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Don’t drink and code. Definitely don’t drink and commit. Absolutely don’t drink and push to master at 4:55 on a Friday.3
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Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) headphones in, whatever music that your mood requires at the time (my taste varies from classical to country to blues to jazz, pop, rock, metal and even heavy metal (growls) at times).
libre.fm is a good source for non-redundant music. The community channel is actually very good. (even though some crap do creep in every once in a while)
If you can zone out the noise around you, have a coffee machine within your chair's (assuming it has wheels) roll-range - you're all good.
PS : There's one problem that you can never rule out - interruptions from people around you, for that, you make a list of predefined answers :
9 -
Boss: "I know we just finished the first part of Client A's project but they also want this extra work done that wasn't in the contract."
Me: "Can't do it without pushing back Client B's work"
Boss: "Well we don't want that. We need to hit that deadline."
Me: "Cool"
Boss: "But Client A was really hoping this new feature which wasn't in the scope would be in."
Me: "Then we're pushing back Client B's work"
<<loop continues >>5 -
You know you're fucked when google returns less than a page of results on your short three word query. The first result is the only question on SO related to your problem un-answered for two years and the rest of them are in Chinese or Russian.9
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You know your week starts great, when you receive a call, that the whole shop database of a company is not working anymore.
Turns out MS Fucking SQL decided to drop all tables, just because the harddisk was full.
A SERIOUS FUCK YOU TO MICROSCHROTT!
It's not a lot of fun, when 15 people have to wait for you about 1 hour, until it is restored.
Why does this have to happen on a monday?10 -
I just love going through the code review gauntlet doing maintenance work, don’t you?
(“boyscout rule” = “leave it better than you found it”)
7 -
If you’re having trouble with the bossman’s ‘tude
He’s giving you the blues
You wanna dev, but not for this dude
Here’s what you gotta do:
Pull up the CV, it’s that easy
Send it every time
Just use a throw-away email, hey.10 -
April fools day prank idea:
1. Replace all semicolons with Greek question marks
2. Add a Gradle task that automatically fixes the semicolons, but only when run on the build servers
3. Watch as people get confused because the code builds in the server but not locally3 -
Yesterday my employer banned the use of all wireless keyboards and mice due to security concerns. This applies to all employees, including our many remote employees (I wonder how they plan to enforce that). I’m trading in my nice quiet wireless keyboard for some Cherry MX blues to protest. I really liked my current keyboard and mouse too. RIP8
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THE RULES OF TECHNICAL SUPPORT
Rule #1: The Customer Lies
Rule #2: Rule #1 still applies when the customer is your coworker
Rule #3: Customers following instructions is like characters dying in a movie: if it didn't happen on-screen, it didn't happen.1 -
Found out a senior dev threw me under the bus for a mistake I made while coding and it affected my raise. Not only was I never initially informed of the mistake, I was never told what went wrong and why it needed fixing. We also don't implement code reviews or anything of the sort. Seems like a great avenue for improvement and growth, right? 😑5
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This is what happens when you make style more important than function.
Pop quiz: when you lift the handle, what temperature water do you expect to come out? (This isn’t a trick question; assume you have an awesome water heater with instant warm-up time)
“Hot,” you might say, because the “H” is pointed towards you and aligned with the faucet.
“Cold,” you might say, because the handle is turned in the direction of the “C”.
There wouldn’t be any ambiguity if the H/C markings were on an immobile part of the fixture so that the relative position of the handle made the answer obvious.
(If you instinctively answered “cold” then congrats this is the perfect faucet for you.)
14 -
For any keyboard lover like me: this little guys are the most valuable things in my setup. Ortholinear keyboards from http://olkb.com I can't recommend them enough. They are fully programmable and comes in kits for you to finish mounting. The red one is a planck and the other is a preonic.
I'm using dsa keycaps from pimpmykeyboard and the switches are gateron blues.
They just opened a new massdrop for the planck, these are already assembled and ready for use. Check it out at https://massdrop.com/buy/...
P.S.: I have nothing to do with the project and I'm not getting paid to post this. Just love them and want to spread the word. Hope someone love them as much as I do.
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Today's project was answering the question: "Can I update tables in a Microsoft Word document programmatically?"
(spoiler: YES)
My coworker got the ball rolling by showing that the docx file is just a zip archive with a bunch of XML in it.
The thing I needed to update were a pair of tables. Not knowing anything about Word's XML schema, I investigated things like:
- what tag is the table declared with?
- is the table paginated within the table?
- where is the cell background color specified?
Fortunately this wasn't too cumbersome.
For the data, CSV was the obvious choice. And I quickly confirmed that I could use OpenCSV easily within gradle.
The Word XML segments were far too verbose to put into constants, so I made a series of templates with tokens to use for replacement.
In creating the templates, I had to analyze the word xml to see what changed between cells (thankfully, very little). This then informed the design of the CSV parsing loops to make sure the dynamic stuff got injected properly.
I got my proof of concept working in less than a day. Have some more polishing to do, but I'm pretty happy with the initial results!6 -
Regardless of your education, your career will almost certainly start with a low-paying job that's not really what you want to do. You'll do that for a year or two, and move to a job that's a little closer to what you want. Until after 10-15 years, you'll be doing work that actually interests you.
Almost every career starts with a period of what American blues musicians call, "paying your dues."13 -
I don't get what people don't understand about how monthly bills work.
"But I already paid you once!"
"Yeah, for the work we did two months ago. This is the bill for the work we did last month."
"... But I already paid you once!"
"Yes, and then you asked us to do more work"
"... ... But I already paid you once! Why are you trying to rip me off!?!"
*sigh*1 -
I've had today a meeting with the CEO regarding some designs. Here have some quotes that he made:
1. So you can click, click, click, click, click
2. numbers are so complicated so I just said something
3. I like the vibe in Amsterdam
4. We are doing a rebranding. Our rebranding document is the color of the 2 blues and one orange
5. I've to ask my wife for the design (with no design experience) to make the rebranding documents
6. In <the app our technicians/support use>, you can brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrb
7. This is what differeniate us between most applications; FAVORITE SQUARES
8. I never watch that mess. I don't even know if it works or have ever worked with it. (talking about a simple table view)
9. You have been reported to the admins (in an admin-only application for our customers)
10. It's always nice to see developers think; when I don't think
11. But it's already an iPhone (when looking at android designs & cries in largest userbase in my country)7 -
Monday morning. Return to Office after weeks of half sick work from home. Unsolvable problems awaiting you. Getting up early again. The crowded subway. The rain. And then suddenly you think that you have been working for more years then you have been in high school and university together. Time is a bitch.1
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I love listening to music while coding, mainly metal/rock/classical
Comment with 10 tracks from your playlist .... Here are my 10
0. Disturbed - stricken
1. Tremonti - decay
2. Black label society - bored to tears
3. Ac/dc - back in black
4. Rolling Stones - paint it black
5. Gary Moore- still got the blues
6. Carcass - blind bleeding the blind
7. Alter bridge - metalingus
8. Fear factory - linch pin
9. Pantera - 5 minutes alone8 -
I am become gradle
destroyer of builds
look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair
Why can't zip/tar tasks work like copy tasks? Whyyyyyyy?
I got it working--abusing tasks.create--but hot damn this should be easier. -
Came to work this morning with a bunch of cards coloured red, marked "urgent"...
And it's Monday... the day after Sunday...
The blues day...
Blue's my favourite colour, but this blue (and reds) I do not like...
Ok snoozy mind of mine... wake up!!1 -
This story is really quite amazing.
I got into my current company thanks to keeping a friendship from a quasi-ex-girlfriend. She got me in contact with her husband, who besides being a fellow nerd was also a highly-respected guy inside the company. Which is to say his name carried quite a bit of weight, and got me an interview and ultimately a job.
I got in via Support, but finally got promoted to developer last year, and have been enjoying it quite a bit. -
I had so much fun working on my side projects this weekend that now I'm sad to spend next 5 days on client projects.3
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In my life I have never had trouble researching a concept... Until now.. Never had so many fruitless endeavours, its getting frustrating.7
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Some people of devRant are astonishingly stupid.
I post a rant of Ryan Dahl where he says he don't like the unnecessary complexity of modern software. It's an obvious UX rant, but @Crost says that it's about rushing releases and writing sloppy code to "tick the item off my list and solve the problem". @Crost and other boubas, if Ryan's vision was more widespread, macOS, the OS you all hate so much, wouldn't have existed because Linux would have the best UX ever.
I post a rant about Google algo being nasty and throwing triggering shit at me. I previously posted stuff like this, Root confirmed that it works just the way I think it works, it's a manipulative piece of crap. But @Oktokolo says that "The algorithm literally just gives you same of the stuff you just saw", well, I don't know, nice view of the problem for a guy with no computer and no smartphone, @Oktokolo! All that "youtube recommendations gathered us together on some obscure video" comments, and you still don't get it.
I post a rant about how I redesigned a fucking color wheel icon. It shows a "before-after" pic and the colors are obviously the same, but fucking @Oktokolo be popping up again, telling me that I have eye condition (!) that makes me see more blues than yellows.
No wonder you guys don't know how to use CSS, the simplest programming language (yes, it's a programming language).
No wonder smart people like SortOfTested just leave.
I still refuse to believe that devRant user base consists of stupid people exclusively. Perhaps they are just average, and I'm the genius with my Aspergers just getting way more information out of my environment like I always do.21 -
A client brought us a project once related to drones. Our team came up with a great solution for the problem and pitched it back to the client. After going back and forth and beating us up on the price, they ultimately got cold feet and stopped responding to us.
Flash forward several months and wouldn't you know it, NASA and Lockhead Martin have the same idea and file the patent. Could have been sitting pretty if the client just went through and filed our design first which would have barely cost anything.2 -
Google has a really strange idea of what a rate limit is.
I’m trying to feed a few hundred URLs into the link shortener service. Docs say “1m a day, 1 req per second per user.”
No problem. Put a 1.2s sleep between hits.
Almost to the end... 403 rate limit exceeded.
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻4 -
The amount of willful ignorance about how “master/slave” might be offensive to some people is disheartening. Not surprising, but disheartening.
I thought it was suspect back in the 90s when I was configuring IDE hard drives.
There are loads of terms that express the exact same relational concept, that don’t have their roots in exploitative human relationships.
If you disagree, kindly fuck off. Your shitty attitude is why tech is predominantly white and male.30 -
I'm not sure which is worse: games that display the "unsaved changes will be lost" warning immediately after you saved, or games that display the warning and there's no obvious way to actually save your game.
Bonus points when there really is a manual save process and you lose all your progress because you thought it auto saved.1 -
1st. Put my Razor Blackshark Aviator headset on. Noise cancellation the low-tech way with full earcups.
2nd. I go on music genre binges for weeks at a time. Lately I've been listening to Viking inspired Dark Folk music like Wardruna, Fejd, Corvus Corax, and Forndom. That came after I did a month of proto rock n roll blues from the southern United States like Leadbelly, Blind Willie Johnson, and Mississippi John Hurt. I also drop some liquid DnB on a bender here and there.
3rd. I set up Hyper.is terminal to use the power plugin that makes sparks fly off of each keystroke.
4th. I set up Atom to work similarly with a continuous code counter that keeps a score of how long and fast you type continuously when coding. It also throws sparks off of the cursor as you type.
5th. Pop my neck and fingers and geterdun.2 -
I'm hosting dancers for BluesShout! a dance festival in Chicago. Three of the people I'm hosting are developers (two girls, one guy). There are a lot of engineering types that dance. If you haven't done any social dancing, you should really give it a shot. Find a Lindy/Swing, Blues or Contra group and take a class. You might love it. 💃💜3
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Definitely landing the first real gig.
I've been writing software since I was 12 (full disclosure: early code consisted of C=64 BASIC). I learned C in high school. Contributed to a MUD in my 20's. But I never got a CS degree and didn't really understand how hiring works, so I limped along doing technical support for years. Years turned into decades.
About 2 years ago, I became an embedded support person inside a development team. I got to show off my skills, and the year effectively became a live interview. Last October I finally got the title.
On the positive side, by taking the long way around I missed out on some of the insanity of the software world in the 90s/00s.2 -
Normal people spend their holiday weekend with friends and family. I spent it bisecting RetroArch to figure out exactly when a Wii U crash bug started happening.
(I exaggerate. There was plenty of friends and family time)2 -
When you've been very clear every time about what your app can and can't do. Boss misspeaks once and now you have to add a whole other feature.1
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When you spend months putting together a major update for the original scope of a project, release the update to a client, and the first thing they say: "Where's that new feature I asked for last week?"
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How is it, that features goes thru the entire mill of dev, staging, preview.
Then when deployed to production, things blow up..
Turns out, columns are nullable only in production DB and of course, those happen to be null in there.
If I had a dime for every time I’ve seen shit like this…
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻7 -
That feeling when your boss knows you have a major deadline coming up Friday but has you sit in on several unrelated meetings during work hours anyway. There go my evening plans for the rest of the week.
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Working in the industry for several years on dozens of projects with little to show. Between clients who can't pay, who abandon projects, who have scope creeped out of control, or are just plain slow to respond, my actual finished project output seems like 25% and somehow we're the ones who get shouldered with all the blame.
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How about "version control blues" about version control tools being more trouble than help? Because I'm having some wonderful time with subversion for VS20102
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Its festive season. Half of the team mates are on leave. Servers are down. No work can be done. Office looks life less ( which it always is). Boss asking why didnt you take leave. Yes because your free time off is almost zero. I need money. People being happy and getting in relationship/married. I am a fucking loner here.
Dragging my ass across the hallway like a ass fucked zombie. Typing this rant with a grumpy face. And people say monday blues are worst.
Fuck this emptiness. Fuck servers on maintenance. Fuck these white iridescent bulbs glowing for no reason. Fuck people murmuring around me. Fuck everything which is in my sight. Fuck this depressive fucking festive season.2 -
Ever get the feeling of enthusiasm on a Monday when you decide you are going to finish the project way before time but then you sit it in front of your IDE and you just want to cry and sleep.
I am going through that right now. -
PROTIP: If you go outdoors for recreation and you happen to be hiking in dry country where there is obviously a lot of potential tinder around you, don't be a dumbass and light off fireworks.
The lingering smell of burning is not conducive to creating software.
With the AQI north of 170, the building's HVAC can't keep up.1 -
Always love debating different switches with coworkers. What is your favorite blues, browns, reds, or some other type of switch?
Personally, I am a fan of Cherry Blues.1 -
Suffering from the cash flow blues.
Remote contracting roles are far and few between, and so far I’ve only found the one client, the problem is that because they’ve been burned in the past by contractors, they only operate on an order by order basis.
So we’re stuck in this perpetual cycle of issues > estimates > order > development > test > tweak > pay and repeat.
The problem is that there is always significant delay between the stages from both sides, either because they’re busy on stuff, or I’ve burnt myself out rushing to meet an estimate and having to take a bit of breathing room.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s great working in blocks of a few days to a week and then having some time to myself (and the money is nice too), but the cash flow inconsistency is super scary when you’re having to manage corporation tax, accountancy fees and a salary.
Anyone else have these issues / know good places to find remote contract work?2 -
Spending hours troubleshooting with a customer, nothing works, until eventually it comes out that the customer lied in response to one of my first questions.
Congratulations, asshat, you played yourself.
This happened across multiple companies, multiple classes of products, multiple classes of customers. It is how my “rule 1” came to be (see previous rant). -
I have an unfortunately low number of folks nearby who I can rant about foolish client behaviour to where they'll understand my frustration. It's the kind of stuff you don't want in writing forever on the internet but seriously some of the crap people do to sabotage their own success is mind boggling.1
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Fuck AIX, fuck you in your stupid face. I hope you choke on a mouse and die in computer hell.
Bonus points if you get the movie reference without google.1 -
There needs to be a new (MOOC) class for people like me.
Hi, I'm William. I can't get my head around designing systems. I've read GoF and a few breakdowns of it as well. I find some patterns obvious for my field of interest (game dev, woot!) while I'm reading through the stuff, but have a pretty hard time retaining much of it. I'm aware of the danger of over using patterns, so I don't worry that much about it. I'll look something up when I'm sure I need it.
Still, I'm tired of the tutorial blues. I can watch a few different people write entire games, usually not in the language of choice, but that only helps me so much.
How do I fight scope creep? In the meantime, how can I make things extensible? Scope does need to creep some, after all.
People joke about starting with (visual) BASIC ruining you forever. I don't believe in that crap, but is this just denial? Am I too dumb for this? Not that I'd ever seriously blame a language for that.
I've been a hobbyist for well over 10 years, please don't make me count exactly how long I've been unsuccessful.
I'm baffled by Löve. I think it's the coolest shit I've seen, maybe ever (unless we're counting IPFS).
I think what really prompted this rant, apart from the obvious degradation of my mental health, was my search for an entity component system for Löve/Lua. Hold your replies. I know there's a few of them, and I'm positive that they're fantastic. I'd roll my own, but that requires actual Lua specific knowledge that I just haven't dug all that deep into yet. I can't wrap my head around the ones that exist, even though I can tell their complexity is next to none really.
I have severe tool anxiety, I'm shocked that I've stuck with ZeroBrane Studio as long as I have. It feels good though.
Sorry to use this as "Devs Anonymous", but I think that's how this community helps (me) best.
I feel like I should stop now and just say: Advice? before this gets much deeper/less readable. -
I hate when you've poured all sorts of blood/sweat/tears/money into an app for a client and worked out all of the bugs they've complained about, only to see them throw their hands in the air saying "I don't know how to sell a mobile app, but since it didn't sell a billion downloads on day one it's a failure". Made more frustrating given that the app is a huge success to the people we've shown it to and selling it is stupid simple for someone with an inkling of sales experience.1
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The feeling you get on fixing an issue after breaking your head the entire day and you fix it just in time to leave home... One bug a day 🖖
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working with Mapbox and so far everything works except displaying custom svg pointers for single points while clustering the multiples.
the documentation is only semi useful.
and my work-at-home coworker keeps meowing at me like that guy who wants to talk about TV shows whenever I'm working
I want a nap! -
Not a rant, but was wondering:
If I undervolt Ryzen 5 3600 using Ryzen Master from windows, do I get the changes when I boot into my Linux distro? 🤔9 -
Run ./configure and gmake directly, it works.
Run a gradle script with exec tasks that runs the same commands, and the binary doesn’t run complaining about a library.
Fuck you AIX.
I haven’t fully root-caused it yet. I’m assuming something is fucking up during configure. -
Guitars and genres they're shine at:
• Les Paul: Alternative, Progressive, Indie, Hard rock, Psychedelic rock, Classic rock, Punk, Folk, Glam, Grunge, Blues, Southern rock, Garage rock, Post-rock, New wave, Shoegaze, Heavy metal, Stoner, Emo…
• Strat0caster: Alternative, Progressive, Indie, Hard rock, Psychedelic rock, Classic rock, Punk, Folk, Glam, Grunge, Blues, Southern rock, Garage rock, Post-rock, New wave, Shoegaze, Heavy metal, Stoner, Emo…
• PRS: lawyer blues5 -
What are your favorite keyboard switches for your mechanical keyboard setup? I'm looking to get a Vortex Race 3. I currently own a keyboard with topre and mx blues. I'm leaning toward blues currently.1
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It's always fun to have to explain things like COPPA to a client and why we can't just use high school kids to test an app targeted at an older demographic anyway. Looking at thousands of dollars in fines per infraction if they use it without parental consent.
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