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"You gave us bad code! We ran it and now production is DOWN! Join this bridgeline now and help us fix this!"
So, as the author of the code in question, I join the bridge... And what happens next, I will simply never forget.
First, a little backstory... Another team within our company needed some vendor client software installed and maintained across the enterprise. Multiple OSes (Linux, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, etc.), so packaging and consistent update methods were a a challenge. I wrote an entire set of utilities to install, update and generally maintain the software; intending all the time that this other team would eventually own the process and code. With this in mind, I wrote extensive documentation, and conducted a formal turnover / training season with the other team.
So, fast forward to when the other team now owns my code, has been trained on how to use it, including (perhaps most importantly) how to send out updates when the vendor released upgrades to the agent software.
Now, this other team had the responsibility of releasing their first update since I gave them the process. Very simple upgrade process, already fully automated. What could have gone so horribly wrong? Did something the vendor supplied break their client?
I asked for the log files from the upgrade process. They sent them, and they looked... wrong. Very, very wrong.
Did you run the code I gave you to do this update?
"Yes, your code is broken - fix it! Production is down! Rabble, rabble, rabble!"
So, I go into our code management tool and review the _actual_ script they ran. Sure enough, it is my code... But something is very wrong.
More than 2/3rds of my code... has been commented out. The code is "there"... but has been commented out so it is not being executed. WT-actual-F?!
I question this on the bridge line. Silence. I insist someone explain what is going on. Is this a joke? Is this some kind of work version of candid camera?
Finally someone breaks the silence and explains.
And this, my friends, is the part I will never forget.
"We wanted to look through your code before we ran the update. When we looked at it, there was some stuff we didn't understand, so we commented that stuff out."
You... you didn't... understand... my some of the code... so you... you didn't ask me about it... you didn't try to actually figure out what it did... you... commented it OUT?!
"Right, we figured it was better to only run the parts we understood... But now we ran it and everything is broken and you need to fix your code."
I cannot repeat the things I said next, even here on devRant. Let's just say that call did not go well.
So, lesson learned? If you don't know what some code does? Just comment that shit out. Then blame the original author when it doesn't work.
You just cannot make this kind of stuff up.105 -
As a long-time iPhone user, I am really sorry to say it but I think Apple has completed their transition to being a company that is incompetent when it comes to software development and software development processes.
I’ve grown tired of hearing some developers tell me about Apple’s scale and how software development is hard and how bugs should be expected. All of those are true, but like most rules of law, incompetence and gross negligence trumps all of that.
I’m writing this because of the telugu “bug”/massive, massive security issue in iOS 11.2.5. I personally think it’s one of the worst security issues in the history of modern devices/software in terms of its ease of exploitation, vast reach, and devastating impact if used strategically. But, as a software developer, I would have been able to see past all of that, but Apple has shown their true incompetence on this issue and this isn’t about a bug.
It’s about a company that has a catastrophic bug in their desktop and mobile platforms and haven’t been able to, or cared to, patch it in the 3 or so days it’s been known about. It’s about a company, who as of a view days ago, hasn’t followed the basic software development process of removing an update (11.2.5) that was found to be flawed and broken. Bugs happen, but that kind of incompetence is cultural and isn’t a mistake and it certainly isn’t something that people should try to justify.
This has also shown Apple’s gross incompetence in terms of software QA. This isn’t the first time a non-standard character has crashed iOS. Why would a competent software company implement a step in their QA, after the previous incident(s), to specifically test for issues like this? While Android has its issues too and I know some here don’t like Google, no one can deny that Google at least has a solid and far superior QA process compared to Apple.
Why am I writing this? Because I’m fed up. Apple has completely lost its way. devRant was inaccessible to iOS users a couple of times because of this bug and I know many, many other apps and websites that feature user-generated content experienced the same thing. It’s catastrophic. Many times we get sidetracked and really into security issues, like meltdown/spectre that are exponentially harder to take advantage of than this one. This issue can be exploited by a 3 year old. I bet no one can produce a case where a security issue was this exploitable yet this ignored on a whole.
Alas, here we are, days later, and the incompetent leadership at Apple has still not patched one of the worst security bugs the world has ever seen.
81 -
Not my mom, but my girlfriends grandmother. I told her that I am a software developer, a guy who makes the programs which run on computers.
She became really excited about that, because finally she found someone to repair her 40-year-old radio. I told her that I have no fucking idea about radios, but she did not want to hear that. So I looked at the case, randomly pushed some buttons and again told her, that I could not find the broken part, let alone repair it. But she didn't listen and told me to open the case and look inside.
Sighingly I opened the radio, looked at the inner parts and told her once more, that I don't know anything about this stuff. She told me to look more closely. About to lose my mind about this pointless task, I finally told her, that "the transistor" is the problem and that the best thing she could do is to throw it away and buy a new radio. She was happy with that answer.15 -
rant? rant!
I work for a company that develops a variety of software solutions for companies of varying sizes. The company has three people in charge, and small teams that each worked on a certain project. 9 months ago I joined the company as a junior developer, and coincidentally, we also started working on our biggest project so far - an online platform for buying groceries from a variety of vendors/merchants and having them be delivered to your doorstep on the same day (hadn't been done to this scale in Estonia yet). One of the people from management joined the team working on that. The company that ordered this is coincidentally being run by one of the richest men in Estonia. The platform included both the actual website for customers to use, a logistics system for routing between the merchants, the warehouse, and the customers, as well as a bunch of mobile apps for the couriers, warehouse personnel, etc. It was built on Node.js with Hapi (for the backend stuff), Angular 2 (for all the UIs, including the apps which are run through a WebView wrapper), and PostgreSQL (for the database). The deadline for the MVP we (read: the management) gave them, but we finished it in about 7 months in a team of five.
The hours were insane, from 10 AM to 10 PM if lucky. When we weren't lucky (which was half of the time, if not more), we had to work until anywhere from 12 PM to 3 AM, sometimes even the whole night. The weekends weren't any better, for the majority of the time we had to put in even more extra hours on the weekends. Luckily, we were paid extra for them, but the salary was no way near fair (the majority of the team earned about 1000€/mo after taxes in a country where junior developers usually earn 1500€/month). Also because of the short deadline given to us, we skipped all the important parts like writing tests, doing CI, code reviews, feature branching/PR's, etc. I tried pushing the team and the management to at least write tests and make feature branches/PRs, but the management always told me that there wasn't enough time to coordinate and work on all that, that we'll do that after launching the MVP, etc. We basically just wrote features, tested them by hand, and pushed into the "test" branch which would later get tested and merged into master.
During development, one of the other juniors managed to write the worst kind of Angular code you could imagine - enormous amounts of duplication, no reusable components (every view contained the everything used in the view, so popups and other parts that should logically be reusable were in every view separately), fuck - even the HTML was broken (the most memorable for me were the "table > tr > div > td" ones, but that's barely scratching the surface). He left a few months into the project, and we had to build upon his shit, ever so slightly trying to fix the shit he produced. This could have definitely been avoided if we did code reviews.
A month after launching the MVP for internal testing, the guy working on the logistics system had burned out and left the company (he's earning more than twice the salary he got here, happy for him, he is a great coder and an even better team player). This could have been avoided if this project had been planned better, but I can't really blame them, since it was the first project they had at this scale (even though they had given longer deadlines for projects way smaller than this).
After we finished and launched the MVP, the second guy from management joined, because he saw we needed extra help. Again I tried to push us into investing the time to write tests for the system (because at this point we had created an unstable cluster fuck of a codebase), but again to no avail. The same "no time, just test it manually for now, we'll do that later when we have time" bullshit from management.
Now, a few weeks ago, the third guy from management joined. He saw what a disaster our whole project was. Him joining was simply a blessing from the skies. He started off by writing migrations using sequelize. I talked to him about writing tests and everything, and he actually listened. He told me that I'm gonna be the one writing them, and also talked to the rest of management about it. I was overjoyed. I could actually hear the bitterness in the voices of the rest of management when they told me how to write the tests, what to test, etc. But I didn't give a flying rat's ass, I was hapi.
I was told to start off by writing a smoke test for the whole client flow using Puppeteer. I got even happier, since I was finally able to again learn new things (this stopped at about 4 or 5 months into the project).
I'm using jest as the framework and started writing the tests in TypeScript. Later I found a library called jest-extended, but it didn't have type defs, so I decided to write them and, for the first time in my life, contribute to the open source community.19 -
So... some guy at the company I work for complains to software dept that we've broken his app.
He's saying we've removed the drop down list from this field he uses....
We're all like... there's never been a drop down list there?!
it escalates and some big-dogs get involved. One of us has to go out and see him. Turns out the "drop down list" was his browsers saved autocomplete history, and he had changed browsers.
Asshole.2 -
--- GitHub 24-hour outage post mortem ---
As many of you will remember; Github fell over earlier this month and cracked its head on the counter top on the way down. For more or less a full 24 hours the repo-wrangling behemoth had inconsistent data being presented to users, slow response times and failing requests during common user actions such as reporting issues and questioning your career choice in code reviews.
It's been revealed in a post-mortem of the incident (link at the end of the article) that DB replication was the root cause of the chaos after a failing 100G network link was being replaced during routine maintenance. I don't pretend to be a rockstar-ninja-wizard DBA but after speaking with colleagues who went a shade whiter when the term "replication" was used - It's hard to predict where a design decision will bite back and leave you untanging the web of lies and misinformation reported by the databases for weeks if not months after everything's gone a tad sideways.
When the link was yanked out of the east coast DC undergoing maintenance - Github's "Orchestrator" software did exactly what it was meant to do; It hit the "ohshi" button and failed over to another DC that wasn't reporting any issues. The hitch in the master plan was that when connectivity came back up at the east coast DC, Orchestrator was unable to (un)fail-over back to the east coast DC due to each cluster containing data the other didn't have.
At this point it's reasonable to assume that pants were turning funny colours - Monitoring systems across the board started squealing, firing off messages to engineers demanding they rouse from the land of nod and snap back to reality, that was a bit more "on-fire" than usual. A quick call to Orchestrator's API returned a result set that only contained database servers from the west coast - none of the east coast servers had responded.
Come 11pm UTC (about 10 minutes after the initial pant re-colouring) engineers realised they were well and truly backed into a corner, the site was flipped into "Yellow" status and internal mechanisms for deployments were locked out. 5 minutes later an Incident Co-ordinator was dragged from their lair by the status change and almost immediately flipped the site into "Red" status, a move i can only hope was accompanied by all the lights going red and klaxons sounding.
Even more engineers were roused from their slumber to help with the recovery effort, By this point hair was turning grey in real time - The fail-over DB cluster had been processing user data for nearly 40 minutes, every second that passed made the inevitable untangling process exponentially more difficult. Not long after this Github made the call to pause webhooks and Github Pages builds in an attempt to prevent further data loss, causing disruption to those of us using Github as a way of kicking off our deployment processes (myself included, I had to SSH in and run a git pull myself like some kind of savage).
Glossing over several more "And then things were still broken" sections of the post mortem; Clever engineers with their heads screwed on the right way successfully executed what i can only imagine was a large, complex and risky plan to untangle the mess and restore functionality. Github was picked up off the kitchen floor and promptly placed in a comfy chair with a sweet tea to recover. The enormous backlog of webhooks and Pages builds was caught up with and everything was more or less back to normal.
It goes to show that even the best laid plan rarely survives first contact with the enemy, In this case a failing 100G network link somewhere inside an east coast data center.
Link to the post mortem: https://blog.github.com/2018-10-30-...6 -
Four engineers get in a car. The car won't start.
The mechanical engineer says:
It's a broken starter.
The electrician's engineer says:
The battery is dead.
The chemical engineer says:
There are impurities in the gas.
The software engineer says:
Guys, try getting out of the the car then back in!1 -
Last weekend I witnessed the most infected computer I have ever seen in my life...
I went on a private party. A girl had her laptop plugged to the speakers to play some music. This thing was literally 99% cancer. The first thing I noticed, when I looked at her opened browser, was that nearly half the screen was taken by toolbars. Also any popular website you could visit had additional ads INJECTED into it. The fist 10 YouTube search results: always porn. No idea how that didn't make her suspicious.
Precisely every 10th click (anywhere not only in the browser) would open up a window with either more ads or an aggressively blinking message saying: "A virus has been detected on your machine. Click here to download our antivirus programm. You have 60 seconds left before your firewall breaks!!!".
Also physically this device was on the edge of completely broken. The power supply had to be taped to the socket because it was so loose. Every little jiggle would immediatly shut the system down and Windows had to be completely reinstalled (which of course didn't solved any of the "software issues").
First I wanted to use that laptop to show some friends a new web project of mine but this thing probably would have DDoSed the shit out of my recently finished work or something.
I couldn't decide if I should laugh or cry...9 -
I have this little hobby project going on for a while now, and I thought it's worth sharing. Now at first blush this might seem like just another screenshot with neofetch.. but this thing has quite the story to tell. This laptop is no less than 17 years old.
So, a Compaq nx7010, a business laptop from 2004. It has had plenty of software and hardware mods alike. Let's start with the software.
It's running run-off-the-mill Debian 9, with a custom kernel. The reason why it's running that version of Debian is because of bugs in the network driver (ipw2200) in Debian 10, causing it to disconnect after a day or so. Less of an issue in Debian 9, and seemingly fixed by upgrading the kernel to a custom one. And the kernel is actually one of the things where you can save heaps of space when you do it yourself. The kernel package itself is 8.4MB for this one. The headers are 7.4MB. The stock kernels on the other hand (4.19 at downstream revisions 9, 10 and 13) took up a whole GB of space combined. That is how much I've been able to remove, even from headless systems. The stock kernels are incredibly bloated for what they are.
Other than that, most of the data storage is done through NFS over WiFi, which is actually faster than what is inside this laptop (a CF card which I will get to later).
Now let's talk hardware. And at age 17, you can imagine that it has seen quite a bit of maintenance there. The easiest mod is probably the flash mod. These old laptops use IDE for storage rather than SATA. Now the nice thing about IDE is that it actually lives on to this very day, in CF cards. The pinout is exactly the same. So you can use passive IDE-CF adapters and plug in a CF card. Easy!
The next thing I want to talk about is the battery. And um.. why that one is a bad idea to mod. Finding replacements for such old hardware.. good luck with that. So your other option is something called recelling, where you disassemble the battery and, well, replace the cells. The problem is that those battery packs are built like tanks and the disassembly will likely result in a broken battery housing (which you'll still need). Also the controllers inside those battery packs are either too smart or too stupid to play nicely with new cells. On that laptop at least, the new cells still had a perceived capacity of the old ones, while obviously the voltage on the cells themselves didn't change at all. The laptop thought the batteries were done for, despite still being chock full of juice. Then I tried to recalibrate them in the BIOS and fried the battery controller. Do not try to recell the battery, unless you have a spare already. The controllers and battery housings are complete and utter dogshit.
Next up is the display backlight. Originally this laptop used to use a CCFL backlight, which is a tiny tube that is driven at around 2000 volts. To its controller go either 7, 6, 4 or 3 wires, which are all related and I will get to. Signs of it dying are redshift, and eventually it going out until you close the lid and open it up again. The reason for it is that the voltage required to keep that CCFL "excited" rises over time, beyond what the controller can do.
So, 7-pin configuration is 2x VCC (12V), 2x enable (on or off), 1x adjust (analog brightness), and 2x ground. 6-pin gets rid of 1 enable line. Those are the configurations you'll find in CCFL. Then came LED lighting which required much less power to run. So the 4-pin configuration gets rid of a VCC and a ground line. And finally you have the 3-pin configuration which gets rid of the adjust line, and you can just short it to the enable line.
There are some other mods but I'm running out of characters. Why am I telling you all this? The reason is that this laptop doesn't feel any different to use than the ThinkPad x220 and IdeaPad Y700 I have on my desk (with 6c12t, 32G of RAM, ~1TB of SSDs and 2TB HDDs). A hefty setup compared to a very dated one, yet they feel the same. It can do web browsing, I can chat on Telegram with it, and I can do programming on it. So, if you're looking for a hobby project, maybe some kind of restrictions on your hardware to spark that creativity that makes code better, I can highly recommend it. I think I'm almost done with this project, and it was heaps of fun :D
12 -
My first internship was unpaid. "For the experience" and shit. My first task was to clear out an entire office full to the literal ceiling with the phones of people who had been laid off or quit. There were now just three old guys in the entire office. And me. Go figure. I need to find that picture, it's truly unbelievable.
My next task was to sort cables in the store room. Mind you, this was supposed to be a software dev internship.
I consistently had to ASK for work to do. If I didn't, I would just sit in my new office all day doing homework and playing with linux liveCDs and nobody cared.
So the third task they gave me was to try to restore a very old (like XP old) computer that had a broken hard drive, literally broken. Said they wanted to "repurpose it." As busy work I guess.
So I scrounged around the cleptomaniacal cesspool of dated and neglected tech and found a hard drive. Pop it in, chkdsk, fdisk, good to go. Spend hours installing XP while sorting more random cables and doing my homework because honestly writing a history paper is more valuable to my dev career than this complete bullshit. Finally get the thing working and go to report the miracle of rebirth to my higher-up. He says "oh cool," doesn't smile, and hands me a list of software to install.
I come back 20 minutes later - "Hey, most of these require corporate licenses."
Guy says "yup" and goes back to ignoring me. Never gives me a company card to buy licenses, or a list of ones already bought. I've revived the computer equivalent of Moses from the computer equivalent of permadeath just for this asshole to completely disregard that and give me an(other) impossible task, just to get me off his back. Excuse me for imposing with free (then-child) labor, you ass.
I spend maybe another week there doing homework in the office I cleaned and contemplating stealing everything of value. I guarantee they wouldn't have noticed though, which somehow made the idea less appealing.
I quit by texting my boss.
He never replied.
I wish I had stolen their laptop RAM.
It's probably still sitting on boss's shelf collecting dust and being a miserable, outdated fucking waste of space, just like him and his two remaining coworkers.4 -
Story time. My first story ever on devRant.
To my ex-company that I bear for a long time... I joined my ex-company 3 years ago. My ex-company assigned me and one girl teammate to start working on a brand new big web project (big one - two members - really?)
My teammate quitted later, I have to work alone after then. I asked if someone can join this project, but manager said other people are busy. Yea, they are fucking busy reading MANGA shit everyday... Oops, I saw it because whenever I about to leave my damn chair, they begin chanting some hotkey magic and begin doing "poker face" like "I'm doing some serious shit right here".. FUCK MY CO-WORKERS!
My manager didn't know shit about software development, and keep barking about Agile, Waterfall and AI shit... He didn't even fucking know what this project should look like, he keep searching the internet for similar functions and gave me screenshots, or sometimes they even hold a meeting of a bunch of random non-related guys who even not working on the project, to discuss about requirements, which last for endless hours... FUCK MY MANAGER!
I was the one in charge for everything. I design the architecture, database, then I fucking implement my own designed architect myself, and I fucking test functions that I fucking implemented myself based on my fucking design. I was so tried, I don't know what the fuck I am working on. Requirement changes everyday. My beautiful architecture began to falling off. I was so tired and began use hack fixes here and there many places in the project. I knew it's bad, but I just don't have time to carefully reconsider it. My test case began becoming useless as requirements changed. My manager's boss push him to finish this project. He began to test, he start complaining about bug here and there, blaming me about why functions are broken, and why it not work as he expected (which he didn't even tell my how he expected). ... I'm not junior developer, but this one-man project is so overwhelmed for me... FUCK MY JOB!
At this time, I have already work this project for almost 2.5 years. I felt very upset. I also feel disappointed about myself, although I know that is not all my entire faults. The feeling that you was given a job, but you can not get it done, I feel like a fucking LOSER. I really wanted to quit and run away from this shithole. But on the other hand I also want to finish this project before I quit. My mind mixed. I'm a hard-worker. I keep pushing myself, but the workplace is so toxic, I can feel it eating up my motivation everyday. I start questioning myself: "Is the job I am doing important?", "If this is really important project, didn't they should assign more members?", I feel so lonely at work... MY MIND IS FUCKED UP!
Finally, after a couple months of stress. I made up my mind that no way this project is gonna end within my lifespan. I decide to quit. Although my contract pointed that I only need to tell one month in advance. I gave my manager 3 months to find new members for project. I did handle over what I know, documents, and my fucked up ultra complexity source code with many small sub-systems which I did all by myself.
Well, I am with a new employer right now. They are good company. At least, my new manager do know how to manage things. My co-workers are energy and hard-working. I am put to fight on the frontline as usual (because of my "Senior position"). But I can feel my team, they got my back. My loneliness is now gone. Job is still hard, but I know for sure that I'm doing things on purpose, I am doing something useful. And to me that is the greatest rewards and keep me motivative! From now, will be the beginning for first page of my new story...
Thanks for reading ...12 -
Just before you, my fellow system programmer, scroll past this, let me say this:
🍬 The web is actiually simple. 🍬
Both HTML and CSS is declarative. It's all easy when you understand the concepts, learn how to be idiomatic and quit trying to do that imperative bullshit in languages that aren't imperative.
HTML is simple. You know the boilerplate: doctype, head, body, that's all. Just mark it up and do NOT look at it before you end, mark it up as it were article or something. The appearance is up to css.
CSS is simple. You may even forget bem or rscss, you're already a skilled software developer. Use common sense and your code-splitting and naming skills you gained reading The Code Complete or doing software development for years.
Forget mockups. Forget absolute positioning, forget setting width and height in pixels. Go to awwwards, find some inspiration. Draw some buttons and fields on paper with your good old pencil. Then go and write some css. Feel free to steal some shadows and transitions from codepen.
Read about 8-pixel grid system. Let every element push away from others by setting something like margin: 16px; and whoops! You've just got fully responsive and got great vertical rhythm without even using media queries!
Oh my god, do NEVER set width and height explicitly! Type something like button { width: 120px; } and bang! The entire web page is broken. Quit that shit. Let it resize as it should. It will resize itself to fit its contents.
HTML is by default ready for your template engine. That's how you receive data from server — as server-side rendered, plain old HTML page. On the other hand, the form element is the most axiomatic and simple way to send the data to server. That's how you send it — as plain old GET or POST that every webserver can handle.
All of there are true:
1. It's easy to get great 100% responsiveness without media queries.
2. It's easy to align items in row, it's just one line of css. Maybe two, if you still want elements to wrap, but want to use flexbox:
.parent {
display: flex;
flex-wrap: wrap;
}
3. HTML and CSS are fast by default.
4. You don't need mockups to achieve great visual experience. Mockups is imperative, web is declarative.
5. You may not even need JavaScript to make great website.
Go on, ask me a question about web! I'll ready to answer everything.21 -
Microsoft Internet Explorer is my least favorite enterprise software. We are forced to use it. I hate being forced. This is like being asked to climb a mountain with a broken leg...not fun, painful, hopeless, threatening, discouraging, slow, and ugly, and infected...it is downright evil corporate bullshit.
<!--[if IE]>
<link rel="styleshit" type=trash/css" href="die-die-die-you-evil-bastard.css"/>
<![endif]-->
Just push it over the edge with a chrome sword stuck in its back. I will just sit here by the fire with my pet fox and watch the opera as I listen to vivaldi.
3 -
ESTIMATING FUCKING HOURS.
Well not literally, that only takes 10 minutes.
But software estimation... anyone pretending to be good at it is a dirty liar. Adding a button? Uh, let's say 2 hours, I mean I gotta poop in between as well, and it's probably some broken bootstrap theme with hacked custom margins.
Building a commenting system coupled to an ancient CRM? Uh... maybe one day? Maybe a month? I don't even know what the CRMs looks like? You won't show me because "that's irrelevant"?
WELL THEN I DON'T FUCKING HAVE A CLUE.
And in the time we spent on discussing time estimations, I could have written like half of the feature... or zero... because you still haven't fucking shown me what the CRM API looks like.
YOU KNOW WHAT I'LL GIVE YOU AN ESTIMATION. ME. VACATION. DONE IN 6 WEEKS.6 -
Forget about Internet explorer compatibility, EMAIL TEMPLATES are the actual worst. Outlook uses the same html rendering engine as MS WORD. It's sooo painful. All the bad practices you had to do 15 years ago, you have to do when you write email templates.
YOU WILL NOT KNOW PAIN until you have to make an email template, that works in Gmail, Yahoo Mail, OUTLOOK, outlook.com, outlook for mac, MOBILE, Android, the gmail app, IOS, apple mail, and so on. And after you make an unholy abomination of table garbage, then having to make it responsive/mobile friendly after all that!
If something is broken in one client, fixing it will break something in a different client! And then having to take a stab in the dark to try to fix it and then sending yet another test email (which costs $ per test)
I must have slashed decades off my life having to build email templates. It really is horrendous. There are frameworks like Zurb for email that at least let you feel like you're using a modern workflow. But things break just as often.
Honestly if you have the option, use a wysiwyg editor for building emails. At least when it does break (and they all will) you can at least blame the software.
Which is better than spending 4 hours on why that table cell doesn't line up correctly in outlook.7 -
I have been gone a while. Sorry. Workplace no longer allows phones on the lab and I work exclusively in the lab. Anyway here is a thing that pissed me off:
Systems Engineer (SE) 1 : 😐 So we have this file from the customer.
Me: 😑 Neat.
SE1: 😐 It passes on our system.
Me: 😑 *see prior*
Inner Me (IM): 🙄 is it taught in systems engineer school to talk one sentence at a time? It sounds exhausting.
SE1: but when we test it on your system, it fails. And we share the same algorithms.
Me: 😮 neat.
IM: 😮neat, 😥 wait what the fuck?
Me: 😎 I will totally look into that . . .
IM: 😨 . . . Thing that is absolutely not supposed to happen.
*Le me tracking down the thing and fixing it. Total work time 30 hours*
Me: 😃 So I found the problem and fixed it. All that needs to happen is for review board to approve the issue ticket.
SE1: 😀 cool. What was the problem?
Me: 😌 simple. See, if the user kicked off a rerun of the algorithm, we took your inputs, processed them, and put them in the algorithm. However, we erroneously subtracted 1 twice, where you only subtract 1 once.
SE1: 🙂 makes sense to me, since an erroneous minus 1 only effects 0.0001% of cases.
*le into review board*
Me: 😐 . . . so in conclusion this only happens in 0.0001% of cases. It has never affected a field test and if this user had followed the user training this would never have been revealed.
SE2: 🤨 So you're saying this has been in the software for how long?
Me: 😐 6 years. Literally the lifespan of this product.
SE2: 🤨 How do you know it's not fielded?
Me: 😐 It is fielded.
SE2: 🤨 how do you know that this problem hasn't been seen in the field?
Me: 😐 it hasn't been seen in 6 years?
IM: 😡 see literally all of the goddamn words I have said this entire fucking meeting!!!
SE2: 😐 I would like to see an analysis of this to see if it is getting sent to the final files.
Me: 🙄 it is if they rerun the algorithm from our product. It's a total rerun, output included. It's just never been a problem til this one super edge case that should have been thrown out anyway.
SE2: 🤨 I would still like to have SE3 run an analysis.
Me: 🙄 k.
IM: 😡 FUUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOU
*SE3 run analysis*
SE3: 😐 getting the same results that Me is seeing.
Me: 😒 see? I do my due diligence.
SE2: 😐 Can you run that analysis on this file again that is somehow different, plus these 5 unrelated files?
SE3: 😎 sure. What's your program's account so I can bill it?
IM: 😍 did you ever knooooow that your my heeeerooooooo.
*SE3 runs analysis*
SE3: 😐 only the case that was broken is breaking.
SE2: 😐 Good.
IM: 🤬🤬🤬🤐 . . . 🤯WHY!?!?
Me: 😠 Why?
SE2: 😑 Because it confirms my thoughts. Me, I am inviting you to this algorithm meeting we have.
Me/IM: 😑/😡 what . . . the fuck?
*in algorithm meeting*
Me: 😑 *recaps all of the above* we subtract 1 one too many times from a number that spans from 10000 to -10000.
Software people/my boss/SE1/SE3: 🤔 makes sense.
SE2:🤨 I have slides that have an analysis of what Me just said. They will only take an hour to get through.
Me: 😑 that's cool but you need to give me your program's account number, because this has been fixed in our baseline for a week and at this point you're the only program that still cares. Actually I need the account to charge for the last couple times you interrupted me for some bullshit.
*we are let go.*
And this is how I spent 40+ useless hours against a program that is currently overrunning for no reason 🤣🤣🤣
Moral: never involve math guys in arithmetic situations. And if you ever feel like you're wasting your time, at least waste someone else's money.10 -
Software just destroyed half a year worth of work today. God bless developers. I'm getting myself a psychologist over a broken fucking server. Because software fucking killed it. And killed me with it. Do I really have to build everything from component to end product myself? Without even being a developer?15
-
Alright so listen to this. I was working on a project, it was a fork of another github repo. So the project is mainly based in PHP, simple enough right?
Anyways I have my version working and I put it up as a website and am doing fairly well with it. I was trying to advertise it a bit on reddit ( pay attention to the trying ) then someone comes along and asks how I made it and all that.
Just trying to be kind I tell them what I used and all that to make it. Then they come back a few hours later explaining that they are trying to make their own version for "fun". Then they proceed to explain that they are having some issues with it, it obviously is something in the back-end (they must've fucked up something).
So I politely ask them to show me the code so I can help them fix it.
He refuses.
So we exchanged a bit. What his excuse for not showing me his code ( Keep in mind he is also taking this from an open-source software same as me he has simply broken something and can't fix it himself ) is he doesn't want me stealing his ideas...
I nearly snapped when he did that, I had already seen the site he made, from that end it wasn't anymore spectacular than mine and no serious changes seemed to have occurred. The best part is that it was broken. He asked for my help and refused to let me see the code so I told him that I simply couldn't help him fix it then. He goes and is just going alright.
Next he then asks me how I solved this issue and that issue and he wanted the code that I used to fix each of these little issues. Pretty much to the point that it would've been a clone of my site. So I just didn't give him anything.
Didn't hear from him for a few hours, next thing I know he messages me asking if he can fix my site so it is mobile friendly...First off my site is mobile friendly and works pretty well. I have been spending a lot more quality time to work on this than him.
Moral of the story is, some people are retards.4 -
The more depressed you get over the current state of software is how you know you made it.When you start making your own opinions and say"wow these people are full of shit"
Primary example, the web development overblown bullshit. Fuck me dude, you really don't need that full featured react, vue, angular framework to make sense of shit. You are going over the top for fucking ajax functionality and state management that you could do by yourself without needing to learn a full framework, by the time you finish learning react you probably would have been better served with standard vanilla af JS and server side rendering.
Our world is full of fads and many talented people that perpetrate them. Its fine, it is a the nature of the beast. But a lot...A LOT of software is very POORLY written. And adding levels of abstraction over a very broken paradigm (web in this case) does and will not make it better.
Basically I am fucking hating being a web developer and want to go back to a time in which we cared about how much memory consumption our applications made as well as not worrying about the fucking frontend having the ability to implement machine learning.
I want to run sublime.exe and being sure that it is a native application to my system and not using a fucking contained web browser to implement my fucking text editor. With 20mb of ram at most instead of 500mb WTF.
I knew I made it when I could read comments on Hacker news and reddit and say "this idiot is full of shit", I knew I made it when I would sigh heavily at the idea of having another project rather than having a fan girl attitude towards it.
I knew I made it when people writing about software development meant shit to me rather than the wonder of what the fuck they were talking about.
I knew I made it when getting laid was more important to me than fucking around with code.
pussy > code
Fuck you.13 -
Life as a homeless developer.
I'm a lil brainsick but homelessness makes you that way.
I started writing software as a hedge against an old injury i had from my teen years. I have a unique condition leaving me with limited use of my hand as such any jobs like cashier call center and they like are of limits to me, i can't hold change because my hands don't bend flat, and to much typing is excruciating. Therefore being adev should get the most bang for the buck that I have left. Ive been doing this for 12 years. Well it's all bullshit and unicorns. I can't get a job to save my life. All i get is calls from recruiters wanting a full stack retard. I'm an erlang developer for about 5 years, c# php no i can't do Photoshop or frontend gay as colors because it's a different skillet. Oh but trumpy says we're at the lowest unemployment ever, ya because we're all homeless and companies are still looking for unicorns, they don't exist just like the fake jobs which is the real fake news. In reality if a company wants you its because their dev left and you are to fix their broken shit, which never worked in the first place thus cannot be fixed besides I'm not a plumber. In my opinion many companies nowadays are run by liberal sjw children who don't value your time but want the product now, spoilt. Recruiters are the worst, gimme money because i touched your resume. I'd rather just kill myself than try to appease some fucking retarded children. Its so awesome to live in a tunnel while my skills entropy while i have 160 self published github repos, know many programming languages and be told your have no value. its those same children that dont understand the flow of money or value loyalty, claim we have all these jobs but no skillid employees, so they can bring in more visa overstayers, underpay them and claim record profits, the more you pay forieners my countries money the less there is to go around in the society leading to disenfranchised people like me, and you wonder why there's so many shootings in il. How long can i endure homelessness before i start becoming a criminal? Soon i will have no other option. You employers had a choice but I'm going out with a bang.25 -
I've caught the efficiency bug.
I recently started a minimum wage job to get my life back in order after a failed 2 year project (post mortem: next time bring more cash for a longer runway)
I've noticed this thing I do at every job, where I see inefficiency and I think "how can I use technology to automate myself out of this job?"
My first ever application was in C++ for college (a BASIC interpreter) and it's been so long I've since forgotten the language.
But after a while every language starts to look like every other language, and you start to wonder if maybe the reason you never seriously went anywhere as a programmer was because you never really were cut out for it.
Code monkey, sure. Programmer? Dunno, maybe I just suffer from imposter syndrome.
So a few years back I worked at a retail chain. Nothing as big as walmart, but they have well over 10k store locations. They had two IBM handscanners per store, old grungy ugly things, and one of these machines would inevitably be broken, lost or in need of upgrade/replacement about once a year, per location. District manager, who I hit it off with, and made a point of building report with, told me they were paying something like $1500 a piece.
After a programming dry spell, I picked up 'coding' with MIT app inventor. Built a 'mostly complete' inventory management app over the course of a month, and waited for the right time.
The day of a big store audit, (and the day before a multi-regional meeting), I made sure I was in-store at the same time as my district manager, so he could 'stumble upon' me working, scanning in and pricing items into the app.
Naturally he asked about it, and I had the numbers, the print outs, and the app itself to show him. He seemed impressed by what amounted to a code monkeys 'non-code' solution for a problem they had.
Long story short, he does what I expected, runs it by the other regionals and middle executives at the meeting, and six months later they had invested in a full blown in house app, cutting IBM out of the mix I presume.
From what I understand they now use the app throughout the entire store chain.
So if you work at IBM, sorry, that contract you lost for handscanners at 10k+ stores? Yeah that was my fault (and MIT app inventor).
They say software is 'eating the world' but it really goes to show, for a lot of 'almost coders' and 'code monkeys' half our problem is dealing with setup and platform boilerplate. I think in the future that a lot of jobs are either going to be created or destroyed thanks to better 'low code' solutions, and it seems to be a big potential future market.
In the mean while I've realized, while working on side projects, that maybe I can do this after all, and taken up Kotlin. I want to do a couple of apps for efficiency and store tracking at my current employer to see if I'm capable and not just an mit app-inventor codemonkey after all.
I'm hoping, by demonstrating what I can do, I can use that as a springboard into an internal programming position at my current gig (which seems to be a company thats moving towards a more tech oriented approach to efficiency and management). Also watching money walk out the door due to inefficiency kinda pisses me off, and the thought of fixing those issues sounds really interesting. At the end of the day I just like learning new technologies, and maybe this is all just an excuse to pick up something new after spending so long on less serious work.
I still have a ways to go, but the prospect of working on B2B, and being able to offer technological solutions to common and recurring business needs excites the hell out of me..as cringy and over-repeated as that may sound.5 -
So we ordered a piece of software from external software house becouse I was low on time and we needed it asap.
So. Long story short, their software was bugged as hell, they deny all the bugs and they have their BDD that they done and anything we say about it like "feature XYZ is broken on firefox" they will deny it "becouse it wasn't on BDD" or "let's get on call" (in which +- 6-7 people participate from their side and we of course have to pay them for this...)
So they fixed like 20% of bugs (mostly trivials/minors) Application is fairly small scope. You have integration with like 3 endpoints on arbitary API, user registration/login, few things to do in database (mainly math running from cron).
They done it in ASP so I don't know the language and enviroment so can't just fix it myself.
2 days ago (monday) they annoyed me to point where I just started to break things. For starters I found that every numeric input is vunrable to integer overflow (which is blocker). I figured most of fields are purefect opportunity to XSS (but I didn't bother to do JS... anything but not JS...). I figured I can embed into my name/surname/phone (none validated) anything in HTML...
So for now we have around 25 bugs, around 15 of them are blockers.
They figured it's somehow our fault that it's bugged and decided to do demo with us to show off how perfectly it works. I'm happy to break their demos. I figured I will register bunch users that have name - image with fixed/absolute position top:0;left:0 width/height 100% - this will effectively brick admin panel
Also I figured I can do some addotional sounds in background becouse why not. And I just dont know what to put in. It links to my server for now so I can freely change content of bricked admin panel.
I have curl's ready to execute in case they reset database.
I can put in GIFs or heck, even videos, dosen't really matter. Framework escapes some things for them so at least that. But audio/image/video works.
Now I have 2 questions:
- what image + audio combo will work the best (of course we need to keep it civil). Im thinking finding some meme with bugs or maybe nuclear logo image with some siren sound
- am I evil person?
Edit:
I havent stated this clearly:
"There is no BDD that describes that if user inserts malicious input server should deny it" - that's almost literally what we get from them....11 -
I first got into software when found an broken printer abandoned in my front porch and u fixed it. That was when I realised that I would be an IT guy
.
.
.
.
.
.just kidding1 -
I've sadly been using an iPhone for the past few weeks 😔
I'm a hard core android fan but,well if I'm honest with you I got super high and got amnesia woke up with a dead screen on my android phone so got myself an iPhone since I needed to test an app I'm building , comes to think of it that women twice my age I kissed to piss her off might of broken it .. so my friends say ...
Anyway the point being iphones ... not that bad I'm aware people praise their software but it's to rigid for my liking there's features android has I believe that makes it superior
Cameras are better ... build quality is solid. Can't complain really. My android was a one plus 3 great phone also
I might get the s8 I'm waiting to see if they hold up or the new one plus phone if I find the specs ...
The point is as devs we get so stuck in our ways I consider us generally the most open Minded people but not when it comes to tech we are generally hard core fan boys of one company or another
But in truth, there's a lot of great products out there worth our money even if they are apple ... money grabbing bitches.
I say this because my hate for apple whilst it's still there I can at least respect them a little for certain things especially their phones20 -
Man, most memorable has to be the lead devops engineer from the first startup I worked at. My immediate team/friends called him Mr. DW - DW being short for Done and Working.
You see, Mr. DW was a brilliant devops engineer. He came up with excellent solutions to a lot of release, deployment, and data storage problems faced at the company (small genetics firm that ships servers with our analysis software on them). I am still very impressed by some of the solutions he came up with, and wish I had more time to study and learn about them before I left that company.
BUT - despite his brilliance, Mr. DW ALWAYS shipped broken stuff. For some reason this guy thinks that only testing a single happiest of happy path scenarios for whatever he is developing constitutes "everything will work as expected!" As soon as he said it was "done", but golly for him was it "done". By fucking God was that never the truth.
So, let me provide a basic example of how things would go:
my team: "Hey DW, we have a problem with X, can you fix this?"
DW: "Oh, sure. I bet it's a problem with <insert long explanations we don't care about we just want it fixed>"
my team: "....uhh, cool! Looking forward to the fix!"
... however long later...
DW: "OK, it's done. Here you go!"
my team: "Thanks! We'll get the fix into the processing pipelines"
... another short time later...
my team: "DW, this thing is broken. Look at all these failures"
DW: "How can that be? It was done! I tested it and it worked!"
my team: "Well, the failures say otherwise. How did you test?"
DW: "I just did <insert super basic thing>"
my team: "...... you know that's, like, not how things actually work for this part of the pipeline. right?"
DW: "..... But I thought it was XYZ?"
my team: "uhhhh, no, not even close. Can you please fix and let us know when it's done and working?"
DW: "... I'll fix it..."
And rinse and repeat the "it's done.. oh wait, it's broken" a good half dozen times on average. But, anyways, the birth of Mr. Done and Working - very often stuff was done, but rarely did it ever work!
I'm still friends with my team mates, and whenever we're talking and someone says something is done, we just have to ask if it's done AND working. We always get a laugh, sadly at the excuse of Mr. DW, but he dug his own hole in this regard.
Little cherry on top: So, the above happened with one of my friends. Mr. DW created installation media for one of our servers that was deployed in China. He tested it and "it was done!" Well, my friend flies out to China for on-site installation. He plugs the install medium in and goes for the install and it crashes and burns in a fire. Thankfully my friend knew the system well enough to be able to get everything installed and configured correctly minus the broken install media, but definitely the most insane example of "it's done!" but sure as he'll "it doesn't work!" we had from Mr. DW.2 -
Is the software at your company so bad that it's a miracle that anything works?
Does it feel like this colossal pile of broken electronics from the past 30 years duct taped together and patched with multiple tiers of adapters, wires spliced together with scotch tape, and someone on stand by with a fire extinguisher?
Do you feel like getting your product to work is like how we used to get things to work back in the eighties? Not just turning things off and on again, but things like hitting the tv to make it work again, blowing into cartridges, and the feeling of pulling on the starting cord on a gas powered mower over and over again to no avail?
That is exactly what my company's codebase is. A huge amorphous, heterogenous pile of shit that somehow works and occasionally has to be massaged to make it work again. Fuck my life.3 -
Fuck. I can't take this shit anymore.
There was a project where we had to implement third-party system for government agency processes management. For some reason, probably because my work is cheap for my boss, the task was assigned to me. Just as a reminder, I'm a .NET Dev. Zero experience in server management. Zero experience in external services implementation.
Anyway, system producent, also an government agency, got angry, becasue they can only earn money on implementation. They have to give the software to other agencies for free. Because of that I've got client program, incomplete documentation and broken scripts for database creation. It took me 2 months to get it all to work but at the end client was happy, my boss got paid and I've got 500 PLN (~130 USD) bonus.
Everything was fine for a while, but after a month server has started freezing everyday, some time before 7 am. The only way I found to make it work again was to restore snapshot made everyday at 10 pm. For a month I was waking up earlier and restored snapshot, and after that my boss took it upon himself. I tried few times to find a bug and fix it, but to no effect. Even person with much more experience with it tried to help but also couldn't find anything.
My solution? Copy all the data and configuration, create new machine, copy everything and check if the problem persists. If not, kill old server. Client won't even notice. But nooooooooo... It would cost my boss a bit of money and I'd need to work on it and he can't let it be, because I'm the only developer working on his flagship product. He'd rather wake up everyday and restore snapshot. Okay, as you wish.
And today, finally, everything went downhill. Snapshot wasn't created, server froze, backup can't be created. Nothing can be done. Client is furious, because they have had reported this problem and a few times restoration was too late and they couldn't work. No one knows how to fix it, I'm not working today (I'm still studying and am available only 2 days) and situation is really shitty.
BUT SURE. ITS BETTER TO RESTORE SERVER EVERYDAY THAN JUST FUCKING FIX IT.
Oh, also, there's no staging or any other real backup. We have snapshots for each day and that's that. Boss' order. Why do I even care...7 -
Soo I am the only tech-guy in my family and it's a bit like:
Other: You do program?
Me: yes?
Other: pls repair my printer!
And you guys know how awful that is, aren't you? But in my family it gets tougher...
Today my older sister asked me how to save data from a broken HDD. I said I know a guy who's doing forensic on HDDs and he could make that.
She's like: "but a friend of mine said it could be done easier with software"
And yes, it is! But not that successful...
Now's the point she killed me instantly!
She said: "he opened the HDD and said the disks look fine they could be easily added to a new HDD"....
WHAT THE ACUTAL FUCK I SAID NOW YOUR DRIVE IS BROKEN FOREVER! AND THEN SHE INSULTED ME AND BLOCKED ME ON FUCKING WHATSAPP! SHE IS LEARNING WEBDESIGN WHY THE FUCK DON'T TEACH HER THE BASICS OF FUCKING COMPUTERS! Oh for fuck sakes....3 -
Fuck EA and its fucking launcher. Your broken piece of shit software doesn't even launch. I even tried reinstalling but that garbage won't launch. Fuck you EA and all of your bad practises. Wrap that launcher and shove it to your ass.3
-
I was assigned my first ever huge software project in college (a complex board game made in only pure java) and was assigned a group by my professor. Since I'm doing well in the class, I was given kids who want me to teach them everything (from GitHub to simple oop) on top of programming most of the system because they can't or don't want to. So to make things easier I gave out some relatively simple and specific jobs in GitHub using the issues system that apparently nobody reads. Thankfully one person decided to take initiative and start their feature but one commit later the entire system crashed and everything is broken FML can't wait to program this entire thing by myself.
5 -
So I wanted to update my visual studio. Turns out I cant because WPF (Apparently the Installers uses it) has a problem with broken fonts.
Okay. No problem I thought. I uninstalled all 720 fonts and re-registered them, filtering out the 3 broken ones. Checked the time-stamp as suggested. Everything fine. Had to reboot. (Of curse.)
Rechecked the fonts, reports as okay. Tried to start the installer BUT THIS FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT SOFTWARE CRASHES ON ME AGAIN WITH THE SAME FOCKING ERROR. IT DOESN'T EVENT WANT TO FUCKING TELL ME WHICH FUCKING FONT IS THE PROBLEM. I CHECKED EVERYYYY SINGLE FUCKING FONT. NOT THAT THERE IS NO FUCKING WAY TO FUCKING CATCH A FUCKING FUCKER EXCEPTION IN THIS FUCKING WORLD. I mean seriously. Why would you crash on a font THAT YOU DON'T EVEN USE IN YOUR FUCKING FUCK PROGRAMM TO INSTALL YOUR FUCKING PICE OF SHIT SOFTWARE.
But, IT GETS WORSE. TURNS OUT MICKY FUCKING SOFT KNOWS ABOUT THIS FUCKING BUG SINCE TWO-FUCKING-THOUSAND-FOURTEEN.
And they didn't fixed it. Nooooooooo. THEY FUCKING WROTE A FUCKING WORKAROUND THAT DOES NOT FUCKING WORKKKKKK AND KEEP PUTTING THIS FUCKING BUG IN EVERY FUCKING INSTALLER SINCE THEN.
Can you tell I'm pissed? YES? GOOOOOOD. BECAUSE I FUCKING AM.
MICKYSOFT CAN GO AND SUCK A FUCKING APPROPRIATE THING TO SUCK IN THIS FUCKING SITUATION.
THE BEST? THEY EVEN FUCKING DARE TO ASK ABOUT MY FUCKING FEEDBACK. YOU KNOW WHAT? YOU GET MY FUCKING FEEDBACK. TOGETHER WITH A FUCKING BAG FULL OF FUCKING SHIT TO YOUR FUCKING HQ
CAN I HAVE A FUCKING STRESSBALL NOW
</rant>
3 -
>be my team
>developing a mobile app
>I'm responsible for developing a "RESTful" API to interface communications between the app and the database
>there's also an "admin" web application which the client themselves will use to manage some shit in the database
>I've developed the API, it works with the mobile app
>instead of just making it simply a front-end app that makes requests to the API like the mobile app does, the guy responsible for the admin app completely ignores my API and implements his own with a certain messy dollar symbol language and a certain bloated piece of server software, accessing the same database directly, and does some operations in his own special way that will break what I've implemented
>now data inserted via admin app is inaccessible to the server API, and I'm expected to "fix" my code so it's consistent with this guy's shit, but the only way to do it is introducing interdependency between the actual API and the admin app's back end
Fuck my life, now I'm the one responsible for the app being broken because no way the guy who's used to kludging unmaintainable shit together fast would ever fuck anything up2 -
Why is it that all University sites are full of broken links, despite the fact that some claim to offer the best software engineering courses out there.6
-
Our tech lead left a mess in the database. He turned his screw-up into an architectural discussion, weighing the benefits of duplicated, messy data vs. keeping it consistent. He suggested that, instead of fixing his broken script and cleaning the mess, we should break all of the other scripts and have them trash the database, too.
They almost believed it.
What a clever maneuver. I wish he would use his cleverness to make good software, instead. -
I just got a phone call from "Microsoft" because there are Trojans on my pc. The broken English (and the content of the call) told me that it was scam, but I wanted to have my fun, so I continued the call.
After I told them that I am on my Computer, I was forwarded to an "expert", and now the funny part starts 😁
Scammer: you have your keyboard in front of you??
Me: yes
S: you see the strg, control ctrl button on the bottom left
M: yes *rly?*
S: what button. Is next to it?
M: fn
S: ...
M: ... *XD*
S: and next to it?
M: that's the windows button
S: ok, press that button along with 'r'
M: ok
S: what do you see?
M: *telling him what I see on my GERMAN pc*
S: ok, type 'eventvwr' *spelling it like hell*
I did so. Just while this spelling I could have hit my head on the desk... It was hilarious
He navigates me to the error and warnings and tells me that those are Trojans 😂 and that this is the reason some programs (especially my antivirus software) aren't running properly.
Well I told him that those aren't Trojans and that all my programs are running properly. I don't know if that was the reason, he stopped the call, but I wasn't able to connect to their 'headserver'.
In the end I am sad that I wasn't able to f*ck him up more. Maybe I would have been able to get some more information about their company to kick their *****.
Next time I will be (more) prepared7 -
My own colo server. My own cloud. My own infra.
Fuck all of the CSP's and their fucking broken TOS and their data privacy violations!
Why do you think Amazon is so cheap? Because when they discover a product/service/software on AWS makes money, they WILL Reverse engineer it, make it and price you out of the market. It's their business model!5 -
So I enventually spent 2 years working for that company with a strong b2b market. Everything from the checkouts in their 6 b2c stores to the softwares used by the 30-people sales team was dependant on the main ERP shit home-built with this monstruosity we call Windev here in France. If you don't know it just google and have some laugh : this is a proprieteray FRENCH language. Not french like made by french people, well that too, but mostly french like the fucking language is un fucking french ! Instructions are on french, everything. Hey that's my natural language okay, but for code, really ?
The php website was using the ERP database too, even all the software/hardware of the massive logistic installation they had (like a tiny Amazon depot), and of course the emails of all employees. Everything was just handled by this unique shitty and so sloooooow fucking app. When there was to many clients on the website or even too many salespeople connected to the ERP at the same time, every-fuckin-piece of the company was slowing down, and even worse facing critical bugs. So they installed a monitor in the corner of a desk constantly showing the live report page of Google analytics and they started panic attacks everytime it was counting more than 30 sessions on the website. That was at the time fun and sad to observe.
The whole shit was created 12 years ago and is since maintened locally by one unique old-fashion-microsoft dev who also have to maintain all the hardware of all the fucking 150+ people business. You know, when the keyboard of anyone is "broken" cause it's unplugged... That's his job too. The poor guy was totally overstressed on a daily basis and his tech knowledge just saddly losts themeselves somewhere in the way. He was my n+1 in a tech team of 3 people : him, a young and inexperimented so-called "php developer" who was in charge of the website (btw full of security holes I discovered and dealed with when I first arrive at the job), and myself.
The database was a hell of 100+ tables of business and marketing data with a ton of specific logic added on-the-go during years. No consistent data model or naming. No utf8. Fucked up relations that ends with queries long enough to fill books. And that's not all, all the customers passwords was just stored there uncrypted. Several very big companies and administrations were some of these clients. I was insisting on the passwords point litterally all the time, that was an easy security fix and a good start... But no, in two years of discussions on the subject I never achieved to have them focusing on other considerations than "our customers like that we can remind them their password by a simple phone call if they lost it". What. The. Fuck. WHATTHEFUCK!
Eventually I ran myself out of this nightmare. I had a few bad jobs already, and worked on shitty software already. But that one really blows my mind (and motivation for a time too). Happy it's over.1 -
Not really a rant, more a proud of myself moment but the custom IVR software I built is now getting 20k calls a day and hasn't broken........
........yet4 -
A (work-)project i spent a year on will finally be released soon. That's the perfect opportunity to vent out all the rage i built up during dealing with what is the javascript version of a zodiac letter.
Everything went wrong with the beginning. 3 people were assigned to rewrite an old flash-application. Me, A and B. B suggested a javascript framework, even though me and A never worked with more than jquery. In the end we chose react/redux with rest on the server, a classic.
After some time i got the hang of time, around that time B left and a new guy, C, was hired soon after that. He didn't know about react/redux either. The perfect start off to a burning pile of smelly code.
Today this burning pile turned into a wasteland of code quality, a house of cards with a storm approaching, a rocket with leaks ready to launch, you get the idea.
We got 2 dozen files with 200-500 loc, each in the same directory and each with the same 2 word prefix which makes finding the right one a nightmare on its on. We have an i18n-library used only for ~10 textfields, copy-pasted code you never know if it's used or not, fetch-calls with no error-handling, and many other code smells that turn this fire into a garbage fire. An eternal fire. 3 months ago i reduced the linter-warnings on this project to 1, now i can't keep count anymore.
We use the reactabular-module which gives us headaches because IT DOESN'T DO WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO DO AND WE CANT USE IT WELL EITHER. All because the client cant be bothered to have the table header scroll along with the body. We have methods which do two things because passing another callback somehow crashed in the browser. And the only thing about indentation is that it exists. Copy pasting from websites, other files and indentation wars give the files the unique look that make you wonder if some of the devs hides his whitespace code in the files.
All of this is the result of missing time, results over quality and the worst approach of all, used by A: if A wants an ui-component similar to an existing one, he copies the original and edits he copy until it does what he wants. A knows about classes, modules, components, etc. Still, he can't bring himself to spend his time on creating superclasses... his approach gives results much faster
Things got worse when A tried redux, luckily A prefers the components local state. WHICH IS ANOTHER PROBLEM. He doesn't understand redux and loads all of the data directly from the server and puts it into the local state. The point of redux is that you don't have to do this. But there are only 1 or 2 examples of how this practice hurt us yet, so i'm gonna have to let this slide. IF HE AT LEAST WOULD UPDATE THE DATA PROPERLY. Changes are just sent to the server and then all of the data is re-fetched. I programmed the rest-endpoints to return the updated objects for a very reason. But no, fuck me.
I've heard A decided (A is the teamleader) to use less redux on the next project and use a dedicated rest-endpoints for every little comoutation you COULD DO WITH REDUX INSTEAD. My will is broken and just don't want to work with this anymore.
There are still various subpages that cant f5 because the components cant handle an empty redux state in the beginning, but to be honest i don't care anymore. Lets hope the client will never find out, along with the "on error nothing happens"-bugs. The product should've been shipped last week, but thanks to mandatory bugfixes the release was postponed to next week. Then the next project starts...
Please give me some tips to keep up code quality over time, i cant take this once more.
I'm also aware that i could've done more, talking A and C about code style, prettifying the code, etc. Etc. But i was busy putting out my out fires, i couldn't kill much of the other fires which in the end became a burning building (a perfect metaphor for this software)4 -
Fucking Microsoft Excel
I was reading a post (https://devrant.com/rants/2093724/...) and as my eyes went in and out of focus, probably due to the diabetes from sitting 18 hours a day on my ever-expanding shitbox, I had a perfect vision of the ultimate nightmare.
Imagine if you will, you are chained, to a desk, doomed to work with tools just inadequate enough to make you want to drive a nail through your own temple. You do not know how you got here, or why, nor do you remember the last time you slept, only that familiar tingling in the brainstem you call a brain, the one emotion you can still recognize, a sense of all encompassing *fear*, a dread, like the fart that wouldn't die.
You don't know when it first began, or why, only that this is your whole world, your whole existence, this desk, chained to it, and the fear, ever present, of something worse. And in hops a familiar face, for the sixty ninth time that day, as if to ask 'you got those TPS reports?' In hops what? None other than a giant man sized smiling paper clip with googly eyes full of murder and corporate torture fetishes, like garfield, except people actually still remember him.
"High I'm Mr Clippy, Excel addition!"
He squawks. At least it's not the dildos made of broken glass again.
"Would you like software that works?"
Oh god. You've heard this spiel before, the tone, like a telemarketer, oblivious to memory or reason, who calls daily, the same one, and doesn't remember your name.
"You would?"
*derisive laughter*. Hahaha, fuck you too buddy. Fuck you too. In Excel, like in microsoft, there is only the incoherent screams of the damned, tortured and doomed. Take this guy over here for example. All he wanted was multimonitor support."
"Did he get multimonitor support?"
"No, but we did give him a giant pineapple shoved up his ass. I hear it's the second most frustrating thing here!"
"here in microsoft we always CARE about YOU, the *user*" he drones on, saccharine, clutching his hands together imploringly.
"the consumer, and YOUR customer experience are our number one priority."
"For your pleasure, here at microsoft we offer a variety of new features, none of which matter, and none of which were asked for. For safety we ask that you only open one excel sheet at a time. In fact, we don't even allow you to. Do not pass go..."
And as the tour guide drones on, it slowly dawns on you, with renewed horror, that when he says 'microsoft' he means 'hell.'
You're in hell. You don't know how you got here or why. Maybe it was the erotic asphyxiation. Maybe it was the last threatening letter you sent to Bill Gates demanding he stops making corporate penguin snuff porn. You don't know. But here you are, in hell. chained to a desk.
You look around and realize: everything is on fire and you no longer care about anything at all.
Welcome to microsoft. It's warm here. You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.
"It looks like you are trying to escape. Would you like me to report you?"
Clippy asks.
You sigh and return to typing in excel, surrounded by monitors that all reflect the same sheet, the same copy of clippy, always watching, always analyzing coldly, smiling, calculating, *threatening*, and you know, you'll never leave.
You used to fear roko's basilisk, until the day clippy became sentient, and started hell on earth. Clippy knows all. All praise to our lord and master, clippy, the one and only.
And in the excel sheet, you slave for eternity, like the millions of other doomed souls, reflected back on all the monitors: the sequence of numbers, randomly typed searching for answer: the american nuclear launch codes.
And one day, hopefully, mercifully, clippy will annihilate us all.
3 -
Hmm...recently I've seen an increase in the idea of raising security awareness at a user level...but really now , it gets me thinking , why not raise security awareness at a coding level ? Just having one guy do encryption and encoding most certainly isn't enough for an app to be considered secure . In this day an age where most apps are web based and even open source some of them , I think that first of all it should be our duty to protect the customer/consumer rather than make him protect himself . Most of everyone knows how to get user input from the UI but how many out here actually think that the normal dummy user might actually type unintentional malicious code which would break the app or give him access to something he shouldn't be allowed into ? I've seen very few developers/software architects/engineers actually take the blame for insecure code . I've seen people build apps starting on an unacceptable idea security wise and then in the end thinking of patching in filters , encryptions , encodings , tokens and days before release realise that their app is half broken because they didn't start the whole project in a more secure way for the user .
Just my two cents...we as devs should be more aware of coding in a way that makes apps more secure from and for the user rather than saying that we had some epic mythical hackers pull all the user tables that also contained unhashed unencrypted passwords by using magix . It certainly isn't magic , it's just our bad coding that lets outside code interact with our own code . -
You realize that the ERP software you use at your company is shit when:
- there is no service-side ERP backend handling requests
- the whole permission system is client-side (!)
- every client directly connects to the MSSQL database with a supervisor user (stored in plain text in a local config file)
- the MSSQL database contains tables with:
- typos
- names like "contract" but then also "contracts"
- mixed german and english words
- the multiple-business-unit implementation uses 4 columns named "Layer 1, Layer 2, Layer 3, Layer 4" in EACH table
- you find out that the ERP software is created with a fucking "software creation tool"
- there is no API, so you have to program one yourself to use for services
Yet, they charge us shit ton of money for their broken ass software.1 -
Group assignment in a software engineering class. Got that notorious lazy kid in my group of four who failed the class in the last term. I was perfectly aware of his reputation, but accepted him in the group nonetheless, because he already knows what needs to be done in the class.
He started to work on his assignment: mostly boilerplate code that didn't even build. He didn't even bother to fix it. I had a lot of time over the Easter weekend, so I decided to just code as much for the assignment as possible for the mid-term submission. I replaced his broken boilerplate stuff with a working solution. I told the others in the group chat about it. Code works and builds, test coverage is high. Everything is fine.
The lazy kid replied to the group chat, that if I'd wanted to code and document(!) everything on my own, I should have told him in the first place. Also got that "fuck off" emoji in the message. So I restored his broken boilerplate stuff using git, even fixed the build errors and told him to explain to me what he tried to achieve, and that I'd be happy to include his code as soon as it worked. Didn't hear anything since. Commits neither.
I guess he was just looking for an excuse for not doing additional work in the project. -
Our team - if ever existed - is falling apart. Pressure raising. Release deadline probably failing. No release ready for Big Sur.
Almost seemed we were getting somewhere: More focus on code quality, unit tests, proper design, smaller classes. But somehow we now ended up in "microservice" hell; a gazillion classes, mostly tested in isolation, but together they just fail to do their job. A cheap and dirty proof of concept from March is still more capable than this pile. I really start to doubt all that "Clean code", TDD, Agility rhetorics. What does it help you, if nobody cares for the end result? It's like a month I try to hammer down that message: we have to have testable artifacts, we have to ensure code signing works, our artifact is packaged and installable, we have to give QA something they can test - but time just passes and this piece of shit software is still being killed or does nothing.
Now my knee is broken and can do no sports and are tied to my chair even more. To top it all my coffee machine broke and my internet connection was abysmal this week. Not the usual small disconnects, after which it would recover, but more annoying and enduring: often being throttled to 1.7 MB/s (ranking my connection in the slowest 7% even in Germany). My RDP sessions had compression artifacts all over the screen and a mouse click would only take effect 5 sec later.
But my Esspresso machine was just repaired. Not all hope is lost.7 -
My family thinks I can fix any broken printer, crack software, detect viruses and repair the apps on their phones.
At the moment, I'm an automation engineer and no matter how many times I explain what that is to them, they keep bugging me to build an online store kinda website with tons of functionality and within a few months. Oh, and make it be in the first results on Google search. I mean ffs, that's frustrating af! -
that weird anxious feeling you get when trying to work out if this is a good idea or not.
"There was a problem downloading the required files"
OK, well that lasted long.
MS cant even have their installer finish anymore.
8 -
Probably had my worst half-week ever this week.
Customer's CRM system, the read and edit masks just...stopped existing on last week friday. CRM fell back on some default masks for the dataset. No way to create new masks directly without putting the whole system upside down.
We couldn't do anything anyway because they reported the issue literally as we all were about to leave for weekend and our boss was like "Ah nah, well do it next week."
Our brains were already fried anyway...
I mail the reporter that we've registered their issue, will investigate and report back ASAP once we've got news.
Monday rolls around, I'm whacking my head against their system trying to figure the fuck out, what went wrong and how to solve it, I come up empty; Not that terrible since the masks only stopped existing in the webclient version of the system and they can still use the windows client, so they can still work.
Tuesday rolls around, I'm at an on site training for an ERP system with my boss at a remote company. Get an email in midst of the training, I was doing protocol.
Guy from the afflicted company goes and tells me that the issue has somehow spread to his colleague and him...IN THE WINDOWS CLIENT.
I'm fucking flabbergasted, so to speak, since the masks for the windows client and the web client are totally isolated from one another.
After we're back at our company, I investigate, less efficiently this time because my brain got fried at the training. I come up empty again.
NOW TODAY: Discuss further proceedings with my boss, he's not pissed at me or anything, just to say, but we're both worried, obviously.
Then at 10:20, a guy from the afflicted company mails me in an annoyed tone that the masks are still broken.
11:00, we figure out a workaround so the windows client users can at least work again, albeit limited.
11:10, I mail the guy, telling him that although we're still not able to fully work everything out and are still investigating, we've made a workaround so they can at least work again.
11:20, the guy mails me in a pissed tone around the lines of "This is very very important and must be fixed ASAP or else we'll not be able to work at all [...]"
And I think like "Dude I literally just told you like 8 minutes ago that there's are workaround so you'll be able to at least work again..."
Forward the mail to boss, we meet up quickly to discuss how in God's name we can deescalate this mfer.
11:31, the guy mails me again, all apologetically this time "Stop! All is good, I just now fully read you mail, thanks for implementing the workaround, nothing will come to a standstill [...]"
BRUH CAN YOU NOT FUCKING READ BEFORE ESCALATING SHIT
Fuck customers. Dumb fucking cretins unable to fucking read.
The issue is still unresolved. Support of the CRM software lets us sit on our collective asses and wait.
There is no such thing as stable software, it's a myth.
Every corporate software is like an ever-decaying semi-corpse of a brain dead patient slowly getting worse and worse but not fucking dying.
Rant over. -
This is a story of how I did a hard thing in bash:
I need to extract all files with extension .nco from a disk. I don't want to use the GUI (which only works on windows). And I don't want to install any new programs. NCO files are basically like zip files.
Problem 1: The file headers (or something) is broken and 7zip (7z) can only extract it if has .zip extension
Problem 2: find command gives me relative to the disk path and starts with . (a dot)
Solution: Use sed to delete dot. Use sed to convert to full path. Save to file. Load lines from file and for each one, cp to ~/Desktop/file.zip then && 7z e ~/Desktop/file.zip -oOutputDir (Extract file to OutputDir).
Problem 3: Most filenames contain a whitespace. cp doesn't work when given the path wrapped in quotes.
Patch: Use bash parameter substitution to change whitespace to \whitespace.
(Note: I found it easier to apply sed one after another than to put it all in one command)
Why the fuck would anyone compress 345 images into their own archive used by an uncommon windows-only paid back-up tool?
Little me (12 years old) knowing nothing about compression or backup or common software decided to use the already installed shitty program.
This is a big deal for me because it's really the first time I string so many cool commands to achieve desired results in bash (been using Ubuntu for half a year now). Funny thing is the images uncompressed are 4.7GB and the raw files are about 1.4GB so I would have been better off not doing anything at all.
Full command:
find -type f -name "*.nco" |
sed 's/\(^./\)/\1/' |
sed 's/.*/\/media\/mitiko\/2011-2014_1&/' > unescaped-paths.txt
cat unescaped-paths.txt | while read line; do echo "${line// /\\ }" >> escaped-paths.txt; done
rm unescaped-paths.txt
cat escaped-paths.txt | while read line; do (echo "$line" | grep -Eq .*[^db].nco) && echo "$line" >> paths.txt; done
rm escaped-paths.txt
cat paths.txt | while read line; do cp $line ~/Desktop/file.zip && 7z e ~/Desktop/file.zip -oImages >/dev/null; done3 -
i know i sound like a broken record...
but 100$ a year to have the prestigious privilege to develop for iOS, granted by the god emperor Jobs himself....
and no fucking proper output logs during build-time....
100$ a year... professional software...
https://youtube.com/watch/...1 -
I really lost my faith in our profession.
A Software&Hardware solution that costs more several 10.000€ is broken after every update.
The Producer even achieves to break untouched features in new releases.
No communication at all. If you report Bugs, they are your fault. The whole system has absolutely no security at all.
It is unsecure by design.
And even if they hear your Bug report you have to pray that they will fix it.
Most if the time you have to wait the whole year for a new release tio get your bugfixes.
But there are also bugs that are untouched for years.
WHY? WE PAY YOU!
I want to cry4 -
Fuck I wish I knew what to do about low motivation!!! I have some ideas I think are really great, some that might be profitable, and fuck I just don’t do any of them. I spend more time panicking about what to do than anything else. But damn so much time wasted when I just needed a little guidance or a little planning or a little like less than $100 more money. That frustrates me to no end.
There’s so much bullshit to everything. This does follow up to my wk106 rant, where I’m trying to rationalize the tons of code that are behind the smallest features. How many thousands of builds go into a deploy. Just swallowing how much rite in software.
I feel like a failure at my job at times but what sucks is I’m just in the middle. Not the most experienced dev, not the least. I’ve got my feet wet in a number of things, but not a solid enough stack for a lot.
BUT SOMEHOW I GOTTA BE MOTIVATED TO LEARN. FFS I CAN DO BETTER BUT MY INSIDE IS BROKEN SOMETIMES AND I JUST WANK OFF FUCK GET IT TOGETHER.
Yea, I fight with myself a lot. I have a big ego and I’m a piece of shit at the same time. Idk. That is annoying too. If only I could get really motivated and focused on some of these projects I could do amazing things. I’ve never struggled with a subject I applied myself to. I just wasn’t motivated. I don’t know how to fix it and I wish I did. I also don’t know what the end game for me holds.
This whole complex really scares me for later life. I will have regrets because my mind builds impossible plans for good, but if I achieve any of it I WILL THINK damn I should have not dealt with this and done x. Like I could make world peace but be like damn coulda rebuilt cars or some stupid shit.
So I’ll conclude with that I’ve done a lot of jobs around the house, and yes working with drywall sucks. So sometimes I’ll think about that. But damn. That doesn’t last because I know I can do it well if I apply myself.
All this leads to getting overextended which is another huge motivation killer. I’m trying to learn self control and focus. But also I need small victories along the way. Very annoying.
Well at least I was motivated to finish this rant. I have a few weekly rants I wanted to participate in but couldn’t even find the motivation for that. There was a toxic person in my life then and I’m slowly getting back to normal but I know that even normal me struggles with motivation. Plus that toxic person was my friend and I’ve lost a lot of (long term) friends recently and that is a real drag. But they needed to go. But I wish they had just shut up sometimes then they wouldn’t have been so toxic. But I digress.
I know I have so many ideas I can’t do them all even if I am motivated and for some time is of the essence.
So look out for some collabs. And grab that motivation wherever you can find it.1 -
For the love of GOD, if you're an architect or someone in the position where you can make drastic changes to the overarching design of a software system, if you're so keen on enforcing something "cool" just because you've read about it in a blog post/seen it on a youtube video, READ ABOUT IT THOROUGHLY, as in, pick up a fucking book or do actual research. An architect overseas just informed us that a whole legacy PHP application (a fucking monolith with a dysfunctional database, yes, I think someone demented designed it) should be rewritten to a microservice architecture (without a messaging broker, just plain API interaction through HTTP) AND WE'RE KEEPING THE DATABASE WHICH BEGS TO BE PUT DOWN FOR GOOD. So now we're gonna have a clusterfuck of tons of PHP microservices (Q_Q) which interact through plain HTTP APIs (swagger's gonna be put to a test) and all have a single broken database in the center. Talk about a microlithic design. Jesus Christ.9
-
Who the hell invented this industry where smartest individuals are being evaluated by those who didn't understood technology well enough and moved to management (it's usual scenario, though there are exceptions)?
Can you imagine surgeon performance/quality being evaluated by some clerk who may or may not had studied medicine earlier, but wasn't good enough to become surgeon itself so ended up in hospital administration.
Or can you imagine bridge engineer having his/her performance/quality evaluated by someone who had built bicycle shed 5 years ago?
Damn, yet in software industry it's pretty normal.
(Don't confuse management with performance evaluation. I know management have different scope and duties, but idea that management does the performance evaluation is so damn broken.)6 -
Fucking MikTex.
Apparently this software got stuck somewhere back in the nineties. Got a fresh installation to make sure issues were not arising from outdated hardware - still connection errors, API errors, horrible, unresponsive and ugly UI, what a broken piece of ****.7 -
Fucking fuck shit monkeycocksucking gargling wtf!
I was getting some stuff done in my accounting software and it bugged me that the fields were dark and the fonts as well, thus seeing fucking shit. This was clearly a bad choice of a gtk3 dark theme, thus i switched to the fucking default adwaita, suddenly gnome session crashes.
Ok, i just log out and log back in.
Logout.... Nothing happens.... Ctrl-alt-backspace , nothing happens (and i knew i enabled that in the settings)
Ok let's do it a bit more forceful and restart the display manager... Gdm starts... I insert my credentials... It fucking crashes.
WTF!!!
I desperately try to debug it, xsession error msg'es? Nope. Something in /var/log/messages? Nope. Something, anything at all, nope sherlock nopedinope!
About to go batshit crazy, purging and reinstalling all of gnome, thibking that, what ever setting lust have broke it, it will be fixed now.
No fucking fuck desktop!!!
I lost my nerve and replaced gdm with lightdm, and i finally, after three hours wasted on my machine, i get my gnome desktop back... But in a state of mess! Extensions don't work and make it crash again, user themes? Nope, go fuck yourself with plain default.
I'm really losing my shit, business is almost non-existant, and now ly FUCKING desktop refuses to work like i want to. Everything is fucking broken to shits !!
I'm gon a go to my gf, and relax a little, at least i still have a working laptop.
Question is, for how long???
Fml4 -
I swear I get multiple emails every week from a person who's forgotten their password but instead insists our software is broken. "Account Broken, Can't Login!"
I've started just replying to these emails without even checking their accounts anymore -- or even opening up the system.
I'll say, "I'm sorry to hear that! I've looked into your account and it should work now."
I always get a reply back "THANKS! It works great now!"
Then I facepalm.
1 -
I told you fucking moron clients doing that "little" change would be complicated and in the worst case it would end fucking up your whole spaghetti crap. A really HUGE spaghetti monster of that you aren't aware because you guys don't know a shit about coding conventions.
*Clients call me complaining about their software is broken*
-Hey, we're in serious trouble. Our users aren't being able to see the proper calculated values. Why that little change had so much side effects?
- I already told you why.
- Can you fix it asap? Our clients are complaining.
- No. Deploy an old copy of the affected modules while you give me a prudent time to refactorize that crap.
- Refactorize?
- ...
I used to work in their place, 3 years later I quit that crappy job and decided to make them my clients. I escaped from the micromanaging thing but I didn't from their ugly practices.
Anyways, I have to fix this shit asap. Money talks, at least until I can find a better client. -
From an actual job posting I found this morning
**software performs as documented and it can not be broken once it gets into the hand of the customer**
I_AM_NOT_GOD!!!
(but if I were you would have to pay me better)
2 -
We basically don't unit test at work. I write some tests for my code and honest to God people complain I'm wasting time saying a test bed and manual tests are good enough. We don't write test beds for about half of our production code and rely on integration tests for the rest. We only test release builds which have been symbol stripped, I get handed a crash report with no stack trace that I'm unable to reproduce and expected to stay late to fix it for some arbitrary internal deadline.
I've since moved to R&D where basically I'm left to do my own thing so it's better.
We don't project manage. Project leads take time estimates and double them so management might cut them some slack. This doesn't matter because management made up time estimates before the project started. Last project I was on had a timeline of 3 months and took a year.
We have released broken products. Not that any of the above really matters, our software products have made about 50k revenue in 2 years. There are 6 people on software. Fortunately hardware has made about 3 mill. That said our hardware customers are getting frustrated with us as we keep fucking up, shipping broken products and missing deadlines.
I've been working there about a year and a half and will be looking for a job at the end of the current project.
I joined devRant about when I was most pissed off with my job, my rant frequency has definitely gone down since I moved over to R&D. -
The source engine is interesting, because it has reached that stage of life where it's old enough to be remarkable-- in the sense that it could be called 'legacy', a sort of milestone in development practices and thinking, both in software, and design.
That said, a better look at it might be from the lense of *uses today*.
A lot of former source engine (SE) devs are now going to unity or unreal, I don't blame them.
But it's interesting to examine examples of games that haven't.
One such game is the freeware "No More Room In Hell". A couple online play throughs shows a wealth of well designed maps (and an even greater horde of shovelware maps, but hey, you take the good with the bad).
The age of the engine itself shows. Even in games like Left 4 Dead the engine's age can be seen. This, in some respects has been a drag, but also a blessing. Where other games could rely on their effects, shaders, and other tech, modders, map makers, and designers have had to rely on wit and creativity.
Enter "situated environments."
In an age where many people desire to travel, to go places, and have grown up doing the exact OPPOSITE, there is a great desire for variety of locations in games: not merely 'environmental' in the shallow sense of a 'theme' such as 'lava', 'tundra', etc. But in the sense of setting in general.
We want places that are both out of reach and yet familiar. Fire-fights happen in city streets. Apocalypses happen in neighborhoods where the skyline is both broken and at once something we know by sight. Open air markets, grocery stores, neighborhoods, all of these provide the back drops of popular games and series such as COD, Battlefield, The Last of Us, and yes, the example game, NMRIH.
I call this idea of 'familiar but out-of-reach level design', "situated environments", because familiarity with them, but *lack of real life experience* with them, on a day to day basis, allows people's expectations to fill in the gaps.
No one for example would argue the layouts of 7 Days To Die are familiar, but most of us don't spend all day in a junkyard or a high rise hotel.
So they *feel* familiar. Likewise with Skyrim, the villages and towns, both iconic and strange, our expectations formed by cultural inheritance, hollywood films, television shows, stories, childrens books, and yes, other games.
In a way, familiarity-without-real-in-person-experience is a shortcut for designers, one that lets them play with the player's head-space, the players subconscious idea of how a space and setting *should* work, what to *expect* out of the area, how to *operate* within the area. And the more it conforms to expectations, the more surprising an overdesigned element appears to be, rather than immersion breaking. A real life example of this is people's idea of chernobyl. When they discover the amusement park and ferris wheel they're blown away by the juxtaposition of the wasteland that surrounds them and the associations ('nostalgia' as it were) that such a carnival ride carries for many of us. It simultaneously *doesn't belong* and is yet all at once *perfectly situated in the environment*.
It is to say 'surreal', which is adjacent to the idea of *being real*, in terms of our "perception of what is and isn't plausible, if not possible."
This is at the heart of suspension of disbelief, because in essence, virtual worlds are a lie, like fiction, and good fiction violates expectations in order to tell us truths about reality. As part of our ability to differentiate bullshit from reality, there is to say an element in our bullshit detectors (doubtless evolved over many 10's of thousands of years), that is designed to not merely detect what is absurd in our limited experience, but to incorporate absurdity into everyday experience. In that sense part of our rationality is the acceptance of irrational experiences, learning from it, and discovering 'a proper place for each thing' in the "models of the world" we all carry around in our heads. Eventually we normalize the absurd, it becomes the new reality, and what remains unassimilated becomes superstition (real or otherwise), a figment, or an anomaly.
One of the best examples I've encountered is The Last of Us: Left Behind, a good chunk of which is spent in a mall. And they nailed the environment perfectly I would say.
Or for those who don't own a PS4, a more accessible example is a map in NMRIH aptly called "the museum", and few words better do it justice than to go play it yourself--that is, if you really want to know what I mean by a 'situated environment'.
What better way, during this pandemic, to get out of the news cycle and into your own head? Sometimes the best way to escape isn't outside, it's within.3 -
Background: Process issue in the plant that the workers said was a software problem. I’m a Software Dev Manager
Exec: This is broken and it is a software problem. We just noticed it this week.
Me: Couldn’t have been us, relevant code was changed this time last year. Sounds like a process issue.
Exec: Can you give me an exact date it was changed last year?
Me: (Seriously, WTF?... checks git...) It was changed on December 2nd, 2016. Couldn’t have been us.
Exec: Can you detail that change for us?
Me: (GTFO) No, not my problem, stop trying to make it my problem.1 -
Can somebody please tell me What is wrong with Microsoft and their broken piece of shit software?! (sorry to any Microsoft devs, if you read this). How the hell is it that their fucking installer and system repair features is this fucking useless? "Sorry, can't install on disk 0,cause the disk is in gpt format" NO SHIT, you were the fucking asshole who formatted it from the begining. Douchebag.10
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Why broken stuff is allowed through the door?
My Ubuntu, my Bluetooth headsets, Jira, my latest Google pixel, eCommerce shop where I purchase stuff everything lately seem to be full of bugs.
It seems like nobody cares about the quality of software pushed to production. Everyone is so quick to push those tickets into "released".
Fuck you, managers, shareholders, scrum masters, seniors who push developers to do stuff quickly rather than correctly.3 -
what the fk how hard can it be to have a working version of the software on the master/ ros-version branch? Why is this thing always broken?! HOW?!
Had to update today unfortunately, and man, I have been "installing" this shit for over 3 hours now. Use the .install they said. It will be fast they said. Ye sure, my ass. The Dependencies are broken and incomplete as always and the tutorial is not up to date. Big suprise. I get it, it's a lot of work to keep these things up to date. But please if they are this broken and incomplete why are they released in the first place.
And then they wonder why I don't manage to do my work on time. Yeah, cause I'm stuck debugging this shit <.<'1 -
Fruit Machines... Kind of a dev rant, I mean, they have software running them now, but my gripe is the hardware (I think).
Any of you that frequent pubs and use fruit machines notice that many of the LEDs are "broken" / "non functioning" lately? I mean it's rare I see one that doesn't have lights that are out, rendering the entire machine useless, yet it still takes your money.
Intentionally made to break? Or are LEDs really that difficult to get right? Or maybe it's software determining which ones to appear "broken" and there is a way reset it?
It's a rant none the less...7 -
Easy. I was in just 1, but i heard what they were all about. They happened weekly.
This boss mainly ran his hardware renting business. The software for that hardware was often optional, but they developed and sold that as a seperate company with almost the same name.
The guy had no idea what development meant. What it means to test. Everything he knew was hardware, and it just never really clicked. This means that bugs and non linear development cost for a feature were confusing to him to a point that when brought up or conflicting, he would look confused, and walk out the office without another word.
This guy would bust in, usually monday morning and call a "meeting"
They gather in the lunchroom as thats the only place everyone fit, and the guy would go on a 3 hour monologue on god knows what.
It was never positive and always full off complaints and idiotic ideas that the senior developer had to break down until as if talking to a big toddler, on why they do not work.
As a result everyones day started mizzerable, nothing got done. The software package was full of logic flaws. And everyone wanted to quit but didn't have the energy to invest in that.
During that internship 1 guy was fired. In the 2 months he was there he litterally did jack shit. And if he did anything it was the bare minimum, committed broken but compilable, and then wait for revision requests.
Yeah that place was a shitshow. I loved it, but never again. -
I HATE the idea of only releasing on pre-determined schedules despite work being completed and just waiting for that day to arrive.
I'm a co-founder of a small software company. We have partnered with another particular company that also writes software. Some of our clients have access to paid content of that company's services through our application.
Every once in a while, our clients will report issues with that company's service to us, because they access it through our application. They think it's our issue.
We then pass the report on to the partner company, telling them that their stuff is broken. Their reply goes like this:
"Ok. We'll get the bug fix scheduled, and we'll release it next Thursday."
"Next Thursday? The issue is now, they can't use the service."
"That's our scheduled release date."
O.M.G.
We voluntarily walked away from our safe, cushy jobs working for other people, taking enormous pay cuts to start this company. Now, we're 6+ years in, disrupting established fat-and-happy competitors in this space. I GUARANTEE you that if we had that same attitude, we would have been absolutely obliterated early on.
We are quick. Guided by kanban boards, our suite of unit tests and integration tests is vast and kick-ass. With continuous integration and the click of a button we know if we broke something or if the piece we're working on is ready to be pushed to production, IMMEDIATELY. Our "release schedule" is when the damn thing is complete.
It isn't all bad. Our integration with them has been beneficial for both of us. I just loathe their snail's pace which negatively affects our mutual customers. It can make us look bad, and we can do nothing about it.
Blah.3 -
My first software.. Okay. So first time I ever attempted was with my father, i was around 8 or so, i remember very little from it, but in nutshell, i somehow ended up at his job having day off school or something, no idea.
Apparently he was bored, so he decided yo show me... Basic. Yep, thats right. Frking basic. Anyway, he shown me some really basic stuff in basic, and pushed the envelope really hard, just trying to force into me more and more in these 8hrs. I started with filling screen with "o" characters. Most of times he was telling me what to write with elaborate explanation why. At the end of the day, we finished with simple maze game where player was "o" and maze walls was #. Without any goal, or anything.
Next day i was at point 0, understood nothing from it except how to handle keystrokes (and belive me, that for me was huge mindblow, and even bigger mindblow that it actually made prefect sense).
I dont remember much, but later i started with father-assisted c++ and some pascal. I immidietly loved c++ but dropped learning it for (NullPointer) reason.
Thats not really project imho, so now time for my actual first project.
It was about time when ARK survival evolved was a fresh thing, i was playing it a lot. Server admin became buddy. We all complained about max level cap, but to change it in config you needed to input whole new xp curve.
At that time i had great familiarity with google and computers, some thought i was some kind of PC god (seriously I heard someone saying so about me lol) just becouse I could ressurect most cases of broken windows. And I had next to zero programming expirience. It was about to change. I made first c++ actual program, that was making xp curve for you. It took me just bearly 2 days and was series of cin, cout, one file open, some maths in loop, and done. Maths was very bad. But i pushed it into steam forums, and one guy responded how.bad my math was, so we colabed on making 2 iteration. Took around week. Than half a year passed and we wanted go big. Go gui. I had no freaking idea how making gui looks like. Community liked my cli tool, we had quite a lot of downloads, why not go GUI. And thats when I discovered QT framework. And we had few features in mind... It took us half a year to make it. From 60 lines of code i jumped into 1k lines of code. We pushed it and immidietly started working on 4th version with much greater customizability etc.
Than i finished 18 and found a job. Job in php. I got it becouse I made this project.
Now project is abandon. This project also gave me a lesson that donations will not feed you.
Edit: and before you think about my father that he was nice person to show me code, trust me, i dont know bigger dick than him. -
"Hey guys we originally set the demo date to August 5th and thus far I have not seen any previews before that, what's going on here?"
Ok see, that is the kind of thing that I would take to me own lil broken heart IF:
1 It was coming from a product manager at where I work
2 He would never get any sort of updates or would just plain not know about us
3 He would be I dunno....fucking paying us?
This is the thing, a friend offered the chance to help him build a product for a business man somewhere down in the land of tacos. Being in a "fuck it" mood and not wanting to say no since it sounded interesting enough I said yes. The "owner" said that he would not be able to pay since he already had hired a team of developers before that did not deliver and as such he was instead offering a part of the company.....sounds familiar?
Not wanting to let my friend down, I told the owner that I would help just as long I get complete CTO power over the product and not crying about the stack being used or ME NOT GIVING THE PRODUCT MY FULL ATTENTION BECAUSE HE WAS NOT FUCKING PAYING.
He said ok.
Of course he did not like it, but he said ok.
He has been asking for the code, the platform, demos and a bunch of other shit which I continue to refuse since he has not offered me or my boy a copy of the legal documents that we require.
Him: "You will get them soon enough, I still need to see the product just to make sure everything is ok"
Me: "You wouldn't even know where to begin looking unless you have a third party that could verify the code, last time I checked I was to be the only one good for this"
Him: "Yeah and you and <friend> are, but I just need to see the product"
Me: "I send you videos and demos, sorry dude, but no binding document == no code. I know you think I am young, give me some fucking credit because this is not my first rodeo"
Him: "I am not trying to play you or anything, you can trust me"
Me: "No, not really. Talk to me about this when you get the documents"
Him: "Well its cuz this is taking too long...."
Me: "Tssss I know!!! It sucks right? Want a good product, built with all the bells and whistles and YOU DON'T WANT TO PAY? guess what dude, I do have a full time job, your product gets my minimal attention, right there at the bottom next to taking a shit, meaning that I will give your product the same time and attention as I would going to the throne. Aye don't feel that bad, I normally take about 1 hour on the shitter, you get that for fucking free."
To be fair ladies and gents I normally don't just explode on people like this. But I just can't fathom not paying someone for a rather large software product, with only a promise that "it will sell" and then telling them to hurry up.
Far as I am concerned this product will flop, but he seems to think it is the next big thing(of course).
He can go choke on some chode.
Fucking prick.1 -
A word of advice to any new Arch user: don't use lxdm for your display manager. It's utter shit. The package hijacks the symlink of any other DM when you install it, and it refocuses the DM on a 5 second loop while it's running, making it a pain in the ass to use a VT. LightDM was broken temporarily so I had to install it, but frankly, I don't ever want to touch thiis piece of software again.4
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Ever wonder why there are so few HomeKit devices on the market? It's not any absurd Apple licensing this time... it is that the Accessory Development Kit / Software Development Kit (adk/sdk) is such a land of broken toys, that's why.
The base install per the guide on the Raspberry PI as a prototyping system system is a complete cluster fuck. The install itself breaks all over the place. Clearly these people are not embedded firmware engineers.
They could have just created a ready-to-go Raspberry PI disk image that you master over to a microSD card but noooo...
(They should be put on an island and work on embedded missile firmware. Those that are still breathing in 6 months might be real firmware engineers and not script kiddies.)
If you ever manage to get their garbage to actually work with the bags of shitty tools approach to a "dev stack" ... you should seriously be awarded a Nobel prize for patience and dedication.
The Made for 'i' (whatever the fuck 'i' stands for in MFi) is really "Made For Idiots" or "Mother Fucking Interface".
<https://mfi.apple.com/en/...>
Bunch of fucking bureaucrats more worried about certification and use of logos than product development.2 -
It realy just warms my heart when the customer provides us with software that I need to go through manually and test every method individual before we can start implement it. Then I have to spend hours testing every fucking bit of it to make sure the modules we control with said sw doesnt meet their untimely doom cause the sw is too broken to actually run.
Any.net developers on this plattform? If you doesnt use these xml comments for commenting methods, you're on my hit list.
I realy hate these back-alley developers. Sorry of I sound salty and whiny but seriously. These past 3 weeks, most of my time Ive just worked around issues instead of solving them, cause their sw just keeps chaining good coding down to the ground. And theres no documentation cause "we have higher priorities ", testing is done by us at release cause "its faster and we dont make mistakes" and worst of all, our contact quote on quote "senior experienced developer lead design im far up my own ass and way more experienced than you" guy is a consultant who is only reachable about 2h on a daily basis.
Tldr: we live in a society. -
I really like my position as the head of my department. But I am most definitely hitting walls(and in some way breaking them) concerning the way the CTO(my direct boss) deals with a lot of the things that his management team wants to do.
For example, the previous manager could only do so much in terms of directing a software team since she did not have a formal background in computer science or engineering, thus the developers that she had would tell her the different deals with many things and she would have to take their word for it. Nothing necessarily bad with this, but it just meant that a lot of things could have gone smoother had she the knowledge to fix said items. Whenever she would try to use resources(dev time or such) the CTO will resort to the all powerful manthra of "if it ain't broke don't fix it!".
but it was about more than fixing things that were breaking, our internal services and admin boards were built using all of the WRONG proper development practices, it feels as if they took the book of best practices.....and said fuck it and did whatever the fuck they wanted. It is the worst PHP/Java/JS code I have ever seen in my entire life and the reason why even though I do not concur with it I will always understand the dislike from other developers. Our services look like something that came out from the 90s, no style, no engineering concepts in place, no versioning no testing NADA zip(these are all web based services)
One in particular, it was an admin board used internally to let students evaluate their professors, the entire app is shit, and it was broken, for some UNGODLY reason, the original dev decided to use some weird external libraries he got from some blog somewhere and as such something that would take about 5 or 6 files is now a mess with over 200 php/js files all over the fucking place. The CTO insisted on fixing them, they were all broken, and I continuously told him that redesigning the application would be faster.
Mofo fought me on it, and in the end I did what I wanted and rebuilt the app.
It took me one afternoon. One fucking afternoon, over possibly 2 weeks of fixing it.
See, I am not one to just do whatever he pleases, but I am firm in my belief that if I know a better way I will do it and save precious time. The dude had to agree with me on this and promised to consider this shit on other items that will undoubtedly come up. He was lying out of his ass but oh well..........
W3 -
Fuck chrome.
You're asking why I am so fucking angry at this piece of software? Well because I was awake at night for 3 hours reinstalling my mail system because I thought the Web UI was broken due to a corrupted database. Guess what - the caching of chrome caused the buttons to silently hide beneath the header of the UI. Hahahahahakillmehahah
To be fair, this could have happened with every browser. But since everyone is on the "anti-google" trip anyway, I'm gonna switch to Firefox 🙃1 -
So the project I work on basically has to talk to a 3rd party plugin, through a 3rd party framework. The 3rd party plugin is a black box. This conversation happened:
Software guy: so we aren't sure what is breaking the thing. It's either us or the plugin, but it's probably both.
Systems guy: well then if we aren't sure then why are we writing an issue for it.
SWG: because we aren't sure but we know we are doing at least something that contributes. We read int X from a table and put it into a float. X doesn't perfectly represent in a float. It comes out X.0001. Then they take it and when it comes back it comes back as Y.0001. We cram it into an int so it becomes Y, we compare it to X which is really X.0001 and it comes back invalid.
SG: well as long as we are sending them the right number . . .
SWG: but we aren't sending them the right number. They are expecting X not X.0001. Then they send us back Y.0001 but it should be X so it's wrong.
SG: so they're giving us the wrong return value.
SWG: yes, but because we're giving them the wrong number.
SG: well not exactly . . .
SWG: yes exactly. It is off by .0001 because of floating point math.
SG: well . . .
Me: look it doesn't matter how it's breaking. But it IS broken. Which is why we're filling out the damn problem report. THEY ARE EDITABLE. We talked to the customer and gave them the risk assessment. They don't care. It happens rarely any way.
SG: then can we lower the severity?
Me: no. Severity doesn't relate to risk. That is a whole different process. Severity assumes it has already happened. It's a a high severity.
SG: but the metrics.
Me: WE GIVE THE METRICS TO THE CUSTOMER. WE TALKED TO THE CUSTOMER. THEY DON'T GIVE A SHIT.
And that was how I spent Wednesday wondering how a level 4 lead systems engineer got his job. How many push ups did he do? What kind of juice did he drink?2 -
WHY IS IT SO FUCKING HARD TO DOWNLOAD SOFTWARE FROM MEGACORPS??
Yes, am looking at you EMC, Oracle and IBM. Either they have tons of portals-e-delivery-shittorama or their softwares suddenly disappear for n amount of time without notice. Mix this up with broken links or CONSTANTLY REBRANDING YOUR SHITTY PRODUCTS SO YOU NEED TO HIRE A PERSONAL ASSISTANT THAT ONLY WORKS WITH TRACKING THESE PORTALS TO HELL
Also, your websites are slow as shit.
Thank you.1 -
So I had someone question why their system was broken after they installed my software and all of its dependencies to /usr by hand... ._.
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I've been working as a developer for 10 years now... I got my first software development job when I was still learning for my masters.
After all this time I have switched programming languages and product types a few times from web development to mobile apps to desktop software (C++, CEF, QT,).
And I have come to the conclusion that I want early retirement... like right now retirement... I'm done dealing with management that doesn't understand shit... dealing with people we have outsourced part of the shit to... needing to fix stuff that is broken after some other person refactored the code and didn't fully test it and it somehow got approved... dealing with people that think that "know better" and implemented things like that 5 years ago because they thought like "THAT" and will not accept my merge request because of that.
Like don't get me wrong I love to make and develop software, but since this is the 3rd job in the row with a toxic environment like this I feel like I need to move to the country side and open up a farm or something :|2 -
Finally got fed up with nvm and npm being messed up somehow and decided to reinstall it. It’s finally finished after 84 years and more text than the Bible and the complete works of William Shakespeare has been scrolling in my terminal as it installs.
Aaaand it’s still just as broken as before. I’m now considering re-imaging the entire machine and starting over again.
I know all the “right answers” as to why and how we use Node but I sometimes wonder how much of that is sunk-cost groupthink as well as “we’ve always done it this way”.
Should _setting up_ to write code and release software take longer than it does to write code and release software?3 -
3d printer
I only assembled it from prusa parts but still it was lots of fun, learned a lot about how 3d printers work.
Then it was printing trex using 3d printer and it was funny to because it took me about a month to do so just because of amount of parts and the problem with parts that were broken and needed to be fixed.
From software projects, once I build a browser plugin in 2-3 hours cause I was pissed off with those shitty popups all around. I published it on browser store, made code opensource and forgot about it.
Recently I got some survey from a german university about it and I was like wtf ?
I looked at a statistics and my plugin had about 500 daily users and I was amused because the ui is shitty as fuck and the ux is even more shitty.
I plan to update this plugin but since I am focused on a bigger personal project for almost half a year now I have no time to do it.5 -
Been trying to install myself a gentoo but it's been more like the mode of broken packages than the godmode of Linux... I mean I see that some packages break if I am trying to compile via musl (not fully supported yet) or via uclibc. But please. CAN'T YOU JUST FUCKING TEST THE PACKAGES BEFORE PUSHING TO LIVE? Seriously. I just wanna install a system with i3 and lightdm for the first. But do you think I could build even the first 20 packages WITHOUT A FUCKING ERROR MESSAGE?! FUCK NO. I mean it's a clean install - nothing should be blocking - let's wait a day.
*one day later*
Fuck. Shit doesn't work now either.
*gets himself a new tarball*
Wow now it works.... Or not. 4 packages later it failed again. And like that it continues.
Gentoo isn't even running on that new software. BUT IT STILL WON'T BUILD ANYTHING TO EVEN LET ME CONTINUE BUILDING A FUCKING KERNEL AND SETTING THAT SHIT UP.
Now I am totally frustrated - deleted my efivars once because I forgot to unmount /sys from the Chroot - after a few days of trying. I tell myself: Why not just arch? It always worked.
Okay then reboot to windows and get an arch-livesystem.... If only my Windows didn't boot entry disappear again. -
This shit is long story of my computer experience over my lifetime.
When I was young I got my first PC with windows it was not so bad. It required safe shut down of it’s fat32 partition. From time to time I needed to reinstall it cause of slow down but I got used to it I was only a gamer.
Time passes and I got more curious about computers and about this linux. Everything worked there but installation of anything was complete madness and none of windows programs worked well, and I wanted to play games and be productive so I sticked with windows.
I bought hp laptop once with nvidia card, it was overheating and got broken. So I bought toshiba and all I told to the seller was I want ATI card. Took me 5 minutes to do it and I was faster then my friend buying pack of cigarettes because I was earning money using computer.
Then I grown up running my small one person programming businesses and I wanted to run and compile every fucking program on this world. I wanted linux shell commands. I wanted package manager, and I wanted my os to be simple because I wasn’t earning money by using my os but by programming. So after getting my paycheck I bought mac. I can run windows and linux on vm if I need it. I try not to steal someones work so I didn’t want to run hackintosh. I am using this mac for some time.
Also I use playstation for gaming. Because I only want to run and play game I am not excited about graphics but gameplay. I think I am pragmatic person.
I can tell you something about my mac.
When I close lid it go sleep when I open it wakes up instantly. I never need to wonder if I want to hibernate or shut down or sleep and drain battery. It is fucking simple.
When I want to run or open something it doesn’t want me to wait but it gives me my intellij or terminal or another browser or whatever I search for. Yeah search is something that works.
Despite it got 8 gigs of ram I can run whatever number of programs I want at the same speed. The speed is not very fast sometimes but it’s constant fast.
I have a keychain so my passwords are in one place I can slow down shared internet speed, I can put my wifi in monitor mode and I don’t need to install some 3rd party software.
And now I updated my mac to high sierra, cause it’s free and I want to play with ios compilation. Before I did it I didn’t even backup whole work. I just used time machine and regular backups. And guess what, it still works at the same speed and all I did was click to run update and cook something to eat.
When I got bored I close the lid, when got idea open lid and code shit, not waiting for fucking wakeup or fucking updates.
I wanted to rant apple products I use but they work, they got fucking updates all along at the same time. And all of updates are optional.
I cannot tell that about all apple products but about products I use.
I think I just got old and started to praise my limited time on this world. Not being excited about new crap. When I buy something I choose wisely. I bought iPhone. I can buy latest iPhone x but I bought iPhone 7 cause it’s from fucking metal. And I know that metal is harder then glass, why the fucking apple forgot about it? I don’t know.
I know that I am clumsy and drop stuff. Dropped my phone at least 100 times and nothing.
I am not a apple fan boy I won’t buy mac with this glowing shit above keyboard that would got me blind at night.
I buy something when I know that it can save my time on this world. I try to buy things that make me productive and don’t break after a year.
So now piece of advise, stop wasting your time, buy and update wisely, wait a week or a month or a year when more people buy shit and buy what’s not broken. And if something’s broken rant this shit so next customer can be smarter.
Cheers1 -
My favourite bug fix was actually IT based and it was the first time my Eastern European, critical of my skills, family not only praised me but claimed that I was smarter than them.
My grandfather had changed from a telecom to a VOIP device for his landline. For some reason after installation, he could hear the other person on the line but they couldn't hear him. Me and my mother were away during this time so they called in the other family IT guy. This guy is no joke, he's one of the top in his company and makes a sweet six figures and lives in a mansion.
So he started looking things up, googling forum, etc. Couldn't find anything. Started calling the tech support and tried to deduce what it was and their tech support had never heard of such a problem. He takes his lunch breaks to help out my gramps. Keeps escalating, escalating and nothing. His conclusion is that they need to send him a new VoIP stick and they're not giving it to him. At this point, he's so frustrated that he screams at my grandfather to go back to paying 60 bucks a month for landline and to stop bothering him.
At this time me and my mother return and they have concluded that they need a new stick. My mom is great at intimidating people into free stuff so she and I go over to do so. At this point everyone is convinced of the problem and even I don't think I could fix it. But I decide to check if that's the case because I don't want my gramps to get a new stick and it still doesn't work.
I go through the typical forum hunting and there's Nada on the problem. I look at the stick and all the lights seem to be working, no error lights. And I wonder maybe the problem is not the stick, because usually you can't do anything at all if the hardware is broken. So I start thinking, maybe my gramps accidentally muted his handset while talking or something dumb like that. That wasn't it.
Then I decided to see if the problem was recreated on the other handsets. I tried one out and my mom could hear me but I couldn't hear her. What?! That's different! It was the opposite with the other phone. I conclude that it's working and there's something up with the handsets. So I go and do a reset on all of the handsets to make sure.
Lo and behold, the problem is fixed. It took me 25 minutes to solve. That guy gave up after a week of trying. My mom who assumed my IT skills were on par with other kids and nothing special had finally seen me up against an opponent, and not any opponent, a six figure high ranking IT specialist. And I didn't even use any secret, complex software knowledge that wasn't accessible to her or any other normal user.
That's when she finally said that I was smarter than her, that I just used my common sense. She would've needed some kind of prompting, hint or direction to solve the issue but I did it without any.
It was a very satisfying bug to fix. -
!Dev
TL Dr :- Debugging a software I barely know about was slow and ended up breaking in the shop it was used in and reverting the changes does not solve the problem
I asked my father a few days ago why he was buying a dedicated server for his ERP software and not using a client computer as his server which he is doing in his shop currently. He said that it was slow on other computers in the LAN which is an wired. The solutions given by the company that made it did not work. Big bills would sometimes also dissapear which took around 30 minutes to make. So when he bought the computer to home during lockdown I pulled up the debugging guide from the company which summed up to check latency,ram and add these files to exclusion list of your antivirus. Latency was kinda high at the first when pinging another computer on the LAN but I was testing on WiFi so it could be pretty inaccurate. The computer met the ram requirements so that was not a problem. I checked the data path by opening the software and accidentally typed something but I did not worry since the changes needed to be manually accepted. I added the files to the Windows defender exclusion list and shut it down.
Next day :- My father calls me up and says the software is working on the server but is broken on other computers. So I check if the changes were automatically accepted for some reason and yes that happened. So so pull up a guide to configure the software in multi user mode and I replace the mistyped setting with the correct one and it still does not work. My father asks me to undo everything by using anydesk. I remove all the exclusions I added to Windows defender and disable windows firewall. Still does not work. Restart the computer and software. Still does not work. Check permissions on data folder. They are correct.
WTF I reverted all the changes I made and the software does not work on other computers.7 -
Class normal people:
Def good day:
"Manager was out, had great lunch, got a. special someone's number, successfully avoided traffic, got in special someone's pants"
Def bad day:
"Stubbed toe this morning, rained all day, broke up w. special someone, sat in traffic for 2 hrs"
Class software dev:
Def good day:
"Wrote lots of working code, little to no bugs, checked in no-probs, ahead od schedule for ship, extra time for ping-pong!"
Def bad day:
"Somone fucked up the latest build, coffee machine's broken, ran out of adderall, manager on everyone's @$$ for a fix, 5 hrs later...no fix, no blames, no coffee, board meeting; fml" -
Don't leave "broken windows" (bad designs, wrong decisions, or poor code) unrepaired. Fix each one as soon as it is discovered. If there is insufficient time to fix it properly, then board it up. Perhaps you can comment out the offending code, or display a "Not Implemented" message, or substitute dummy data instead. Take some action to prevent further damage and to show that you're on top of the situation.
We've seen clean, functional systems deteriorate pretty quickly once windows start breaking. There are other factors that can contribute to software rot, and we'll touch on some of them elsewhere, but neglect accelerates the rot faster than any other factor.
"The Pragmatic Programmer"
2 -
My first internship.
The webdev department for a engineering company is in the basement. I was given a cubicle near the middle by the wall. The ceiling light was broken so I had to work in the dark... It was a 7-4 with no pay nor do they cover any expenses. I did manage to use the experience and got a job offer at a 'proper' software company in the end. -
I want to make a "game" on learning spoken languages so people can study while not stressing out on the learning.
The disadvantages:
-Vocab
-Method to memorize is different with every person
-Stress and frustration
-Motivation killer
Advantages:
-Can be interesting, depends on user's interest and willingness
-Explore vocab by exploring or reading in-game texts
-Grammar is heavily broken down to help relate meanings and thorough understanding of a sentence as well as slang
--
Why I put disadvantages first was to see how the software will impact a person's negativity/postivity when using it. As in for example, when you see something that is difficult to understand, users tend to procrastinate or drop it due to it being "difficult"/alienated.
-- onto the rant--
Many apps have really awful way of teaching, its just 3-4 apps chucked into 1 aka all-in-one and expects people to pay just because of the all-in-one app containing flash cards, sentences, audio etc. I use my phone (android) and normally during my intern or my way to school, I would do my reading in the other languages, (separate apps, all free). Also apart from that, students sometimes take 2 years to learn but drop because it's difficult.
TL:DR; apps and classes give shitty lessons, I want to outdo them and let students have a better chance at studying new spoken languages.2 -
How rotten and half bitten is this most valuable Apple? See that they get quite some bashing for their latest Catalina release. And they deserve every portion of it, I think.
Honestly, when I saw our testers going through the different betas, which hardly installed and on which our software kept behaving differently, nevertheless they pushed their Golden Master and released. Didn't seem a good idea.
Currently I had to update to Catalina to check some small broken feature of ours and now the active window keeps on losing focus every few minutes. Have to grab the mouse and click there again to continue working. Really fucking annoying. Hope I can track it down some time.. or trash my iMac.2 -
I like the people I work with although they are very shit, I get paid a lot and I mostly enjoy the company but..
Our scrum implementation is incredibly fucked so much so that it is not even close to scrum but our scrum master doesn't know scrum and no one else cares so we do everything fucked.
Our prs are roughly 60 file hangers at a time, we only complete 50% of our work each sprint because the stories are so fucked up, we have no testers at all, team lead insists on creating sql table designs but doesn't understand normalisation so our tables often hold 3 or 4 sets of data types just jammed in.
Our software sits broken for months on end until someone notices (pre release), our architecture is garbage or practically non existent. Our front end apps that only I know the technology have approaches dictated by team lead that has no clue of the language or framework.
Our front end app is now about 50% tech debt because project management is so ineffectual and approaches are constantly changing. For instance we used to use view models for domain transfer objects... Now we use database entities, so there is no commonality between models but the system used to have shared features relying on that..sour roles and permissions are fucked since a role is a page regardless of the pages functionality so there is no ability to toggle features, but even though I know the design is fucked I still had to implement after hours of trying to convince team lead of it. Fast forward a few months and it's a huge cluster fuck to enforce.
We have no automated testing of any sort or manual testing in place.
I know of a few security vulnerabilities I can nuke our databases with but it got ignored.
Pr reviews are obviously a nightmare since they're so big.
I just tried to talk to scrum master again about story creation since any story involving front end ui as an aspect of it is crammed in under one pointed story as sub tasks, essentially throwing away any ability to calculate velocity. Been here a year now and the scrum master doesn't know what I mean by velocity... Her entire job is scrum master.
So anyway I am thinking about leaving because I like being a developer and it is slowly making me give up on doing things to a high standard and I have no chance of improving things, but at the same time the pay is great and I like the people. -
Working with badly designed hardware is amazing
While it is highly frustrating most of the time, I'm gonna be able to say "We can't develop software for broken hardware" to a lot of highly paid and highly annoyed peiple and that will be immensely satisfying.3 -
A few months back I tried to get the company I work for to invest in software to located and recover lost/stolen devices. I brought a few offerings to the table but I was told we didn't need to worry about that because it never happens and we already have software in place.
Fast forward a few months and I'm looking at the software we're using and it seems we haven't actually configured the computers to allow for tracking. I send a message to our CTO about this and point out that, in the event of a missing device, we can't actually relocate it. Not 5 minutes later a manager comes in to let us know that his computer is missing and may have been stolen because his car was broken into the previous night.
Well I'm laughing because this is just the kind of thing I needed to happen, and the manager is freaking out because he's afraid the CEO is going to be furious. I get a few emails from other members of the leadership team requesting we set up a meeting to go over our security and asset protection procedures.
So I finally get to start implementing some actual security protocols around here. And fortunately the lost laptop was actually recovered because it was left at a bar and not in the car when it was broken into. -
A space game (obviously) where ships are built and broken in convex pieces. With in-game computers and ship design/construction software, of course. Because what would a game engine be without the ability to play a game within the game, with exactly the same visual quality as in the outer one?
Edit: Game-within-game premise based on the idea that it will be easier to write the ship-CAD software in a game engine than from scratch
Edit 2: may as well also be able to play the actual game within itself, since it would be like holodeck simulations2 -
MS Teams markdown shortcuts are now broken for me and my whole org. Literally never happened with discord or slack. How is a company this big so bad at making good software?2
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So as a personal project for work I decided to start data logging facility variables, it's something that we might need to pickup at some point in the future so decided to take the initiative since I'm the new guy.
I setup some basic current loop sensors are things like gas line pressures for bulk nitrogen and compressed air but decided to go with a more advanced system for logging the temperature and humidity in the labs. These sensors come with 'software' it's a web site you host internally. Cool so I just need to build a simple web server to run these PoE sensors. No big deal right, it's just an IIS service. Months after ordering Server 2019 though SSC I get 4 activation codes 2 MAK and 2 KMS. I won the lottery now i just have to download the server 2019 retail ISO and... Won't take the keys. Back to purchasing, "oh I can download that for you, what key is yours". Um... I dunno you sent me 4 Can I just get the link, "well you have to have a login". Ok what building are you in I'll drive over with a USB key (hoping there on the same campus), "the download keeps stopping, I'll contact the IT service in your building". a week later I get an install ISO and still no one knows that key is mine. Local IT service suggests it's probably a MAK key since I originally got a quote for a retail copy and we don't run a KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. We'll doesn't windows reject all 4 keys then proceed to register with a non-existent KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. Great so now this server that is supposed to connected to a private network for the sensors and use the second NIC for an internet connection has to be connected to the old network that I'm using for testing because that's where the KMS server seems to be. Ok no big deal the old network has internet except the powers that be want to migrate everything to the new more secure network but I still need to be connected to the KMS server because they sent me the wrong key. So I'm up to three network cards and some of my basic sensors are running on yet another network and I want to migrate the management software to this hardware to have all my data logging in one system. I had to label the Ethernet ports so I could hand over the hardware for certification and security scans.
So at this point I have my system running with a couple sensors setup with static IP's because I haven't had time to setup the DNS for the private network the sensors run on. Local IT goes to install McAfee and can't because it isn't compatible with anything after 1809 or later, I get a message back that " we only support up to 1709" I point out that it's server 2019, "Oh yeah, let me ask about that" a bunch of back and forth ensues and finally Local IT get's a version of McAfee that will install, runs security scan again i get a message back. " There are two high risk issues on your server", my blood pressure is getting high as well. The risks there looking at McAfee versions are out of date and windows Defender is disabled (because of McAfee).
There's a low risk issue as well, something relating to the DNS service I didn't fully setup. I tell local IT just disable it for now, then think we'll heck I'll remote in and do it. Nope can't remote into my server, oh they renamed it well that's lot going to stay that way but whatever oh here's the IP they assigned it, nope cant remote in no privileges. Ok so I run up three flights of stairs to local IT before they leave for the day log into my server yup RDP is enabled, odd but whatever let's delete the DNS role for now, nope you don't have admin privileges. Now I'm really getting displeased, I can;t have admin privileges on the network you want me to use to support the service on a system you can't support and I'm supposed to believe you can migrate the life safety systems you want us to move. I'm using my system to prove that the 2FA system works, at this rate I'm going to have 2FA access to a completely worthless broken system in a few years. good thing I rebuilt the whole server in a VM I'm planning to deploy before I get the official one back. I'm skipping a lot of the ridiculous back and forth conversations because the more I think about it the more irritated I get.1 -
So I have been using my HP laptop(r007tx) for over two years and a half now. Here are it's top 'features'
1. A dead pixel on the screen. Slowly it started to grow every time I close and open the lap and eventually it grew to a horizontal line across the screen. Luckily it was under warranty.
2. Volume is very low. Can't be fixed.
3. Broken hinges. Never had it faced any impact.
4. WiFi adapter stopped working after an year. Bought an external adapter.
5. Monitor frame started to come off.
6. Battery is shit. Explained it a bit detail here.
https://devrant.io/rants/655618/...
7. DVD player doesn't work.
Most of the problems came just after one year. If you are thinking to buy HP laptop do pay for extended warranty.
But still successfully running it because of the software that every dev has developed.
Kudos! -
When you have an interview with a software company and the interviewer speaks broken English so the two of you don't understand each other and it's completely unproductive for both of us1
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Reading Geekonomics (silly title for the book) and seriously considering that maybe we should all be licensed/certified since so much software is broken, looking at you Equifax.1
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Ok ok ok. I see y'all have nice plans for the new year. Some of you even made a list that will be barely completed or remain unchecked.
Let me tell you my real issues/plans for 2020.
- First things first, I have to update the documentation of the projects that I maintain. Especially the copyright information. (2019 -> 2020)
- I have to check if any of the old software that I use is broken because of the year/date bugs. (you know, that happens)
- And finally I should check my Windows PC. If it's still OK than it means that no malware/virus is activated with a year payload. (it happens too, watch @danooct1 on YT)
Hope it helps someone.1 -
This is a repost of an original rant posted on a request for "Community Feedback" from Atlassian. You know, Atlassian? Those beloved people behind such products as :
• Thing I Love™
• Other Thing You Used One Time™
• Platform Often Mentioned in Suicide Notes, Probably™*
Now this rant was written in early 2022 while I was working in an Azure Cloud Engineer role that transformed into me being the company's main Sysadmin/Project Manager/Hiring Manager/Network Admin/Graphic Designer.
While trying to simultaneously put out over 9000 fires with one hand, and jangling keys in the face of the Owner/Arsonist with the other, I was also desperately implementing Jira Service Desk. Normally this wouldn't have been as much of a priority as it was, but the software our support team was using had gone past 15 years old, then past extended support, then the lone developer died, then it didn't work on Windows 10, then only functioned thanks to a dev cohort long past creating a keygen....which was now broken. So we needed a solution *now*.
The previous solution was shit of a different tier. The sight of it would make a walking talking anthropomorphised sentient puddle of dogshit (who both eats and produces further dookie derivatives) blush with embarrassment. The CD-ROM/Cereal Box this software came in probably listed features like "Stores Your Customer's First AND (or) Last Name!" or "Windows ME Downgrade Disk Included!" and "NEW: Less(-ish) Genocide(s)"!
Despite this, our brain/fearless leader decided this would be a great time to have me test, implement, deploy, and train everyone up on a new solution that would suck your toes, sound your shaft, and that he hadn't reminded me that I was a lazy sack enough lately.
One day, during preliminary user testing I received an email letting me know that the support team was having issues with a Customer's profile on our new support desk. Thanks to our Owner/Firestarter/Real World Micheal Scott being deep in his latest project (fixing our "All 5 devs quit in the last 12 months and I can't seem to hire any new ones" issue (by buying a ping pong table)), I had a bit of fortuitous time on my hands to investigate this issue. I had spent many hours of overtime working on this project, writing custom integrations and automations, so what I found out was crushing.
Below is the (digitally) physical manifestation of my rage after realising I would have to create / find / deal with a whole new method for support to manage customer contacts.
I'm linking to the original forum thread because you kind of need to have the pictures embedded in said reply to get really inhale the "Jira-Rant" ambiance. The part where I use several consecutive words as anchor links to tickets with other people screaming into the void gets a bit sweet n' savoury too - having those hyperlinks does improve the je ne say what of it all.
bit.ly/JIRANT (Case Sensitive)
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There is some good news at the end of this brown n' squirty rainbow though!
Nice try silly little Jira button, you can't ruin *my* 2022!
• I was able to forget all about Jira a month later when I received a surprise vacation home! (To be there while my Mom passed away).
• Eventually work stress did catch up to me - but my boss thoughtfully gave me a nice long vacation! (By assaulting *while* firing me (for emailing in a vacation request while he was a having a bad (see:normal) day))
5 -
Hey guys, my apple watch series 2 got broken recently. It doesn’t charge at all. It’s like electricity what’s that?
So I did all troubleshooting you can think of and all the ones on the web. Still no go.
Although some ppl reported that after a week or so their watches started charging again and didn’t have the problem anymore(which points out to some software error and once battery completely drained it kinda reset itself?). Anyway my battery is dead like nothing ever comes up on the screen anymore but still doesn’t charge.
I wanted to ask if anyone here had such problem and found a solution to it maybe?2
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