Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*

We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:

- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings

Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!

*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*

Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason

*audience: ooooohhhhh*

You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.

*audience: laughs*

Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.

Backstory:

We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!

... oh to have a time machine

Working with C:

- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.

- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".

- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.

- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.

- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.

- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.

- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.

... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.

- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:

Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"

... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?

- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.

- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).

- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.

- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.

- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.

- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?

You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.

I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.

Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex

Found this at my school in the broadcasting department. It makes me mad on many levels

Whether you hated 2017, 2018 will be better, promise.
Wish everyone a happy new year.

Best wishes,
cozyplanes

P.S.1. Thank you everyone for making me the part of devRant!
P.S.2. Thanks David and Tim!
P.S.3. If you need to work todayn and you don't think that it is the right thing to do, think of engineers working in a TV/radio broadcasting company. They should prepare the show! (Poor devs there)

Let me tell you a crazy story

A friend of mine got the idea to make a charity gala for the Swedish event Musikhjälpen. It's a charity event that involves a small group of celebrities being locked up in a glass cage for a week, broadcasting on radio 24/7. During the event anyone can wish a song by donating $5 or more, and it will get played on radio.

So this friend of mine books a huge arena two months before the gala that hasn't even been planned yet, and it all came down to this big thing yesterday evening. With over a thousand people in the audience we managed to collect almost 200 000 SEK, about 22 000 USD. Oh, and did I mention it was all done voluntarily - even the scene and video coverage was donated.

So here we are, having collected a total of over 400 000 SEK (44 000 USD) for the cause of this year's theme; everyones right to be they way they are, regardless if you've got Downs Syndrome or any other disability. You see, this was done together with the Swedish Scouts, and during this week that's the crazy amount of money we've been able to collect for this great cause. Damn it's been great!

Just had to share it. You won't be able to believe what a great feeling this is 😊

I started a hobby software project producing TV graphics for eSports racing events.

At first it really only was a hobby without getting paid at all. After a few years we got our first customer for whom we build a fully functional TV graphics package for their broadcasting network for about 350€ for roughly 80-100 hours of work total.

This was the first time I was getting paid for my own software and since it was just a hobby, it was nice at that time.

After a few more years in the business, we are lucky enough that our software is used by the game developers themselves and big car companies for their eSports events and we are able to make a decent profit from our small hobby.

Took only about 5 years. So never give up, I guess. :)

So for my programming class, we had to make a game using Scratch. No problem, I said. Scratch is easy stuff. Just drag and drop blocks. Like legos. Legos that actually do shit. Cool.

So my game is about a dog underneath a plinko set, dodging balls that come down the plinko thing. Easy enough. I figured I would spice things up a bit. My teacher has to go through 20 of these games, I figured I'd make mine interesting. I add a little heart system.

Now for those of you who don't know Scratch, or don't care enough to look it up, all of Scratch's codes are within the sprite themselves. They can communicate with other sprites with a thing called broadcasting. When other sprites receive a broadcast, it can activate a script. yeah, cool.

So I had a script on the dog, that broadcasts a message to the heart system to remove a heart when the dog is hit. So to keep things short, I call the broadcast "Dog's hit."

For anyone who knows programming, computers have no clue what an apostrophe or a space is. They can't read it unless you have it all letters, maybe a semicolon. So, I removed the space and apostrophe, with my innocent 17 year-old mind not realizing this makes it "Dogshit."

Game's finished. Finally. Due date comes in, I submit it all proud and everything. I just created the best dog-plinko simulator of all time. Later that day, I show it to my friend, who then points out the typo.

At this point, my teacher already graded it. I went down to see him after school, and he must've known why I went down as soon as I walked in the door, and just cracked up. He told me it was fine, and not to do it again.

I left red.

I spent the last three weeks+ (literally THREE full weeks, weekends too) building something I thought was really cool, powerful, and useful. Made a blog post, posted a giant thread on the company Twitter.

Literally one person gave it a like.

I don't know why I give shit anymore, cuz nowadays if it isn't about getting rich quick, cHaTgPt, or some other made up hype, no one cares. Apparently I shouldn't either...

Meanwhile my 16 GIGABYTE RAM MAC, yes 16 GIGABYTE RAM can't even hold power while plugged in, and I'm still clowning around with an ancient iPhone 6 (actually one of my mom's old iphones) that barely stays above 20% battery for more than an hour...

And FINALLY, my FUCKING ISP is for sure screwing me, since I've been doing some hard core data streaming and broadcasting, even though I pay $60+ month for that shit it, keeps dropping out, shit doesn't load.... I mean wtf this isn't 1990 dialup AOL anymore

When I step back I just feel like the worlds biggest loser, maybe the world's biggest 🤡

So I just got off of a teams call which I suffered the classic BSOD part way through, a colleague tells me that the entire time I was disconnected waiting for my laptop to restart, my team's account was broadcasting a super loud jackhammer style racket to everyone else in the call 🤦🏼‍♂️ and of course nobody knew how to mute me so they sat in 3 minutes of what can only be described as noise 😂😂

I'm not sure whether to feel embarrassed to have caused the issue or to be annoyed that the software does something so random while I'm not even in the call or with a powered on laptop 🙈

Terminator's broadcast feature is nice.
However, it's fragile as crap, and oftentimes sends duplicate characters, or adds garbage.

Quite awhile ago I posted a PSA on how to fix it (by killing ibus) but now it's broken for me again. And due to just how it broke, I've given up on fixing it. Instead of broadcasting one or two duplicate characters like before, it now hangs for many seconds because it's broadcasting THREE BLOODY MEGABYTES WORTH OF DUPLICATES with every keystroke.

Like, seriously?
How do you fail that hard?

The client in my previous rant asked me to overhaul their whole internet radio system in three days.

So I went on and install RadioDJ, which needs MySQL, which also needs .NET framework. And an encoder is needed to convert the RadioDJ's output and port it to the streaming host, ShoutCast.

Oh, and every software install needs the network admin's permission.....which won't be here until end of next week.

And here I am, in their broadcasting room on a Sunday, trying to download everything that I can so the admin can install it.

On the bright side, that stupid icon is finally vertically centered.

We're doing a concert with our choir representing Sweden that'll be broadcast on radio across all of Europe in 2.5h. If your local radio's broadcasting it, it's at 16.00 UTC. Search for EBU Christmas concert :)

Just felt like telling y'all!

I come from an older generation where we didn't mention personal lives or politics at work. I can be productive and befriend people that are opposites of me politically, as a matter of fact I kind of like it. My complaint is when tech companies as a whole broadcast their views. They have every right to but does it make good business sense? I am also not comfortable with people broadcasting personal details about their personal lifestyle in a professional setting. I like to be lifestyle and political neutral in business.

Video conferencing apps:

Competition is great. It just sucks when you have to use all the competition.

Things I want to be able to do:

- Test Mic and Audio before joining the call, BOTH DAMN IT (some do do this, some just one or the other).

- No fiddling in settings to do test / change settings. I want to know / test every damn time before I join ...

- and it would be great if it forced everyone to test too ;) (obviously some complications there if folks are joining and don't intend to talk)

Things I to see all the time on the app, don't hide this shit, and GOD DAMN IT DON'T AUTO HIDE IT:

- Is my mic muted or not.
- Is my mic broadcasting sound or not.

I've been lucky enough to not have any terrible dork ups using these apps but man they seem to invite it by hiding stuff.

I kind of ended up writing my own version of Redis, just an Express server broadcasting events you send it, when I made my first full-stack project.

Boring uses of artificial super intelligence:
- eternal peace and prosperity
- hostile world domination
- genocide

Fun uses of artificial super intelligence:
- ALL the paperclips
- time travel games where you can meet accurate behavioral models of your future self taking into account memories of this same encounter
- trolling alien civilizations by broadcasting assembly instructions for it

When our app encounters an error, it shows an alert with an option to copy the error details to the clipboard, that includes the full stack trace, broadcasting to the world that we are coding in C#. Also, our page URLs show .aspx at the end, so anyone using it can see details of our implementation. Not exactly world-stopping since the desktop portal is only available on customer servers and the ipad app requires username/password AND pin authentication. But still....

Screw wasting time reading blogs and all the bloggers' cliché content like "10 tips to become a better developer" or "10 ways to boost productivity"

I already know I should take care of my body so STFU. Go back to actually building something and stop broadcasting your noobness like a talentless "Instagram Influencer"!!

There are many people broadcasting over Zello from Puerto Rico on the 'Puerto Rico' and other channels. Might help if you need to connect or need situational awareness.
Thoughts with our friends in Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands...
Stay safe.

I'm working on broadcasting changes in a SQL Server db using web sockets, but trying to not install anything because then I'd have to get our DBAs involved...

Spent hours trying to package a little node app that broadcasts the changes as an exe using nexe, realized for the most part it just compiles node from source, and the outputted binary didn't end up running, anyway.

Then it hit me; I can just run the node exe without installing it. Now I just have to get this service broker to work...

Only just got around to listing to the devRant podcast #1 this morning. DHH is a little potty mouth 🙃
Excellent content none the less! I kind of agree on DHH's stance on project managers.

On a side note, what other podcasts do you guys listen to? I quite like most of the content from jupiter broadcasting. LAS and Coder Radio specifically.

#Suphle Rant 9: verbatim exception scare

In multiple rants, I've bitched about laravel stealing suphle features. By some very weird coincidence, it appears I've been given a taste of my own medicine. Let me explain:

We're having a chat this morning on a laravel group chat when someone says he uses their notification component a great deal. Curious, I ask him what he uses it for since I only used it sparingly during my laravel days. To pry an answer out of him, I ask whether he uses them for sending app error alerts to a slack channel, and he responds with an eerily familiar term. I quickly look it up and the results on the docs are chilling: errors can be sent to bugsnag (which suphle has an integration for), sentry and Co. Errors can either be broadcast or disabled. Specific kinds of errors can be caught. My heart sunk. My brother called for something while I was going through it and I was struggling to pull myself together

Their exception component is almost identical to mine and I'm only just realising. It's shameful that I'm just learning about functionality present since 5.8. I thought my creation was novel. BUT! The good news is, the implementation differs

Too many errors went unnoticed during my time there because error broadcasting is optional. Since none of my colleagues read that part of the documentation, we were firefighting by pulling and wrangling production error logs. This informed their abolishment in suphle altogether

A relatively minor difference is in the APIs –their philosophy makes significant use of global functions, violating SRP, etc.

But the most important difference, that still cheers me up, is that they only catch known errors. Suphle has a construct for isolating calls to a decorated service. Any unforeseen error to occur during its execution will do a series of things before control is returned to the caller

I am planning to create a broadcasting channel app.
there is a group of people who are managing 20-25 whatsapp groups and are sending religious messages.
They tried broadcasting feature of whatsapp but they prefer managing group which makes sure that people are receiving messages.
broadcaster's number needs to be saved in receivers contacts for whatsapp broadcasting and all subscribers were not doing so, and complaining about not receiving messages.

so this group decided to manages whatsapp groups and put guidelines that no users other than admins are allowed to post anything.

so ultimately they want a broadcasting medium.

another problem here is that it is hard to find old messages to refer to. they are posting everything on blog too, but not all the subscribers are comfortable using that.

so I am planning to create an app which will store the received messages offline(last 30 days) and anyone can read older messages within the app and also can share it on other social media.

would you guys please suggest me architecture for this app?
I have learned PHP and thinking about using phalcon PHP framework, but it required VPS and it is costly.

any suggestions welcomed.

Do you have any solution or idea for broadcasting over Wi-Fi from PC to XBOX One?