So, someone submitted a 'bug' to Mozilla.

As some of you may know, in the next year, the new mass surveillance law in the Netherlands is going into effect.

Another fun fact is that the dutch security agencies/government have their own CA (Certificate Authority) for SSL/TLS certificates.

The new law says that the AIVD (dutch NSA/GCHQ equivilant) is allowed to hack into systems through obtained certificates and also that they're allowed to INTERCEPT TRAFFIC THROUGH OBTAINED PRIVATE SSL/TLS KEYS.

So someone actually had the fucking balls to submit a fucking issue to Mozilla saying that the Dutch State certs shouldn't be accepted anymore when the new mass surveillance law gets into place.

This person deservers a fucking medal if you ask me.

Anyone else used Stack Overflow for many years without ever asking or answering a single question?

I found it!

So they were having trouble with the server always being slow and maxed to 100%, so the boss told me when wait times were hitting 5+mins due to server trying to catch up, he complained at me, said if I could get the wait time to 30sec to instant he would raise my pay to 90k a year, then walked away after I agreed, I was quite serious but I don't think he thought I was, so I decided to look over the system, IDK who but they put all the calculations and processing server-side for the CA's on floor then sent the completed view to the CA, so I spent months recreating the entire system except the server only pulled the data needed then the new client would do all the processing on their computer since they weren't doing anything anyways, I did a practice run today as its one of our peak days, wait times went to barely 5secs or "instant" according to CA's, I walked into the office, slapped that hourly report down after just two hours and showed the massive increase in employees production times.

That look on his face...
That look on my face...
That look on my next check...

Bliss

To new beginnings

Seen in Amsterdam, getting on a ferry.

"Unit tests are a waste of time, and we should avoid doing that if possible. "

Kill me please.

Life suddenly became less complicated. Thanks devRant 😊

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail!

This was something which my tech lead used to tell me when I was so obsessed with nosql databases a few years back. I would try to find problems to solve that has a use case for nosql databases or even try to convince me(I didn’t realise it back then) that I need to use nosql db for this new idea that I have, without really thinking deep enough whether the data in question is better represented using an sql schema or not.

Now, leading a team of young developers, I come across similar suggestions from few of my team members who just discovered this new and shiny tech and want to use it in production projects.

While I am not against new and shiny, it’s not a good practice to jump right in to it without exploring it deep enough or considering all the shortcomings. The most important question to ask is, whether some of the problems you are trying to solve can be solved with the current stack.

Modifying your stack requires more than just a week’s experience of playing around with the getting started guide and stack overflow replies. This is something which need to be carefully considered after taking inputs from the people who would be supporting it, that include operations, sysadmins and teams that are gonna interface with your stack indirectly.

I am not talking about delaying adoption by waiting for long list of approvals to get some thing that would bring immediate value, but a carefully orchestrated plan for why and how to migrate to a new stack.

Just because one of the tech giants made a move to a new stack and wrote about it in their engineering blog doesn’t mean that you need to make a switch in the same direction. Take a moment to analyse the possible reasons that motivated them to do it, ask yourself if your organisation is struggling with the exact same problems, observe how others facing the same issue are addressing it, and then make an informed decision.
Collect enough data to support your proposal.
Ask yourself again if you are the one holding the hammer.
If the answer is no, forge ahead!

The Great Escape. by Apple!!

API Guy.

He has a serious regex problem.
Regexes are never easy to read, but the ones he uses just take the cake. They're either blatantly wrong, or totally over-engineered garbage that somehow still lacks basic functionality. I think "garbage" here is a little too nice, since you can tell what garbage actually is/was without studying it for five minutes.

In lieu of an actual rant (mostly because I'm overworked), I'll just leave a few samples here. I recommend readying some bleach before you continue reading.

Not a valid url name regex:
VALID_URL_NAME_REGEX = /\A[\w\-]+\Z/

Semi-decent email regex: (by far the best of the four)
VALID_EMAIL_REGEX = /\A[\w+\-.]+@[a-z\d\-.]+\.[a-z]+\z/i

Over-engineered mess that only works for (most) US numbers:
VALID_PHONE_REGEX = /1?\s*\W?\s*([2-9][0-8][0-9])\s*\W?\s*([2-9][0-9]{2})\s*\W?\s*([0-9]{4})(\se?x?t?(\d*))?/

and for the grand finale:

ZIP_CODE_REGEX = /(^\d{5}(-\d{4})?$)|(^[ABCEGHJKLMNPRSTVXY]{1}\d{1}[A-Z]{1} *\d{1}[A-Z]{1}\d{1}$)|GIR[ ]?0AA|((AB|AL|B|BA|BB|BD|BH|BL|BN|BR|BS|BT|CA|CB|CF|CH|CM|CO|CR|CT|CV|CW|DA|DD|DE|DG|DH|DL|DN|DT|DY|E|EC|EH|EN|EX|FK|FY|G|GL|GY|GU|HA|HD|HG|HP|HR|HS|HU|HX|IG|IM|IP|IV|JE|KA|KT|KW|KY|L|LA|LD|LE|LL|LN|LS|LU|M|ME|MK|ML|N|NE|NG|NN|NP|NR|NW|OL|OX|PA|PE|PH|PL|PO|PR|RG|RH|RM|S|SA|SE|SG|SK|SL|SM|SN|SO|SP|SR|SS|ST|SW|SY|TA|TD|TF|TN|TQ|TR|TS|TW|UB|W|WA|WC|WD|WF|WN|WR|WS|WV|YO|ZE)(\d[\dA-Z]?[ ]?\d[ABD-HJLN-UW-Z]{2}))|BFPO[ ]?\d{1,4}/

^ which, by the way, doesn't match e.g. Australian zip codes. That cost us quite a few sales. And yes, that is 512 characters long.

My sister in law got me this guy for Christmas after I told her about devrant!

She found it in a rubber duck shop in Amsterdam.

Best sister in law!

I am serious. In 1 month, I wrote 32451 lines of code.

- 960 functions
- 189 unit tests

One of the best developer jokes....

I hope the person that drives this Camaro (Glendora, CA) is a ranter on here. 😂

When I take a break from ranting, this is where you can find me.

Well.. I'm a front end developer and this quote is my favourite.

"A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it's not that good. "

Project manager: how was the day?
Me: wrote a few lines of code
Me: ran the code
Me: full of errors
Me: I cried

It's a perfect chronological sequence from left to right:
"I'll fix this bug in a jiffy"
"Fml i can't figure out whats wrong"
"I give up on life"
and then finally "Oh look, missing semicolon"

Pic taken at a Starbucks in MountainView CA

A common scenario strikes again today:

- Blocked on a problem at the end of the day
- Tell my wife I'm headed home
- Inspiration strikes
- time flies by coding in the zone
- realize I'm super late
- run out the door like a crazy person

When you spend a weekend building your custom rig, but the inner fanboy conscience takes over 😜

The number of tabs opened in the browser is directly proportional to the completely of the problem! :p

Somebody is very active!

Launched my product yesterday. Been working hard on it for a year.

Got a bunch of day 0 signups from all over the world. I’m super delighted. Then I see a bunch of them “broken” in my database.

I dig in and... long story short:

Twilio are cunts. I thought they were a world beater. THEEE messaging api on the market.

Well it turns out you can’t sms North American numbers without setting up special provisions.

I can sms fucking Botswana and Ghana and Iceland and fucking KUWAIT (I actually got a member from Kuwait), but Twilio can’t fucking sms A-CUNTING-MERI-FUCKING-CA

Our "monitoring" today.

Night before flying internationally includes the following checklist:

- check VPN works, can access frontend sites and hit the backend
- git push

This morning I kept falling back asleep after the alarm went off, drifting in and out of a dream about programming.

My wife finally said "no more sleeping".

Still mostly sleep, I replied very confidently "you can't sleep in a sandbox!".

I was dreaming I was in a code sandbox. Obviously sleeping is not allowed.

Jeez, my head has been really full of programming since this conference. (One of the talks was on codesandbox).

My wife is complaining that am spending too much time on devRant. I just told her, am coming here only when windows is updating :p ;)

I thought meditation was more like putting myself in “airplane mode”. But in reality it felt more like a DDoS attack!

How to solve windows Blue Screen Of Death.

Change the color to Green. No more BSOD. :/

Every time I hear my boss say "surely it can't be that hard" or "that's what, like a 5 minute job?"
*shudder*

Most of my code solutions came to me while I'm in the shower
🚽🚽

Let me tell you a story.

Our company has a homegrown monitoring solution. Keeps track of our deployments and alerts us when something is broken. Really nice for the most part, except a little issue where we get up to 25 alerts PER DAY that our PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT IS DOWN. Including weekends.

With this many false positives, we quickly learn to ignore the alerts and miss real incidents.

So we approached this team, remember its our own tool, and told them about the problem. Turns out it is a known issue. And here's the kicker: they aren't planning on fixing it!

It gets better. Rather than fix this glaring issue, their solution is to make ANOTHER ALERT that lets us know the monitoring is misbehaving.

To recap, we can now expect to get up to 25 false positive alerts per day that our production is down, followed immediately by more alerts that the monitor is broken, which means we can ignore the previous alert.

As our PM said when he heard this: fuck that noise. We are escalating the shit out of this!

I'm such an idiot.

Spilled water on my MacBook today. Not that much water, but the cup landed right in the middle of my keyboard.

Worst part is I was gaming with my sister and didn't want to stop. So I wiped it off and shook it out a bit and kept playing. A bit later the screen started flickering and eventually went black.

Finally my brain turned on and I switched it off, shook out some more water, and set it up to dry. Just hoping it's not too late.

At least the drying setup recommended by the internet is pretty hilarious looking.

Now we play the waiting game. They say 72 hours before turning it on again. Seems a bit extreme. Will there still be moisture evaporating 3 days later? Not sure I can wait that long to see if it's toast.

Such an idiot.

I just hate it when clients with no knowledge of developing says I'm looking for "more professional"

FUCK YOU!!!!!!!!!

Somebody did that with dedication and you can't just call it that!!

SCREW YOU!!!
😡😡😡😡😡

*spends a long time crafting a huge eBay post (we're moving)
* tries to drag and drop first picture
* page navigates to the picture without warning
* loses everything

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

WHEN DRAGGING A PICTURE INTO A WEB PAGE I NEVER WANT TO NAVIGATE TO A PAGE WITH JUST THAT IMAGE. WHY NO WARNING BEFORE LEAVING THE PAGE. WHY DON'T YOU SAVE TEXT LOCALLY. WHY DOES THE WEB SUCK SO HARD. AAAGGGHHHH.

* feels better
* starts over

Team: Qt doesn’t let us build the UX we have in mind. Web is the future.

Me: what do you guys recommend ?

Team: Electron! We vote for Electron!

Me: Alright, who know JavaScript here?

Team: ...

My partner in crime

Netflix, why is your loading spinner so horrible!

Do you know what a percentage is??? 99% means you are ALMOST done. Just a tiny fraction to go. I should not see 99% for seconds or even minutes on end. Much less after the first 98% took only a couple seconds!!

Stop the lies!!!

Perfect security !

2 days into a new java project and I already miss scala so much.

My new fitbit reminds me take 250 steps each hour. When I do stop and take a walk, I find it helps my productivity, and I feel better. However, I'm not good at keeping to it.

It's always the same story.

"Quiet you, I'll get up and walk once I finish this one thing".

...

Another hour goes by.

If only I could keep to my own convictions.

I don't know why quiting vim is such a challenge for new users.
While Quit starts with q , so q is very logical for quiting 😬

Dont get attached to your code at work! Coz it's not your code, you got paid for writing that code and that's it.

I spent more than an hour trying trying to debug why two functions were always returning undefined. I even put in conditional breakpoints and executed the statements to confirm the logic was correct.

I forgot return.

Connect a pen drive, format it successfully. Connect to a new machine to copy data and see the data exists.

Crap! which drive did I formatted :(

Just received a job invitation for my first developer position. But I never wrote a line of code in my life. I guess my interviewer too.

Finally got the amazon fire 7 !
Reading books from my phone was quite bothering.

Marketing pushed deadline for release one week earlier. That sucks.

What sucks even more is that frontend was not ready, but our frontend guy promised to take a look over the weekend and finish it. Thats cool we might make.

What sucks is that he fixed one small issue on Sunday 9PM and left the whole thing unusable.

So guess who was googling till 4am how to do stuff in bloody javascript?

In the end, I beleive I did a decent job and we ca release some kind of alpha and get rid of my dirty hacks later. That's how you get technical debt.

Now lets see what my boss thinks about it and if we are really going to release it or if I'm going to kill somebody.

My work desktop setup!

Follow me on @cha_m_ra

Got pretty peeved with EU and my own bank today.

My bank was loudly advertising how "progressive" they were by having an Open API!

Well, it just so happened I got an inkling to write me a small app that would make statistics of the payments going in and out of my account, without relying on anything third-party. It should be possible, right? Right?

Wrong...

The bank's "Open API" can be used to fetch the locations of all the physical locations of the bank branches and ATMs, so, completely useless for me.

The API I was after was one apparently made obligatory (don't quote me on that) by EU called the PSD2 - Payment Services Directive 2.

It defines three independent APIs - AISP, CISP and PISP, each for a different set of actions one could perform.

I was only after AISP, or the Account Information Service Provider. It provides all the account and transactions information.

There was only one issue. I needed a client SSL certificate signed by a specific local CA to prove my identity to the API.

Okay, I could get that, it would cost like.. $15 - $50, but whatever. Cheap.

First issue - These certificates for the PSD2 are only issued to legal entities.

That was my first source of hate for politicians.

Then... As a cherry on top, I found out I'd also need a certification from the local capital bank which, you guessed it, is also only given to legal entities, while also being incredibly hard to get in and of itself, and so far, only one company in my country got it.

So here I am, reading through the documentation of something, that would completely satisfy all my needs, yet that is locked behind a stupid legal wall because politicians and laws gotta keep the technology back. And I can't help but seethe in anger towards both, the EU that made this regulation, and the fact that the bank even mentions this API anywhere.

Seriously, if 99.9% of programmers would never ever get access to that API, why bother mentioning it on your public main API page?!

It... It made me sad more than anything...

My Sunday Morning until afternoon. FML. So I was experiencing nightly reboots of my home server for three days now. Always at 3:12am strange thing. Sunday morning (10am ca) I thought I'd investigate because the reboots affected my backups as well. All the logs and the security mails said was that some processes received signal 11. Strange. Checked the periodics tasks and executed every task manually. Nothing special. Strange. Checked smart status for all disks. Two disks where having CRC errors. Not many but a couple. Oh well. Changing sata cables again 🙄. But those CRC errors cannot be the reason for the reboots at precisely the same time each night. I noticed that all my zpools got scrubbed except my root-pool which hasn't been scrubbed since the error first occured. Well, let's do it by hand: zpool scrub zroot....Freeze. dafuq. Walked over to the server and resetted. Waited 10 minutes. System not up yet. Fuuu...that was when I first guessed that Sunday won't be that sunny after all. Connected monitor. Reset. Black screen?!?! Disconnected all disks aso. Reset. Black screen. Oh c'moooon! CMOS reset. Black screen. Sigh. CMOS reset with a 5 minute battery removal. And new sata cable just in cable. Yes, boots again. Mood lightened... Now the system segfaults when importing zroot. Good damnit. Pulled out the FreeBSD bootstick. zpool import -R /tmp zroot...segfault. reboot. Read-only zroot import. Manually triggering checksum test with the zdb command. "Invalid blckptr type". Deep breath now. Destroyed pool, recreated it. Zfs send/recv from backup. Some more config. Reboot. Boots yeah ... Doesn't find files??? Reboot. Other error? Undefined symbols???? Now I need another coffee. Maybe I did something wrong during recovery? Not very likely but let's do it again...recover-recover. different but same horrible errors. What in the name...? Pulled out a really old disk. Put it in, boots fine. So it must be the disks. Walked around the house and searched for some new disks for a new 2 disk zfs root mirror to replace the obviously broken disks. Found some new ones even. Recovery boot, minimal FreeBSD Install for bootloader aso. Deleted and recreated zroot, zfs send/recv from backup. Set bootfs attribute, reboot........
It works again. Fuckit, now it is 6pm, I still haven't showered. Put both disks through extensive tests and checked every single block. These disks aren't faulty. But for some reason they froze my system in a way so that I had to reset my BIOS and they had really low level data errors....? I Wonder if those disks have a firmware problem? So that was most of my Sunday. Nice, isn't it? But hey: calm sea won't make a good sailor, right?

I might have told this in other rants, but this thing (requested from the client) is one of the worst thing I've ever done.

So we were developing a website to find the stores of a certain brand across the country, specifically: Italy.
In Italy, a lot of towns have accents and apostrophes in their name.
Client managers wanted ALL DATA to be capitalized, including letters with accents, but the client management was using Windows and Windows doesn't simply let you enter capital letters with accents from the keyboard, so the client requested to make a procedure to turn every apostrophe into an accent, therefore a town named like "CA' DEL BOSCO" would be "CÀ DEL BOSCO" (which is wrong) as they just couldn't bother copy-pasting from Word.

An important thing to notice is that most Italian towns with apostrophes don't have accents and most towns with accents don't have apostrophes, and that specific routine couldn't figure out what to exactly, so we ended up having all the stuff messed up.

The feature was a total SHIT, but the client was extremely happy with it, so we didn't even bother arguing with that.

When your team uses both scss & less in the same project

Request: Need stress ball
Reason: Learning JavaScript

came across this in a python blog!

Right, I've been here before.
Our app requires an internet connection, and one of our clients wants to roll it out on a strictly managed network.
We told them which addresses our app communicates with and their network team opened them up for traffic. Should work, right?
Nope, doesn't work.

So I request them to use Fiddler to do some debugging of the network traffic, and lo and behold, it does work when Fiddler is active.
One important detail is that Fiddler uses it's own SSL certificate to debug HTTPS communications. I've had moments where expired certificates were the cause of things not working and running Fiddler "fixes" this because of their own certificate.

So I point this out in numerous mails to their network team, every time I get a response saying "nah, that can't be it".
I keep insisting "I have had this before, please check if any installed Root CA Certificates is expired"
At this point I'm certain they have updates turned off on these machines, and their certificates must not have been updated for a long time.

At one point they come back to me. "Hey, when Fiddler is off, WireShark shows the app communicating with ICMP calls, but when it's on it shows HTTP calls instead".

...YOU'RE THE SUPPOSED NETWORK EXPERTS?! You think data can be send via ICMP? Do you even know what ICMP is? Of course you'll see ICMP calls when the network is rejecting the packages instead of HTTP calls when everything's fine.
(ICMP is used to communicate errors)

I'm trying to keep my patience with these guys until they find exactly what's wrong because even I am somewhat grasping at straws right now. But things like this makes me doubt their expertise...

Finally my fidget cube arrived

Coding has given me the ability to turn my favorite hobby into a career. This in turn gave me the chance to take jobs in three countries so far (US, Germany, UK). So, I can explore the world with lovely wife while doing something I'm really passionate about and constantly learning. It also allows me to relate more to my dad, a software engineer of about 30 years who got me started when I was a kid.

In short, coding changed everything for me.

PS: I met my wife in intro to CS, though she's not a developer.

Damn! Always during deadline!! :/

Google DevFest Sri Lanka

Chrome, Firefox, and yes even you Opera, Falkon, Midori and Luakit. We need to talk, and all readers should grab a seat and prepare for some reality checks when their favorite web browsers are in this list.

I've tried literally all of them, in search for a lightweight (read: not ridiculously bloated) web browser. None of them fit the bill.

Yes Midori, you get a couple of bonus points for being the most lightweight. Luakit however.. as much as I like vim in my terminal, I do not want it in a graphical application. Not to mention that just like all the others you just use webkit2gtk, and therefore are just as bloated as all the others. Lightweight my ass! But programmable with Lua, woo! Not like Selenium, Chrome headless, ... does that for any browser. And that's it for the unique features as far as I'm concerned. One is slow, single-threaded and lightweight-ish (Midori) and another has vim keybindings in an application that shouldn't (Luakit).

Pretty much all of them use webkit2gtk as their engine, and pretty much all of them launch a separate process for each tab. People say this is more secure, but I have serious doubts about that. You're still running all these processes as the same user, and they all have full access to the X server they run under (this is also a criticism against user separation on a single X session in general). The only thing it protects against is a website crashing the browser, where only that tab and its process would go down. Which.. you know.. should a webpage even be able to do that?

But what annoys me the most is the sheer amount of memory that all of these take. With all due respect all of you browsers, I am not quite prepared to give 8 fucking gigabytes - half the memory in this whole box! - just for a dozen or so tabs. I shouldn't have to move my web browser to another lesser used 16GB box, just to prevent this one from going into fucking swap from a dozen tabs. And before someone has a go at the add-ons, there's 4 installed and that's it. None of them are even close to this complete and utter memory clusterfuck. It's the process separation. Each process consumes half a GB of memory, and there's around a dozen of them in a usual browsing session. THAT is the real problem. And I want to get rid of it.

Browsers are at their pinnacle of fucked up in my opinion, literally to the point where I'm seriously considering elinks. Being a sysadmin, I already live my daily life in terminals anyway. As such I also do have resources. But because of that I also associate every process with its cost to run it, in terms of resources required. Web browsers are easily at the top of the list.

I want to put 8GB into perspective. You can store nearly 2 entire DVD movies in that memory. However media players used to play them (such as SMPlayer) obviously don't do that. They use 60-80MB on average to play the whole movie. They also require far less processing power than YouTube in a web browser does, even when you download that exact same video with youtube-dl (either streamed within the media player or externally). That is what an application should be.

Let's talk a bit about these "complicated" websites as well. I hate to break it to you framework web devs, but you're a dime a dozen. The competition is high between web devs for that exact reason. And websites are not complicated. The document itself is plain old HTML, yes even if your framework converts to it in the background. That's the skeleton of your document, where I would draw a parallel with documents in office suites that are more or less written in XML. CSS.. oh yes, markup. Embolden that shit, yes please! And JavaScript.. oh yes, that pile of shit that's been designed in half a day, and has a framework called fucking isEven (which does exactly what it says on the tin, modulo 2 be damned). Fancy some macros in your text editor? Yes, same shit, different pile.

Imagine your text editor being as bloated as a web browser. Imagine it being prone to crashing tabs like a web browser. Imagine it being so ridiculously slow to get anything done in your productivity suite. But it's just the usual with web browsers, isn't it? Maybe Gopher wasn't such a bad idea after all... Oh and give me another update where I have to restart the browser when I commit the heinous act of opening another tab, just because you had to update your fucking CA certs again. Yes please!

Every time I copy some code I feel like holding I'm something heavy till I past it somewhere!😋😋

Home desktop setup

When your company buys a third party solution and you spend all your time emailing them about bugs in their system.

Seriously, I even sent you the exact line of the bug in your JavaScript with a suggested solution, and deployed a new stack with your latest (broken) fix so you can test out that solution. Then you email back saying it is fixed but it is clearly still broken. If I email you a fixed version of your file will you deploy it? OMG!

Forget TDD, BDD...
Use GDD.
(Google Driven Development)
:P :D

After being live multiple years supporting only Safari, Firefox, and Chrome, one customer wanted IE support. After taking a close look at the usage numbers, and discussing with us front-end devs, our product guy shot it down. Pop the champagne!

Working in my underwear

If an orange costs $6 and a grape costs $4, how much does a pineapple cost?

I found this old printout of my username and password for my school account from ca 2008. I really like how the password are the same as the username except for some capitalization 😂😅

“sECurItY”

Slow time so I can code more AND sleep more!

Esc :/

My #developer stater pack!

Last Monday I bought an iPhone as a little music player, and just to see how iOS works or doesn't work.. which arguments against Apple are valid, which aren't etc. And at a price point of €60 for a secondhand SE I figured, why not. And needless to say I've jailbroken it shortly after.

Initially setting up the iPhone when coming from fairly unrestricted Android ended up being quite a chore. I just wanted to use this thing as a music player, so how would you do it..?

Well you first have to set up the phone, iCloud account and whatnot, yada yada... Asks for an email address and flat out rejects your email address if it's got "apple" in it, catch-all email servers be damned I guess. So I chose ishit at my domain instead, much better. Address information for billing.. just bullshit that, give it some nulls. Phone number.. well I guess I could just give it a secondary SIM card's number.

So now the phone has been set up, more or less. To get music on it was quite a maze solving experience in its own right. There's some stuff about it on the Debian and Arch Wikis but it's fairly outdated. From the iPhone itself you can install VLC and use its app directory, which I'll get back to later. Then from e.g. Safari, download any music file.. which it downloads to iCloud.. Think Different I guess. Go to your iCloud and pull it into the iPhone for real this time. Now you can share the file to your VLC app, at which point it initializes a database for that particular app.

The databases / app storage can be considered equivalent to the /data directories for applications in Android, minus /sdcard. There is little to no shared storage between apps, most stuff works through sharing from one app to another.

Now you can connect the iPhone to your computer and see a mount point for your pictures, and one for your documents. In that documents mount point, there are directories for each app, which you can just drag files into. For some reason the AFC protocol just hangs up when you try to delete files from your computer however... Think Different?

Anyway, the music has been put on it. Such features, what a nugget! It's less bad than I thought, but still pretty fucked up.

At that point I was fairly dejected and that didn't get better with an update from iOS 14.1 to iOS 14.3. Turns out that Apple in its nannying galore now turns down the volume to 50% every half an hour or so, "for hearing safety" and "EU regulations" that don't exist. Saying that I was fuming and wanting to smack this piece of shit into the wall would be an understatement. And even among the iSheep, I found very few people that thought this is fine. Though despite all that, there were still some. I have no idea what it would take to make those people finally reconsider.. maybe Tim Cook himself shoving an iPhone up their ass, or maybe they'd be honored that Tim Cook noticed them even then... But I digress.

And then, then it really started to take off because I finally ended up jailbreaking the thing. Many people think that it's only third-party apps, but that is far from true. It is equivalent to rooting, and you do get access to a Unix root account by doing it. The way you do it is usually a bootkit, which in a desktop's ring model would be a negative ring. The access level is extremely high.

So you can root it, great. What use is that in a locked down system where there's nothing available..? Aha, that's where the next thing comes in, 2 actually. Cydia has an OpenSSH server in it, and it just binds to port 22 and supports all of OpenSSH's known goodness. All of it, I'm using ed25519 keys and a CA to log into my phone! Fuck yea boi, what a nugget! This is better than Android even! And it doesn't end there.. there's a second thing it has up its sleeve. This thing has an apt package manager in it, which is easily equivalent to what Termux offers, at the system level! You can install not just common CLI applications, but even graphical apps from Cydia over the network!

Without a jailbreak, I would say that iOS is pretty fucking terrible and if you care about modding, you shouldn't use it. But jailbroken, fufu.. this thing trades many blows with Android in the modding scene. I've said it before, but what a nugget!

From this day onwards I'm following this technique

“Overhearing powers of the Fullstack dev”

We have an internal control panel (BEEP) to manage our dev Tomcat instances. The other day, with one of my muggle friend, I was trying to restart an instance. There’s a checkbox to clean the host tmp files and directories, ingeniously named as - Purge cache.

Innocent Me (to my muggle friend): bro would Purge cache delete the application log files?

__(Fullstack dev overhearing us)__

Muggle friend: Purge ca... (gets interrupted my the Fullstack dev)

Fullstack dev: so the thing is ... it’s like ... (gotta be consistent with the opening) what “npm purge” does is it deletes the files which are not being used.

Confused Muggle friend: bro it’s a BEEP option to clean the tmp dirs.

Fullstack dev: oh I thought you guys were talking about “npm purge”

Angry muggle friend: then WHY THE FUCK did you answer if you didn’t know [...] the fuck we were talking about.

Calm fullstack dev: FYI. Might help you someday.

Deeply-hurt Me: (what the fuck is “npm purge”). Hey man do you mean “npm prune”? Because they don’t have an npm purge. And what do you mean by “it deletes the files which are not being used”?

Confident Fullstack dev: NO

Me: (cries in npm)

More to come!

When you try to clap in a presentation while holding coffee and spill it all over yourself.

"Can you check what my password is?"

var does not mean dynamic

TL;DR:
JuniorDev ignores every advice, writes bad code and complains about other people not working because he does not see their result because he looks at the wrong places.

Okay, so I am really fed up right now.
We have this Junior Dev, who is now with us for circa 8 months, so ca. a year less than me. Our first job for both of us.
He is mostly doing stuff nobody in the team cares about because he is doing his own projects.

But now there's a project where we need to work with him. He got a small part and did implement that. Then parts of the main project got changed and he included stuff which was not there anymore. It was like this for weeks until someone needed to tell him to fix it.
His code is a huge mess (confirmed by senior dev and all the other people working at the project).

Another colleague and me mostly did (mostly) pair programming the past 1-2 weeks because we were fixing and improving (adding functionality) libraries which we are going to use in the project. Furthermore we discussed the overall structure and each of us built some proof-of-concept applications to check if some techniques would work like we planned it.
So in short: We did a lot of preparation to have the project cleaner and faster done in the next few weeks/months and to have our code base updated for the future. Plus there were a few things about technical problems which we need to solve which was already done in that time.
Side note: All of this was done not in the repository of the main project but of side projects, test projects and libraries.

Now it seems that this idiot complained at another coworker (in our team but another project) that we were sitting there for 2 weeks, just talking and that we made no progress in the project as we did not really commit much to the repository.
Side note: My colleague and me are talking in another language when working together and nobody else joins, as we have the same mother tongue, but we switch to the team language as soon as somebody joins, so that other colleague did not even know what we were talking about the whole day.

So, we are nearly the same level experience wise (the other colleague I work with has just one year more professional experience than me) and his work is confirmed to be a mess, ugly and totally bad structured, also not documented. Whereas our code is, at least most of it, there is always space for improvement, clean, readable and re-useable (confirmed by senior and other team members as well).
And this idiot who could implement his (far smaller part) so fast because he does not care about structure or any style convention, pattern or anything complains about us not doing our work.

I just hope, that after this project, I don't have to work with him again soon.
He is also one of those people who think that they know everything because he studied computer science (as everybody in the team, by the way). So he listens to nothing anybody explains to him, not even the senior. You have to explain everything multiple times (which is fine in general) and at some points he just says that he understood, although you can clearly see that he didn't really understand but just wants to go on coding his stuff.
So you explain him stuff and also explain why something does not work or is not a good thing, he just says "yes, okay", changes something completely different and moves on like he used to.

How do you cope with something like this?

Modify the front-end code and noting change.

Empty the cache... ✔️ not work
Check xampp open... ✔️ not work
Check my sass compile... ✔️ not work
Compile vuejs webpack... ✔️ not work
Check my laravel route... ✔️ not work
Check with Xdebug... ✔️ not work

Go get coffee... ✔️Not work

See the url on stagging.<website>.ca in my browser ❌

😲🙄😅 Holy fucking retard i am...

If you didn't became a developer what would you be? What's your plan B?

Mine is to be a psychologist.

When you make a mistake and try to fix it, but you can't remember how to spell amend...

git commit --ammend
error: unknown command `amend'

git commit -ammend
[branch-name] mend

Huh?

git log
commit #
mend

Created a new commit with message 'mend'. Now to clean this all up and go get some sleep!

Work of a my co-workers good work! It's called colspan you dumb fuck! Best part is that no way I'm changing this coz I work in place where they don't give a fuck about code quality! So fuck it!

What if you were asked to develop something that goes against your morals or beliefs. Would you do it?

PS - they are willing to pay you more that you ask for

!rant

Super awesome day today.

1. Got up early to do a risky production deploy and it worked!
2. Three PRs approved before lunch.
3. Got some time to continue learning scala.
4. Coffee and cupcakes with some refugees and discussed work as a software engineer.
5. Tried virtual reality for the first time. Really fun.
6. Helped prepare our goals for this quarter and present them to the department.
7. Department meeting had free local craft beer and pretzels.
8. Went bouldering after work and flashed a 6c.
9. Curled up with my wife watching Netflix.

I really love my life sometimes.

Even though I have 500 reputation on StackOverflow I'm afraid to ask a question! Coz other devs can be really down right mean! No one knows everything, we are all here to learn. Some ppl don't understand that they too started like this.

Boss: Hey! I know you just got everything working on that new project. But good news: I have a repo you can clone and we can work together. So just clone that and look at my changes, find something that’s broken, and work away. Oh, I also modified everything to use HTTPS locally. HTTP won’t work anymore. Alright, I’m off on vacation! Ciao!

… and that’s the story of how I spent a day and a half fighting with NPM, Brew, setting up a new CA and self-signed cert, and getting passenger to work with it. The good news is that I can connect locally via 443. The bad news is all assets use http and are thus blocked for being mixed-content. And idk how to fix it. Joy!

Not mentioned: npx removing a required package every time I run it, version mismatches, and the usual NPM problems.

Why is it soooo taboo to ask co-workers salary?

True comment!
😂😂🤣🤣🤣

I think I can learn English here.
HAHAHA
I can also learn professional knowledge.

**I am a Korean.**

And...
Succeed!
Android studio AVD powered pictures

Years ago, one of my friends in college was taking an intro to CS class. He asked me for help on one of his assignments. It was a simple Python program, but it wasn't running as expected. I go in figuring it will be easy to fix. But everything looks exactly right. An hour later I'm tearing my hair out! It isn't even entering the function although it's clearly called. I'm beginning to feel very self conscious, as a CS major who can't even debug a 15 line program for a friend.

Then it hit me. This is Python. I used an editor macro to convert all indentation to tabs, lined them up, and it ran on the first try. Turns out, he had somehow ended up with a mixture of tabs and spaces.

I'm not sure what the takeaway is, but I think he got a surprisingly honest introduction to the life of a developer...

PSA: negate your tests and make sure they fail!

I have what I thought was a weird and slightly paranoid habit. When I write tests sometimes just as a sanity check negate the assertion to make sure the test fails and isn't a false positive. Almost always fails as expected.

But not today! Turns out I had forgotten to wrap my equality check in an assertion so it would always pass. It freaks me out to imagine pushing a test that always passes not just because it doesn't do its job, but could also obscure a bug and trick me into thinking it works differently than it does. Broken tests are the worst!

But it pays to be paranoid.

Nested nested if statements!!!
😡😡😡😡😡😡

!dev && rant

Looking for a song's lyrics... A very complicated task apparently. Blinding Lights by The Weeknd for whoever's interested.

Firefox: just one small thing to keep going, sorry we just updated our CA certs again. Screw you, close the browser. I will not restart it for you but I will tell you that I would. When you restart the browser, you will lose whatever search you were just doing. Sucks for you bastard! Enjoy the update.

Go to Genius Lyrics, please turn on JavaScript to run this "app". Done that? Okay now solve this CAPTCHA please. Um.. let me just leave that ingenious site.

Next one, AZ Lyrics: Yeah sorry your IP is from a hosting provider, but we will not tell you that is the reason. You've just been denied access to the site. See you next time! Everyone using a VPS to make a VPN connection with is obviously an abuser after all.

Finally found the lyrics on lyrics.com after a long journey that was way more complicated than it should've been. It's a good song.

Oh and Firefox consumed well over a GB for just a single tab of course...
I want Gopher, BBS, IRC and the likes back.

Thought;
Why is there not much support behind the open and free CA "CACert" that has been around much longer then Let's Encrypt?

How do you deal with team members who's not open to criticisms as a TL

Good artists copy but great artist steal
🤔😱🤷

At first i was like lol Netherlands Root CA not trusted anymore, then i was like WTF Amazon-CA when the fuck did this happen?

Heathrow express having some trouble this morning.

Me: *adds a shiny new graph to our foos web app showing player ratings*

Fred: Can I please have a button to see just my scores?

Me: *adds "JUST FRED" button*

Fred: perfect, thanks

Holy fuckin shit. Fuck java updates.

Today we deployed to production with a java app. For whatever reason it didn't work, just throwing SSL errors left and right.
Same app works on dev and qa

There's only one tiiiiny difference: Java 8 141 on dev/qa, Java 8 171 on prod

Guess what happened in 171 ... they updated the CA

rip 4h debuggin

When you got hired

HR: please come to us if there's any problems related work so that we can give a solution.

After years of working you send a mail with you problems, it's been months. Still no reply! And try to avoid conversation regarding that problem.

Have you had any money saved? What is your process when it comes to saving money? What kind of investments did you do with your savings?

9:45 AM
I just woke up and in my whatsapp there was rhe following message of one of my friends:
"Hello how are you? I have to ask you a favor, ca you check if in my facebook profile is hooked up a hacker? A person told me that but I don't trust at all! Could you please check and let me know? Meanwhile I closed my profile, if I have to open it again let me know, thanks and greetings"
I think I return to sleep

github is down :(
Lets me open devrant :) yeahhhhh!!!!

Power cut at the office now I have to talk to my coworkers!!! 🙄😶😑

!dev
Deutsch Bahn, again: A delay of 8 minutes (the DB officially recognizes this as late) results to an impossible to reach connecting train leading to a total delay of ca. 2 hours, as I cannot use the Inter City train anymore, but have to use a "Regional Express" instead.

Out of 5 times travelling this route, I arrived 2 times 2 hours later.

Don't understand what the hype about Elementary OS was. Used for ca. half a year, do not see any benefit.

If this is supposed to provide "usability" on a Linux kernel, then I am sorry, but in this regard it is a tremendous failure.

All tasks take long, there are all sorts of bugs, today I needed a multi-monitor setup for a presentation "real quick", dear lord was that a shitshow.

Nah, this thing is not for me.

Got hooooot pink coloured pair of beats for my birthday!!! Best gift ever! Two most things I like is music and code this is the perfect gift! Pink is the only problem but fuck it. I love theseeeee!!!

When you offer to help out a fellow coworker on the top priority feature he is developing and he just sends you the branch and stops working on it.

I get home today and my wife says:

"Just finished some chores and really want to play stardew valley, but the computer has been updating for an hour!"

Windows 10 anniversary update strikes again.

Supposed work hours: 240
Actual work hours: ca. 350

The guy whos code I refactore atm, ca. 2006

Yesterday was a day off so I developed a vue, vuex , laravel application. Today back to work and start writing some shity code!

just found one more *DD
RDD - Readme Driven Development
Its real google around...

:D

Full stack isn’t about knowing just a backend and little bit of JavaScript. Turns out a bunch of them who applied this week seem it have derived a new meaning for it!

Throwing around terms like “I am exploring MEAN” doesn’t make you sound cool unless you have some working examples that you have built with it.

Did you ever take advantage of clients that has less computer literacy? Like have you ever escape a bug in the system by telling the client heavy technical BS! 😋

PS - fixings that bug later obviously!!

බෑ බෑ මට වැඩ කරන්න බෑ

1.Learn RegEx
2.Learn C#
3.Finish My Qt app (you ca see it at GitHub)
4.Get a new laptop

Hardest thing for me as Team leader is to teach people in my team, that task is done, when unit tests are written, pull request is created, approved and merged.

Not when their code compiles for a first time.

Why do I find really hard to connect with my coworkers?! I'm an introvert but after few months in my old job I connected with everyone. In my new job I find it really hard! And it's almost a year! 😥😫

How do you manage your relationship with you partner and work like?

The number of services you need to grok for full AWS certification...

Dockerize all the things! 🐳🐋

Frustrated... had a signed job offer disappear right before start date after jumping through a ton of hoops, turning down a competing offer, and wasting 3 days of PTO on their process, so back to interviews again.

How do you all determine what salary to ask/look for? Current job has pretty concrete pay bands that I'm pretty sure aren't market, but most of the site (glassdoor, etc) are all OVER the place, as titles can get so fuzzy from one place to another. From people I know I've heard everything from 20k less than I make to 70k more than I make (moderately high COL area, but not CA level). Levels.io seemed promising, but the one FANG offer I had didn't nearly match up with there, so I'm not sure how much of that is bluster or whatever... Blegh. I absolutely hate job hunting.

You are not real devloper untill you suddenly realized "that's how I should code that"

i just wanna get fucking drunk and not go to work

(written ca. 1:00 AM CET)

When you immediately regret your career decisions.

...It relies on the BouncyCastle cryptography library instead of OpenSSL, yet replicates OpenSSL bugs to guarantee compatibility.

Bed to desk, desk to bed

What if programming languages are only available commercially?

We've been using private GitHub repos as a distribution method for our personal npm packages at work for years.

I finally got sick of it and did the work to publish them to artifactory yesterday. Today, I worked out the remaining kinks, fixed the CI builds, and wrote a wiki page explaining the change with step by step migration instructions and sent it around to the rest of the devs. And it's working great!

I feel simultaneously like a hero for finally getting this fixed and an idiot for putting up with it for so long.

Also thankful for my devops friend who helped a bunch.

Finally successfully installed Ubuntu!!!!

You don't! Working for a bad company would ultimately give you the experience you need that a good company wouldn't

How would you explain SSL, certificates, and CAs to a layman?

I just spent 30mins trying to explain it to them in a chat (related to Mpngo driver configs and the sslValidatrle flag), they sorta went silent on me so not sure if I explained it or understood the roles/purposes correctly...

One example I used was it prevents a man in the middle attack where your connection gets rerouted to another server. If the CA didn't recognize the cert the new server replies with then it rejects it and prevents the attack.

I don't understand wtf is happening today..

- in project A, terraform suddenly decided to stop working with kubernetes-related providers -- the CA cert mismatch error. I agree, it should be not working, because there are 2 kube-api severs behind an LB. But why now??? Why was it working for the last 2 months, until NOW????

- in project B, terraform suddenly decided to stop working _correctly_ with kubernetes-related providers -- it doesn't find resources randomly, even though they are available and I can see them via kubectl get. TF_LOG=DEBUG shows terraform sending correct requests to the kube-api, but the response is a 404. wtf... I see those resources present in another terminal window, only using kubectl. wtf....

- my PR in github was commented, I wanted to ask a question seconds later, and I'm getting a 502 from GH

wtf... I can't spot a pattern and that drives me freaking crazy.

Is this the Friday's curse...? IDK

Now... I understand 2FA is to make things more secure, and I do appreciate it. BUT can we please work out a damn solution for people who work in an agency for other corporates which only have one shared account across the agency that bundles one phone number or mobile app.

What if people are on leave or sick? I need stupid 2FA to be able to login/work. uhhhhhhh.....

Maaaan, we all knew it was coming, we were warned, again and again, yet still, when Lets Encrypt's old root CA expired today, we found out a tool we were using to get new certs (Not cerbot, custom wrapper around acme-tiny) included the old root in the chain.

So... A few hours ago, some of our servers started having connection issues.

Great final 3 hours of today. Better luck next time I guess? Still, despite the little hickup, Lets Encrypt still remains as one of the biggest revolutions in the adoption of SSL, they're the good guys.

Just moved countries and started a new job at an awesome company, which is so great I have nothing yet to rant about.

Oh here goes: almost three weeks with no internet at home and no end in sight.

I want to buy a beer for everyone who developed the mobile pass app. Just breezed through immigration and customs without waiting in the 1 hour+ line. Technology wins. Cheers!

Things you should not say on your last day of work:

If I broke it, I think it would be pretty obvious.

There's nothing annoys me more that seeing un-indented code. I think I have code OCD

I got ca. 200€ and want to spend them on smth. awesome.
I'm interested in coding, electronic and tech in general.
Do you have any cool ideas / things you have bought that were worth it?

I asked for a front end developer not fucking project manager!

git pull origin master --allow-unrelated-histories

Because I like to keep life interesting.

PROJECT: New shiny app in js
TODO:
1. Window shopping for new frameworks

For my local dev, set up my own root CA, added to trusted root CA in my machine, generated a cert for my local domain, signed by my own root CA, but the behavior is different across browsers:

Can someone help in making Google Chrome padlock green or grey (not red)?

Hmmm! So I'm passive aggressive person. I don't argue with my fellow devs I post the their faults on devRant!

Just attended my first conference and it was awesome! So many new ideas, but also tired and overloaded. Can't decide if I should code tonight, go to bed early, or just do something mindless.

Working as a team!! I hate working with others! 😫

Mine was at my school when I was 13 or 15. I didn't have a computer at home because my parents could not offered a one. Back then I didn't know any thing about computers but always knew that I wanted to do something related to computers.

So, when I went to the computer lab in my school I was so dumb, I couldn't even click on a button using the mouse. We were partnered up two students per computer and me try so hard use a computer and my partner take over and show off his talent how he can use a computer.

I was sad and devastated even though I love computer I couldn't use a computer but my willingness to learn about computers science never faded a away!

Few years fast forward; I'm a web developer and I'm happy with what I do. The fellow student who showed off still contact me for his trouble shootings regarding computers.

Never give up on you dreams

I had an interesting mystery the other day. I work in the UK, but I'm working remotely from the US for a while. First day, I made some changes, ran the tests and they failed. Weird part was the failing test was for a component I hadn't touched. I took a closer look, and realized it was a date off by several hours. The test was checking that a passed in date appears in the output. But it was creating the date by parsing a string. The library I was using defaults to local time, but the component uses UTC. So, I had inadvertently created a unit test that only passes when run from UTC. But I had never noticed before because my work is in that timezone. Yikes!

In CS class I had a only 10 lines long python script (everything else was commented out). It didn't work and I searched the bug for ca 20 minutes. I asked a class mate (who commented the other code out) if he could figure it out and he just says: "The indention of the comment is wrong". We had a discussion that it doesn't matter how to indent comments. In the end he selected all the lines, pressed tab and it just worked ?!?!

Thanks! It arrived sooner than I thought! Thank you! Love the stickers!!
❤️❤️❤️

Uh... how many?

Only Linux guys knows the difference between root and root ;)

Having just endured 30 excruciating minutes of utter braindead idiocy that is trying to setup and configure WPA2-Enterprise on a Windows 10 machine, I wanna go and fucking kill myself.

How can it be so bad after so many years this protocol has been out?! Not only can the authentication options be changed only in the who knows how many years old control panel settings and not the modern settings app, but once you finish setting up the network, you can no longer modify some of the key attributes like which CA certificates to validate the radius server against!

What. The. Fuck. Microsoft.

I swear, I don't usually get my jimmies rustled at work, but this... This just bloody infuriated me!

How religious are you?

pritn object

Every single time... :(

When everyone thinks FE is easier, quicker, and less important than BE. Just because our fantastic UX people made you a high fidelity mockup in a day does not mean we can build the whole FE in a week.

This is why I'm returning to full stack.

Job satisfaction minus infinity 😣😣😣😣😣😣

I am sitting here fixing some asshole's fuck up (he went and fucked around with the certificates on the Sonic Wall - now DPI SSL doesn't work anymore and people are wondering why things aren't working as they used to).

I have been offered an opportunity to work in a place that is about 1000 miles from where I currently work. The pay is a bit better, and I get benefits (like health, pension, etc - where here I don't get shit).

The issue is that my family and what not are this side. They are begging me not to leave. They don't know that I have been considered for the job.

Not going to lie, the last time I moved away, I nearly died because I have a family to support, and I was porting all my funds back to them (yeah - the one who cheated).

I am anxious as fuck, and today I have an interview.

I don't know if going is the right thing to do. There is so much opportunity, and I might stuggle for about a year - but is the struggle worth it.

I cannot take it where I am now. They appointed a new guy, and he is monumentally fucking everything up. He also doesn't shut up. Even if you ignore him, or tell him that you are busy - he just goes on and on talking. Fuck my life.

Anyways, will see how things go - I don't know what is right - perhaps it will come to me.

I'll let you guys know what happens, not that anyone might directly care - which is fine.

Time to go fix CA, and then code until I die.

I was always interested in computers. My dad was a big computer geek and a programmer to boot. Usually had a couple old PCs in the basement to play with.

In middle school, I took tech ed and we made simple web sites with html and css. I remember the struggle of nested tables.

In high school, I couldn't fit any CS into my schedule. But someone gave me a learning to code book in ruby. I loved it, and have been hooked ever since.

I'm estimating the cost for a data migration from CA Clipper based system.

I've got to meet the original developer: the most energetic 79 yo man I've ever met - I honestly wish he was my grandfather

Best tip for getting unstuck? If it's after your usual leaving time, GO HOME.

So many times I solved the problem right away the next morning. Only wish I followed my own advice more often...

Current Mac and Windows user here looking to get back into Linux. Any distro suggestions?

Looking for something not too high maintenance.

Why is so Fitbit so bad at multiple time zones??

Guess what, people get on planes and travel.

Every time, my Fitbit gets so screwed up, including things like changing previous step counts, or duplicating an entire day of steps.

I understand MTZ is a tough problem, but this is just unacceptable. I'm not obsessed with my steps, but when your product is all about counting something, seems like you should be more careful to avoid double counting or not counting at all. Seriously, how much R&D have they invested in their hardware and apps, but it completely fails when you travel. Get it together!

It drives me crazy when there are unclosed parens or quotes anywhere.

Is it too much to ask for people to run their Facebook posts through a compiler first?

Launching my own product! Had enough BS from clients!

Drowning my sadness and loneliness on Netflix

What's is the weirdest requirement a client has asked you to develop ?

Computer does a BSOD right at the end of a tiebreaker competitive overwatch match where the enemy is about to cap the point and win. I'm one of the tanks. Hard reboot and back in the game within 45s. Just barely hold them off in overtime and win the match. Epic!

Thank God for SSDs!

So this horrible client micromanaging every single thing in the application now suddenly asking me where a menu should go! I'm like why are you asking me that now I think you should take the menu and shove it up your ass?

4am writing an assignment about the ethics of anonymity tools (TOR, VPNs, brown bags to put on your head)
I love the subject – I picked it – but these written assignments for peripheral classes are the most soul sucking part of studying software engineering