well, today I felt like the witch from the sleeping hollow movie.

I was working on a code that logins to a page and download files to a folder, according to the user.

Well, I tried to use the webservices from the page (like it should be) but the links were broken, and I lost a entire working day on trying the API 😮

The second day I tried with Selenium. Everything was going ok, but I wanted to run it without opening the browser and I found a “Headless Chrome”. At the end of the day, I found several blogs saying that Headless Chrome can’t download files 😱 second working day lost

Today I read about “PhantomJS”. I tried the code in C# with OpenQA.Selenium.PhantomJS BUUUUUUT it was missing 😡 I also tried with Python, but I had the same problem.

Finally, I found a blog with a solution for C# with Headless Chrome 😄

God I hate slow burn in projects.

Trying to do something with a feature that's still in beta for the language. No docs so I asked for this.

Seems like a cycle of days where I'd be trying random ass solutions to no avail when suddenly one time I mistype the Google search and it brings me to this obscure ass blog with a potential solution that raises some new issue all over again.

It's been modification/addition/removal of over 10000 lines in different local branches and commits and only 200 of them actually are going to make it into the final code.

Ok so first technical blog post/rant cuz I just reduced a lot of debt... Prolly gonna put this in an email to my boss (he says progress improvement is now a priority but there are some problems as listed below):

So last week, I spent a lot of time investigating db logs manually to figure out a prod issue: tiring, time consuming, and not very effective.

This week I built an app. It took a few days but having the time to design it correctly, it is very powerful.

So in order to really do process improvement, you need to have: dedicated the time, the problem solving mindset (the right people), and the understanding of what the problem is and why so you can build a good solution (time and people).

Thank You StackOverflow.

After looking for 4 hours on internet and stackoverflow, searching whole documentation and blog pages, i didn't find a solution to an error I was getting in my Android app.
So I began and started writing the question on StackOverflow, phrasing it properly, to the point (so as to not get downvoted), providing all my files and code (so not to get closed or duplicate), formatting them properly, and explaining why my error was unique. On the last XML file I see something trying to call a function which wasn't declared.

So yeah, there you go.

But it's not over yet.
I saw it and got excited, corrected it and ran the code again. But accidentally ran it on the emulator and forgot my device wasn't connected anymore, and the emulator wasn't already loaded either. And my machine is old.

I don't know what to say anymore.

I'd like to start an online journal, like a blog, describing my adventure and things I'm learning as a junior web developer. I really like talking tech and teaching and inspiring others.

Q: Can you guys recommend me a platform or custom solution for my blog? I'd like a very customisable one but I don't have enough time to do it from scratch. (you can skip WordPress)

hey, so i have recently started learning about node js and express based backend development.

can you suggest some good github repositories that showcase real life backend systems which i can use as inspiration to learn about the tech?

like for eg, i want to create a general case solution for authentication and profile management : a piece of db+api end points + models to :

- authenticate user : login/signup , session expire, o auth 2 based login/signup, multi account login, role based access, forgot password , reset password, otp login , etc

- authorise user : jwt token authentication, ip whitelisting, ssl pinning , cors, certificate based authentication , etc (

- manage user : update user profile, delete user, map services , subscriptions and transactions to user , dynamic meta properties ( which can be added/removed for a single user and not exactly part of main user profile) , etc

followed by deployment and the assoc concepts involved : deployment, clusters, load balancers, sharding ,... etc

----

these are all the buzzwords that i have heard that goes into consideration when designing a secure authentication system for a particular large scale website like linkedin or youtube. am not even sure how many of these concepts would require actual codelines and how many would require something else.

so wanted inspiration from open source content to learn about it in depth, replicate and create new better stuff if possible .

apart from that, other backend architectures like video/images storage system, or just some server for movie, social media, blog website etc would also help.