Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!

So, here goes!

A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.

The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.

Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.

Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.

Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.

The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.

They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.

Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.

So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.

So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.

We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.

As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.

So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...

Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.

Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!

[Continues in the comments]

You know what?

Young cocky React devs can suck my old fuckin LAMP and Objective-C balls.

Got a new freelance job and got brought in to triage a React Native iOS/Android app. Lead dev's first comment to me is: "Bro, have you ever used React Native".

To which I had to reply to save my honor publicly, "No, but I have like 8 years with Objective-C and 3 years with Swift, and 3 years with Node, so I maybe I'll still be able help. Sometimes it just helps to have a fresh set of eyes."

"Well, nobody but me can work on this code."

And that, as it turned out was almost true.

After going back and forth with our PM and this dev I finally get his code base.

"Just run "npm install" he says".

Like no fuckin shit junior... lets see if that will actually work.

Node 14... nope whole project dies.

Node 12 LTS... nope whole project dies.

Install all of react native globally because fuck it, try again... still dies.

Node 10 LTS... project installs but still won't run or build complaining about some conflict with React Native libraries and Cocoa pods.

Go back to my PM... "Um, this project won't work on any version of Node newer than about 5 years old... and even if it did it still won't build, and even if it would build it still runs like shit. And even if we fix all of that Apple might still tell us to fuck off because it's React Native.

Spend like a week in npm and node hell just trying to fucking hand install enough dependencies to unfuck this turds project.

All the while the original dev is still trying TO FIX HIS OWN FUCKING CODE while also being a cocky ass the entire time. Now, I can appreciate a cocky dev... I was horrendously cocky in my younger days and have only gotten marginally better with age. But if you're gonna be cocky, you also have to be good at it. And this guy was not.

Lo, we're not done. OG Dev comes down with "Corona Virus"... I put this in quotes because the dude ends up drawing out his "virus" for over 4 months before finally putting us in touch with "another dev team he sometimes uses".

Next, me and my PM get on a MS Teams call with this Indian house. No problems there, I've worked with the Indians before... but... these are guys are not good. They're talking about how they've already built the iOS build... but then I ask them what they did to sort out the ReactNative/Cocoa Pods conflict and they have no idea what I'm talking about.

Why?

Well, one of these suckers sends a link to some repo and I find out why. When he sends the link it exposes his email...

This Indian dude's emails was our-devs-name@gmail.com...

We'd been played.

Company sued the shit out of the OG dev and the Indian company he was selling off his work to.

I rewrote the app in Swift.

So, lets review... the React dev fucked up his own project so bad even he couldn't fix it... had to get a team of Indians to help who also couldn't fix it... was still a dickhead to me when I couldn't fix it... and in the end it was all so broken we had to just do a rewrite.

None of you get npm. None of you get React. None of you get that doing the web the way Mark Zucherberg does it just makes you a choad locked into that ecosystem. None of you can fix your own damn projects when one of the 6,000 dependency developers pushes breaking changes. None of you ever even bother with "npm audit fix" because if security was a concern you'd be using a server side language for fucking server side programming like a grown up.

So, next time a senior dev with 20 years exp. gets brought in to help triage a project that you yourself fucked up... Remember that the new thing you know and think makes you cool? It's not new and it's not cool. It's just JavaScript on the server so you script kiddies never have to learn anything but JavaScript... which makes you inarguably worse programmers.

And, MF, I was literally writing javascript while you were sucking your mommas titties so just chill... this shit ain't new and I've got a dozen of my own Node daemons running right now... difference is?

Mine are still working.

Me: *opens a terminal in front of parents and starts a build script from command line. Logs start rapidly flooding the screen*

Mom: *whispers to dad proudly* “look at how much she has worked. Look how fast the lines are running on the screen!!

I didn’t wanna burst their bubble by explain them that their child is NOT doing any rocket science, and is something even they can do(maybe better).
So I responded back with a fake serious tone
“Yeah it’s all code.”
If only they knew what I was actually doing...

Not a rant, but I found this funny enough to share.

About two weeks ago, I’m contacted by a third party development firm that is responsible for building the next iteration of a control board were are developing. Alongside build of the PCB they were scoped to flash the firmware and verify all connected components.

During the call, they tell me they don’t have the resources to build our testing environment with the Ansible script I provided, and they don’t know if the updates they have made will work with our control system. Ugh...really...

I attempt to walk them through the 3 pretty simple commands to launch the playbook. Instead of listening, their project manager insists that I need to load up the environment and send them a ready to go system.

I quickly load up a RaspberryPi and prepare it for shipping. I hand the box to our shipping clerk and fill out the shipping request documentation. Then about a week goes by and this is where the story really begins.

I get an email from the same rep asking where the environment is, and I head down to the warehouse to inquire where the RaspberryPi might be. After speaking with the head clerk, we can’t seem to track down the package. I’m assured that they will find the Pi and send me the shipment update.

I pass the information along and after about a day and a half I still didn’t receive word back from the warehouse team. I load up another Pi and head back down to the warehouse. I follow up with the warehouse staff. They inform me that they have not been able to locate my package and another warehouse worker is called over. He says he hasn’t seen it, but they they were having a food day that day and he thinks more than likely someone ate it.

Like it didn’t even click at first but after a few seconds I realize that these guys have literally been looking for a pie for the past two days...and I JUST DIE.

After the 5 or so minutes of laughing I show them the newly flashed RaspberryPi, and of course they know exactly where the original one was.

It’s shipped out now, but wow. Also, it turns out the PCB manufacturing company didn’t even really need this and it was all a guise to hide that they are behind schedule and that they will not be able to finish the work scoped. FML!

Dear Indian Companies,

Why do you hire for a role and then say: "We dont have that role but then we want you to grow up to be a Generalist"!

6 years as a build, release and SCM guy at Moto and Nokia back then, I shifted to this big Indian IT corp coz Nokia was shutting down...

A week into my orientation (which is a crazy weirdness inducing ritual in and of itself), the new manager I'm supposed to be working with comes up and says- "Here's the code repo, there are 2 open jQuery issues, fix them!"

I'm not really sure what to say at this point because jQuery is nice and all but thats not who I am.. I'm the infra / DevOps guy. And this is circa 2012 when DevOps as a term was just hotting up...

Tell me to setup a multi-stage pipeline and automated test cycles, I'll do it drunk, but oh no! bug fixing on a jQuery script? Noooo!!!!! I just dont have the chops for it.

So long story short, I get reported to HR for insubordination - Yeah, Go Figure!

Cue: HR meeting
HR: You wont work?
Me: I cant work on jQuery. I am a sysadmin / devops guy... Give me a project that involves those skills and I'll work.
HR: But we hired you to work on jQuery.
Me: But you did not mention jQuery / UI / UX in the job description - Pulls up email and shows JD for interview which says Symbian, Build, Release, Configuration Management but NOT jQuery.
HR: ....
Me: :-/
HR: But we want you to be a generalist.
Me: #wtf
HR: We want an engineer to be able to do anything he is tasked with!
Me: Can I know my last working date here?

And thats how my career at a glorious IT corporation just went poof!

When I think back on it, I feel good that I chose to do what I wanted to get better at and what I loved working on...

And this is the problem with IT companies in our country - They play with people's aspirations and passions... To the point that all thats left of a software engineer is the looking forward to pay day so he can start the damn cycle all over again.

- just do your job. Close this ticket already and go to the next one

- It's just a 1 minute job.. Don't build scripts for things that simple!

- Look, we don't have time to spare for coffee breaks. Stop wasting your time on scripting!

- netikras, the IST shift fucked things up again. I need you to do your magic and clear those alerts

- netikras, there are 20 tickets waiting to be investigated. Either your coleagues spend 2 hours on them or you do your magic in 2 minutes, as always..

- netikras, please share your scripts with your team

- netikras, I have nominated you for the Star Award for your script

- netikras, here's the star award and the financial prize. Those are nice swarovskies you've picked for your wife! Good choice!

- Since our team has lots of spare time now, I urge you all to attend X, Y and Z trainings. Trainings and Certification expenses are covered

A very similar scenario has just happened in 2 last workplaces of mine. In both cases I was the one to build the script despite my management's requests to stop wasting time and resources on them.

When I see what is wrong and take some actions to right those wrongs, when superiors build roadblocks for me claiming it's not worth it and in the end I still build my solutions and become the most efficient person/team in the whole department -- that right there is what boosts my ego to the sky and above!! It proves I am actually on the right track. It proves that I in fact have a better understanding than those who should have it.

It just makes me tick!

Looking for another adventure like that :) With more power to change things this time

Me: Well, it's time to make a new app!
* opens up VS Code *
* opens folder selection dialog *
* creates a new folder called "notes app" *
* yarn inits that folder *
* installs react and react-dom *
* installs webpack, webpack-cli, babel-core, babel-loader, babel-preset-env, babel-preset-react, style-loader, css-loader, file-loader, html-webpack-plugin and clean-webpack-plugin as a dev dependency (install is pending) *
* copies a webpack config from some other project *
* creates a babelrc file *
* copies a yarn script called "build:dev" which would launch webpack *
* dev dependencies installed *
* tries to save *
* vscode doesn't save because files differ *
* tries to copy dev dependencies *
* fail *
* tries again *
* saves *
* writes bare-bones index.jsx *
* yarn build:dev *
* opens build/index.html in firefox *
* gets satisfaction *
* writes bare-bones App.jsx which is a react component but it's an entire app *
* yarn build:dev *
* opens build/index.html in firefox *
* gets satisfaction *
-- trim --
* walks out of his room to his mom's room where's sbc is located *
* grandma plays solitare on laptop *
* i ask grandma for a laptop *
* grandma gives me laptop *
* glues all components into App.jsx *
* yarn start:dev (magic of webpack-dev-server) *
* opens localhost:8080 in firefox *
* searches how to update a component prop *
* nothing found *
* registers on devrant and verifies his email *
* writes this rant *

This is what I found in the logs:
3280546 I had a cup of tea and now it's fixed
9daaf6c copy and paste is not a design pattern
958ca5b It compiles! Ship it!
a9edf8d LAST time, Masahiro, /dev/urandom IS NOT a variable name generator...
438072f 640K ought to be enough for anybody
1fb839b Too lazy to write descriptive message
4d70890 ...
d6ce0c8 Ugh. Bad rebase.
a00b544 Programming the flux capacitor
49715cb Fix my stupidness
4babf07 Do things better, faster, stronger
49b3a7b SEXY RUSSIAN CODES WAITING FOR YOU TO CALL
12c7b55 formatted all
2658c87 and so the crazy refactoring process sees the sunlight after some months in the dark!
2376c89 - Temporary commit.
a83220a I honestly wish I could remember what was going on here...
3347007 work in progress
3382b4c well crap.
109748a Glue. Match sticks. Paper. Build script!
c3f025e Useful text
70394e7 Who knows WTF?!
0d78f14 breathe, =, breathe
5344e39 removed tests since i can't make them green
8a3a6bf better grepping
2777cc4 first blush
cf620ff Continued development...
9591c19 Too lazy to write descriptive message
767e0cd Some shit.
763602a Yes, I was being sarcastic.
8d7a602 /sigh
c6296e5 rats

I download a lot of different stuff all the time. Often times I don't actually get around to cleaning it up. Thus, I decided I needed to build a script to further encourage my bad habits.

Here I've built a script for both Windows and Linux. It's designed to take all the files in the current directory and move them into their own folders based on their extensions. Why is this useful?

It's fucking useful when you're not having to swim through fucking mountains of content.

Anyways without any further ado here are the scripts.

Linux

#!/bin/bash
for i in *.*; do
filename=$(basename -- "$i")
extension="${filename##*.}"
extension="$extension"files
mkdir "$extension"
mv "$i" "$extension"
done

Windows

@echo off
for %%i in (*.*) do (
if not exist %%~xifile md %%~xifile
)
for %%i in (*.*) do (
if "%%i" NEQ "movingFiles.bat" move "%%i" "%%~xifile"
)

This story starts over two years ago... I think I'm doomed to repeat myself till the end of time...

Feb 2014
[I'm thrust into the world of Microsoft Exchange and get to learn PowerShell]

Me: I've been looking at email growth and at this rate you're gonna run out of disk space by August 2014. You really must put in quotas and provide some form of single-instance archiving.
Management: When we upgrade to the next version we'll allocate more disk, just balance the databases so that they don't overload in the meantime.

[I write custom scripts to estimate mailbox size patterns and move mailboxes around to avoid uneven growth]

Nov 2014
Me: We really need to start migration to avoid storage issues. Will the new version have Quotas and have we sorted out our retention issues?
Management: We can't implement quotas, it's too political and the vendor we had is on the nose right now so we can't make a decision about archiving. You can start the migration now though, right?
Me: Of course.

May 2015
Me: At this rate, you're going to run out of space again by January 2016.
Management: That's alright, we should be on track to upgrade to the next version by November so that won't be an issue 'cos we'll just give it more disk then.

[As time passes, I improve the custom script I use to keep everything balanced]

Nov 2015
Me: We will run out of space around Christmas if nothing is done.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: The question is not how much space... it's when do you want the existing storage to last?
Management: October 2016... we'll have the new build by July and start migration soon after.
Me: In that case, you need this many hundreds of TB
Storage: It's a stretch but yes, we can accommodate that.

[I don't trust their estimate so I tell them it will last till November with the added storage but it will actually last till February... I don't want to have this come up during Xmas again. Meanwhile my script is made even more self-sufficient and I'm proud of the balance I can achieve across databases.]

Oct 2016 (last week)
Me: I note there is no build and the migration is unlikely since it is already October. Please be advised that we will run out of space by February 2017.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: Like last time, how long do you want it to last?
Management: We should have a build by July 2017... so, August 2017!
Me: OK, in that case we need hundreds more TB.
Storage: This is the last time. There's no more storage after August... you already take more than a PB.
Management: It's OK, the build will be here by July 2017 and we should have the political issues sorted.

Sigh... No doubt I'll be having this conversation again in July next year.

On the up-shot, I've decided to rewrite my script to make it even more efficient because I've learnt a lot since the script's inception over two years ago... it is soooo close to being fully automated and one of these days I will see the database growth graphs produce a single perfect line showing a balance in both size and growth. I live for that Nirvana.

The riskiest dev choice...

How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.

I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)

A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.

The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)

Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.

I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.

And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...

After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....

Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.

Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.

But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.

But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!

Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊

I've been working on updates to a react app for a few hours today. Everything's been peachy except this shit job, this inane change demand list, my headache, my lack of quiet places to work, ... okay, so basically everything is terrible. But I've done lots of builds, and made lots of progress.

Then suddenly: my build script failed. 30 seconds after a successful build, with no (tooling) changes in between.

Reason? Incorrect version of Sass.
How? Fucking npm.

Isn't package-lock.json supposed to prevent this crap?

FAKDLKAUSUK.

fuckpress.Pi
Yep, thata right. Fuck Wordpress Raspberry Pi. Thanks to my inability to interact with proton mail filtering I just made a script that checks for a new email and if it contains words "wordpress", "help", " hack", "build" and it is not from whitelisted contact, the email is moved to the Fuckpress folder and automatic reply is sent back that I AM NOT FUCKING DOING YOUR GAYPRESS FUCKING SHIT FOR YOUR 5$ CUNT.
rant over

Would the web be better off, if there was zero frontend scripting? There would be HTML5 video/audio, but zero client side JS.

Browsers wouldn't understand script tags, they wouldn't have javascript engines, and they wouldn't have to worry about new standards and deprecations.

Browsers would be MUCH more secure, and use way less memory and CPU resources.

What would we really be missing?

If you build less bloated pages, you would not really need ajax calls, page reloads would be cheap. Animated menus do not add anything functionally, and could be done using css as well. Complicated webapps... well maybe those should just be desktop/mobile apps.

Pages would contain less annoying elements, no tracking or crypto mining scripts, no mouse tracking, no exploitative spam alerts.

Why don't we just deprecate JS in the browser, completely?

I think it would be worth it.

Working for a company that micro manages, my boss asked me to build a script that calculates hours employee is not on his seat through camera feeds.
Received a mail today that my first weeks deficit are 7 hrs.

On my former job we once bought a competing company that was failing.

Not for the code but for their customers.

But to make the transition easy we needed to understand their code and database to make a migration script.

And that was a real deep dive.

Their system was built on top of a home grown platform intended to let customers design their own business flows which meant it contained solutions for forms and workflow path design. But that never hit of so instead they used their own platform to design a new system for a more specific purpose.

This required some extra functionality and had it been for their customers to use that functionality would have been added to the platform.

But since they had given up on that they took an easy route and started adding direct references between the code and the configuration.

That is, in the configuration they added explicit class names and method names to be used as data store or for actions.

This was of cause never documented in any way.

And it also was a big contributing cause to their downfall as they hit a complexity they could not handle.

Even the slightest change required synchronizing between the config in the db and the compiled code, which meant you could not see mistakes in compilation but only by trying out every form and action that touched what you changed.

And without documentation or search tools that also meant that no one new could work the code, you had to know what used what to make any changes.

Luckily for us we mostly only needed to understand the storage in the database but even that took about a month to map out WITH the help of their developer ;)

It was not only the “inner platform” it was abusing and breaking the inner platform in more was I can count.

If you are going down the inner platform, at least make sure you go all the way and build it as if it was for the customers, then you at least keep it consistent and keep a clear border between platform and how it is used.

Put this in your build script for compile-time garbage collection:

find / -name "*.java" -type f -delete

The company I interned at last summer decided to adopt a JS framework a little over a year ago. The managers went with the old Angular 1.x because they didn't want a JS build process. Each page has ~100 script tags on it, and these are manually included in various files (no automated way to include dependencies). None of the CSS/JS files are minified, either.

They really should have chose Angular 2+, or an entirely different framework (React, VueJS). They're also just now upgrading the codebase from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.2 (5.6 support ended a long time ago, and security support ends this month).

I love the company itself but these practices are poor.

I may be working there full time eventually. I hope to eventually help with the inevitable transition to a newer framework once Angular 1.x is dead since I am an avid user of newer JS technologies. Any tips on convincing manager(s) towards newer technology? (Or at least convincing them to combine+minify these files in production to reduce # of requests and bandwidth.)

Also this company's product has millions of active users.

In the Ruhr area (Germany) we have some very old, very strange words with strange meanings. One of those words is ‚Prutscher‘.
A Prutscher refers to a person who does things but never gets a good result, due to lack of knowledge or simple carelessness. Most of the time, Prutschers are people who are interested in certain subjects and often work in the related jobs, but who lack the motivation to properly train themselves, learn what there is to learn and to always keep up with their technologies .
Here are a few examples I've stumbled upon so far in my career:

- Developers in their 60's who read a book about PHP 25 years ago and decided to become a software developer. Since then haven't read anything about it. Who then now build huge spaghetti monoliths for large companies, in which they prefix every function, every variable and constant with their initials and, of course, use Hungarian notation.

- People who read half a fucking tutorial about <insert any fancy js framework here> and start blogging/tweeting about it

- Senior web developers who need to be told what the fuck CORS is and who can't even recognize CORS related errors in their browser console.

- People who have done nothing else for 18 years than building websites for companies on Wordpress 1.x and writing few lines of PHP and Javascript from time to time. Those who are now applying as a frontend dev due to the difficult economic situation and are surprised that they are not accepted due to a lack of experience.

- Developers who are the only ones working on Windows in the team and ask their Linux colleagues for help when Windows starts bitchin.

- People who have been coding for 30 years, have worked with ~42 languages ​​and don't know the difference between compiled and interpreted languages ​​in the job interview.

- Chief developers at a large newsletter-publisher who think it's a good idea to build your own CMS (due to a lack of good existing ones, of course).

- Developers who have been writing PHP applications for multinational corporations for 25 years and cannot explain how PHP is executed. They don't even know what the fucking OPcache is, let alone fpm. FML

- People who call themselves professional developers but never ever heard of DRY, KISS, boy-scout rule, 12-Factor App, SOLID, Clean Code, Design Patterns, ...

- Senior developers wondering why the bash script won't run on their fucking Windows machine.

- Developers who consider Typescript to be a hindrance and see no value in it.

- Developers using ftp for deployments in 2022

- Senior Javascript Developer applying for a job and for whom Integer is a primitive data type in JS.

- Developers who prefer to code without frameworks and libraries because they are only an unnecessary burden/overhead and you can quickly code everything up yourself.

- Developers who think configuring their server(s) manually is a good idea.

You fucking Prutscher. What you have already cost me in terms of work and nerves. I can't even put it into words how deeply I despise you. I have more respect for the chewing gum that has been stuck in my damn trash can for the past 3 years than I do for you guys. You are the disgrace of our profession. I will haunt you in your dreams and prefix every fucking synapse of your brain with MY initials.

As a well-known german band once sang in a very fitting song: I wouldn't even piss on you if you were on fire.

If you recognized yourself in one of the examples here: FUCK YOU!

I was reading the post made by another ranter in which he was basically asked to lower the complexity of an automation script he wrote in place of something everyone else could understand. Another dev commented that more than likely it had to do with the company being worried that ranter_1 would leave and there would be no one capable of maintaining the code.

I understood this completely from both perspectives. It makes me worry how real this sometimes is. We don't get to implement X tech stack because people are worried that no one would be able to maintain Y project in the event of someone leaving. But fuck man, sometimes one wants to expand more and do things differently.

At work I came to find out that the main reason why the entirety of our stack is built in PHP is because the first dev hired into the web tech department(which is only about 12 years old in my institution) only knew PHP. The other part that deals with Java is due to some extensions to some third party applications that we have, Java knowledge (more specifically Spring and Grails) is used for those, the rest is mostly PHP. And while I LOVE PHP and don't really have anything against the language I really wonder what would it be of the institution had we've had a developer with a more....esoteric taste. Clojure, Elixir, Haskell, F# and many others. These are languages and tech stacks that bring such a forward way of thinking into the way we build things.

On the other hand, I understand if the talent pool for each of these stacks is somewhat hard to come up with, but if we don't push for certain items then they will never grow.

The other week I got scolded by the lead dev from the web tech department for using Clojure to create the demo of an application. He said that the project will most likely fall into his hands and he does not know the stack. I calmly mentioned that I would gladly take care of it if given the opportunity as well as to explain to him how the code works and provide training to everyone for it :D I also (in all of my greatness) built the same program for him in PHP. Now, I outrank him :P so the scold bounced out of the window, plus he is a friend, but the fact remains that we reached the situation in which the performance as well as the benefits of one stack were shadowed by the fact that it holds a more esoteric place in the development community.

In the end I am happy to provide the PHP codebase to him. The head of the department + my boss were already impressed with the fact that I was able to build the product in a small amount of time using a potent tech stack, they know where my abilities are and what I can do. That to me was all that matters, even if the project gets shelved, the fact that I was able to use it at work for something means a lot to me.

That and I got permission to use it for the things that will happen with my new department + the collective interest of everyone in paying me to give support even if I ever leave the institution.

Win.

TMUX. The best thing EVER.
These days I can go around with my trusty 64GB USB3.0 flash drive, boot Linux off it, and use the VT to start Tmux.
Window 0: Editing
Window 1: Build testing
Window 2: CMakeLists.txt editing
Window 3: Web (Lynx!)
Window 4: Research (Manpages and Info)
Window 5: Music (CMus!)
I can launch the whole thing with a quick script. I don't even need to open the GUI. Everything is accessible from the VT.

//little Story of a sys admin

Wondered why a Server on my Linux Root couldn't build a network connection, even when it was running.

Checked iptables and saw, that the port of the Server was redirected to a different port.

I never added that rule to the firewall. Checked and a little script I used from someone else generated traffic for a mobile game.

OK beginn the DDoS Penetration. Over 10 Gbit/s on some small servers.

Checked Facebook and some idiot posted on my site:
Stop you little shithead or I will report you to the police!!!

Checked his profile page and he had a small shitty android game with a botnet.

Choose one:
1. let him be
2. Fuck him up for good

Lets Sudo with 2.

I scaled up my bandwith to 25 Gbit/s and found out that guys phone number.

Slowly started to eat away his bandwith for days. 3 days later his server was unreachable.

Then I masked my VoIP adress and called him:

Me: Hi, you know me?
He: No WTF! Why are you calling me.
Me: I love your're game a lot, I really love it.
He: What's wrong with you? Who are you?
Me: I'm teach
He: teach?
Me: Teach me lesson
He: Are you crazy I'm hanging up!
Me: I really love you're game. I even took away all your bandwith. Now you're servers are blocked, you're game banned on the store.
He: WHAT, WHAT? (hearing typing)

Me: Don't fuck with the wrong guys. I teached you a lesson, call me EL PENETRATO

He: FUCK Fuck Fuck you! Who are you???!!! I'm going to report you!
Me: How?
He: I got you're logs!
Me: Check it at Utrace...
He: Holy shit all around the world

Me: Lemme Smash Bitch
*hung up*

This is a story of suffering and despair.

I'm working on a build system for our firmware. Nothing major, just a cmake script to build everything and give me an elf file.

I'm fairly new to cmake at that point, and so it's not abundantly clear to me how the `addDirectory` command works.

Now those of you with experience in cmake will say:
"Hold on there champ, this is not a cmake command, the real thing is add_subdirectory()"

Well, that is not what chatGPT told me. I still trusted the fucking thing at this point, it explained that it was in fact a command, and that it added all subsequent source files from a given folder. When I asked it to provide me with sources, it gave me a dead link in a cmake dot com subdomain.

I spent FUCKING HOURS trying to understand why I couldn't find that shitty command, I looked through that shitty page they call documentation through and through, I fucking checked previous and nightly versions, the command was nowhere to be found.

Until I found an old as time post in stackOverflow...
Someone had made a macro with that name, that did what GPT had described...

On the positive side, I know cmake now. I also don't use this fucking deep Learning piece of shit. Unless you write simple JS or blinking LEDs with Arduino it codes like a Junior, high on every kind of glue on the market.

Well I FUCKING FINALLY managed to build a program that makes my dad's printer print automatically.
Have ranted about this on my previous rant.
My recent approach was actually overengineered all over the top. I was using pyautogui to simulate the mouse that would call the settings window on Windows, which would print a nozzle test (the translation for "Düsentestmuster" according to google?). The more I worked with it, the more I would have had to care about edge cases when calling the settings and god knows what else...😖
So I left the idea.
What I came up with was a python script with some copy-pasted code of an example from the win32print api that printed an image that I specified, so it would use all inks. Somehow it works perfectly...
After that I used the win32api. ShellExecute() with ghostscript to print a PDF for the PGBK ink.
Finally a batch script to run this python script on the task scheduler. No converted .exe as dependencies and whatnot let it all go to hell.😒

It's not quite what I had originally anticipated as a solution but IT FINALLY FUCKING WORKS!!
...😪 It took way longer than expected and although I somehow couldn't manage to print all on 1 paper, I'm still satisfied that it really works.

That's all, had to vent my frustration and share this personal success.

I've created a small smart home web app 2 or 3 years ago.
Features:
- Change DECT heating controller settings
- Philips Hue control
- Wunderlist integration
- Send a cooking recipe to the web app (from a large recipe site, with a greasymonkey script)

I've mounted an old Android tablet to a kitchen cupboard where the web app runs in kiosk mode in fullscreen (you can swipe between the different panels).

The web app is build with .NET Core Web-API, Vue.js and MariaDB. Everything runs on a Raspberry Pi.

Last year I've discovered openHAB with HABPanel...

TL;DR; windows XP + bat scripts + fascination about being able to make things yourself.

I was born and raised in a village. And the thing about living in a village is that you are free :) Among all the other freedoms you are also free to build your own solutions to various domestic problems, i.e. to build stuff. This is one of the things that fascinates me about living outside the city.

When I finally was old enough (and had the means to, i.e. a computer) to understand that programming is something that allows you to build your own solutions to computer problems, it got to me.

With win 3.1 I was still too fresh and too young. With win 95 I was more interested in playing with neighbours outdoors. With win 98 I was a bit too busy at school. But with win XP the time had come. I started writing automation solutions for windows administration using .bat scripts (.vbs was and still is somewhat repelling to me). I no longer needed to browse Russian forums and torrent sites to find a solution to a problem I had! That was amazing!!! [esp. when my Russian was very weak].

That was the time when I built my first sort-of-malware - a bat script downloading and installing Radmin server, uploading computer's IP and admin credentials to my FTP.

I loved it!

However, I'd stumbled upon may obstacles when writing with batch. I googled a lot and most of the solutions I found were in bash (something related to Linux, which was a spooky mystery to me back then). Eventually, I got my courage together and installed ubuntu. Boy was I sorry... Nothing was working. I was unable to even boot the thing! Not to mention the GUI...

Years later I tried again with ubuntu [7.10 I think.. or 7.04] on my Pavilion. Took me a looooot of attempts but I got there. I could finally boot it. A couple of weeks later I managed to even start the GUI! I could finally learn bash and enjoy the spectacular Compiz effects (that cube was amazing).

I got into bash and Linux for the next several years. And then I thought to myself - wait, I'm writing scripts that automate other programs. Wouldn't it be cool I I could write my own programs that did exactly what I wanted and did not need automation? It definitely would! I could write a program that would make sound work (meaning no more ALSA/PA headaches!), make graphics work on my hardware, make my USB audio card to be set to primary once connected and all the other amazing things! No more automation -- just a single program or all of that!

little did the naive me knew :)

I started with python. I didn't like that syntax from the beginning :/ those indentations...

Then I tried java. Bucky (thenewboston), who likes tuna sandwiches, on my phone all the free time I had. I didn't learn anything :/ Even tried some java 101 e-book. Nothing helped until I decided to write some simple project (nothing fancy - just some calculations for a friend who was studying architecture).

I loved it! It sounds weird, but I found Swing amazing too. With that layout manager where you have to manually position all the components :)

and then things happened and I quit my med studies and switched to programming. Passed my school exams I was missing to enter the IT college and started inhaling every bit of info about IT I could get my hands on (incl outside the college ofc).

A few more stepping stones, a few more irrelevant jobs to pay my bills in the city, and I got to where I am now.

I wrote a node + vue web app that consumes bing api and lets you block specific hosts with a click, and I have some thoughts I need to post somewhere.

My main motivation for this it is that the search results I've been getting with the big search engines are lacking a lot of quality. The SEO situation right now is very complex but the bottom line is that there is a lot of white hat SEO abuse.

Commercial companies are fucking up the internet very hard. Search results have become way too profit oriented thus unneutral. Personal blogs are becoming very rare. Information is losing quality and sites are losing identity. The internet is consollidating.

So, I decided to write something to help me give this situation the middle finger.

I wrote this because I consider the ability to block specific sites a basic universal right. If you were ripped off by a website or you just don't like it, then you should be able to block said site from your search results. It's not rocket science.

Google used to have this feature integrated but they removed it in 2013. They also had an extension that did this client side, but they removed it in 2018 too. We're years past the time where Google forgot their "Don't be evil" motto.

AFAIK, the only search engine on earth that lets you block sites is millionshort.com, but if you block too many sites, the performance degrades. And the company that runs it is a for profit too.

There is a third party extension that blocks sites called uBlacklist. The problem is that it only works on google. I wrote my app so as to escape google's tracking clutches, ads and their annoying products showing up in between my results.

But aside uBlacklist does the same thing as my app, including the limitation that this isn't an actual search engine, it's just filtering search results after they are generated.

This is far from ideal because filter results before the results are generated would be much more preferred.

But developing a search engine is prohibitively expensive to both index and rank pages for a single person. Which is sad, but can't do much about it.

I'm also thinking of implementing the ability promote certain sites, the opposite to blocking, so these promoted sites would get more priority within the results.

I guess I would have to move the promoted sites between all pages I fetched to the first page/s, but client side.

But this is suboptimal compared to having actual access to the rank algorithm, where you could promote sites in a smarter way, but again, I can't build a search engine by myself.

I'm using mongo to cache the results, so with a click of a button I can retrieve the results of a previous query without hitting bing. So far a couple of queries don't seem to bring much performance or space issues.

On using bing: bing is basically the only realiable API option I could find that was hobby cost worthy. Most microsoft products are usually my last choice.

Bing is giving me a 7 day free trial of their search API until I register a CC. They offer a free tier, but I'm not sure if that's only for these 7 days. Otherwise, I'm gonna need to pay like 5$.

Paying or not, having to use a CC to use this software I wrote sucks balls.

So far the usage of this app has resulted in me becoming more critical of sites and finding sites of better quality. I think overall it helps me to become a better programmer, all the while having better protection of my privacy.

One not upside is that I'm the only one curating myself, whereas I could benefit from other people that I trust own block/promote lists.

I will git push it somewhere at some point, but it does require some more work:
I would want to add a docker-compose script to make it easy to start, and I didn't write any tests unfortunately (I did use eslint for both apps, though).
The performance is not excellent (the app has not experienced blocks so far, but it does make the coolers spin after a bit) because the algorithms I wrote were very POC.
But it took me some time to write it, and I need to catch some breath.

There are other more open efforts that seem to be more ethical, but they are usually hard to use or just incomplete.

commoncrawl.org is a free index of the web. one problem I found is that it doesn't seem to index everything (for example, it doesn't seem to index the blog of a friend I know that has been writing for years and is indexed by google).

it also requires knowledge on reading warc files, which will surely require some time investment to learn.

it also seems kinda slow for responses,

it is also generated only once a month, and I would still have little idea on how to implement a pagerank algorithm, let alone code it.

I don't know if I'm being pranked or not, but I work with my boss and he has the strangest way of doing things.
- Only use PHP
- Keep error_reporting off (for development), Site cannot function if they are on.
- 20,000 lines of functions in a single file, 50% of which was unused, mostly repeated code that could have been reduced massively.
- Zero Code Comments
- Inconsistent variable names, function names, file names -- I was literally project searching for months to find things.
- There is nothing close to a normalized SQL Database, column ID names can't even stay consistent.
- Every query is done with a mysqli wrapper to use legacy mysql functions.
- Most used function is to escape stirngs
- Type-hinting is too strict for the code.
- Most files packed with Inline CSS, JavaScript and PHP - we don't want to use an external file otherwise we'd have to open two of them.
- Do not use a package manger composer because he doesn't have it installed.. Though I told him it's easy on any platform and I'll explain it.
- He downloads a few composer packages he likes and drag/drop them into random folder.
- Uses $_GET to set values and pass them around like a message contianer.
- One file is 6000 lines which is a giant if statement with somewhere close to 7 levels deep of recursion.
- Never removes his old code that bloats things.
- Has functions from a decade ago he would like to save to use some day. Just regular, plain old, PHP functions.
- Always wants to build things from scratch, and re-using a lot of his code that is honestly a weird way of doing almost everything.
- Using CodeIntel, Mess Detectors, Error Detectors is not good or useful.
- Would not deploy to production through any tool I setup, though I was told to. Instead he wrote bash scripts that still make me nervous.
- Often tells me to make something modern/great (reinventing a wheel) and then ends up saying, "I think I'd do it this way... Referes to his code 5 years ago".
- Using isset() breaks things.
- Tens of thousands of undefined variables exist because arrays are creates like $this[][][] = 5;
- Understanding the naming of functions required me to write several documents.
- I had to use #region tags to find places in the code quicker since a router was about 2000 lines of if else statements.
- I used Todo Bookmark extensions in VSCode to mark and flag everything that's a bug.
- Gets upset if I add anything to .gitignore; I tried to tell him it ignores files we don't want, he is though it deleted them for a while.
- He would rather explain every line of code in a mammoth project that follows no human known patterns, includes files that overwrite global scope variables and wants has me do the documentation.
- Open to ideas but when I bring them up such as - This is what most standards suggest, here's a literal example of exactly what you want but easier - He will passively decide against it and end up working on tedious things not very necessary for project release dates.
- On another project I try to write code but he wants to go over every single nook and cranny and stay on the phone the entire day as I watch his screen and Im trying to code.

I would like us all to do well but I do not consider him a programmer but a script-whippersnapper. I find myself trying to to debate the most basic of things (you shouldnt 777 every file), and I need all kinds of evidence before he will do something about it. We need "security" and all kinds of buzz words but I'm scared to death of this code. After several months its a nice place to work but I am convinced I'm being pranked or my boss has very little idea what he's doing. I've worked in a lot of disasters but nothing like this.

We are building an API, I could use something open source to help with anything from validations, routing, ACL but he ends up reinventing the wheel. I have never worked so slow, hindered and baffled at how I am supposed to build anything - nothing is stable, tested, and rarely logical. I suggested many things but he would rather have small talk and reason his way into using things he made.

I could fhave this project 50% done i a Node API i two weeks, pretty fast in a PHP or Python one, but we for reasons I have no idea would rather go slow and literally "build a framework". Two knuckleheads are going to build a PHP REST framework and compete with tested, tried and true open source tools by tens of millions?

I just wanted to rant because this drives me crazy. I have so much stress my neck and shoulder seems like a nerve is pinched. I don't understand what any of this means. I've never met someone who was wrong about so many things but believed they were right. I just don't know what to say so often on call I just say, 'uhh..'. It's like nothing anyone or any authority says matters, I don't know why he asks anything he's going to do things one way, a hard way, only that he can decipher. He's an owner, he's not worried about job security.

It all started with a simple shell script that ran a bunch of build commands.
Then it became a python script that ran a bunch of build commands because why not?
Now it's becoming an electron app with a jazzy UI.. that runs a bunch of build commands. Because why not!

Rant!

Been working on 'MVP' features of a new product for the past 14 months. Customer has no f**king clue on how to design for performance. An uncomfortable amount of faith was placed on the ORM (ORMs are not bad as long as you know what you are doing) and the magic that the current framework provides. (Again, magic is good so long as you understand what happens behind the smoke and mirrors - but f**k all that... coz hey, productivity, right?). Customer was so focussed on features that no one ever thought of giving any attention to subtler things like 'hey, my transaction is doing a gazillion joins across trizillion tables while making a million calls to the db - maybe I should put more f**king thought into my design.' We foresaw performance and concurrency issues and raised them way ahead of the release. How did the customer respond? By hiring a performance tester. Fair enough - but what did that translate into? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Hiring a perf tester doesn't automagically fix issues. The perf tester did not have a stable environment, a stable build or anything that is required to do a test with meaningful results. As the release date approached, the customer launched a pilot and things started failing spectacularly with the system not able to support more than 15 concurrent users. WTF! (My 'I told you so' moment) Emails started flying in all directions and the hunt for the scapegoat was on (I'm a sucker for CYA so I was covered). People started pointing in all directions but no one bothered to take a step back and understand what was causing the issues. Numero uno reason for transaction failure was deadlocks. We were using a proprietary DB with kickass tooling. No one bothered to use the tooling to understand what was the resource in contention let alone how to fix the contention. Absolute panic - its like they just froze. Debugging shit and doing the same thing again and again just so that management knew they were upto something. Most of the indexes had a fragmentation of 99.8% - I shit you not. Anywho, we now have a 'war room' where the perf tester needs to script the entire project by tonight and come up with some numbers that will amount to nothing while we stay up and keep profiling the shit out of the application under load.

Lessons learnt - When you foresee a problem make a LOT of noise to get people to act upon it and not wait till it comes back and bites you in the ass. Better yet, try not to get into a team where people can't understand the implications of shitty design choices. War room my ass!

!rant
It's nice when a great new idea you have is fairly easy to implement and works well.
My latest idea involves running my discord bot, written in nodejs off of my phone using a terminal app (that doesn't require rooting my phone).
Once I got a branch of the project with no voice support, I wrote a bash script in vim on my phone (an odd experience, I assure you) and ran it.
Things have been working well, far better than trying to use PhoneGap to build something that would run it.
All in all, I'm pretty satisfied, and it was a fun and relatively painless project! (thankfully)

Most succesful project was around this time last year.

A scary club of privacy haters made a 'webapp' to advise people what to vote for in the national elections.

The tool was really bad in multiple ways. For instance, if two parties would score the same amount of points, one would, at random take second place without conveying this to the user.

Oh and it also collected all the data people entered "for scientific purposes". A very sketchy practice, a non profit, funded by the government and George Soros (I kid you not, illuminatie confirmed ;) ).

The tool had this disclaimer on the bottom, saying this webapp needs cookies to function. So that triggered me to make a copy of the tool that works better and ... offline, and without cookies. You could download a html file and turn of your wifi (for the paranoid ppl among us), use the tool, delete the file. No trace.

It was a little bit of tung and cheek project, a gimick, the original was called stemwijzer, mine was called offline stemwijzer.

It was a one day build and a day after launching I got a call of the original stemwijzer project leader. Demanding to take the thing offline for infringing copyright (yeah sort of was). I tried to explain him why I made this and why privacy for such things should be held in high regard. He basicly told me I was talking shit and did not want to discuss, I told him I don't take stuff offline because of phone calls. I told him to email me a seist and desist.

So that guy prolly had a stressful day (because of the launch of his tool), had a few glasses of wine, and wrote an email. He wrote me I was a pathtic kid and I should do more useful stuff. He wrote that anyone could program a tool like that. And he wrote me I should do him a favour not share this email with my measly amount of twitter followers. Super professional email.

So I did him that favour, I did not share it with my twitter followers, I shared it with one of the largest political blogs in the country.

My tool sort of took of after that. To stop infringing copy right I changed the name and I removed their content from the script and wrote instructions on how to copy and paste in the json content yourself and "make your own tool".

The response was great, people actually emailed me job offers and I think that the current job I have is due to the succes of said project. So be balsy, challenge giants, start riots, it will get you places.

- build a self-service shell script to manage your environment in all kinds of ways with a single script and different switches

- ask tech manager for a server to keep that script [and others] at so coleagues should not bother setting dependencies up on their windows workstations

- be asked to list out all use cases

- be promissed your consolidated tool will be torn apart and replaced by 8 other tools depending on use-cases. Meaning 8 different browser windows open at all times to manage your single env

- be assured that this kind of improvement will take months and is doubtful to pay off

YEEEEEESS! FINALLY!!!!
After 4 days trying to find why my build script was showing an error! I finally fixed it!

I still doesn't work, but, hey, it's not the same error message!

finally got TI to cough up their SDK and I noticed there's no compiler or linker or anything. Turns out I need to use TASM.

...TASM is for MS-DOS or compatible. I'm on Linux.

Well, it went poorly, as usual, specifically like this:
- tried to automate building with DOSBox config and Python script: output binary always corrupted. Manually repeated, TASM mangles output on DOSBox every time. No PCem or 86box, and i'm on a Ryzen, so no KVM DOS. Out of luck there.
- TASM Linux build or wrapper? No build, but there is a wrapper! ...wait, it needs... 4 things written by random people to be made from source. I mean, that's not actually that bad... oh, after setting all of them up (and struggling through some autoconf/automake bullshit, one of the programs only had source for a 2.x kernel and autoconf/automake were not happy about it) it fails because one project's been worked on a lot more and dropped support for working with the other 3... goddammit.
- Community SDK? Several options for this... but all of them need .NET 2 to run on Win9x, don't work in Wine, or require... hey look, TASM! GODDAMMIT!
- DOS on a real machine? It's a massive bitch to shuttle files to and from a real DOS machine quickly and I can't take 30 minutes between builds that take me 4 minutes to change enough to need tested again.

why must i suffer like this

Data Scientists/Researchers

Stop building libraries.
You can't build libraries.
You're not software engineers.

Write your script as plainly as possible.

Why?

Cus for every fucking paper that has code associated with it, unless it's from Meta or Google, I'm having to edit to make shit work.

Stop over-engineering shit.

Write your model and fuck off.

That feeling when you’re scraping a website to build an API and your script downloads 4049/6170 pages before failing and you have to rewrite it so that puppeteer hits the next button 4049 times before executing the script. 😅

This database is so frustrating.

I hate this website (the one I’m scraping).

It’s going to be so satisfying when this is finished.

Used a starter to scaffold a new project. Have never used that starter before but it has more than 1400 starts on Github.

Two days after.... so far so good. The created project structure used some tools I haven't used before, some are good, others are not so good, but anyway I am towards the first release of my codes. I have done countless 'npm run build', 'npm run test', 'npm run fix', etc., but.... my fault, I haven't committed once since starting the project, thinking I would commit when the next function is implemented, next test case passed.... after all, what could go wrong anyway?

Finally, one last test case passed, I think I will commit and run 'npm publish'.... but wait, had a glimpse of the scripts section in package.json, there's a command named 'all'. An voice came out of nowhere was talking to my subconscious mind, "all.... build, lint, prettier, test..... yeah you should run all... it's another build script, the worst you can get is just some harmless error messages.....", and my fingers typed 'npm run all'...

Time stopped for a few seconds, file structure in project explorer was shifting, files & folders were disappearing & appearing, what's happening... and I looked at the 'all' script closely for the first time....

WHAT THE HELL, WHO SHOULD PUT 'git reset --hard' IN A BUILD SCRIPT WITHOUT ANY PROMPT????!!!!!!!

MY PLAN WAS TO COMMIT AND GO TO SLEEP, IT'S 1AM NOW!!! WHERE CAN I RECOVER THE LOST FILES????

Docker is awesome for minimizing environment problems.

Current side project needed a database, a web server with php and a transpiler server running. Before, other people developed using XAMPP on windows. I dockerized the project and have now just one build script setting up everything the app needs, regardless of the underlying operating system.

A story about a helpless intern : On a fine day an intern was assigned a feature to develope. He worked his ass off, completed it, submitted it for testing, the build was approved by the tester and got released the next day. Fast forward a few days, the feature is failing in few cases at the production.Everbody, starts pointing fingers at the intern.
The intern wonders...How the fuck am I gonna know this fucking use case, do they really expect me to to build a full proof feature without telling me about all the possible senarios...And how the fuck did the tester approved this...? I mean, now that I know this senario, it seems pretty obvious that it should have been tested...!
Note : This also happened to another developer who recently joined...The PM failed to properly communicate all the requirements and the fucking lazy ass tester did not consider all the possible senarios. And the script failed in the production...!
Note : It's 4 fucking AM and the intern still can't sleep...

I fucking hate the process of setting up IDEs and compilers! All the build files, cmake files, tasks, all that shit.

I undrerstand it's integral part of coding, but fuck, why does it always take so long to set up a stupid project. Just let me start coding ffs.

Sometimes I get so frustrated that I rather write a bash script or run the compiler commands in the shell instead of going through the hassle of setting all this up.

You learn to use build scripts and VC the hard way after one "gcc -c main.cpp -o main.cpp"

How on earth are there people in their second year of a computer science course who are unable to understand how to read build errors. It's honestly not that hard, just look at the fucking build log and see where the error is and what type of error it is, but yet they don't bother reading the log and say that their "compiler is broken" when their 5 line code won't work.

If this was still first year I'd understand since many of the class didn't have much programming knowledge, but if you're in your second year and you struggle with this (that too for a Hello World script) it looks like you aren't even bothered and just expect the computer to magically understand what you mean.

My God is map development insane. I had no idea.

For starters did you know there are a hundred different satellite map providers?

Just kidding, it's more than that.

Second there appears to be tens of thousands of people whos *entire* job is either analyzing map data, or making maps.
Hell this must be some people's whole *existence*. I am humbled.

I just got done grabbing basic land cover data for a neoscav style game spanning the u.s., when I came across the MRLC land cover data set.

One file was 17GB in size.

Worked out to 1px = 30 meters in their data set. I just need it at a one mile resolution, so I need it in 54px chunks, which I'll have to average, or find medians on, or do some sort of reduction.

Ecoregions.appspot.com actually has a pretty good data set but that's still manual. I ran it through gale and theres actually imperceptible thin line borders that share a separate *shade* of their region colors with the region itself, so I ran it through a mosaic effect, to remove the vast bulk of extraneous border colors, but I'll still have to hand remove the oceans if I go with image sources.

It's not that I havent done things involved like that before, naturally I'm insane. It's just involved.

The reason for editing out the oceans is because the oceans contain a metric boatload of shades of blue.
If I'm converting pixels to tiles, I have to break it down to one color per tile.
With the oceans, the boundary between the ocean and shore (not to mention depth information on the continental shelf) ends up sharing colors when I do a palette reduction, so that's a no-go. Of course I could build the palette bu hand, from sampling the map, and then just measure the distance of each sampled rgb color to that of every color in the palette, to see what color it primarily belongs to, but as it stands ecoregions coloring of the regions has some of them *really close* in rgb value as it is.

Now what I also could do is write a script to parse the shape files, construct polygons in sdl or love2d, and save it to a surface with simplified colors, and output that to bmp.

It's perfectly doable, but technically I'm on savings and supposed to be calling companies right now to see if I can get hired instead of being a bum :P

I was experimenting with a load test suite called 'Siege' to build and scale increasingly complex searches against our new site search engine. I assumed that an old iMac couldn't have generated a crushing load against the beta servers and I learned two things the day I wrote and started that script before heading to lunch:

1) Beta and Production shared MSSQL instances
2) That single iMac was more than enough to take the whole production site down...

Thank god for docker and dockerfiles, I can't stand having to install PHP extensions that require 3 to 4 programs to work properly. Especially if I just have a throwaway script and don't want to install pecl, build scripts and phpize, don't want that shit on my system

I am learning about CI/CD and DevOps, and i finally made my first build/deploy/unit test script.

I use arch btw

I am scratching my head since 2 days cause a rather large Dockerfile doesn't work as expected.

CMD Execution just leads to "File not found".

Thanks, that's as useless as one ply toilet paper...

Whoever wrote the Dockerfile (not me…) should get an oscar...

Even in diarrhea after eating the good one day old extra hot china takeout from dubious sources I couldn't produce such a dumpster fire of bullshit.

The worst: The author thought layering helps - except it doesn't really, as it's a giant file with roughly 14 layers If I count correctly.

I just found out the problem...

The author thought it would be great to add the source files of the node project that should be built as a volume to docker... Which would work I guess....

Except that the author is a clueless chimp who thought at the same time seemingly that folder organization means to just pour everything into one folder....

Yeah. That fucker just shoved everything into one folder.

Yeeeeeesssssssss.

It looks like this:
source
docker-compose.mounts.yml
docker-compose.services.yml
docker-compose.yml
Dockerfile-development
Dockerfile-production
Dockerfile
several bash scripts
several TS / JS / config files
...

If you read the above.... Yes.
He went so far to copy the large Dockerfile 3 times to add development and production specific overrides.

I can only repeat what I said many times before: If you don't like doing stuff, ask for fucking help you moron.

-.-

*gooozfraba*

Anyways...

He directly mounts this source directory as a volume.

And then executes a shell script from this directory...

And before that shit was copied in the large gooozfraba Dockerfile into the volume.

Yeeeaaah.

We copy stuff inside the container, then we just mount on start the whole folder and overwrite the copied stuff.

*rolls eyes* which is completely obvious in this pit latrine of YML fuckery called Dockerfile.

As soon as I moved the start script outside the folder and don't have it running inside the folder that is mounted via volume, everything works.

Yeah.... Maybe one should seperate deployment from source files, runtime related stuff from build stuff.

*rolls eyes*

I really hate Docker sometimes. This is stuff that breaks easily for reasons, but you cannot see it unless you really grind your teeth and start manually tracing and debugging what the frigging fuck the maniac called author produced.

Not sure if it's the worst code review but it's a recent one.

We don't really do code reviews where I work unfortunately but my coworker used my framework for the first time (build some nice composer libraries for cmdline projects) and asked if I could make them do autoloading.
He never used namespaces before so I was glad to help him out.

What I saw was a dreadful mess. His project was called "scripts" so good luck picking a namespace...

Than it was all lose functions in the executable file. All those functions are however called by a class in another file (if they where not calling eachother as a cascading mess). That class was extending an abstract class from my library as instructed. However I never imagined my lib being raped like that.

The functions themselves are a horrible mess. Nothing uniform completely different style (our documentation states PSR's should be used).
Parameters counts higher than 5.
Variable names like Object and Dobject (in calling function Dobject is Object but it needs a fresh one.

If statements on parameters that need basically split it in two (should simply be to functions)
If else statement with return of same variable as a single line (sane people use ternary for that)

Note that I said functions. All of it should have been OO and methods. Would have saved at least some of the parameter hell.

I could go on and on. Do I think the programmer is bad yes (does not even grasp interfaces, dep injection, foreach loops). Is this his best work no. He said that for a one of script like this it just has to work. Not going to be used elsewhere. I disagree as it is a few thousand lines of code that others have to read too.

So let's say you spent over a day trying to clone WebKit using git but it failed every single time. Because the WebKit repo is HUGE (at least 7GB of worthless bloated refs), your connection is unstable, and git doesn't resume.

Then you discover you can solve the issue by simply cloning it via SVN in your cmake script.

Then you hit build, and forget that you had `-j 8` set in your IDE settings.

Then your computer freezes when it tries to compile 8 of WebKit's "UnifiedSourceXXX.cpp" files at a time, and all your 16GB of RAM get obliterated.

What the fuck, universe?

So looking at React/Node and all the GitHub projects etc. It seems JS/Node is the current/next big language like Java, C++. Runs on everything, can build anything with it, and is well supported.

Sorta crazy thinking about it though since JS is old and used to be shit used by script kiddies...

For the last 2.5 weeks I have been working on a application for a client that essentially amounts up to a glorified asset management tool. This project had a crazy deadline and I was tasked to solo dev. Because I could choose what to build the application with I thought I would try out Bun and Elysia. Loved it. Thats not the point of the story. I spent about 130 hours in 2.5 weeks on the project, slept 3 hours last night delivered the project after multiple QA rounds. Clients response on slack: This is unusable. We can not test. Client shares screenshot of design and my implementation. I went off script with a silly input field that they designed that never got used in any other place in the app but in this one model, so I decided to rather reuse a working component than creating a stray one. Oh and obviously the panel that the comments live in is full hight and not 80% like the designs. So the app is unusable. FML. How does that make the app unusable? Can you post comments. Yes tard, can you upload assets, yes tard. So what about constructive feedback. *constructive feedback left the building* THE APP IS UNUASABLE. FIX NOW.

So I go into Google Search Console to try to determine why its saying pages are not compliant with mobile and whatnot.

3 hours later I come out realizing that what Google REALLY wants is for everyone to build every web page as static HTML with no script tags and never a call to an external website. Just dump all that javascript and css and HTML into one BIG FRIGGIN FILE so our crawler feels satisfied that it's loading everything all in one request.

No CMSes allowed unless GOOGLE built it.

Let's just all revert to HTML 1.0 and be done with it.

When I was 6yo I was playing next to my dad with his old PC on a good old CRT a game called “Sperms” where you catch sperm with condoms and every time you do it made a really loud “YIPPIE” sound. I was playing this game for 4 years.

Somewhere around when I was 10 my dad told me we should build a PC and I was asking “Why does everyone has to make their own PC?”, I didn’t yet know what an cheap ass my dad is, so we did. Had a lot of fun and was very scared of the PSU, like really scared.

It blew up a few months later because I switched the toggle on the back from 220v to 110v, and got even more scared of PSU’s until I started an electricians apprentice.

Anyways, one day my dad and I where at a friends place and I played Tux Racer on his super loud Maschine that would crash if you kept the side door of the table closed, it ran some kind of Linux and I was fascinated how “simple and clean” it looks. I got a mini-cd to install it at home and immediately was hooked because the windows installation was such a pain in the arse those years. I did that all by myself just because I also wanted to play Tux Racer at home.

Anyways, somewhere right before GTA IV came out I started with VB.Net and ever since I was totally hooked and spend more time doing that than actually going to school.

My dad didn’t care and just let me do this, my mum just made sure I would have been up at least after the first lession, I don’t miss the bus and that I went to bed in a timely manner, which never happened because the PC was in my room and my mum slept downstairs and couldn’t notice that I was doing script kiddie things after an hour or so of “sleeping”.

So yeah, they didn’t care and were happy I didn’t annoy them.

Actually I didn’t wanted to become a developer because I always wanted to have it be a hobby or something and I liked woodwork more, but then people more qualified than me were more stupid than this script kiddie that still just wanted to play Tux Racer. That’s it.

How would you go about writing ES6 in your node applications? I'm using nodemon together with babel-core/register and then using a shell script on my server to build it.

Wasted a day as Shitlock Holmes with the build chain.

It would not reproduce the firmware hexfile that had been checked in. Reverse engineering that along with the mapfile to find out the cause, it was a const string that was guarded by an ifdef from another file that was auto-generated as prebuild step via a script that fetched some version control info.

Or, it would have been if the installation instructions had been correct and someone had described that no spaces in the absolute path name of the project are allowed. Otherwise, that shit just failed silently.

I then had to reverse engineer the intended workflow from the commit history in the version control to figure out that the last dev obviously hadn't quite understood the project specific workflow and how the version control interacts with these build scripts.

At least, I finally did get a matching hexfile.

Well, I am not sure whether this is supposed to be about worst experience as a reviewER or a reviewEE so I'ma do both. First as a reviewer.

So, on my first project in this company, I introduced automated build scripting (read: suggested, was "volunteered" to do it, then had to bust my ads to get it done). Prior to this, our process was run the thing in Visual Studio a bunch of times (don't ask) and package the resulting files. Well, new requirements made this not sustainable.

So after many many meetings in which I assured my co-workers that the script wouldn't cock up and go sideways and format our server (HOW???) and showed them how to work it AND added all the features they requested. I finally send the script out for code review. Oh the joy. Questions like: "why did you implement this?" Came from the guy who told me to implement it. "Can you change the formatting?" I checked and no. "Why isn't this to the code standard?" Because the code standard doesn't include scripting languages.

And here is the piece that takes the whole piss soaked shitsicle pie "I don't understand why we're doing this in the first place. We have a build process already, why do we need a new one?" FUCKING REALLY?!?!? YOU WERE IN THE GODS DAMNED MEETING WHERE WE DECIDED TO DO THIS!!! SET OUT THE REQUIREMENTS!!! LITERALLY EVERYTHING TO DO WITH THIS SCRIPT YOU WERE THERE AND YOU'RE ASKING WHY WE'RE DOING IT NOW!?!?! Fucking hell. I forced it through anyway because I had the higher ups all signed off on it, but seriously. Just because we're doing something new that slightly inconveniences you, doesn't mean it doesn't need to be done. Stop being afraid of change.

Side note: these people actually would regularly hold up process and product improvement because change is scary.

Try to finish some of the projects I've started in 2018. Right now I have a todo list text file, along with multiple written lists (the written ones are more focused on a single project normally).

-Finish the startpage I've been doing off and on for at least a month now. I ended up making a lot of it command based (just need to write the scripts for the commands..). I had a little config menu but I just got tired of it and the text box is autofocus anyways, so I figured I'd make it command focused.

-Nice little root safety script as I call it. I've made very stupid mistakes as root before. I once made a typo and ran "chmod --recursive 644 /" while half asleep. I believe I was trying to run that on the current directory I was in, but as you know, the . and / are right next to each other. Basically the script would see what you're doing and echo "you're about to do x, are you sure that's what you want to do?". Something I know I could knock out in a day, but I've been putting it off for at least a year now.

-Compiling notification. I saw something similar once a few years ago, and it was so fucking cool. I remember it being a Mac, and it had a notification that would basically tell you how many files and shit you had left to compile if you were building something. Kinda want to build something for polybar.

-FUCKING RUBBER DUCK DEBUGGING TO THE EXTREME! This one was inspired by a comment someone made once months ago. Might have been here, or reddit, or in real life, not sure. Basically a big ass fucking rubber duck with LEDs in it that will like glow red if your code wouldn't compile (I think Visual Studio has like an automatic error detecting thing in there?? Maybe something similar if I can figure that out). Honestly not sure how the fuck I'd do this one, but I love the idea and I really want to fucking do it

There's more shit. These are just the main ones I want to attempt sometime in the near future.

tl:dr
i fucking hate that professor for whom i have to work on laboratory project right now.

reason#1
the project is using a stack full with java. JavaScript. react and some weird facebook api of which i have no clue about. not to mention the server side of this application which uses tomcat (ok its java after all) and sql.

well that wouldn't be not so bad if...

reason#2
we wouldn't have to fucking debug his mistakes he put into the fucking prepared code AND his fucking useless instructions how to set up the project for eclipse the first time. not to mention his fucking requirements which make no sense

oh yeah im a student. i can always go and ask him for help if i need any...

reason#3
i have another 70% mandatory course at the same time and that fucker refuses to upload hos sheets in moodle and answer even one fucking question via mail. not to mention no support if I am there unless i have eclipse setup. even through the projects should be build using gradle...

reason#4
oh. and have i mentioned that this course is only about design patterns? uts not like we could see several of them in a java only application. no we literally have to learn java itself. gradle. nodejs JavaScript Extended for react which i have no clue about at the moment... and yes i especially mentioned gradle and nodejs beccause we have to set shit up and not only use a script.

reason#5
and all that wont even give us a grade. no ita simply a pass or fail part of the module which the course is part of.

have i also mentioned that the whole shit should be done in 20 hours according to the schedule

Ugh... some people...

Just left the office early because of the toxic climate. That one infamous collegue is basically unable to communicate without being a narcissistic 5-year-old and was arguing whether we should write a test (I was going to write the test) that would need a single additional branch in the build system.

(The test was for a parser and it should test whether it can handle absolute paths. A simple regression test with a file and an expected output. Because absolute paths are different for every platform and user, the files to be parsed would have to be generated with appropriate paths before the tests were run. Well that would require one single python script and a single line in the script that runs the script and DONE)

Well that guy was unable to focus on his own work and started an argument about whether that test was necessary.
Even though I still think it is necessary, it might have been a reasonable argument if he would have acted more agreeable. But he was saying the feature was useless anyways "everyone will use relative paths only anyways" and "because noone here cares a ratass about maintaining the tests it will all fall on me again" ..

Wtf was this guys problem, I (CAPS) was going to write the stupid test and since when do we not write tests in order to better maintain our product? I get that he worries that the test environment will get more messy, but thats better than having the product code go messy or unfunctional! And c'mon guys, how are absolute paths a redundant feature...

Gradle builds are fucking annoying.

Two (2) senior developers and one (1) senior tester left our team and I am left with two (2) Java legacy applications that are hard to maintain. Here is a list of things I hate about these old webapps (let's call them app A and B):

1. App A depends on 80% web services. If one web service for a product or warehouse goes down, work flow is impeded while prod support team checks with the core services team for repair

2. App B is a maven project with multiple modules dependent on libraries that are dependent on company's internal libraries. So if we want to upgrade to OpenJdk 9 and up, the project will definitely produce a lot of errors due to deprecated/unsupported codes

3. App A is dependent on Tibco and I have no experience on that

4. App B's continuous integration build tool is Jenkins and the jobs that build it has a shell script that wasn't updated during the tech upgrade enhancement. The previous developer who did the knowledge transfer to me didn't tell me about this (it should be considered a defect on her part but she already resigned)

5. App A when loaded in eclipse IDE is a pain to work with since it is only allowed to build a war file using ant. I have to lookup in quick search instead of calling shortcuts (call hierarchy) because the project wasn't compiled via eclipse.

6. It's impossible to debug app A because of #5

7. Both applications have high priority and complex enhancements and I have no other teammates to help me

8. You never know what else can go wrong anytime

How to run PHP in a container :
1. Begin a docker file for an existing php cron app (when all you know is php, everything looks like a php app)
2. Set the FROM.. Apt get update .. Do composer install
3. Builds the image
4. Discover I need git
5. Add git to apt get install step
6. Builds the image
7. Launch the php script
8. Fatal : use of undefined constant SOL_UDP
9. Opens the source code of the third party. The there's no mention of where that constant is from.
10. Spend many minutes online to find what's missing.
11. Find the PHP sockets page about that option. Digs into the documentation to find out that's missing from the installed PHP.
12. Find out I need to add a step to install the socket extension in my docker file.
13. Build the image again
14. Execute it, finally it works
15. Remember why I hate php
(for brevity I've omitted the even more complex part of having to set up zlib)

How to install node js in a container image:
FROM node:8
ADD package.json
RUN npm install

When your building GCC from scratch and you finally after hours get the damn thing to begin to build it crashes an hour in because of some dependency that is the wrong version! why did the build script not include the check in the first 10 mins COME ON!!!!!!

So I created a little script for my mother because otherwise she had to combine 70 spreadsheets manually, I just couldnt sit there and do nothing. So I wrote a simple Python script in like 30 mins, decided that it needed a GUI because in the end it is for my mother. So wrote a GUI and partly learnt PyQt during that in an hour, which was all working fine.

Then I got to the point where I actually had to hand it over to my mother, preferably as an executable so that there is no hassle at all. So found this tool, Pyinstaller which seems to work great. Created an executable with all the dependencies and stuff in a single file, it worked on my win10 machine (because I developed on Linux of course). So I distributed it to her and she immediately gets an error. Of course there is no description and stuff because I made it a simple program, no log files and such. But fortunately she told me that it errorred when she wanted to run it, so I knew it had to be due to the executable.

Turns out she is still using windows 7 at work, which of course is different that windows 10 and here I am at 11pm, installing updates on a fresh windows 7 machine just to create a new build in that environment and make it work on her machine.

Fuck you, windows update. I swore to never see that ugly ass progress bar again, but yet here I am. Send halp.

I am almost just at the point where Im going to teach my mother how to run a python application from the command line because wheels are actually available for all python dependencies (instead of compiling them)!

Are there better python executable creators out there for wincrap?

Well it's nothing I wrote myself but I don't know why it exists.

I currently work on a reasonably big LaTeX (markup/typesetting) project.
For what ever reason someone had the glorious idea to build a Compiler in Java to compile the LaTeX sources to PDF, so far so good.
The problem is that
1. Most people working on that project either use an editor with its own compiling functionality or
2. use the shell script in the same fucking directory

Of course the Compiler is also slower than both of the above and tends to crash.

Well at least it's not my time which went into there.

I'm at my Community College as a member of the engineering club requesting funds for a software and hardware-related physical project.

The code was mostly pre-written in Python from a university already, but we needed to build essentially a gaming-level PC to run it, do some welding and metalwork for the hardware, cables, et citera. I don't want to get too detailed in case anyone involved is reading this story.

To get funding, we needed to go before the student senate. I didn't go the first time, but later when we needed more funding for the project to do expansions, we attended.

I came in with a few pages of documentation explaining how the project operated, it's scope, and why we needed the additional $500 on top of the previous $1000 or so spent. I went in woefully behind the times on what a student senate meeting was like.

For starters, I thought this would be somewhat formal, being "Student Senate" in Week 8, and prepared to defend my project fully. Instead, we spent the first 15 minutes going around the table explaining what animal we would be and why, if we had to turn into an animal. It just kept going hilariously, painfully downhill from there.

They did ask some questions about what my project was and how it operated (as not many had seen it), and they wanted explanations even though it was clear absolutely nobody else in the room understood anything. My partner virtually shut down and let me do all the talking for my project and his because he couldn't take the ignorance of some of the questions and the assorted nonsense spread throughout the meeting.

Amazingly, we got funding. We had to sit for the rest of the meeting though, which (among other things) included a segment about whether we should create a new committee called the "Fundamental Insecurities committee" to help out with, well, "Fundamental Insecurities." There was only one member on this proposed committee.

When I brought up the question on why we were making a one-person committee alongside the, like, three one-person committees already in existence, they congratulated me for asking good questions and said I should come more often. They then said the exact same thing again when I pointed out there were better names than "Fundamental Insecurities." It's such a reality check that you are trying to impress people to get funding, when you can't help but feel that everyone is an utter idiot in the back of your head.

Almost a year later, I had to go back with a list of parts we needed. I wrote a whole complex list of things we needed for the project. Even though they tried to ask questions about what certain parts were (to appear like they weren't totally incompetent), and despite asking questions about a bunch of the items, nobody cared about what the $10 for "C418" was (google it if you don't get this joke). I spent about 30 minutes talking with them and succeeded in getting $600 more in funding. We then, to my surprise, spent less than 5 minutes debating whether to send 2 students on a field trip for $700. 30 minutes for $600, for a permanently installed project. <5 minutes for a $700 one-time thing.

And, because this is already a long rant, here's one more thing: The Student Senate's voting rules initially gave everyone who showed up 1 vote. We're all students, we all get a say, right?

Well, I soon put together that Student Senate had fairly low attendance. Engineering Club had high attendance. Student Senate and Engineering Club took place at the same date and time. I then, of course, asked why we couldn't bring the whole Engineering Club into Senate one day, and then proceed to pass an order by simple majority saying that all Student Life funding goes to us.

They then said that the administrators (the heads of Student Senate) could override that, but I pointed out that kind of defeats the purpose of voting in the first place. They then switched script and said they wouldn't do that and would honor such a vote. Shortly after, they changed the rules saying that you only get a vote on your 2nd consecutive visit; and again said I should visit more often because I was brilliant.

You can't make this stuff up.

So for the past one month I'm working on an enhancement in a product coded in C++ and shell script, running on RHEL. After toiling away for almost 10 hours/day for a month, the enhacement is ready. Coded, tested, documented. Ready to ship.

The client is supposed to recieve the update as a drop. 1 day before the drop is scheduled to be released to Quality Control, I fire an overnight build on the build machine, update the change request ticket, update other related tickets, inform QC of the drop to be released tomorrow. On the D-day, I package the drop using the company's painfully arduous method. Everything is ready by the evening, and the drop is good to go.

At 7pm (one hour before the drop is to be released), Jack fucking Jack-o-lantern (one of the top most exec in the company) tells me that the default value of the parameter introduced in the enhancement, needs to be changed from 86400 to 1500. HALF AN HOUR BEFORE THE DROP IS TO BE RELAEASED!

Now here I am, changing the value in over 25 files, followed by firing an overnight build, followed by sanity testing, change specific testing, followed by drop packaging, followed by inform QC that the drop will be delayed.

All because fucking jack-o-lantern wanted to change the fucking default value.
GOOD FOR YOU FUCKING JACK.

Well, this happens time to time...

I'm freelancing as a backend guy. I like to take care of all infrastructure before really starting to build anything, this mostly includes dev/staging/prod environments with some linear promotion strategy. So.. I did this API. Still on staging, proceeding with the development as planned, everything goes according the timeline.

And then.. this happens... At some point PM told frontend guy that it's time for production (without notifying me), so the frontend guy does what "anyone" would do in this case - tells PM to create DNS record for production to point to staging app.

Time passes, I'm still unaware of this. But I'm starting to see some quality entries in the DB, not the usual QA crap. I write to them that they're doing good job and continue with my tasks.

One of the tasks required some major DB change. I could've written migrations script, but since we're not in "production" yet, I just wipe the DB and recreate schema as I need it.

In 10 minutes the furious PM starts shouting that "production" is down and I need to fix it ASAP.

I'm lost, I'm asking questions, I'm slowly understanding what's happening...

So I want to grab some coffee, sat back down, wrote politely that they suck, added a finger emoji and terminated the contract.

Felt like the right thing to do as I definitely don't want to continue within the same "team".

Starting my work day:

* fire up the build script wrapper script wrapping the Docker compose scripts, which starts I dunno 20 different microservices, frontend build processes, watchers, blah, blah, blah, chews my laptop's battery like a muthafukka, wait for 15 minutes, for maybe a 40% chance that maybe it'll work, or maybe I'll have to fix some random thing that's wrong out of the 20 million things that could possibly go wrong and then restart... and if I'm lucky at the end of all this, I get to work on, I dunno, adding some field to a modal?

Firing up my weekend side project:

* php -S and immediately start working productively every time

Fuck the "modern web"

So today's conversation with my co-worker who built our build system...

Me:OS X build server is not building valid installs.
Him:What's the problem?
Me:The KEXT is not rebuild... I think that Jenkins isn't capable of updating the file because of the permissions the script set when you test compiled it manually... Could you please add Jenkins user to sudoers file or something?
Him:Yes of course, but what should I google?

WTF dude? Do you even think yourself? And for some reason no-one has acces to the build servers configs exept for him and he shows up like 3 times a week...

Yesterday i have worked from 9 to 5 for $0/hour (they dont call it $0/hour they call it a technical interview)

To which i had to build all alone all by myself a rest api backend in java, bash script to move the jar to other folder a gitlab cicd pipeline and deployment to aws.

Basically for this position i have to work both backend and devops

I passed

Yesterday at 8pm (yes) the recruiter told me i passed and she asked me to schedule the next interview tomorrow morning in 8am.

I didn't open linkedin and then she sent me a word template at 10pm.

Are you fucking kidding me? Was it not enough that i was your slave from the fucking morning till the whole working day for $0/hour and now you want me to reply to your messages outside of work? You want me to be ur $0/hour slave 24/7 and not 9/5? Fuck off. Genuinely get fucked.

I hate the corporate world. This is satan's job. This is the work of the devil. I feel my soul dying. This matrix is killing my soul. I must escape. i need energy to escape but this matrix is sucking all the energy out of me

So yesterday, I got a call from some cousins saying my aunt broke a toenail and (since she's diabetic) she could now either lose both legs due to gangrene or die if they amputate. 2 hour drive to get them and me up to see her, 2 back, all the while having to be stone-faced to console 2 grown men. Today is finals week, and I could also get a call any moment from the hospital to tell me she's either dead or now unable to take care of herself. Could even be mid-class with one of those "well put it on speakerphone" teachers.

On the tech front, i'm trying to compile a toolchain from source. But, oh wait, one of the binaries it needs to configure (pkg-config) is self-calling so it crashes my machine. Let's build it from source, then? Nope, it requires a working copy... of... itself? Well, fuck. A "yum reinstall" doesn't help as it just reinstates the self-calling version, and I can't outright remove it because systemctl needs it. Well, apparently it's like a binary but is a text script, somehow, so I removed the recursive line and configuring works. Now though, I'm worried it might be broken, so i'm gonna try and compile from source. But, despite it needing itself, it also needs a SUPER FUCKING SPECIFIC version of libtool, so that's gotta be compiled...

I really wanna fucking shoot myself.

So, i'm trying to get linkr (a pretty cool short link service) to work in a docker container since 4 hours now to host it on my server. There is no official container because it needs a working database connection and stuff during installation which can only be done via console and (for whatever reason I couldn't find out yet) need to be done while building the container. The problem is, I can't connect it to the database while building the container so there is no database during installation to create tables and stuff and the build will fail. ARGH.
Why the hell would you do this????? Theyre actually saying in their readme there is no dockerfile because the config options are specific to your configuration...?!?!
The thing is entirely written in python, so reading and parsing configfiles on the fly should not really be a problem.

Of course I could ssh into the container and run the installation script but that's not the point.

Docker is not about being lazy.
It's about portability.
Maybe I don't want to bloat my server with your 39579372639 npm dependencies? Or I don't want to install a freakin apache, because I have every other site on nginx and therefore wouldn't work with apache.

AAAAAAAARRRRRRGGHHGGGGG

in the end, I'm probably going to modify the thing to install tables when running the container and giving the first user admin rights instead of prompting to enter credentials for a new admin user.
And yet I didn't even speak python.

My work product: Or why I learned to get twitchy around Java...

I maintain a Java based test system, that tests a raster image processor. The client is a Java swing project that contains CORBA bindings to the internal API of the raster image processor. It also has custom written UI elements and duplicated functionality that became available in later versions of Java, but because some of the third party tools we use don't work with later versions of Java for some reason, it's not possible to upgrade Java to gain things as simple as recursive directory deletion, yes the version of Java we have to use does not support something as simple as that and custom code had to be written to support it.

Because of the requirement to build the API bindings along with the client the whole application must be built with the raster image processor build chain, which is a heavily customised jam build system. So an ant task calls out to execute a jam task and jam does about 90% of the heavy lifting.

In addition to the Java code there's code for interpreting PostScript files, as these can be used to alter the behaviour of the raster image processor during testing.

As if that weren't enough, there's a beanshell interface to allow users to script the test system, but none of the users know Java well enough to feel confident writing interpreted Java scripts (and that's too close to JavaScript for my comfort). I once tried swapping this out for the Rhino JavaScript interpreter and got all the verbal support in the world but no developer time to design an API that'd work for all the departments.

The server isn't much better though. It's a tomcat based application that was written by someone who had never built a tomcat application before, or any web application for that matter and uses raw SQL strings instead of an orm, it doesn't use MVC in any way, and insane amount of functionality is dumped into the jsp files.

It too interacts with a raster image processor to create difference masks of the output, running PostScript as needed. It spawns off multiple threads and can spend days processing hundreds of gigabytes of image output (depending on the size of the tests).

We're stuck on Tomcat seven because we can't upgrade beyond Java 6, which brings a whole manner of security issues, but that eager little Java updated will break the tool chain if it gets its way.

Between these two components we have the Java RMI server (sometimes) working to help generate image data on the client side before all images are pulled across a UNC network path onto the server that processes test jobs (in PDF format), by reading into the xref table of said PDF, finding the embedded image data (for our server consumed test files are just flate encoded TIFF files wrapped around just enough PDF to make them valid) and uses a tool to create a difference mask of two images.

This tool is very error prone, it can't difference images of different sizes, colour spaces, orientations or pixel depths, but it's the best we have.

The tool is installed in both the client and server if the client can generate images it'll query from the server which ones it needs to and if it can't the server will use the tool itself.

Our shells have custom profiles for linking to a whole manner of third party tools and libraries, including a link to visual studio 2005 (more indirectly related build dependencies), the whole profile has to ensure that absolutely no operating system pollution gets into the shell, most of our apps are installed in our home directories and we have to ensure our paths are correct for every single application we add.

And... Fucking and!

Most of the tools are stored as source bundles in a version control system... Not got or mercurial, not perforce or svn, not even CVS... They use a custom built version control system that is built on top of RCS, it keeps a central database of locked files (using soft and hard locks along with write protecting the files in the file system) to ensure users can't get merge conflicts by preventing other users from writing to the files at all.

Branching is heavy weight and can take the best part of a day to create a new branch and populate the history.

Gathering the tools alone to build the Dev environment to build my project takes the best part of a week.

What should be a joy come hardware refresh year becomes a curse ("Well fuck, now I loose a week spending it setting up the Dev environment on ANOTHER machine").

Needless to say, I enjoy NOT working with Java. A lot of this isn't Javas fault, but there's a lot of things that Java (specifically the Java 6 version we're stuck on) does not make easy.

This is why I prefer to build my web apps in python or node, hell, I'd even take Lua... Just... Compiling web pages into executable Java classes, why? I mean I understand the implementation of how this happens, but why did my predecessor have to choose this? Why?

Story time: Once I sent our android developer a project that he was supposed to compile and install on a test device. On my machine everything worked perfectly but on his machine ADB would keep failing to install the apk. After an hour of scratching our heads we figured out what happened:

He had just received a new Chinese action camera from Amazon and plugged it into his PC to charge. Turns out it's running rooted Android and runs ADB Debug mode by default. So the build script would try to deploy our phone app to his action cam instead of our test device

I made a php script to generate a powershell script that performs asset conversion. The conversion tool was designed to work via command prompt but i hate using it so i switched it up to powershell and after that i had to build a powershell script because running the shell exec function failed miserably, sad part is that just about to the end of the conversion, that ran in the background for a little over 2 days, i ran out of disk space so it stopped doing anything :( w/e i at least got what i was interested in.

I am currently running a heavily modded version of Ubuntu 18.04. I remove gnome applications, installed xfce with sddm for my login manager, plus removed a bunch of their pre-installed applications. I mostly use AppImages and snaps for installations with occasionally using apt for packages I am too lazy to build or are not in snap form.

I have been contemplating switching to Arch/Antegros/Manjaro. Mostly because I am crazy and heard that I could get a performance boost and I like being more in control of my own software.

My question is this, does it make sense for me to switch distros? Also, I'd like to have a close to the metal Arch install, but last time I did that I got annoyed with configuring too much from the bare bone, took me like close to an hour of setup, it was not hard, just really tedious.... Is Antegros/Manjaro have options to be really close to the bare-metal? Is there maybe a really good install script that I can just tweak some basic settings for?

I decided to make some new icons for Atom editor (the launcher/executable ones), because I liked the vscode-icons project.

Made the repo on GitHub and decided to automate making the icons for different OS using Travis CI.

Started writing the Python Script for Travis.
My google queries:

How to generate icons for Linux?
I can use SVG or generate a PNG, many libraries available. 👍👍

How to generate icons for Windows?
Generate PNGs of various sizes and pack in an .ico file. Easy enough

So far so good.

How to generate icons for Mac?
Mac needs a .icns file, a package of PNGs of various sizes. Libraries available but can be done on OSX only. 😫😫

Then I think, what OS does Travis use?
Oh, I can specify macOS in it 😁😁😁

Starts the build 😎😎

Travis doesn't support Python on macOS

😑😑😑😑

Revision to the Peter/Dilbert Principle, the ProjektAquarius principle: a company will systematically shift the least competent employee on to the assignments the competent employees can't be bothered to do until they become an integral part of the team and drag you down with them. (E.g. eventually they completely fuck up your delivery process, although it's probably still cheaper and quicker than having them do anything else.)

ProjektAquarius principle: A Case Study

We have an engineer who is getting paid quite a bit more than me. Over time his responsibilities have gradually been reduced to documentation and running our almost entirely automated build. Well today the build failed. He pulls me over to tell me, and says he's confused because there is a file there he has never seen before in there and a file he always has seen that isn't there (basically a file got renamed. It was not non-obvious). Answer: change the file name.

Then he comes over and tells us that it's failing again because the script is not finding a file. So a coworker of mine and I go over. He explains the whole build process to us when we ask if there is any point in the script that would help us identify where the script is looking for the file and failing (there wasn't but that's besides the point).

Turns out, he had decided to put the assembly list in order. Normally no problem, but the list is in source destination pairs. So the fucking file was being put in a different directory than the one the script was looking for it in and failing. And that's the story about how my company just paid 3 engineers a quarter of a man hour each for something that would have been resolved in 30 seconds via file search/copying and pasting a file path. Related note: our process for building an install is now about 4 hours long with no change on process besides the BCAK.

Does anyone work on a bunch of local NPM modules wanna describe their workflow for local dev vs deploy?

I’ve got mine but it feels a little trashy. It’s basically one npm script to link all the local modules for dev and another which will npm install them in prod - is there a better way without adding more build tools?

Worst sin ever was during a workplace hackathon.

Being ultra competitive I decided the other teams build script was too functional, ie. It worked. Changing it to

.echo please accept our warmest contrafibularitiea and have a nice day

...and commit gained more than a little (deserved) approbrium.

I am the technical lead in a project which uses a C# based framework. It's a lot of drag and drop, and C# scripts can be embedded for fancy stuff.

Scripts in general are not hard to do, it's harder to understand the business rules rather than the code itself.

I got hired as a junior to build this project from scratch as an MVP, and we need another junior to add enhancements and minor changes required from our end users. Since management wants me to move on working on more mid-senior development stuff, I'm supposed to be only supervising the juniors work (in the hopes that one day they'll be able to work on their own).

We've had bad luck filling this position. Our last hire is a guy like 17 years older than me, supposedly with experience in said framework but OH DEAR GOD.

Fucktard can't understand requirements and corrections, isn't able to deliver a 20 line script without fucking up. I give him a list with 3 mistakes to fix and only fixes two, crap like that.

Now, hear me out, the mistakes are stuff like:

- Unused variables
- Confusing error messages
- Error messages written in spanglish (mix between Spanish and English, we're located in Latin America)
- Untested features, this is the worst of all.

You may say "but he's a junior", sure. But as I said, he supposedly has experience, more years in IT than me, and fine, you're allowed to fuck up a few times on your first tasks but not make the same mistakes over and over, specially since we've already sat down and addressed these issues in presence of the CTO.

Fuck this guy. I genuinely dislike him as a person also, he is from another latin country and we have some serious cultural differences. For instance, he insists on sucking your ass constantly, being overly well manered (we already saluted with the whole team at the daily stand up, stop saying hello, good day, regards in each of your fucking chat messages or task submissions), and other mannerisms that are hard to translate, but whatever, all of these attitudes are frowned upon here. They're not necessary, we just want to keep it simple, cordial and casual and see you deliver the crap that you're being paid for with a decent level of quality.

On Monday the CTO comes back from vacation, I'm looking forward to that meeting, gonna report his ass, there is evidence everywhere on our issue tracker.

This is an actual transcript...
Since it's way too long for the normal 5000 characters, hence splitting it up...

Infra Guy: mr Dev, could you please give some rational for update of jjb?
Dev: sparse checkout support is missing
Infra Guy: is this support mandatory to achive whatever you trying to do?
Dev: yes
Infra Guy: u trying to get set of specific folder for set of specific components?
Dev: yes
Infra Guy: bash script with cp or mv will not work for you?
Dev: no
Infra Guy: ?
Dev: when you have already present functionality why reinvent the wheel
Dev: jenkins has support for it
Dev: the jjb is the bottle neck
Infra Guy: getting this functionality onto our infra would have some implications
Dev: why should I write bash script if jenkins allows me to do that
Dev: what implications ??
Infra Guy: will you commit to solve all the issues caused by new jjb?
Dev: you show me the implications first
Infra Guy: like a year ago i have tried to get new jjb <commit_url>
Infra Guy: no, the implications is a grey area
Infra Guy: i cant show all of them and they may hit like in week or eve month
Dev: then why was it not tackled
Dev: and why was it kept like that
Infra Guy: few jobs got broken on something
Dev: it will crop up some time later
Dev: if jobs get broken because of syntax
Dev: then jobs can be fixed
Dev: is it not ???
Infra Guy: ofc
Infra Guy: its just a question who will fix them
Dev: follow the syntax and follow the guidelines
Dev: put up a test server and try and lets see
Dev: you have a dev server
Dev: why not try on that one and see what all jobs fails
Dev: and why they fail
Dev: rather than saying it will fail and who will fix
Dev: let them fail and then lets find why
Dev: I manually define a job
Dev: I get it done
Infra Guy: i dont think we have test server which have the same workload and same attention as our prod
Dev: unless you test how would you know ??
Dev: and just saying that it broke one with a version hence I wont do it
Infra Guy: and im not sure if thats fair for us to deal with implication of upgrading of the major components just cause bash script is not good enough for u
Dev: its pretty bad
Infra Guy: i do agree
Infra TL Guy: Dev, what Infra Guy is saying is that its not possible to upgrade without downtime
Infra Guy: no
Dev: how long a downtime are we looking at ??
Infra Guy: im saying that after this upgrade we will have deal with consequences for long time
Infra Guy-2: No this is not testing the upgrade is the huge effort as we dont have dev resources to handle each job to run
Dev: if your jjb compiles all the yaml without error
Dev: I am not sure what consequences are we talking of
Infra Guy: so you think there will be no consequences, right?
Dev: unless you take the plunge will you know ??
Dev: you have a dev server running at port 9000
Infra Guy: this servers runs nothing
Dev: that is good
Dev: there you can take the risk
Infra Guy: and the fack we have managed to put something onto api doesnt mean it works
Dev: what API ?
Infra Guy: jenkins api
Infra Guy: hmmm
Dev: what have you put on Jenkins API ??
Infra Guy: (
Dev: jjb is a CLI
Infra Guy: ((
Dev: is what I understand
Dev: not a Jenkins API
Infra Guy: (((
Dev: (((((
Infra Guy: jjb build xmls and push them onto api
Infra Guy: and its doent matter
Dev: so you mean to say upgrading a CLI is goig to upgrade your core jenkisn API
Dev: give me a break
Infra Guy: the matter is that even if have managed to build something and put it onto api
Infra Guy: doesnt mean it will work
Dev: the API consumes the xml file and creates a job
Infra Guy: right
Dev: if it confirms to the options which it understands
Dev: then everything will work
Dev: I am actually not getting your point Infra Guy
Infra Guy: i do agree mr Dev
Dev: we are beating around the bush
Infra Guy: just want to be sure that if this upgrade will break something
Infra Guy: we will have a person who will fix it
Dev: that is what CICD is supposed to let me know with valid reasons
Dev: why can't that upgrade be done
Infra Guy: it can be done
Infra Guy: i even have commit in place

so part of the whole xz backdoor debacle involved some sock puppet named "kumar"?

like from the famous "kumar-asshole.sh" script that's part of the "we cleaned after our build engineer and look what scripts we found" legend?

good one

So. My new machine at work has decided that running visual studio is too hard and our build script has decided that building vcxproj files is too hard. And our one sysadmin for our team of 100+ is the only one allowed to fix it.

Luckily I have an old box that *only* takes 45 minutes to run our build, a hangover, apparently I am going through early manopause because it is hot as fuck in this office, and today is the day that everyone wants to loudly ask every question ever.

I guess what I am saying is I blame everyone else for my bad decisions and project them into my you-me instead of focusing on my me-me. Also I really don't want to talk to the S.A. He is difficult.

So I'm working on a snippet of JS to generate widgets for a custom data dashboard at the moment, in a project where I've been paired with a junior "developer" (he's more of a junior script monkey though), which is just plain painful...

Recently he wrote up a long message bitching about how my library API keeps changing, making it impossible for him to get any of his work done.. This particular message even made references to "writing his own widget library" and "stabbing me in the eye".

It's currently at version 0.1.0-ALPHA, just by the way. Major version 0 mother fucker.

Anyways, one of my colleagues stepped in the other day to try help him with the front-end stuff, which finally helped me get the feedback I was asking for. At which point we found out he's still currently working off a build I gave him 4 fucking weeks back.

Honestly though, I'd both love and hate to see him try make a library to do this: pull data from a non-standards company data API, parse said data from unnamed number arrays nested up to 4 levels deep, then morph that data into one of four different charts or one of five made up of custom markup.

All he has to do is create a UI to configure and present my widgets, but he can't even figure out how to integrate dependency management into his front-end project.

O.o

OMG. Can I stab him?? Pretty please?

As odd as it may be, but when I find an old 5000 line kshell script on an old build server that has its own built in menu happiness fills me.

So, I have a pretty decent understanding of big complete languages like Java, I build android applications following several design patterns, solid principles, building big stuff with databases and servers and libraries interconnected with gradle, tracking everything with git, using tdd and functional programming capabilities blablabla ... And I still have trouble making sense of a FREAKING STUPID SHELL SCRIPT I MEAN WHO CAME UP WITH THAT SINTAX I HATE IT SO MUCH OMG I CAN'T EVEN
But for real everytime I need to read a '.sh' I literally wanna throw my computer away and die. Am I alone?

Fun Fact: It's physically impossible to run a .bat script on a remote Windows machine as admin from a Visual Studio post-build event.

I hate AndroidStudio when it adds constraint-layout as a dependency in my build script whenever I create a new Activity.

Let a clean uninstall script be a thing for all packages if you build from source and install.

Java script must be so powerful. I didn't know you could build a whole pip network using mobile and desktop devices as servers to replace the dark Web!

A year ago I built my first todo, not from a tutorial, but using basic libraries and nw.js, and doing basic dom manipulations.

It had drag n drop, icons, and basic saving and loading. And I was satisfied.

Since then I've been working odd jobs.

And today I've decided to stretch out a bit, and build a basic airtable clone, because I think I can.
And also because I hate anything without an offline option.

First thing I realized was I wasn't about to duplicate all the features of a spreadsheet from scratch. I'd need a base to work from.

I spent about an hour looking.
Core features needed would be trivial serialization or saving/loading.

Proper event support for when a cell, row, or column changed, or was selected. Necessary for triggering validation and serialization/saving.

Custom column types.

Embedding html in cells.

Reorderable columns

Optional but nice to have:

Changeable column width and row height.

Drag and drop on rows and columns.

Right click menu support out of the box.

After that hour I had a few I wanted to test.

And started looking at frameworks to support the SPA aspects.

Both mithril and riot have minimal router support. But theres also a ton of other leightweight frameworks and libraries worthy of prototyping in, solid, marko, svelte, etc.
I didn't want to futz with lots of overhead, babeling/gulping/grunting/webpacking or any complex configuration-over-convention.

Didn't care for dom vs shadow dom. Its a prototype not a startup.

And I didn't care to do it the "right way". Learning curve here was antithesis to experimenting. I was trying to get away from plugin, configuration-over-convention, astronaut architecture, monolithic frameworks, the works.

Could I import the library without five dozen dependancies and learning four different tools before getting to hello world?
"But if you know IJK then its quick to get started!", except I don't, so it won't. I didn't want that.

Could I get cheap component-oriented designs?

Was I managing complex state embedded in a monolith that took over the entire layout and conventions of my code, like the world balanced on the back of a turtle?

Did it obscure the dom and state, and the standard way of doing things or *compliment* those?

As for validation, theres a number of vanilla libraries, one of which treats validation similar to unit testing, which seems kinda novel.

For presentation and backend I could do NW.JS, which would remove some of the complications, by putting everything in one script. Or if I wanted to make it a web backend, and avoid writing it in something that ran like a potato strapped to a nuclear rocket (visual studio), I could skip TS and go with python and quart, an async variation of flask.
This has the advantage that using something thats *not* JS, namely python, for interacting with a proper database, and would allow self-hosting or putting it online so people can share data and access in real time with others.

And because I'm horrible, and do things the wrong way for convenience, I could use tailwind.
Because it pisses people off.

How easy (or hard) would it be to recreate a basic functional clone of the core of airtable?

I don't know, but I have feeling I'm going to find out!

One offsite team are not adding dependencies to the build script and are puzzled when it doesn't compile on my machine....

I have to build a database migration that generates user handles. The user handles are unique within an organization. The user can change them. The auto generated handles are either the first name + last name, or the business name depending on which user type it is. Unless it would be a duplicate. Duplicates auto increment if the handle is taken. The character limit for a user handle is the same length as first name plus last name so I have to check for possible overflow if I add digits. I also have to see if the generated name is in the DB already because a user could have custom entered the result of the auto generation.

This has to be programmed async. The DB driver is using a transaction but multiple calls have to be made to check if the generated handle exists for that organization. Also I have to check the migration script itself for possible duplicates. 3/4 of the users have a handle and with the scale there will definitely be duplicate names.

My idea is if there is a collision, use a UUID and let the users pick something nicer next time they log in. Business says “Reeeeeee!!!! The users shouldn’t see a UUID!!! You can do this!!!” Absurd uniqueness requirements. Absurd backfill procedure. Absurd business rules.

Creating the build script for the CI pipeline:

- 20% trying to avoid someone getting access to passwords, tokens, etc.
- 10% writing commands for the build and tests
- 70% writing work arounds for bugs and errors caused by the CI system or SDKs in headless environments...

why can't i ever have a successful make build even with all dependencies satisfied. took TWO weeks of faffing with libdvdcss becasue it couldn't find libc6. I think at one point i might have inadvertently deleted libc6 doing an ln -s in reverse order. I know i got kernel panics trying to cp it back before discovering apt -reinstall cause like fuck was i gonna purge and reinstall my whole system. ANYWAY couldn't find where the libc6 dependency was in the build script but did find a way to tell it to ignore missing deps. although copyright lawyers needed the guillotine so this would never have been an issue

Horror story and rant time I guess...

I haven't seen the main developer of this MVC project that I've been working on but I can totally assure that his seniority isn't in frontend development 😠 and I doubt the backend too... Fucking DataTables converted to IDictionaries<string,object>

Guess who need to build on top of the pile of shit!

Anyway, I wasn't really careful about what kind of template I was given to work on a new SPA page, so I'm doing the job given the time, but it's fucking gory:
- matrioska style layers (n.3) without documentation
- partials everywhere
- too much inline styling
- too many <style> sections (n per layer or partial)
- too many <script> sections (n per layer or partial)
- poor CSS styling or no styling at all! (classes without any style nor js association)😠

He's just been lucky that the browser is capable of handling his shit

Now that at the end of this year I'll leave this project (solo fullstack) and need to provide documentation for the next poor souls I was thinking to leave behind something at par of my skills and capabilities but analysing the current mess ticks my brain in a bad way, fuck you Marco!
Fuck you
and your seniority
and the Italian way of perceiving seniority that gives you a higher living in the wrong side of the field 🤬🤬🤬

We recently pulled in a developer onto the devops team, and also our manager was fired a month ago. Everything devops is Python/Go but all our developers are in Clojure or Node. He's recently been writing a lot of stuff on Clojure and I didn't get an opportunity to bring it up at the last retro.

Recently he changed all our old Go projects to use a CI-pipeline he built, even though I wrote a build tool, with tests, that does everything his pipeline does, in Python .. over two years ago. When I asked him why he doesn't just use our existing builder, he responds saying he doesn't know why he should use some tool/script just because it exists ... um, everything we've built uses it?! 😡

Our last manager was a dick and I understand why they let him go, but he also would put this guy in his place. He's literally made is own little "devops roadmap" for himself and shared it out with the team. It's all about his personal goals and what he wants.

So as part of my news years resolution, I thought id build an app and I thought I would build it in vue.js and native script with a shared codebase, I've started with a fresh project and already I have an error, one that I've not caused, this is in router.js. see if you can spot it.

module.exports = (api, options) => {
require('@vue/cli-plugin-router/generator')(api, {
historyMode: options.routerHistoryMode
};
export default new Router(options);
}

When I've fixed the syntax error, I then get, the error:

/src/router.js: 'import' and 'export' may only appear at the top level (5:0)

This is when I run "npm run serve:ios"

if anyone has encountered this, please let me know how you fixed this.

MPLABX, eclipse and netbeans are biggest pieces of shit software in the world, fucken a I can’t stand this slowness, over bloat, locking up, and the unable to resolve bullshit,

(Porting a suppliers project and build script over to a simple makefile, and so the project can open and build in sublime or vim rather these other bullshit IDES

I was setting up a CI build machine. Builds were supposed to be ran in disposable containers, but I needed a way to trigger a task on the host from inside the container. I didn't want to give containers shell access to host - kinda misses the point.

Solution: a server running on the host and listening for predefined commands on a named pipe. The pipe was bound into containers which would simply echo commands into it. Very simple and effective.

The hacky part? The server was an 8-line bash script.

Visual Studio is a fucking shitheap of an IDE and everyone who worked on it should be fucking incinerated.

I've been trying to get Unity to build my game for about a fucking hour and a half now, only to realize that it was a warning from a script that was causing it to fall flat on it's face.
So I deleted the script because it was a shitty script anyways, not much was being lost here, and I started building the game, and lo and behold, it was actually fucking doing something.
I went to go get a drink, only to come back to see that this stupid fucking engine gave me yet ANOTHER error that wasn't even from a script anywhere in my game's files.
It was fucking Visual Studio. It didn't even give me that concise of a fucking error, just "this file doesn't exist" or whatever hypercomplex bullshit it spat out at me.
So, I took to google, and found that I should open the solution file hidden within the uncompleted build, and upon doing so Visual Studio told me it needed to install some more shit in order to do so.
I decided to let it do it's thing, and you wanna know what the real kicker is?
I started writing this rant when it was at 25%.
I had started talking to my friend about how absolutely fucking garbage and slow this IDE is at around the point where it started downloading. It took fifteen fucking minutes for it to get to 25%.
I could uninstall and reinstall both Destiny 2 and Killing Floor 2, twice, in the time takes for this shitty fucking program to install its tumor of an update onto my system.
FUCK Visual Studio.
Fuck the person who conceived the idea of it.
And fuck every single person who supports it.
Every single person that thinks this fucking anathema of an IDE was a good idea should be incinerated.

I recently refactored a form with complex client side interactivity for one of my clients replacing jquery with vuejs in the process and I'm absolutely baffled by how easier it is to reason about everything when you think of the UI as a function of the state. Only devs who have done both imperative and declarative DOM manipulation at some point in their life can understand the joy of doing this. And all of this can be done with just a simple script tag without having to bring in complex build process that has plagued the Javascript ecosystem.

!rant more advice needed for weather API

I am making a spur of the moment travel app built around a weather API. The problem is I need to feed in temperature and humidity for a date and get a list of countries and all the APIs I'm looking at work on location requests.

So, I plan to solve this using a JavaScript webworker and set intervals to build my own database that I can query.

Would it be better to use a script external to my API or keep the business logic internal?

Best answer receives my warm thanks.

P.S. @dfox there should be a non rant section?

Bad (or at least uninformed due to unclear requirements) design decisions lead to somewhat perplexing (and above all, frustrating) problems down the line...

Here I am, wrote a cli client for event bus subscription, and since EC2 is eqv to Docker, had to fix the main function to keep it alive - now the deploy stage on the ci/cd pipeline fails due to startup script timing out. But why tho?

I’m not really sure whether I should’ve designed this differently from the get-go or whether my build and deploy configs don’t match anymore due to recent changes and I should figure out what’s wrong with them... or both.

Bottom line is: I have no idea what I’m doing.

I spent 2-3 days on debugging code written in assembly script. Apparently, you need to initialise an array using new method otherwise it re-uses the previous array from the same scope and it has created infinitely large array. Just wtf.
And I got error like "wasm blah blah blah blah blah blah".Just give proper error.

Running the environment locally wasn't an option because well it doesn't fucking work locally. So, I have to forcibly test on CI and they have created a site that can show you logs because you can't access or query data directly from server and while debugging you try to log something it randomly works sometimes and sometimes you get output from god knows which deployment. Just create a fucking API for displaying log or build a proper docker so that we test it locally.

I had to generate different kinds of graphs at compiletime and had to compile a graph and write down the code size for that specific width/height in addition to one of three implementations which all need to be evaluated. I computer scienced the shit out of it!
I wrote some Rust code that easily lets me build some graphs with the dimensions passed as input parameter. Then i wrote a method that converts the graph into the definition of the graph in a C header (sadly the only way) and wrote a bash script that executes that rust code with all possible dimensions and saves the header into my source folder. Then i build the application and write the programsize into a file.

In the next step i run a python script that reads all the generated files with the sizes and created a csv file which in turn can be used by excel/numbers to visualize the dependency between depth of graph and code size 😄

I had only some hours for it all, it is messy but works 😄

#Suphle Rant 6: Deptrac, phparkitect

This entry isn't necessarily a rant but a tale of victory. I'm no more as sad as I used to be. I don't work as hard as I used to, so lesser challenges to frustrate my life. On top of that, I'm not bitter about the pace of progress. I'm at a state of contentment regarding Suphle's release

An opportunity to gain publicity presented itself last month when cfp for a php event was announced last month. I submitted and reviewed a post introducing suphle to the community. In the post, I assured readers that I won't be changing anything soon ie the apis are cast in stone. Then php 7.4 officially "went out of circulation". It hit me that even though the code supports php 8 on paper, it's kind of a red herring that decorators don't use php 8 attributes. So I doubled down, suspending documentation.

The container won't support union and intersection types cuz I dislike the ambiguity. Enums can't be hydrated. So I refactored implementation and usages of decorators from interfaces to native attributes. Tried automating typing for all class properties but psalm is using docblocks instead of native typing. So I disabled it and am doing it by hand whenever something takes me to an unfixed class (difficulty: 1). But the good news is, we are php 8 compliant as anybody can ask for!

I decided to ride that wave and implement other things that have been bothering me:
1) 2 commands for automating project setup for collaborators and user facing developers (CHECK)
2) transferring some operations from runtime to compile/build TIME (CHECK)
3) re-attempt implementing container scopes

I tried automating Deptrac usage ie adding the newly created module to the list of regulated architectural layers but their config is in yaml, so I moved to phparkitect which uses php to set the rules. I still can't find a library for programmatically updating php filed/classes but this is more dynamic for me than yaml. I set out to implement their library, turns out the entire logic is dumped into the command class, so I can neither control it without the cli or automate tests to it. I take the command apart, connect it to suphle and run. Guess what, it detects class parents as violations to the rule. Wtflyingfuck?!

As if that's not bad enough, roadrunner (that old biatch!) server setup doesn't fail if an initialization script fails. If initialization script is moved to the application code itself, server setup crumbles and takes the your initialization stuff down with it. I ping the maintainer, rustacian (god bless his soul), who informs me point blank that what I'm trying to do is not possible. Fuck it. I have to write a wrapper command for sequentially starting the server (or not starting if initialization operations don't all succeed).

Legitimate case to reinvent the wheel. I restored my deleted decorators that did dependency sanitation for me at runtime. The remaining piece of the puzzle was a recursive film iterator to feed the decorators. I checked my file system reader for clues on how to implement one and boom! The one I'd written for two other features was compatible. All I had to do was refactor decorators into dependency rules, give them fancy interfaces for customising and filtering what classes each rule should actually evaluate. In a night's work (if you're discrediting how long writing the original sanitization decorators and directory iterator), I coupled the Deptrac/phparkitect library of my dreams. This is one of the those few times I feel like a supreme deity

Hope I can eat better and get some sleep. This meme is me after getting bounced by those three library rejections