Just got a job offer for a SysAdmin job at CERN! :D

A big fuck you to the italian philosophy of hiring newly graduated students with shitty contracts and a big win for a simple student that wants to learn from the best :)

Starting at CERN in 45 days :D Can't wait!!!

Made it!!! Starting at CERN on September 1st! :)

A big thank you to you guys for the support in my previous posts!

Skype interview for CERN: done!
Interviewers were very nice and professional :) If all goes smoothly this adventure starts in September!

This girl from financial department pissed me off so badly I took 15 minutes of my private time to slightly modify CSS and JS for her user in our intranet panel, made everything pink and blue, animate all the buttons to randomly barrel roll and made the mouse cursor explode colourful star particles with each click.

She *liked* it, said it was *sweet* and *apologized* for being an ass. Robbed me of all the satisfaction. :(

Hello from CERN :D Starting soon!

Seven months ago:
===============
Project Manager: - "Guys, we need to make this brand new ProjectX, here are the specs. What do you think?"

Bored Old Lead: - "I was going to resign this week but you've convinced me, this is a challenge, I never worked with this stack, I'm staying! I'll gladly play with this framework I never used before, it seems to work with this libA I can use here and this libB that I can use here! Such fun!"

Project Manager: - "Awesome! I'm counting on you!"

Six months ago:
====================
Cprn: - "So this part you asked me to implement is tons of work due to the way you're using libA. I really don't think we need it here. We could use a more common approach."

Bored Old Lead: - "No, I already rewrote parts of libB to work with libA, we're keeping it. Just do what's needed."

Cprn: - "Really? Oh, I see. It solves this one issue I'm having at least. Did you push the changes upstream?"

Bored Old Lead: - "No, nobody uses it like that, people don't need it."

Cprn: - "Wait... What? Then why did you even *think* about using those two libs together? It makes no sense."

Bored Old Lead: - "Come on, it's a challenge! Read it! Understand it! It'll make you a better coder!"

Four months ago:
==============
Cprn: - "That version of the framework you used is loosing support next month. We really should update."

Bored Old Lead: - "Yeah, we can't. I changed some core framework mechanics and the patches won't work with the new version. I'd have to rewrite these."

Cprn: - "Please do?"

Bored Old Lead: - "Nah, it's a waste of time! We're not updating!"

Three months ago:
===============
Bored Old Lead: - "The code you committed doesn't pass the tests."

Cprn: - "I just run it on my working copy and everything passes."

Bored Old Lead: - "Doesn't work on mine."

Cprn: - "Let me take a look... Ah! Here you go! You've misused these two options in the framework config for your dev environment."

Bored Old Lead: - "No, I had to hack them like that to work with libB."

Cprn: - "But the new framework version already brings everything we need from libB. We could just update and drop it."

Bored Old Lead: - "No! Can't update, remember?"

Last Friday:
=========
Bored Old Lead: - "You need to rewrite these tests. They work really slow. Two hours to pass all."

Cprn: - "What..? How come? I just run them on revision from this morning and all passed in a minute."

Bored Old Lead: - "Pull the changes and try again. I changed few input dataset objects and then copied results from error messages to assertions to make the tests pass and now it takes two hours. I've narrowed it to those weird tests here."

Cprn: - "Yeah, all of those use ORM. Maybe it's something with the model?"

Bored Old Lead: - "No, all is fine with the model. I was just there rewriting the way framework maps data types to accommodate for my new type that's really just an enum but I made it into a special custom object that needs special custom handling in the ORM. I haven't noticed any issues."

Cprn: - "What!? This makes *zero* sense! You're rewriting vendor code and expect everything to just work!? You're using libs that aren't designed to work together in production code because you wanted a challenge!?? And when everything blows up you're blaming my test code that you're feeding with incorrect dataset!??? See you on Monday, I'm going home! *door slam*"

Today:
=====
Project Manager: - "Cprn, Bored Old Lead left on Friday. He said he can't work with you. You're responsible for Project X now."

So today our CFO stepped into IT and angrily proclaimed someone using tech@ e-mail and fake name is defrauding company funds buying themselves... "used female lingerie with extra virgin juice" (sic!).

I work for an IPSP, we handle finance for commercial services (think PayPal but smaller). One of our clients is a big platform where girls can sell items like bath water, used socks and more. CFO demanded our admins found out who and when connected to that website, what URLs and so on.

As mentioned, said platform is pretty big, hence, from time to time we help them with their service when they ask us to, that's why we have a tech@ account. Last month there was a minor issue with one of the banks, someone fixed it and, as per usual, made a small payment of €1 topping up the account wallet to make sure everything works. It was an intern whose will to live is still strong and unencumbered with experience so she jokingly wrote "panties juice, extra virgin" in the payment note. What she *didn't know*, however, is that admins on that platform used the very same account to test new billing system they've implemented and our CFO received an invoice.

First day at CERN: done!

Nothing to rant about :) The place and the people are beautiful, lots of support and it's easy to navigate through things even for very young people like me! Couldn't ask for better stuff.

The welcome event in the Globe of Science and Innovation is already an experience on its own :) so many people to meet and share words with! Later on one of my senior colleagues showed me around the surface datacenter of ATLAS, as well as its control room and a (physically) separate computing testing environment to run simulations and software on to later be deployed at Point 1 (ATLAS). I am stunned, humbled and excited to say the least! More to come soon! Post your curiosities below and I'll gladly answer!

I am amazed. I witnessed (mostly heard) a 14 year old girl calm down a young adult female suffering an anxiety attack before I managed to push through people on the tram. She told her to close her eyes, breath, tell her what she smells, then open her eyes, name first thing that she sees, then look left, name first thing, etc.

This is called sensory grounding and it works. And yeah, what she did was pretty awesome but this isn't what amazed me the most. I asked where she learned that and she said "from a game about apes". And I knew exactly which game she meant. There's a title called Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey and among many interesting mechanics there's one that puts the player in a state of anxiety when they venture into an unknown territory. The way to win that part is by analyzing surroundings by vision, hearing and the sense of smell before a panic countdown goes to zero. It's called "conquering your fear". Holly fuck, I played that and I didn't connect the dots. Are games nowadays teaching kids how to handle real life crisis? Where were those games when I was a kid??

!dev
Last week I watched a DIY video where at the end the guy dumped detergent water on the grass. I kindly commented it's a €150 fine. Their response was on the lines of "Oh yeah, Mr Proper? And what would you say if I told you I spray my whole garden with soap to get rid of weeds, huh?".

Well, you dumb fuck, I don't care what you do, I wasn't attacking you, I was being *nice* and warned you about the fucking fine that you're going to fucking pay because your channel name is your first and last name and your video shows the street and the house number but whatever.

Today I couldn't log into my YouTube account. Why was that, you might ask? Well, because the dumb fuck paid the fucking fine and assumed I was the one that ratted, so he made a video about it and his dumb fuck audience falsely reported all of my videos for child abuse and promoting terrorism.

I only upload unboxing videos that debunk scummy "deals". 🤦‍♂️

Even at CERN, Gineve, rubber ducks Rule the World

Anyone working at CERN in Geneva?

Applying today. Tired of wasting my talents at big tech.

Most... Awkward... Video call... Ever!

Ended about 7 minutes ago. This one guy... Seriously! I mean... 🤷‍♂️ Everyone thought he's just uncomfortably open but when he finally got out of the shower he panicked, screamed like a girl, fell down and covered his camera asking: "Guys, when you were talking just now... Was there anything... Like... *Weird* on my stream?"

WTF is going on in web development nowadays that makes people ask me to compile C# projects to Electron?

Let that sink. I'm being asked to compile a C# project that can run as a beautifully integrated seamless *native* and lightning fast application... to JS so it would run as a *website* in the Electron *browser*. Am I the only one seeing how much cancer that is?

Guy: - "Your restart script doesn't work."
Me: - "What do you mean?"
Guy: - "It does nothing."
Me: - "It should kill every processes that's running within the project and start them again. Wait... Why do you terminate it?"
Guy: - "I don't. It just stops."
Me: - "It says `Terminated` here. You killed it. Just let it do it's job, don't kill it."
Guy: - "I'm not killing it! It just stops!"

(...two hours later...)

Me: - "Wait... Where do you run it from?"
Guy: - "What do you mean? I just run the script you gave me."
Me: - "Yeah, but where do you run it from? Where did you put it?"
Guy: - "It's part of the project so I put it in the project, d'oh!"

Here's the story of my first month at CERN :) But first, a little premise...
Before arriving, I expected to be scared, alone and unguided in most of my experiences: after all I was a simple 19 year old about to leave home and friends for 3 years heading out in the world with zero experience on stuff like banking, taxes.. let alone working in a huge environment! The impostor syndrome was at an all time high on that front.
Then, I had the luck and pleasure to find an extremely competent and helpful plethora of people, ranging from my team to other CERNies (yes, that how we're called :P) who took me under their wing and introduced me to all the key aspects of living the place. When the initial stress finally soothed down thanks to this, I finally started to manage focusing more and more on my work, by following day-by-day my teammates who taught me the core aspects of the system and the many projects that are in progress during Long Shutdown 2. Within a couple weeks, I already managed to grasp various concepts that got me quickly on track, and now I managed to develop and integrate new temperature monitoring scripts into a system checking on hundreds of Single Board Computer-based servers :) It's a real rollercoaster of learning and applying under all fronts and so far I'm not regretting my choice of departing.
Luckily I've also discovered I'm pretty efficient and good at my job, which surely boosts my morale :D
Keep you updated as usual!

Guy: - Why the hell do you keep adding new tests with "TDD" in the commit log? Is this because you're wearing this stupid TDD t-shirt!? You're only supposed to maintain this! There's nothing to develop! Nothing here will ever be test-driven!

Cprn: (turns around)

T-shirt: *Technical Debt Development*

I'm struggling with a bug. It's not my bug, it's in a lib - in an assembly function commented as "this is where the magic happens". After 27 hours of trying to determine what triggers said bug my best guess is it's a relationship between the position of Mimas and the mood of my neighbour's chonker. If it's not triggered by the Saturn's moon and a pet animal... I'm out of ideas.

Now how do I break it to my PM that we have to kill a cat?

During a health and safety course today I was asked to talk about the workspace ergonomics. Part of that course is to make sure everyone knows how to customise their seat, screen, keyboard, etc., so I told everyone to unfold those little feet on the bottom of their keyboards and everyone did... Everyone but a cheeky little customer service girl who was more interested in taking selfies of her skirt coincidentally matching the carpet. I cleared my throat and said again:

- "Please, unfold your keyboard's feet."

Nothing. Coughed. Nothing. Finally, quite annoyed, I repeated myself for the 3rd time:

- "Unfold the feet, please!"

She jumped. Eyes wide. Noticed everyone staring. And very very slowly, with a look of complete puzzlement, she spread her legs.

Long time ago, back in a day of Microsoft Office 95 and 97, I was contracted to integrate a simple API for a payment service provider.

They've sent me the spec, I read it, it was simple enough: 1. payment OK, 2. payment FAILED. Few hours later the test environment was up and happy crediting and debiting fake accounts. Then came the push to prod.

I worked with two other guys, we shut down the servers, made a backup, connected new provider. All looked perfectly fine. First customers were paying, first shops were sending their products... Until two days later it turned out the money isn't coming through even though all we are getting from the API is "1" after "1"! I shut it off. We had 7 conference calls, 2 meetings, 3 days of trying and failing. Finally, by a mere luck, I found out what's what.

You see, Microsoft, when you invent your own file format, it's really nice to make it consistent between versions... So that the punctuation made in Microsoft Word 97 that was supposed to start from "0" didn't start from "1" when you open the file in Microsoft Word 95.

Also, if you're a moron who edits documentation in Microsoft Word, at least export it to a fucking PDF before sending out. Please.

Few years ago a girl from our HR was hitting on my co-worker. She was asking all kinds of personal and professional favours just so he would come by her place, etc. One time she asked him to send her few C/C++ questions that she could use to thin the crowd of potential candidates before inviting them for the formal interview that he'd conduct later on. Obviously she wouldn't know if the answer is good or not but hell with it, he was ready to storm that pink fortress! So he came up with some mind twisters. She left two days later before he even reached the drawbridge. Sad.

So about six months ago he got fed up with some bullshit and left the company. Yesterday we had dinner. He was interviewing for quite some time being picky about which offer to accept and, surprisingly, during his last interview he got asked very familiar set of questions. He answered each. Then he couldn't resist and asked if the girl works there. The guy confirmed and, without a warning, called her. As if it wasn't awkward enough this is how I was told the conversation went:

- "Joan! You won't guess who I've got here! Your very good friend, Peter! Nope. Yeah, that one - how did you kn... Uh-huh. Oh? Yeah. Are you sure? I mean, I wouldn't. Deal!"

Then he turned out to Peter and said:

- "You know what? I wasn't going to hire you for shit because in my opinion your knowledge on the subject matter, how to put that gently, sucks ass... But apparently Joan here says you're professional and can handle everything we'll be able to throw at you. So when can you start?"

Needless to say he took the job. The fortress fell soon after and he wanted to meet to ask if I'm coming for the bachelor party. I'm ordering t-shirts with "batch mode off" in monospace.

We had an obligatory training today about security of remote access to company resources.

We sat for an hour listening to some outdated advice regarding passwords and preparing a work environment at home. Finally the instructor said his goodbyes and left. The rest of us stayed in the call to pass some actual recommendations.

Then we received a join request from a waiting lobby. Everyone muted. I let the guy in. For the next 8 minutes we watched the unaware instructor eat his breakfast and sign some documents stamped with a logotype of our competition.

Then I cleared my throat very loudly. He will have to print some of those documents again.

!rant

Linux just made my day. Everybody knows how Windows won't let you shutdown your hardware until it updates, right? So last night I forgot I was upgrading Manjaro in a background terminal (full distro update, tons of packages) and hibernated my rig, plugged it off, took it to a different location. Today I hooked it up - different network, IP, etc. - it woke up, finished compiling whatever it ended up on then downloaded, compiled and installed everything else, said "Thank you very much!" and dropped the mic. Someone tell me this isn't pure awesomeness! 😂

It asked again for root password but other than that... shrugged off 12 hours difference like a boss!

I worked for a company who supplied CERN with some ultra high end equipment.

At one point the guys at CERN email me "Problem, check this out."

The picture was of some burnt out ultra expensive cards that fit into a larger chassis... the cards looked like they had been exposed to a fire that was located exactly between the cards, but none of the cards themselves looked like they had been on fire. The chips and such looked burnt, but more so exposed to a very hot fire, not like they were on fire themselves.

It was weird. I sent them some crates to securely ship them to our QA folks, and ordered them up about $500k in replacement equipment.

QA later said they never got the equipment, someone "from another department" picked them up from the dock. And CERN never asked about what QA found, that was weird because they always asked.

CERN can collide subatomic particles but cannot maintain their website. Drupal fail.

Just a friendly reminder to fellow developers to take care of yourself.

If your system is constantly pumping out cortisol, even when threats are minor, it gets desensitized to the stress signals. We used to react to cortisol with the fight-or-flight response when our lives were in real danger. Nowadays it's produced when you disagree with your coworker or there's a deadline coming up. So your cortisol rises but you neither fight nor run. The result is a stress response that isn't functioning properly. This is when burnout symptoms develop. Same goes for testosterone, dopamine and some other hormones and neurotransmitters. Read up and start proper work hygiene that includes workouts, fresh air activities and manual hobbies.

Your back, wrists and eyes aren't the only things you have to watch out for when coding long hours. Cheers and have a fun weekend!

When websites steal your browser's shortcuts... <3

Today, during deployment on server without remote access:

Me (on the phone calling our data centre Admin): "There's a permissions mismatch. The following paths need write access from the following users..."

Admin: "Okay, okay, slow down... I'm still in the elevator." - 10 minutes later - "Okay, ready."

And I gave him the paths and he said: "Try now."

And I tried and it still didn't work. And then we tried all that again. And again. And finally he said:

Admin: "Okay, I give up, I'm going back down to get the screen."

My apprentice is driving me nuts with his failed attempts on gold-plating.
The task "Get the data and export it to a file" becomes ""After many attempts to get the data via a different query than we worked out together I now finally got it and it makes sense if it was displayed but only one set of data at a time and it should also be selected what data should be exported and I have no idea how to do that so Cero, can you help me?".
Dang it dude, just show me for once that you can do 1 clearly decribed task, where you have many examples to work with, and NOT try to add any extras!

I am now working on how to tell him this in a nicer way...

I am an insecure person. Coding gave me a much needed boost in confidence in my skills.

We worked with that freelancer some time ago. Most talented coder I've ever known. Coding for only 3 years, and only 1 technology, but technical thinking already up to par with my own 15+ years of experience. Very rude but to the point. We loved it - "one of us". We hired that asshole for different remote projects over 20 times in 3 years. We send spec, answer questions, collaborate on chat, review work on svn, add tickets, get solutions. After about a year working like that we had minor issue with finance that revealed our prized freelancer is a chick.

Changed nothing.

It's 5 AM and I don't want to shit on anybody's party but trust me when I say most of you here complaining about legacy code don't know the meaning of the word.

As someone who maintained a PHP4 codebase with an average file length of 3000+ lines for almost 4 years, I feel you, I feel your pain and your helplessness. But I've seen it all and I've done it all and unless you've witnessed your IDE struggle to highlight the syntax, unless you had to make regular changes in a test-less SVN's working copy that **is** the production and unless you are the reason that working copy exists because you've had enough of `new_2_old_final_newest.php` naming scheme, you do not know legacy. If you still don't believe me bare in mind I said "is" as in: "this system is still in production".

But also bare hope. Because as much grief as it cost me and countless before me, today of all days, without a warning, it got green lit for userbase migration to a newer platform. And if this 20 years of generous custom features and per client implemented services can be shut down even though it brings more profit than all the other products combined, so can happen to any of your projects. 🙏

Unfortunately, I do mean *any*.

"Yeah, I got your e-mail, I see the subject. Oh no, dude, it says urgent so it went straight to the URGENT queue. Yeah? Ah. Sure, I'll get to it as soon as I get through the ASAP, NOW and YESTERDAY queues. Well, if you wanted me to read it right away you should've say there's NO HURRY - I read only one no-hurry e-mail a day but there's currently 0 tasks on that queue."

September 13th, 2013 at 06:20 AM
===========================

~$ cd /mnt/backupdisk
backupdisk$ make_backup --output=./~
Cannot access storage: /mnt/backupdisk/~
backupdisk$ ls
~
backupdisk$ rm -rf ~
^C ^C ^C ^C ^C

...never name your backup same as your home directory.

So after 6 months of asking for production API token we've finally received it. It got physically delivered by a courier, passed as a text file on a CD. We didn't have a CD drive. Now we do. Because security. Only it turned out to be encrypted with our old public key so they had to redo the whole process. With our current public key. That they couldn't just download, because security, and demanded it to be passed in the fucking same way first. Luckily our hardware guy anticipated this and the CD drives he got can burn as well. So another two weeks passed and finally we got a visit from the courier again. But wait! The file was signed by two people and the signatures weren't trusted, both fingerprints I had to verify by phone, because security, and one of them was on vacation... until today when they finally called back and I could overwrite that fucking token and push to staging environment before the final push to prod.

Only for some reason I couldn't commit. Because the production token was exactly the same as the fucking test token so there was *nothing to commit!*

BECAUSE FUCKING SECURITY!

A dev adds a nice range of categories that content creators can select from. Users get a neat filtering system to restrict the unwanted content.

And then...! People post everything in default category.

@dfox Please, give an ability to ban accounts to a few high ranked users?

My No.1 interview question for UX developers:

What are the CSS default text and background colours?

The correct answer is: "undefined-on-undefined".

If your 1st thought was "black-on-white", you're the reason we can't have nice things.

Last job search experience... It's fresh. I was being recruited by a girl from Aruba. During our 2nd video call she became... let's say "friendly", calling me "hun" and "sugar". Our 3rd conversation in attachment. I checked - the company is legit, she does work for them, it's not a scam. Fun fact - her full name is Jameelah but she doesn't use it at work because it's more suitable for a belly dancer than a professional IT recruiter. Her words, not mine.

I quit my job in January. I haven't worked for 6 months, I live off savings and investments and I don't really know what to do with myself except that I finally have time to finish all my pet projects and I'm really doing them one by one, which makes me feel the best I have in years.

Moneywise, I've thought about writing a book or a game, but I mostly just ride my bike or Netflix and chill and do literally nothing.

I'm almost 40 and I feel like I was 18 but very, very sleepy - all the time.

Thoughts?

Also, I asked AI and it assumed I'm a woman. I find that funny.

Today I attended the first half of the WhiteHat challenge at CERN :) one more to go to be a certified pentester! I expected lots of learning, and my expectations were not let down, game on!

Me: "Omg, I'm so not sorry you didn't get a response to your 2:00am text sent to my private phone number about that super duper not important thing that a four year old could solve... but my girlfriend gave me a wrist band thingy that puts my phone on silent whenever it thinks I'm sleeping."

Product Owner: "And you can't set it up properly!? Your title says `señor software engineer` for god's sake!"

Me: "Yeah, it does. This is a hardware issue, though."

...is what I told her and she bought it. 🤷‍♂️

The only reason that's gonna push me to go to university is gonna be social life... being at CERN is great and all, but socially speaking it's a lacking environment :/ Especially for us youngsters

This is kind of personal but wait for the conclusion.

I'm having bad migraines. I used to have them like 10 years ago and recently they came back. The only way to stop an attack is to lie down in a dark room for a few hours and then it's back the next day. CT scan shows nothing. My neurologist shrugged and prescribed some meds. They sometimes take the pain from 8 to 6 on a 0-10 scale, sometimes they do nothing. I stopped working on the weekends and it got better, no more migraines on Saturday morning. So I took few weeks of time off and not a single migraine until the last day.

My shrink said I'm allergic to work.

I heard CERN was starting up again.
<cue the Doom music>

So... Yesterday I ordered a meal and it had whole jalapenos in it. I didn't order jalapeños. I love the taste but I hate toilet visits after. Hence, was putting them aside. But then I got into that new code, jumping around this new project I'll be working on. We were getting intimate. I liked the architecture, I liked it a lot - it was using event sourcing and respected CQRS. Suddenly I realised I ate everything. Including jalapeños. And the only reason I noticed is because I was eating with my hands. And my eye got watery. And I wiped it.

So, yeah. Yesterday for the first time in my life I was pouring milk into my eyes. Does this count as a proper dev rant? I don't know. Fuck the protein interface that can't process simple food orders, though.

I have ME/CFS after Covid19. My manager says its an excuse. Can't wait for them to fire me because of my performance drop. Now I only do about 100% of my work instead of 140%.

Young 22 years old me, hungry for excitement of real world issues, full of whimsical witticisms, writing bootstrap scripts that'd spit meaningful information like...

> $ run bankhack
> Shutting down the old world...
> Checking world population...
> Initializing particle accelerator...
> Exploding sun...
> Entering hell...
> Starting daemons...
> Starting lesser daemons...
> Burning logic...
> Restoring balance in the universe...
> World peace achieved.

What a naive douche he was.

This is not about devRant… but it might as well be.

Imagine public forum. Everyone can read and post, everyone can comment. And there's no way to send a private message.

You use said forum for years. Whether you like it or not, you form alliances, friendships, frenemieships and engage all kinds of social contracts. There's no ro(ot)ster either, so you keep all that in your head, until one day you need a social contract formalized — exchange contact info. With Steven.

You can't just “@Steven text me, here's my phone”, that's borderline suicidal. You yearn a safe haven. A proxy that'd allow privacy. So you quickly spin up a service, let's say Discord (it wasn't Discord, but close enough), post a link, and within seconds Steven joins… He and seven other Stevens.

So you send each a unique sentence, a 2fa token so to speak, and ask them to post it on said devRant-like forum — they can delete it later after all. And a few minutes later there's eleven Stevens posting garbage faster than mods can delete, because whitespace power. But you bravely sift through that shit until the correct Steven rants “I'm blue, da-ba-dee da-ba-da”, and finally you know which Discord Steven is blue, so you can privately chat about colours.

And then Steven's 75 years old, well-reputed account gets banned on devRant for posting along other spamming Stevens. And you can't even PM administration, because devRant is a public forum without PM-ing indeed.

I have a rant. A genuine rant, not a funny story, etc.

I want a keyboard. I need one. It can cost €500, as long as it won't break in a year and fulfils all my needs. Make it a €1000, I don't care. What are my needs then? Well...

It has to be a split keyboard - two halves. But wireless in every aspect, ergonomic, with multimedia keys on its outer edges (preferably pointing outwards, not up) and a heavy metal trackball on the right outer edge (preferably upper right corner). That's a bare minimum.

On top of that it probably some magnetic scrolls for things like navigating pages, changing volume and fidgeting in general wouldn't hurt. Also I'd prefer it to snap back into a one-piece whenever I need it to lie on my knees, e.g. when I type while sitting on a coach (I have a coach PC setup, no desk, and there's a reason). Why do I need it to split then...?

I had an accident. Kind of broke my back when I was 11. It's mostly okay now after couple years of rehabilitation and many more years of careful living. Luckily the only two wheels I ride on are powered by a 105.97 hp @ 9,970 rpm engine. Still, I try to be careful so I tried tons of work hygiene techniques over the years and I found out anything over 2 hours is best done while lying flat.

Coding while lying flat has its challenges, mostly focused around screen and input. Ever since I got a VR headset half of them got solved but the other half - acquiring a suitable keyboard - it's very hard to satisfy. I tried that with a one-piece keyboard lying on my stomach. Turns out actively bending elbows quickly wears them out (hello tennis players). So a split keyboard it has to be. So far I tried 4 different ones and I had to modify the cable connecting both halves in each and every one of them so that it'd be long enough to go behind my back. The main cable itself I only had to modify once because usually there're extensions available.

Apart from cables, all of those keyboards had issues. Starting from some kind of de-syncing when keys from both halves would randomly register in a wrong order - I didn't know it's possible with a cable connected halves... I did try two generic WiFi keyboards (using one for each hand) and they unfortunately suffered from that very same issue but I was sure it wouldn't happen if the device was designed to be a one unit from the very beginning, right? And yet it in 2 of the tested devices.

Other than that, plugs disconnecting on their own forcing me to take off the headset and fiddle around, too high key travel that'd strain the wrists after a few hours, even the noise that would wake up my girlfriend sleeping in a separate room were all a common issue (I briefly had an almost completely silent WiFi mechanical keyboard from Logitech we both really liked, but it was a one-piece). Once I got a split keyboard that was "natively" WiFi but not only the two halves were still connected with a cable that turned out to be way too short for my needs, it also had a very noticeable lag despite the high price - a lag way higher than any of the cheap WiFi keyboards I owned in the past. So I sent it back. Now IDK what to do because AFAICT there are no more models available, at least where I live.

So yeah, I need a keyboard and I'll probably have to make one myself. Sorry, just had to vent.

Yesterday I had a questionable pleasure of interviewing a young software engineer who (while answering one of earlier questions) used a principle of polymorphism but made a mistake. So I asked her to explain what polymorphism is.

She couldn't. When she said "let me start from the beginning" for the 3rd time I jestfully noted that if she's more used to virtual communication she can text me the answer, and she not only thought I was being serious but also thought it's a good idea, then texted me a duck emoji, a dog emoji... And got stuck again.

Obviously when we were discussing potential salary she had an answer for every question. Ridiculous answer but no communication issues whatsoever.

To all the masochists who spent hours debugging misspellings:

1. Learn your tools
2. Learn good practice

Every IDE should point out when you're not using a variable you've initiated or using an uninitiated variable as well as at least highlight, if not simply list, every occurrence of the variable under your cursor and let you find all references or even display the number of references next to a variable at all times, and finally, every IDE should autocomplete for you so when it doesn't you know you've messed up. Good IDE makes all the easy mistakes hard and all of the hard tasks easy. Including running tests. If you don't know how to configure your IDE to do all these things take time and learn it. If you still can't figure it out, replace your IDE maybe...?

Also use the debugger. Preferably one that nicely integrates with your IDE. If you don't, check point 1.

Also write tests and *run them*.

Also if your misspellings tend to consist of a missing `s` at the end of a plural noun just call it `entityCollection` instead of `entities`. And read up on more good programming practices and naming conventions.

Content-Type: application/xml;q=0.9; charset=utf-8…

When their app is 90% sure it serves XML.

After 4 years of being cautious not to stir the waters it happened again. There was much gratefulness. Then there was much hate. Yesterday I accidentally replaced 17 people department with 3 scripts.

So I just realized (while rewriting some code) Python can't import stuff from a sibling directory without voodoo tricks. Seriously. In 21st century.

Might as well start off with the weekly event!
My favourite famous programmer I reckon is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, because without the work of him and his colleagues at CERN, we'd probably be struggling to talk about our favourite programmers with other people around the world - we might even still be dialing into Minitel and BBSes

Dumb mistake from when I was still working:

My work laptop’s SSD went haywire, and I/O would spike every 10 minutes or so for ~50 ms. The hardware guy said he could replace the SSD right away, or I could endure it for a few weeks and get a new laptop instead. Obviously, I agreed to wait. The stutter noticeably affected screen rendering, but I didn’t notice any other issues. Little did I know that every time it happened, all input was ignored (as in: not queued). Normally it wouldn’t matter, because hitting a random ~50 ms window is hard. How-the-f×ck-ever…

A few days later — without getting into “why” — I was forced to apply a patch in production. So I opened an SSH session to prod in one terminal, spun up a dev environment in another, copied the database schema from prod to dev, and made sure to test everything. No issues, so I jumped to prod, applied the patch, restarted services, jumped back to dev, and cleaned up the now-unnecessary database. Only to discover that my “jumped back to dev” keystroke didn’t register.

How can I find all my comments (not posts) on devRant?

Objectively, I know I should leave.

The company hasn't been doing well. At all.
Projects are a shit show.
Despite everything everyone is kind and respectful, though.
My team's great and boss is good.
Pay is okay, too.
As the lead dev I am appreciated for my work and knowledge.
But the company itself seems unable to learn despite the coworkers being young.
My team doesn't have any work now because the customer canceled the project.
There have already been layoffs. 40% of people gone.
Other companies also pay well.
But damn my team is amazing.
Although I am the most experienced developer. But I know I am not THAT experienced, really. i am still young and would love to work with someone MORE experienced.

Maybe i am just lazy. Then I will likely soon be lazy and unemployed.
Oh no....

Satisfying my own curiosity #3:
Who here dabbles in electronics?

As professional or amateur/hobbyist, doesn't matter.

I'd appreciate straining from discussions, ideally 1 comment per person starting with "I do" or "I don't" (it'd make counting easier).

There was a department. Long time ago their work was somewhat complicated: background checks of businesses, websites, ToSes, assuring agreement compliance, some risk management on top. They started as small 3 people team but over the years they were hiring new employees to catch up with the growing customer base. They were still struggling. Few years back we've integrated 3rd party services to help them and, finally, their backlog was gone!

In January they complained about how much more work they have since the merger so I inquired about which process was troublesome, what was the flow, etc., and it turned out to be very... Tinder-like - the issue was the sheer number of cases:

1. open a case,
2. check results in few windows,
3. if green + green + green, move right.
4. else move left.

It was ridiculous, I wouldn't stand for that. I sat for an hour, made some ghosting scripts that followed same business logic and saved results alongside their actual decisions. Last week I compared the two and there was zero difference so I green-lit it with my boss and pushed to prod.

Oh, the happiness on their faces when they heard the news, the disbelief, the tears of joy!

And then it happened. After 4 years of being cautious not to stir the waters I did it again. Yesterday I accidentally replaced 17 people department with 3 scripts. How was I supposed to know it was *all* they were doing??

Code with no clear architecture, no documentation, no coding standards, no tests, many security-issues, a lot of hardcoded stuff, written by people forced to use a completely new technology stack and messing up, of course.

But we are not allowed to change anything, of course.

We have to keep coding in that style and with the tools present in the project. For uniformity, of course.

I managed to work on that code for 2 years... Recently it dawned on me that I don't give a crap anymore.
I quit, of course.

Work today as a student: trying to unterstand CERN code - 50 member variables, no local variables - can you please practice some c++??

Satisfying my own curiosity #2:
Who here works in the video games industry?

As anyone, including visual, audio and mocap artists, etc.

I'd appreciate straining from discussions, ideally 1 comment per person starting with "I do" or "I don't" (it'd make counting easier).

Satisfying my own curiosity #1:
Who here uses Vim/Neovim, and who doesn't?

I'd appreciate straining from discussions, ideally 1 comment per person starting with the name of your IDE (it'd make counting easier).

Satisfying my own curiosity #4:
Who here has a weird hobby unrelated to coding?

I'd appreciate straining from discussions, ideally 1 comment per person starting with the name of the hobby or short description (it'd make counting easier).