Fucking intern.

While I was working next to her a couple weeks back, she spent half her time on social media, playing Candy Crush, or talking with her friend. She also left early almost every day.

I had given her a project to do (object crud + ui), and helped her through it. She made pretty abysmal progress in a week. I ended up finishing it for her by rewriting basically all of her code (every single line except some function names, lone `end` or `}` statements, a few var declarations, blank lines, plus a couple of comments she copied over from my code).

This week I gave her a super easy project to do. It amounts to copying four files (which I listed), rename a few things to be Y instead of X, and insert two lines of code (which I provided) to hook it up. Everything after that just works. It should have taken her ... okay, maybe a few hours because she's slow and new to the language. but it would have taken me five to ten minutes, plus five minutes of testing.

She has spent THREE FUCKING DAYS ON THIS AND SHE'S STILL NOT DONE. SHE'S BLOODY USELESS!

She has kept not pulling changes and complaining that things are broken. Despite me telling her every time I push changes that affect her work (on. my. branch. ergh!)

She keeps not reading or not understanding even the simplest of things. I feel like MojoJojo every time I talk to her because of how often I repeat myself and say the same things again and again.

Now she's extremely confused about migrations. She keeps trying to revert a drop_table migration that she just wrote so she can re-create the table differently. Instead of, you know, just reverting back to her migration that creates the table. it's one migration further.

Migrations are bloody simple. they're one-step changes to the database, run in order. if you want to make a change to something you did a few steps back, you roll back those migrations, edit your shit, and run them again. so bloody difficult!

`rails db:rollback && rails db:rollback`
Edit file
`rails db:migrate`
So. hard.

I explained this to her very simply, gave her the commands to copy/paste, ... and she still can't figure it out. She's fucking useless.

It took me ten minutes to walk her though it on a screen share. TEN FREAKING MINUTES.

She hasn't finished a damned fucking thing in three weeks. She's also taking interview calls while working on this, so I know she totally doesn't care.

... Just.
Fucking hell.

USELESS FUCKING PEOPLE!

*meeting with boss about a quick site for one of her clients*

Boss- "okay so basically I just want you to copy the content from -already made site- and put it on the new one"

Me- "okay sure do you want it verbatim or "

Boss-"no but something similar"

Me-"okay so you want me to paraphrase this list that's on the homepage?"

Boss-"Well no we dont actually need the list at all as it isnt relevant to us so just take that out"

Me-"okay well that is the only thing on the homepage so what should I replace it with"

Boss-"I dont know, something similar to the list. You can figure something out"

Me-"....I dont know anything about the clients business. I am not going to just make up content, you guys can at least give me some direction there"

Boss-"i didnt think it would be that hard"

Me-"it's really not hard. You're making it harder than it needs to be for me though. Anyway, do you wanna keep the same exact pages as the other site or only transfer some of them or"

Boss-"something that resembles that website but isnt exactly it so some of the pages but not all"

Me-"which ones"

Boss-"the ones relevant to client's business"

Me-*closes notebook, stands up, starts to leave room*

Boss-"where are you going"

Me-"I'm going to get another two cups of coffee cause I didnt have enough this morning for this bullshit"

Boss-*raises eyebrow*

Me-"dont tell me to copy paste a website at first and then continue to tell me its going to be "similar" but different and then further continue to be as vague as possible about what is expected of me to be done in order to make it different! Take the time to decide what it is you want exactly and then tell me, with detail, what you're criteria is so I can do the thing!! I cant read your mind."

Boss-"..... I just didnt think it would be that hard to jot in a few sentences here and there"

I left the room at that point. Irritating as fuck. You dont know tech stuff, don't expect me to know enough about YOUR job to write about it as if I'm a professional. I cant fucking read minds, I have no interest in researching anything just to create the site content myself, and its fucking rude that they wont even take the time to sit down and decide what they want for a website that THEY are paying for. For fucks sake people get your fucking shit together

I was 15 years old and the first year of high school. Everything was new to me and I was such a newbie. At that time I had 2-3 year of programming behind me at an institution where they taught competitive programming. And I knew something about computers. Not much but more than most of my school mates. At that time I wanted to become "super cool hacker".

So we had this very very thought teacher for history which was also our form master. She really knows how to explained everything about history and in an interesting way. But while she was teaching we also had to write down notes from her powerpoints that were on a projector. And occasionally she would wait for us to copy everything and then move on with her lecture. But sometimes she didn't. This was frustrating as hell. The whole class would complain about this because you couldn't take notes down normal, you had to do it at double speed.

But she got one weak spot. She was not very good with computers. Our school computers were locked in some kinda closet so that students didn't have physical access to a computer and were also password protected. So I came up with the plan to plant wireless mouse in her computer so that I could control her mouse. At that time it seemed like SUPER HACKER MASTER PLAN.

So I got an opportunity one time when she left the classroom and let closet where the computer was open. I quickly sneaked the USB of the wireless mouse in the computer and then go back to the seat.

So THE FUN began.

Firstly I would only go back in powerpoint so that all my schoolmates could write down notes including me. And it was hilarious to watch when she didn't know what is happening. So then I would move her mouse when she tried to close some window. I would just move it slightly so she wouldn't notice that somebody else is controlling mouse. And by missing X button just by slight she would click other things and other things would pop up and now she had to close this thing so it became a nightmare for her. And she would become angry at the mouse and start complaining how the computer doesn't work and that mouse doesn't obey her.

One time when she didn't pay attention to her computer and projector I went to paint program and drew a heart and wrote we love you (In Slovenian Imamo vas radi -> See the picture below) and one of my school mates has the picture of it. We were all giggling and she didn't know what is was for. And I managed to close everything before she even noticed.

So it got to the point where she couldn't hand it more so she called our school IT guy so that he would check her computer (2 or 3 weeks passed before she called IT guy). And he didn't find anything. He was really crappy IT guy in general. So one week passed by and I still had messed with her mouse. So she got a replacement computer. Who would guessed all the problems went away (because I didn't have another mouse like that). I guess when our IT guy took the computer to his room and really thoroughly check it he found my USB.

So he told her what was the problem she was so pissed off really I didn't see her pissed off so much in all my 4 years in high school. She demanded the apology from whom did it. And at that moment my mind went through all possible scenarios... And the most likely one was that I was going to be expelled... And I didn't have the balls to say that I did it and I was too afraid... Thanks to God nobody from my school mates didn't tell that it was me.

While she waited that somebody would come forward there was one moment when our looks met and at that moment both of us knew that I was the one that did it.

Next day the whole class wrote the apology letter and she accepted it. But for the rest of 4 years whenever was there a problem with the computer I had to fixed it and she didn't trust anybody not even our IT guy at school. It was our unwritten contract that I would repair her computer to pay off my sin that I did. And she once even trusted me with her personal laptop.

So to end this story I have really high respect for her because she is a great teacher and great persons that guide me through my teen years. And we stayed in contact.

Navy story time, and this one is lengthy.
As a Lieutenant Jr. I served for a year on a large (>100m) ship, with the duties of assistant navigation officer, and of course, unofficial computer guy. When I first entered the ship (carrying my trusty laptop), I had to wait for 2 hours at the officer's wardroom... where I noticed an ethernet plug. After 15 minutes of waiting, I got bored. Like, really bored. What on TCP/IP could possibly go wrong?
So, scanning the network it is. Besides the usual security holes I came to expect in ""military secure networks"" (Windows XP SP2 unpatched and Windows 2003 Servers, also unpatched) I came along a variety of interesting computers with interesting things... that I cannot name. The aggressive scan also crashed the SMB service on the server causing no end of cute reactions, until I restarted it remotely.
But me and my big mouth... I actually talked about it with the ship's CO and the electronics officer, and promptly got the unofficial duty of computer guy, aka helldesk, technical support and I-try-to-explain-you-that-it-is-impossible-given-my-resources guy. I seriously think that this was their punishment for me messing around. At one time I received a call, that a certain PC was disconnected. I repeatedly told them to look if the ethernet cable was on. "Yes, of course it's on, I am not an idiot." (yea, right)
So I went to that room, 4 decks down and 3 sections aft. Just to push in the half-popped out ethernet jack. I would swear it was on purpose, but reality showed me I was wrong, oh so dead wrong.
For the full year of my commission, I kept pestering the CO to assign me with an assistant to teach them, and to give approval for some serious upgrades, patching and documenting. No good.
I set up some little things to get them interested, like some NMEA relays and installed navigation software on certain computers, re-enabled the server's webmail and patched the server itself, tried to clean the malware (aka. Sisyphus' rock), and tried to enforce a security policy. I also tried to convince the CO to install a document management system, to his utter horror and refusal (he was the hard copy type, as were most officers in the ship). I gave up on almost all besides the assistant thing, because I knew that once I left, everything would go to the high-entropy status of carrying papers around, but the CO kept telling me that would be unnecessary.
"You'll always be our man, you'll fix it (sic)".
What could go wrong?
I got my transfer with 1 week's notice. Panic struck. The CO was... well, he was less shocked than I expected, but still shocked (I learned later that he knew beforehand, but decided not to tell anybody anything). So came the most rediculous request of all:
To put down, within 1 A4 sheet, and in simple instructions, the things one had to do in order to fulfil the duties of the computer guy.
I. SHIT. YOU. NOT.
My answer:
"What I can do is write: 'Please read the following:', followed by the list of books one must read in order to get some introductory understanding of network and server management, with most accompanying skills."
I was so glad I got out of that hellhole.

Today was my last day of work, tomorrow i have officially left that place. It's a weird feeling because i'm not certain about the future.
The job was certainly not bad, and after all i read on devrant i'm beginning to believe it was one of the better ones. A nice boss, always something to eat/drink nearby, a relaxed atmosphere, a tolerance for my occasionally odd behaviour and the chance to suggest frameworks. Why i would leave that place, you ask? Because of the thing not on the list, the code, that is the thing i work with all the time.

Most of the time i only had to make things work, testing/refactoring/etc. was cut because we had other things to do. You could argue that we had more time if we did refactor, and i suggested that, but the decision to do so was delayed because we didn't have enough time.

The first project i had to work on had around 100 files with nearly the same code, everything copy-pasted and changed slightly. Half of the files used format a and the other half used the newer format b. B used a function that concatenated strings to produce html. I made some suggestions on how to change this, but they got denied because they would take up too much time. Aat that point i started to understand the position my boss was in and how i had to word things in order to get my point across. This project never got changed and holds hundreds of sql- and xss-injection-vulnerabilities and misses access control up to today. But at least the new project is better, it's tomcat and hibernate on the backend and react in the frontend, communicating via rest. It took a few years to get there, but we made it.
To get back to code quality, it's not there. Some projects had 1000 LOC files that were only touched to add features, we wrote horrible hacks to work with the reactabular-module and duplicate code everywhere. I already ranted about my boss' use of ctrl-c&v and i think it is the biggest threat to code quality. That and the juniors who worked on a real project for the first time. And the fact that i was the only one who really knew git. At some point i had enough of working on those projects and quit.

I don't have much experience, but i'm certain my next job has a better workflow and i hope i don't have to fix that much bugs anymore.
In the end my experience was mostly positive though. I had nice coworkers, was often free to do things my way, got really into linux, all in all a good workplace if there wasn't work.

Now they dont have their js-expert anymore, with that i'm excited to see how the new project evolves. It's still a weird thing to know you won't go back to a place you've been for several years. But i still have my backdoor, but maybe not. :P

First job.

CLIENT: It's just a small website, 15-20 pages 2,500$, what do you say?

ME: Sure, sounds easy.

CLIENT: oh, and I need you to sign this contract that you won't copy or competete with me for the next two years.

ME: Sounds reasonable.

-- A year later --
I had finished building a huge CMS system that serves 420+ organizations, the entire thing copied from his competitor.

CLIENT: So there is only about two weeks left of work...

ME: Goodbye, I have a new job that actually pays money.

CLIENT: Don't forget our contract...

ME: Sure..

At least he paid me, but 2,500$ for a whole year's work isn't such a good deal anymore.

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."

For April Fools at a school I worked for, I printed off one of those "Your printer has been upgraded to be voice activated" signs and put it on their fairly new printer, went into the room opposite and waited. I heard far far too many teachers saying "Copy!" repeatedly, getting more and more agitated before 'manually' copying their document. I had to come clean before I left at lunch time because one of the teachers got quite angry at the prospect of a voice activated photocopier and refused to use it that way. The following year April Fools was on a school holiday so I couldn't pull it in the school I was in that day but i fully expect it to work somewhere else.

They had a copy of the repository inside a development folder, on the repository.

I left on week 2.

!rant

I feel darn good today! I caught some A-holes cheating the system on Stack Overflow.

So basically a question was asked with no code examples present and not a single reference to any framework being used.
The tag only had 'javascript', which probably limits to only 157.244.457 existing frameworks.

I'm commenting something like 'Show us your code so we can have a look'.

After 2 minutes, out of the blue, an answer appears. AND WOW! This guy had a Magical 8 Ball™!
He could predict the framework AND had a very specific fix. Just a one-liner! Go figure!

So I'm like thinking.. What the fuck just happened? Did I miss something? «Going over the question two more times»

All of the sudden, up-votes start popping up all over the place. The question was marked 3 times, the answer was marked an up-voted multiple times, and THEN it hit me (I'm kind of slow).
I checked both user profiles and instead of the usual 'air of mystery', these guys were actually dumb enough to include their company name.

AssertEquals == true.

So in the comment section, I raise my concerns on the legitimacy of the question as clearly this was 'telephoned' as we say it in Dutch, meaning as much as 'rehearsed' in this context.
But as if that was not enough, this another guy comes in and COPY/PASTED(!) the answer of guy #1. Again. Up-votes. EVERYWhere.

So I start going over some of the questions and answers of The Three Musketeers or TTM, as I'll refer them as of now.

TTM had posted over 15 questions combined, mostly crap and incomplete no-code questions. And they had answered most of their own questions.
Sometimes another guy's answer was accepted with zero up-votes as a smoke screen while the real winner was one of their own.

I marked ALL of these questions for moderation, left for lunch, and came back to see how far my blast radius reached.
Turns out, pretty damn far! Although their accounts have not been deleted, TTM have lost most of their reputation points.

They will remain on my watchlist for a couple of months. I know that is quite childish of me, but I just call it my 'guilty pleasure'! ;D
And besides, what else is there to do, instead of browsing DevRant?

Never have I been so furious whilst at work as yesterday, I am still super pissed about going back today but knowing it's only for another few weeks makes it baerable.

I have been the lead developer on a project for the last 3~ months and our CTO is the product owner. So every now and then he decides to just work on a feature he is interested in- fair enough I guess. But everything I have to go and clean up his horrendous code. Everything he writes is an absolute joke, it's like he is constantly in Hackathon mode "let's just copy and paste some code here, hardcoded shit there and forgot about separation of code- it all goes in 1 file".

So yesterday he added a application to the project and instead of reusing a shared data access layer he added an entirely new ORM, which is near identical to the existing ORM in use, for this one application.

Being anal about these things, the first thing I did was delete his shit and simply reference the shared library then refactor a little code to make it compatible.

WELL!! I certainly hit a nerve, he went crazy spamming messages on Slack demanding I revert as it broke ONE SINGLE QUERY that he hadn't checked in (he does 1 huge commit for 10 of everyone else's). I stuck to my principals and explained both ORM's are similar and that we only needed one, the second would cause a fragmented codebase for no benefit whatsoever.

The lead Dev was then forced to come and convince me to revert, again I refused and called out the shit quality of their code. The battle raged on via the public slack group and I could hear colleagues enjoying the heated debate, new users even started joining the group just to get in on mine and the cto's difference of opinion.

I even offered to fix his code for him if he were to commit it, obviously that was not taken well ;).

Once I finally got a luck at the cluster fuck of shit he had written it took me around 5 minutes to fix and I ever improved performance. Regardless he was having none of it. Still the demands to revert continued.

I left the office steaming after long discussions with the lead Dev caught in the middle.

Fortunately my day was salvages with a positive technical discussion that evening at a company with whome I had a job offer from.

I really hate burning bridges and have never left a company under bad terms but this dictator is making me look forward to breaking the news today I will be gone in 4 weeks.

Here's a true story about a "fight" between me and my project manager...

I've been working as a Frontend developer for nearly two years, managed to acquire a decent amount of knowledge, in some cases well above the rest of my coworkers, and one day I got into a bit of a disagreement with my project manager.

Basically he wanted me to copy/paste some feature from another project (needless to say, that... "thing" has more bugs than an ant farm), and against his orders I started doing that feature from scratch, to build a solid foundation from the very start.
I had a lengthy deadline to deliver that feature, they were expecting me to take some time to fix some of the bugs as well, but my idea was to make it bug-free from the moment the feature was released. Both my method and the one I should be copying worked the exact same, but mine was superior in every way, had no bugs, was scalable and upgradeable with little effort, there was no reason not to accept it.

We use scrum as our work methodology, so we have daily meetings. In one of those, the project manager asked me how was the progress on that new feature, and I told him I was just polishing up the code and integrating it with the rest of the project, to make sure everything was working properly. I still had a full day left before the deadline set for that feature, and I was expecting to take about half an hour to finish up a couple lines of code and test everything, no issues so far...

But then he exploded, and demanded to know why wasn't I copying the code from the other project, to which I answered "because this way things will work better".
Right after he said that the feature was working on the other project, copying and pasting it should take a few minutes to do and maybe a couple of extra hours to fix any issues that might have appeared...
The problem here is, the other project was made by trainees, I honestly can't navigate through 3 pages without bumping into an average of 2 errors per page, I was placed into this new project because they know I do quality code, and they wanted this project to be properly made, unlike the previous one, so I was baffled when he said that he preferred me to copy code instead of doing "good" code...
My next reply was "just because something has been made and is working that doesn't mean that it has been properly made nor will work as it should, I could save a few hours copying code (except I wouldn't save any, it would take me more time to adapt the code than to do it from scratch) but then I'll be wasting weeks of work because of new bugs that will be reported over time, because trust me, they will appear... "

I told him this in a very calm manner, but everybody in the meeting room paused and started staring at me, not many dare challenge that specific project manager, and I had just done that...
After a few seconds of silence the PM finally said... "look, if you manage to finish your task inside the set deadline I'll forget we ever had this conversation, but I'll leave a note on my book, just in case..."

I finished that task in about 30 mins, as expected, still had 7 hours till deadline, and I completely forgot about that feature until now because it has never given any issues whatsoever, and is now being used for other projects as well.

It was one of my proudest/rage inducing moments in this project, and honestly, I think I have hit my PM with a very big white glove because some weeks after this event the CEO himself came to the whole team to congratulate us on the outstanding work being made so far, in a project that acted against the PM's orders 90% of the time.

> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job

I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.

My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.

Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.

I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.

On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄

I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.

I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.

I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.

I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.

But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.

I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.

But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.

So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.

So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.

I hate people... I hate stupid people even more...

A person asked on slack about where download a Programming Language server called Railo. The official site is no longer up because the software was forked and acquired by a new company.

I suggested just to download that fork since it's more stable. They said no, they needed to mimic their production environment. Makes sense, so I left it alone since I couldn't help further.

Another person on slack asked which version of Railo they need. The OPs response was, "Oh whatever version you have."

My response was... "WTF... the latest version of Railo is 4.3 and the fork is 4.5... the only difference is the new name and a couple of security fixes. If you want to mimic production then you need the exact copy.. otherwise, the fork will be your best bet."

Nope.. I need Railo... any version. They say again.

I've been fairly lucky with my bosses of late since I've progressed in my programming career. But my absolute worst boss was when I first started working in an office environment doing data entry. My boss at the time was terrible, and she was always against innovation or process improvement. She also always tried to make herself look good and taking credit for the accomplishments of others. If she screwed up it was your fault, and she was "always buried in email" so she could never respond to you for pto requests, or escalation of issues between departments. My whole family pretty much worked in various roles in the department and she fired my brother after my mother left the company for no reason, saying he was "sleeping", but I worked right next to him and he's tall and had to slouch just to comfortable see his computer screen since the same manager refused to approve work station improvements for him.

Our workflow was to receive daily spreadsheets of health care claims that we had to manually process and enter into the system. So being the lazy innovator that I am, and trying to find ways I can efficiently work, I delved into studying visual basic and programmed a few functions and tools in excel to analyze, highlight, and process some of the data since the claims on the spreadsheets always had a specific pattern. This was all before I had any formal education in computer science so the program was very basic and clunky but it tripled my efficiency. When I brought it up to my boss to spread it among the rest of our team so they could use it after a short 20 minute training, she struck it down saying any training or use of it would be a waste of resources since it was too technical and complex to be used and if I were to keep improving it or use it I would be fired. It was literally copy and paste from one spreadsheet to the other en masse and clicking a button to sort and fill in the blanks. Eventually I showed it to the director of the department when working on a large data entry project with her, and I was later offered a job as a technical analyst where I was responsible for the codebase that generated the reports for the department and specifically all the reports my old boss used where I would occasionally mess with her to get back at all the crap she gave me and my brother. Since all the reports were blind carbon copied to everyone, I would send out her reports on a delay while everyone else got them on time. It eventually got her in so much crap she had to step down as a manager. She still works in the same company that I started working at again earlier this year, and like the many careers she's ruined she eventually ruined her own within the company 😂

So;dfjkhijasdfkjq;sdfhjkl;asdf

I copy a line from one spec (to create a user) and paste it in another spec. It works just dandy in the first, and throws MySQL missing column errors in the other.

Fucking what.

This codebase is full of shit like this. Things work in one place but not another, and it’s never obvious why. Tens of thousands of gotchas and quirks. The only way I can get an answer to things like these is to either beg my boss for an explanation, which I’m sure he’s long since tired of, or spend a full day (or more) wading through several rabbit holes filled with raw sewage.

I wasted two hours today trying to get a simple fucking factory to work. And you know what? I just gave up and used the existing admin user. Yeah it’s a bad idea, but it’s fucking good enough.

They can yell if they want.
I have no cares left.

From my work -as an IT consultant in one of the big 4- I can now show you my masterpiece

INSIGHTS FROM THE DAILY LIFE OF A FUNCTIONAL ANALIST IN A BIG 4 -I'M NOT A FUNCTIONAL ANALYST BUT THAT'S WHAT THEY DO-

- 10:30, enter the office. By contract you should be there at 9:00 but nobody gives a shit
- First task of the day: prepare the power point for the client. DURATION: 15 minutes to actually make the powerpoint, 45 minutes to search all the possible synonyms of RESILIENCE BIG DATA AGILE INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION MACHINE LEARNING SHIT PISS CUM, 1 hour to actually present the document.
- 12:30: Sniff the powder left by the chalks on the blackboards. Duration: 30 minutes, that's a lot of chalk you need to snort.

13:00, LUNCH TIME. You get back to work not one minute sooner than 15.00

- 15:00, conference with the HR. You need to carefully analyze the quantity and quality of the farts emitted in the office for 2 hours at least
- 17:00 conference call, a project you were assigned to half a day ago has a server down.
The client sent two managers, three senior Java developers, the CEO, 5 employees -they know logs and mails from the last 5 months line by line-, 4 lawyers and a beheading teacher from ISIS.
On your side there are 3 external ucraininans for the maintenance, successors of the 3 (already dead) developers who put the process in place 4 years ago according to God knows which specifications. They don't understand a word of what is being said.
Then there's the assistant of the assistant of a manager from another project that has nothing to do with this one, a feces officer, a sys admin who is going to watch porn for the whole conference call and won't listen a word, two interns to make up a number and look like you're prepared. Current objective: survive. Duration: 2 hours and a half.
- 19:30, snort some more chalk for half an hour, preparing for the mail in which you explain the associate partner how because of the aforementioned conference call we're going to lose a maintenance contract worth 20 grands per month (and a law proceeding worth a number of dollars you can't even read) and you have no idea how could this happen
- 20:00, timesheet! Compile the weekly report, write what you did and how long did it take for each task. You are allowed to compile 8 hours per day, you worked at least 11 but nobody gives a shit. Duration: 30 minutes
- 20:30, update your consultant! Training course, "tasting cum and presenting its organoleptic properties to a client". Bearing with your job: none at all. Duration: 90 minutes, then there's half an hour of evaluating test where you'll copy the answers from a sheet given to you by a colleague who left 6 months ago.
- 22:30, CHANCE CARD! You have a new mail from the HR: you asked for a refund for a 3$ sandwich, but the receipt isn't there and they realized it with a 9 months delay. You need to find that wicked piece of paper. DURATION: 30 minutes. The receipt most likely doesn't even exist anymore and will be taken directly from your next salary.
- 23:00 you receive a message on Teams. It's the intern. It's very late but you're online and have to answer. There's an exception on a process which have been running for 6 years with no problems and nobody ever touches. The intern doesn't know what to do, but you wrote the specifications for the thing, 6 years ago, and everything MUST run tonight. You are not a technician and have no fucking clue about anyhing at all. 30 minutes to make sure it's something on our side and not on the client side, and in all that the intern is as useful as a confetto to wipe your ass. Once you're sure it's something on our side you need to search for the senior dev who received the maintenance of the project, call him and solve the problem.
It turns out a file in a shared folder nobody ever touches was unreachable 'cause one of your libraries left it open during the last run and Excel shown a warning modal while opening it; your project didn't like this last thing one bit. It takes 90 minutes to find the root of the problem, you solve it by rebooting one of your machines. It's 01:00.

You shower, watch yourself on the mirror and search for the line where your forehead ends and your hair starts. It got a little bit back from yesterday; the change can't be seen with the naked eye but you know it's there.

You cry yourself to sleep. Tomorrow is another day, but it's going to be exactly like today.

Around 27 hours at new customer location.

They had a server failure due to incompetence.

They had fired their own IT guy and called us 6 months later because the server stopped responding.

First diagnostic. 2 drives are dead in a raid 5 with one hot spare. Raid controller then proved to be broken once the disks was replaced.

Waiting for new raid controller and installing.

Backup non existing, no one changed dat tape during the 6 months without IT. The tape was just a transparent plastic band, no media left.

Raid config is stored in static ram on controller, no backup!

Several hours in tech support to find out how to rebuild raid config from existing disks.

Proves to be impossible to rebuild raid set due to some checksum failures.

More hours with support to enable some diagnostic read only mode to mirror low level content to external drive.

Then many more hours to copy parts of the tree until it gets an error, restart after that and go on.

In the end we got around 70% back.

During this time I manage to be in contact with the raid manufacturers all support centers, one in europe, one in the us and one in Taiwan, switching each time one if them closed for the night.

The customer later declined a steady support contract due to us being to expensive ;)

Some just don’t want to learn.

So yesterday I deployed a build on our release environment and i had added a new rest api end-point which I needed to test.. A heads up though, its written in java spring and the entire flow consisted of too many calls/returns from various other java & python services.. Also to make things worse, the entire deployment is a really cumbersome process as you need to copy the build from one box to another..

After like almost 4-5 hours of debugging, adding logs left right & center, crazy upload speeds (yaa this is sarcastic) and frustation at its peak, I found the issue..

There was an if condition that was checking for equality between an enum constant & an enum in a request aaaannnnnddd

*Drum roll

THE CONSTANT ENUM BELONGED TO THE WRONG PACKAGE HENCE ALWAYS EVALUATING TO FALSE... ALSO, BOTH THE ENUMS IN THE DIFFERENT PACKAGES ARE IDENTICAL... FUCCKKKKKKK MY LIFE

😑🔫

It was friday evening and almost everyone in office had left. I was assigned a bug related to some of my code changes. I called my senior to help me debug (has three years of experience, whereas me having only one year exp, who is also a very good friend of mine *always helps in debugging*).
So the code goes

switch (someEnum) {
case One:
doSomething()
// no break
case Two:
t.x = someEnum
break
case Three:
.....
}

I had recently added new enun One and was reciting the code logic to him as we were looking through code.
Him: Hey you haven't set t.x in case One. How did you miss that?
Me: No look, I haven't but a break on it. It will go ahead and set it in next case.
Him: What are you talking about? if the someEnun is One why would it execute Two case. Lets copy that line up there and try it locally.
Me: No no no wait. Are you saying that groovy doesn't need breaks in switch (Me being new to groovy but good with Java).
Him: Why would you need break in switch case even in Java?
Me: *stares at him*
Him: I'm going to execute a psvm right freaking now.
Me: *while he writes the psvm* Why did you think there were breaks in switch in any code?
Him: Shut up. *writes psvm code cursing me everywhere*
*executes code*
No way. Really??
Me: Tell me why do you think are there breaks in switch.
Him: I though they were to get you out of switch block and not execute the default block.
Me: So were you coding switch until now without breaks?
Him: I don't know man. I'm starting to doubt all the switches I have ever written.
Me: Anyway that's not the problem, so moving on.
*a while later*
Him: If a interviewer would ask me how would you rate yourself in Java. I would be like "Well I worked on various projects for 3 years in Java, but didnt know why we put breaks in switch. So you figure it out yourself."

One of the best moments in office.

Back at highschool me and a friend were transferring movies from one USB to another, and my friend left some movies on the computer.

IT guys walks in and confronts us about the movies, where we thought we'd get in trouble, guess what he says next...

Hey guys I see you have some movies, well if you want you can copy some of the movies from my collection! LOL

Best part about the covid19 manufactured crisis?
Liquor stores deliver. Worst part about liquor stores delivering? Needing to use their shoddy websites.

I've been using a particular store (Total Wines) since they're cheaper than the rest and have better selection; it's quite literally a large warehouse made to look like a store.

Their website tries really hard to look professional, too, but it's just not. It took me two days to order, and not just from lack of time -- though from working 14 hour days, that's a factor.

Signing up was difficult. Your username is an email address, but you can't use comments because the server 500s, making the ajax call produce a wonderfully ambiguous error message. It also fades the page out like it's waiting on something, but that fade is on top of the error modal too. Similar error with the password field, though I don't remember how I triggered it.

Signing up also requires agreeing to subscribe to their newsletter. it's technically an opt-in, but not opting-in doesn't allow you to proceed. Same with opting-in to receiving a text notification when your order is ready for pickup -- you also opt-in to reciving SMS spam.

Another issue: After signing up, you start to navigate through the paginated product list. Every page change scrolls you to the exact middle of the next page. Not deliberatly; the UI loads first, and the browser gets as close as it can to your previous position -- which was below that as the pagination is at the bottom -- and then the products populate after. But regardless of why, there is no worse place to start because now you must scroll in both directions to view the products. If it stayed at the very bottom, it would at least mean you only need to scroll upwards to look at everything on the page. Minor, but increasingly irritating.

Also, they have like 198 pages of spirits alone because each size is unique entry. A 50ml, 350ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1000ml, and 1750ml bottle of e.g. Tito's vodka isn't one product, it's six. and they're sorted seemingly randomly. I think it's by available stock, looking back.

If you fancy a product, you can click on it for a detail page. Said detail page lists the various sizes in a dropdown, but they're not sorted correctly either, and changing sizes triggers a page reload, which leads to another problem:

if you navigate to more than a few pages within a 10 or so second window, the site accuses you of using browser automation. No captcha here, just a "click me for five seconds" button. However, it (usually) also triggers the check on every other tab you have open after its next nagivation.

That product page also randomly doesn't work. I haven't narrowed it down, but it will randomly decide to start failing, and won't stop failing for hours. It renders the page just fine, then immediately replaces it with a blank page. When it's failing, the only way to interact with the page is a perfectly-timed [esc], which can (and usually does) break all other page functionality, too. Absolutely great when you need to re-add everything from a stale copy of your signed-out cart living in another tab. More on that later. And don't forget to slow down to bypass the "browser automation" check, too!

Oh, and if you're using container tabs, make sure to open new tabs in the SAME container, as any request from the same IP without the login cookie will usually trigger that "browser automation" response, too.

The site also randomly signs you out, but allows you to continue amassing your cart. You'd think this is a good thing until you choose to sign in again... which empties your cart. It's like they don't want to make a sale at all.

The site also randomly forgets your name, replacing it with "null." My screen currently says "Hello, null". Hello, cruft!

It took me two days to order.
Mostly from lack of time, as i've been pulling 14 hour shifts lately trying to get everything done. but the sheer number of bugs certainly wasted most of what little time i had left. Now I definitely need a drink.

But maybe putting up with all of this is worthwhile because of their loyalty program? Apparently if you spend $500, you can take $5 off your next purchase! Yay! 1%! And your points expire! There are three levels; maybe it gets better. Level zero is for everyone; $0 requirement. There are also levels at $500 and $2500. That last one is seriously 5x more than the first paid level. and what does it earn you? A 'free' magazine subscription, 'free' classes (they're usually like $20-$50 iirc), and a 'free' grab bag (a $2.99 value!) twice per month. All for spending $2500. What a steal. It reminds me of Candy Crush's 3-star system where the first two stars are trivial, and the third is usually a difficult stretch goal. But here it's just thinly-veiled manipulation with no benefit.

I can tell they're employing some "smarketing" people with big ideas (read: stolen mistakes), but it's just such a fail.

The whole thing is a fail.

Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.

When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.

I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.

At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.

At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.

I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.

And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

I am much too tired to go into details, probably because I left the office at 11:15pm, but I finally finished a feature. It doesn't even sound like a particularly large or complicated feature. It sounds like a simple, 1-2 day feature until you look at it closely.

It took me an entire fucking week. and all the while I was coaching a junior dev who had just picked up Rails and was building something very similar.

It's the model, controller, and UI for creating a parent object along with 0-n child objects, with default children suggestions, a fancy ui including the ability to dynamically add/remove children via buttons. and have the entire happy family save nicely and atomically on the backend. Plus a detailed-but-simple listing for non-technicals including some absolutely nontrivial css acrobatics.

After getting about 90% of everything built and working and beautiful, I learned that Rails does quite a bit of this for you, through `accepts_nested_params_for :collection`. But that requires very specific form input namespacing, and building that out correctly is flipping difficult. It's not like I could find good examples anywhere, either. I looked for hours. I finally found a rails tutorial vide linked from a comment on a SO answer from five years ago, and mashed its oversimplified and dated examples with the newer documentation, and worked around the issues that of course arose from that disasterous paring.

like.
I needed to store a template of the child object markup somewhere, yeah? The video had me trying to store all of the markup in a `data-fields=" "` attrib. wth? I tried storing it as a string and injecting it into javascript, but that didn't work either. parsing errors! yay! good job, you two.

So I ended up storing the markup (rendered from a rails partial) in an html comment of all things, and pulling the markup out of the comment and gsubbing its IDs on document load. This has the annoying effect of preventing me from using html comments in that partial (not that i really use them anyway, but.)

Just.
Every step of the way on building this was another mountain climb.
* singular vs plural naming and routing, and named routes. and dealing with issues arising from existing incorrect pluralization.
* reverse polymorphic relation (child -> x parent)
* The testing suite is incompatible with the new rails6. There is no fix. None. I checked. Nope. Not happening.
* Rails6 randomly and constantly crashes and/or caches random things (including arbitrary code changes) in development mode (and only development mode) when working with multiple databases.
* nested form builders
* styling a fucking checkbox
* Making that checkbox (rather, its label and container div) into a sexy animated slider
* passing data and locals to and between partials
* misleading documentation
* building the partials to be self-contained and reusable
* coercing form builders into namespacing nested html inputs the way Rails expects
* input namespacing redux, now with nested form builders too!
* Figuring out how to generate markup for an empty child when I'm no longer rendering the children myself
* Figuring out where the fuck to put the blank child template markup so it's accessible, has the right namespacing, and is not submitted with everything else
* Figuring out how the fuck to read an html comment with JS
* nested strong params
* nested strong params
* nested fucking strong params
* caching parsed children's data on parent when the whole thing is bloody atomic.
* Converting datetimes from/to milliseconds on save/load
* CSS and bootstrap collisions
* CSS and bootstrap stupidity
* Reinventing the entire multi-child / nested params / atomic creating/updating/deleting feature on my own before discovering Rails can do that for you.

Just.
I am so glad it's working.
I don't even feel relieved. I just feel exhausted.

But it's done.
finally.

and it's done well. It's all self-contained and reusable, it's easy to read, has separate styling and reusable partials, etc. It's a two line copy/paste drop-in for any other model that needs it. Two lines and it just works, and even tells you if you screwed up.

I'm incredibly proud of everything that went into this.
But mostly I'm just incredibly tired.

Time for some well-deserved sleep.

Professor wants to copy code on his laptop (with beamer)
-selects code
-moves mouse-pointer to top left
-clicks on 'file'
-clicks on 'copy'
-moves cursor to desired destination
-moves mouse-pointer to top left
-clicks on 'file'
-clicks on 'paste'

Man why do have to show us how shitty your trackpad is and bother us with 5min of copying, when you could use Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V?

OMFG I don't even know where to start..
Probably should start with last week (as this is the first time I had to deal with this problem directly)..

Also please note that all packages, procedure/function names, tables etc have fictional names, so every similarity between this story and reality is just a coincidence!!

Here it goes..

Lat week we implemented a new feature for the customer on production, everything was working fine.. After a day or two, the customer notices the audit logs are not complete aka missing user_id or have the wrong user_id inserted.
Hm.. ok.. I check logs (disk + database).. WTF, parameters are being sent in as they should, meaning they are there, so no idea what is with the missing ids.

OK, logs look fine, but I notice user_id have some weird values (I already memorized most frequent users and their ids). So I go check what is happening in the code, as the procedures/functions are called ok.

Wow, boy was I surprised.. many many times..
In the code, we actually check for user in this apps db or in case of using SSO (which we were) in the main db schema..
The user gets returned & logged ok, but that is it. Used only for authentication. When sending stuff to the db to log, old user Id is used, meaning that ofc userid was missing or wrong.

Anyhow, I fix that crap, take care of some other audit logs, so that proper user id was sent in. Test locally, cool. Works. Update customer's test servers. Works. Cool..

I still notice something off.. even though I fixed the audit_dbtable_2, audit_dbtable_1 still doesn't show proper user ids.. This was last week. I left it as is, as I had more urgent tasks waiting for me..

Anyhow, now it came the time for this fuckup to be fixed. Ok, I think to myself I can do this with a bit more hacking, but it leaves the original database and all other apps as is, so they won't break.
I crate another pck for api alone copy the calls, add user_id as param and from that on, I call other standard functions like usual, just leave out the user_id I am now explicitly sending with every call.
Ok this might work.

I prepare package, add user_id param to the calls.. great, time to test this code and my knowledge..

I made changes for api to incude the current user id (+ log it in the disk logs + audit_dbtable_1), test it, and check db..
Disk logs fine, debugging fine (user_id has proper value) but audit_dbtable_1 still userid = 0.

WTF?! I go check the code, where I forgot to include user id.. noup, it's all there. OK, I go check the logging, maybe I fucked up some parameters on db level. Nope, user is there in the friggin description ON THE SAME FUCKING TABLE!!
Just not in the column user_id...

WTF..Ok, cig break to let me think..

I come back and check the original auditing procedure on the db.. It is usually used/called with null as the user id. OK, I have replaced those with actual user ids I sent in the procedures/functions. Recheck every call!! TWICE!! Great.. no fuckups. Let's test it again!
OFC nothing changes, value in the db is still 0. WTF?! HOW!?

So I open the auditing pck, to look the insides of that bloody procedure.. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!
Instead of logging the p_user_sth_sth that is sent to that procedure, it just inserts the variable declared in the main package..
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?! Did the 'new guy' made changes to this because he couldn't figure out what is wrong?! Nope, not him. I asked the CEO if he knows anything.. Noup.. I checked all customers dbs (different customers).. ALL HAD THIS HARDOCED IN!!! FORM THE FREAKING YEAR 2016!!! O.o

Unfuckin believable.. How did this ever work?!

Looks like at the begining, someone tried to implement this, but gave up mid implementation.. Decided it is enough to log current user id into BLABLA variable on some pck..
Which might have been ok 10+ years ago, but not today, not when you use connection pooling.. FFS!!

So yeah, I found easter eggs from years ago.. Almost went crazy when trying to figure out where I fucked this up. It was such a plan, simple, straight-forward solution to auditing..

If only the original procedure was working as it should.. bloddy hell!!

I am not a front end developer. Don't have the skill set, but I am learning. Work assigns me an "easy" task of modifying someone else's angular code(with all those <div> tags) to change some functionality. If it was well formatted, easy shit.

WHY THE FUCK DID THE PREVIOUS FUCKER INDENT LIKE THEY HATE ME? PARENT TAGS ARE FARTHER OUT THAN CHILDREN TAGS. SOME OF THE TAGS ARE 10 TABS FROM THE LEFT, WHILE THEIR CHILD IS ONLY 2. IN ADDITION, ALL THEIR CODE IS COPY PASTED FROM OTHER FILES, REFERENCES CONTROLLERS FROM OTHER PARTS OF THE CODE IT DOESNT NEED!

I am tempted to kill it with fire, find the person who wrote it(on a different continent), kill them, and then rewrite the whole thing in a language I am still learning. FUCK!

In the 1990s code editors on the Mac could insert the omitted function prototypes into a header file with one command; and even automatically keep the header declaration updated when you changed the source definition (name, parameters, etc)

Today in Xcode you have to copy and paste the stupid function header definition from the source code into the header file. What happens if you leave the "{" that got copied accidentally? OMFUCKING LORD, it triggers all sorts of erroneous errors in all the **source code** files where it is included instead of the header with the stray "{"

I started to question whether nor not I knew C, if gravity worked, if the sun would come up. I wasted a day of dicking around in StackOverflow trying to chase down all these insane error messages which make no sense in Xcode.

I just **happened** to see at the bottom of one of the source files, after all the erroneous error, a very important error:

"};" Expected

So I started deleting code from the bottom up in this source file, same error every time. Got to the point where the includes were all that was left.

FUCK YOU XCODE and the hacks that designed that horrendous piece of shit

Xcode is only free if your time is worth absolutely nothing.

In my unenlightened youth, when programming was a module in my college diploma that didn't seem to be taking me where I wanted to go, I had a couple of guys guy in my class that could arguably be the weird ones.

Jonny, although he asserted that he was to be called "Jonhty", whatever, we never did. He was pretty much top of the high school food chain and for some reason elected to study computer science, none of us was prepared to put up with his shit. He was always boasting about some fanciful claim or another, famously entering the classroom and exclaiming he'd "fucked an absolute milf" and seemed somewhat evasive about the answer, turns out he was 17 and she was 35, the age difference was greater than his own age. We burst out laughing. He would also turn up late and state the college bus was late (it wasn't I got the free bus every day, he'd just not got out his wanking chariot early enough).

One valentine's day we got him a card from a mysterious stranger which was accompanied by a package containing a cucumber and Vaseline, the inside of the card read "to assist you in the following request: please go fuck yourself".

Before you think we were being unduly harsh, we had a centre table where we'd be taught from with computers around the outer rim of the room. He'd come up behind people while at the centre desk, quietly press ctrl+P and slowly walk back to the printer. I saw him do it to my machine and I got to the printer first, to which he shouted "that's MY work" which was amusing because unbeknownst to him I had put headers on all my documents so he really didn't have an answer for why my name was at the top of every page.

To top it all off he had dead eyes, there didn't appear to be much going on but the rent, there was no spark of intelligent life, and while I thought it, I never said it out loud, but other students did and I had to agree. He was just copying his way to graduation. However, he ultimately didn't graduate when people refused to allow him to copy.

Another guy, Richard I believe his name was, which is just as well because he was a right dick. In the UK our word for white trash is "chav" (that's a very naïve explanation for it but that's another rant best left for "socialsciencerant") and he was an complete idiot who was gifted with more brain cells than he ever needed to use. He actually studied hard and got reasonable grades, probably on par with me, but he boasted about smoking weed all the time, he was forever playing dark side of the moon via his loud mp3 player. I kinda left him alone generally until he was high in class one time and while we we're watching a documentary he'd shake my chair and make a weird noise in my ear every few minutes, the first couple of times startled me, the remaining multi-dozen times pissed me off.

It all came to a head with this guy when I'd been hearing about his uninteresting bs on drugs, music and how best to spend my time ("you need to lighten up man, come round my house, take a joint and relax man", that sorta thing), well this guy walked like he was mid way through shitting himself so I personally think that perhaps he is too chilled. Anyway he's arguing with me and after the exchange of him making his point, me disagreeing and expecting the end of it, he made the mistake of saying two words to me:

"Listen, mate..."

And I had him in check mate.

"Listen, I ain't your fucking mate , I don't even like you, you're a disruptive annoying twat that thinks he knows it all, we're all 17, none of us know anything, so shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down and stop boring me with your drugs, I ain't interested, and for the record I think pink Floyd ruined prog rock!"

He looked at me with sad puppy dog eyes, and started with the "but, why?", However I was interrupted and had to leave the class for unrelated reasons, I returned to be told he'd put safety pins up right on my chair so I'd sit on them, and mutual friends who TD me I'd been cruel and that he doesn't was hurt, so I should apologize, he overheard and said he was sorry for bring a bit of a dick.

However, you just know when you don't get on with someone? Yeah, that. So I said I wasn't sorry for what I said, for while it was harsh, I am not his mate, nor did I want to be his mate and that was all I had to say on the subject, and that if he wants to take offensive to a nobody not liking him then he's in for a very rough time in life.

Unsurprisingly I don't keep in touch with anyone from college!

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

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

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

Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer

Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....

Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while

But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...

The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm

He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.

I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.

Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.

My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"

I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)

He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)

Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.

Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.

I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.

Am really Fed up with it all

I've got a HDD, gotta look for any data left on it. I don't need a 1:1 copy of the drive to determine if any data is even there still, and i'm also strapped for space, so I threw together a little 20-line or so Python script to skip over large amounts of empty space so I only have to sift through what little it finds to see if anything's left at all. I wrote it, ran it... and it took a while. Too long. My SSD was floored and RAM was full for no reason. I double-checked my code...

device.seek(0)
device_size = len(device.read())

If you don't get it, this would've tried to load the ENTIRE DRIVE'S CONTENTS into RAM before giving the length. The drive's 128GB or so. That's not happening.

I'm a fucking idiot.

EDIT:
This is what this was for. This ain't ext4. What in the fuck...?

4th grade. My parents left for the night and got a babysitter for me and my younger siblings. The babysitter showed me a game she likes in IE. You could make an account, raise a digital pet, a "neopet," play flash games for points to buy items from other users who listed them in their own stores that had custom css/html, including bg music. This was the first time I had really witnessed what the web could look like. Animated tiled gif bgs really amazed me so I took to google with which I discovered sites where one could copy css and html snippets for themes. I stored each new html tag I discovered via w3cschools.com in a powerpoint where the snippets I found were pasted somewhere randomly in the ppt. From there I learned html, CSS, and a billion other things. To date I've made websites, apps with several langs in win/Linux/osx/Android (but not ios yet). I've managed servers, and databases , and DNS records. I've in even ran website with 100k requests a day.

About 3 years ago, my girlfriend had this laptop that she got from her University. She had to give the laptop back to get reset, but didn't want to lose all of her data on it, and a backup would be around 750GB.

So I suggested that I would backup the laptop (was thinking to just dd an image and go from there). So I plugged in my mobile USB and external hard drive, and started the imaging process. Given the amount of data and setup, the process should have taken about 5hours. So we left it there for 5h.

Please be mindful that at this stage in my life I knew very little about boot processes, oses, and hardware.

5h after. The laptop screen is black and it ain't responsive. Not sure what happened, the dd process was completed, but the laptop refused to boot into windows. Tried a number of boot tools, and spent a crazy night hacking at the machine. But the university had some of sort of fail safe to not allow anyone to boot into windows if someone opened bios without entering a password. Whatever this was, I spent over 12h trying to either open mount the windows partition with a Ubuntu usb or mount the corrupt dd image on my laptop.

Long story short, after throwing at it a number of fixes. I was able to mount the image, copy out all of her personal data, and reinstall a new version of Windows on her laptop. The university didnt understand why the laptop was already reset. She still mentions this to me anytime I want to take a "custom approach" to software lol

Gosh only Idiots out there...

Told my coworker, to install the tomar manager on server 1. Same easiest way for him just copy it from server 2. He was already in console of the first... then I see that he opened winscp, navigating via gui to the directory miss clicked a few times. Tried drag and drop the folder to desktop. Get notified that he didn't installed the plugin. Dragged it to another folder on his pc in winscp. Started new session of winscp for the other server. And so on. I said after he started the first winscp that the command line would be 1000x faster.
Meanwhile I wrote the command for this torture on a sticky note and left the room. That wastes too much time of 2 ppls. Good old days when the most people's know how to use a console.

Does most memorable in a bad way count? 🤔

He left almost 2 years ago..or even more.. left a bunch of bugs and logical fuckups for me to fix.. some already fixed, some still lingering there..

I want to not blame him for everything, since we lack proper code review protocols and all.. but I've asked on several occasions if he understands the problem and what must be done..and the answer was always yes..results, after I got time to check up on him, the code he wrote was most probably copy pasted from stack overflow or somewhere else.. butchered in any and every way possible..

And of course already checked in to TFS.. along with bunch of files that were not even changed (he didn't bother to check that and exclude them) + a bunch of files from other projects... Told him to not do that on several occasions too, but he still managed to fuck things up this way.. leaving all the uncommented debugger; crap and alerts in the js files..

On one occasion I was working on new GUI..api part I already finished..got the order from above to delegate this to him as it is not much he can fuck up so I could focus on more important & complex stuff..
Maybe additional 4h of work + testing for everything..
I show him the prepared files, one controller, one view..explained what parts of code goes where etc.. a little short of writing everything myself.. Ask if he understands what needs to be done & how and told him if he has any problems/questions to ask me asap..
Said he understood what needs to be done.. after a day or two he asks me why something is not workig as expected.. I check the files, correct initialization was commented out and all the code was stuffed in the view file.. Took him another day to move the code to proper files.. Not sure about the possible bugs left there as the client later decided that they will not be using this..

I later found out that years of C# experience on his CV was actually a school course.. he didn't even know why the changes on api are not showing up..because he didn't know that he has to build the code..

I mean, if he was honest when asked about experience with .net, we would've taken a month or two to just explain everything from the start..

But as he didn't and based on his CV (much more experience with .net than me) and 'I understand everything' attitude from the start I assumed he knows WTF was he doing..

Boy was I wrong..

He was also more interested in how much I get payed and if I have a company phone etc..than actually doing his job.. I fucking hate chit chat, and this..well.. he didn't get the hints that this is in no way appropriate to ask.. I've told him that if he has problems with his pay and bonuses that he should talk to the management and not me about this..and that I'm only interested in his actual work and progress..

So yeah, I'll definitely be remembering this guy till the day I die..

Sorry, long since my last post...

I have quit my job recently at DERP & CO.. The level of anxiety was already somewhat of medical severity.

For months I had been in a project that not only did not progress, but that it was getting worst day by day.

A bit of Context

November: "Dev, junior anon needs you to help him on the SHIT project because they are running out of time, it is mainly doing unit tests."
Well, the code was a mess, there was a LOT of copy paste and it was all bad quality (we talk about methods with complexities between 80 and 120 according to SONAR QUBE).
Dev: "Anon, you know this is wrong, right?"
Anon: "Why? it works"
Dev: after long explanation.
Anon: "Oh well, yes, from now on I will take it into account." And he did it / try his best.

Dev does the unit tests and do extra work outside of the reach of the sprint (y than i mean work after hours, classic) and alerts the boss of the mess.

December: After a project of approximately 6 or 8 months of development, the boss discovers that the junior anon have been doing everything wrong and/or with poor quality (indicating that throughout the whole development the quality of the code was NEVER checked nor the functionality).

Boss: "This is a shit. Dev, you have to correct all the errors and warnings marked on sonar", which are around 1200 between smelling code, high risk errors, etc.

Dev fixes something like 900 bugs... lots of hours...
Boss: "This still is all wrong, we have to redo it. We will correct the errors leaving something stable and we will make a new repository with everything programmed as it should be, with quality and all"
- 900 corrections later, now are irrelevant -
Boss: "Dev, you will start to redo it, anon is out on other project. First you must leave the existing one working properly"
Dev: "ok ..."

January: How can I correct the mess if the client asks for more things. I am just fixing the mess, doing new functionalities, and when I have free time (outside the work) I try to advance the new repository, poorly I must say because burntout.

Boss: "Everything should be arranged at the end of January, so that you can redo everything well in February."
I can't handle everything, it starts to fall further behind. Junior Anon quits the job.

February: Big Bad Bugs in the code appear and practically monopolize the month (the code is very coupled with itself and touching in one place sometimes meant breaking other stuff).

Boss: "It can't be, you've been with this since January and you haven't even started correcting this mess in the new repo"

Dev: "It is that between the new things that are requested and the bugs I cannot put myself with that"
Boss: "Do not worry, you will be helped by random dev if you needed. SPOILER ALERT: random dev is allways bussy. Not made up bussy, He had a lot of work by itself, but it can't help me the way I need it.

High anxiety levels, using free time to try to reduce the work left and gradually losing the taste for develop.

March: So far, not only do they add new things day and day, but now they want to modify things that were already "ok", add new ones and refactor everything in a new repo. I just did not see an end of this nonsense.
Dev breaks, the doctor says it's anxiety, so I just know what I have to do.
Dev: "I quit my job"
Cool Manager: "Damn, why?"
Explain everithig
Cool Manager: "Do you want to try if I can change you to other project or anotjer scope on the same project?"
Dev: "Thanks, but no Thanks. I need to stop for a while".

End. sry for long sad post and maybe poor use of English (?) Not my native language.

I saw that a co-worker had left their office email open on their machine, so I typed out a huge hate mail of the upper management and then announced resignation for the poor work culture that the company provided. Then I edited the email to be a bit more nice. I added some praise about the company - about having the opportunity to work in the company and for the amazing colleagues (and mentioned my own name) in the first paragraph. To close the email, I wrote :
"PS : This is what happens if you leave your machine open for the office to do as they please"

I first sent out a copy to myself (as proof) with the cover :
" Hey, check this out, I'm sending this out to everyone@company.com in a while. I want to let you know that none of this is directed at you. You've been an amazing colleague and mentor. You've been my inspiration from the start; from the time I joined the team. I'm honoured that I got to work with you. I hope we can remain friends as we are now, meet up once in a while outside work and discuss life. "

And then I put the actual email up in the compose window with the to field addressed to everyone@company.com. I didn't hit send.

Funnily, enough, this person never found out that it was me who actually typed out the whole email for another 1.5 months. They probably looked into their Sent folder later on when they saw the email that I sent to myself. They replied to it saying :
"Thank you for not sending out that email that day. I've been very very extra careful (I didn't understand the "very, very, extra" part) since that day"
I replied that it was only to prove a point and that I thought the point was well conveyed.

I had a good laugh that day. Since then, every time we crossed paths, we had that look in our eyes that met and only the 2 of us understood.

To the front end dev that 'finished' his part of a web form with a Hundred pluss fields. You left every id, name, and label-for as 'first-name'.

I know it saves you time to copy paste and only change what's visible on the page, but FUUUUUUCK YOU!

Me trying to copy a file from pendrive to Hard disk.
Status- 45 seconds left...
Went to College, completed Bachelor, went to university, completed Masters, got married, had two children, got retired from job, returned to the same PC
Status- 45 Seconds left...

A (work-)project i spent a year on will finally be released soon. That's the perfect opportunity to vent out all the rage i built up during dealing with what is the javascript version of a zodiac letter.

Everything went wrong with the beginning. 3 people were assigned to rewrite an old flash-application. Me, A and B. B suggested a javascript framework, even though me and A never worked with more than jquery. In the end we chose react/redux with rest on the server, a classic.

After some time i got the hang of time, around that time B left and a new guy, C, was hired soon after that. He didn't know about react/redux either. The perfect start off to a burning pile of smelly code.

Today this burning pile turned into a wasteland of code quality, a house of cards with a storm approaching, a rocket with leaks ready to launch, you get the idea.

We got 2 dozen files with 200-500 loc, each in the same directory and each with the same 2 word prefix which makes finding the right one a nightmare on its on. We have an i18n-library used only for ~10 textfields, copy-pasted code you never know if it's used or not, fetch-calls with no error-handling, and many other code smells that turn this fire into a garbage fire. An eternal fire. 3 months ago i reduced the linter-warnings on this project to 1, now i can't keep count anymore.

We use the reactabular-module which gives us headaches because IT DOESN'T DO WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO DO AND WE CANT USE IT WELL EITHER. All because the client cant be bothered to have the table header scroll along with the body. We have methods which do two things because passing another callback somehow crashed in the browser. And the only thing about indentation is that it exists. Copy pasting from websites, other files and indentation wars give the files the unique look that make you wonder if some of the devs hides his whitespace code in the files.

All of this is the result of missing time, results over quality and the worst approach of all, used by A: if A wants an ui-component similar to an existing one, he copies the original and edits he copy until it does what he wants. A knows about classes, modules, components, etc. Still, he can't bring himself to spend his time on creating superclasses... his approach gives results much faster

Things got worse when A tried redux, luckily A prefers the components local state. WHICH IS ANOTHER PROBLEM. He doesn't understand redux and loads all of the data directly from the server and puts it into the local state. The point of redux is that you don't have to do this. But there are only 1 or 2 examples of how this practice hurt us yet, so i'm gonna have to let this slide. IF HE AT LEAST WOULD UPDATE THE DATA PROPERLY. Changes are just sent to the server and then all of the data is re-fetched. I programmed the rest-endpoints to return the updated objects for a very reason. But no, fuck me.

I've heard A decided (A is the teamleader) to use less redux on the next project and use a dedicated rest-endpoints for every little comoutation you COULD DO WITH REDUX INSTEAD. My will is broken and just don't want to work with this anymore.

There are still various subpages that cant f5 because the components cant handle an empty redux state in the beginning, but to be honest i don't care anymore. Lets hope the client will never find out, along with the "on error nothing happens"-bugs. The product should've been shipped last week, but thanks to mandatory bugfixes the release was postponed to next week. Then the next project starts...

Please give me some tips to keep up code quality over time, i cant take this once more.
I'm also aware that i could've done more, talking A and C about code style, prettifying the code, etc. Etc. But i was busy putting out my out fires, i couldn't kill much of the other fires which in the end became a burning building (a perfect metaphor for this software)

I was waiting in the lobby of a recuiting place, hearing all their speeches. All super generic stuff, like "I looked at your resume and I have a bunch of cutting edge opportunities in the pipeline that are going fast, which I think you are a perfect fit for!" Which I don't argue is always invalid, just after hearing the same copy and paste speech, you start to wonder.

I even saw a few stand up and wave their hands around while trying to make a meh position sound like the latest golden egg.

I left with a feeling that recuiters would be a great inspiration for a "Wolf of Wall street" styled movie.

When I was in 11th class, my school got a new setup for the school PCs. Instead of just resetting them every time they are shut down (to a state in which it contained a virus, great) and having shared files on a network drive (where everyone could delete anything), they used iServ. Apparently many schools started using that around that time, I heard many bad things about it, not only from my school.
Since school is sh*t and I had nothing better to do in computer class (they never taught us anything new anyway), I experimented with it. My main target was the storage limit. Logins on the school PCs were made with domain accounts, which also logged you in with the iServ account, then the user folder was synchronised with the iServ server. The storage limit there was given as 200MB or something of that order. To have some dummy files, I downloaded every program from portableapps.com, that was an easy way to get a lot of data without much manual effort. Then I copied that folder, which was located on the desktop, and pasted it onto the desktop. Then I took all of that and duplicated it again. And again and again and again... I watched the amount increate, 170MB, 180, 190, 200, I got a mail saying that my storage is full, 210, 220, 230, ... It just kept filling up with absolutely zero consequences.
At some point I started using the web interface to copy the files, which had even more interesting side effects: Apparently, while the server was copying huge amounts of files to itself, nobody in the entire iServ system could log in, neither on the web interface, nor on the PCs. But I didn't notice that at first, I thought just my account was busy and of course I didn't expect it to be this badly programmed that a single copy operation could lock the entire system. I was told later, but at that point the headmaster had already called in someone from the actual police, because they thought I had hacked into whatever. He basically said "don't do again pls" and left again. In the meantime, a teacher had told me to delete the files until a certain date, but he locked my account way earlier so that I couldn't even do it.
Btw, I now own a Minecraft account of which I can never change the security questions or reset the password, because the mail address doesn't exist anymore and I have no more contact to the person who gave it to me. I got that account as a price because I made the best program in a project week about Java, which greatly showed how much the computer classes helped the students learn programming: Of the ~20 students, only one other person actually had a program at the end of the challenge and it was something like hello world. I had translated a TI Basic program for approximating fractions from decimal numbers to Java.
The big irony about sending the police to me as the 1337_h4x0r: A classmate actually tried to hack into the server. He even managed to make it send a mail from someone else's account, as far as I know. And he found a way to put a file into any account, which he shortly considered to use to put a shutdown command into autostart. But of course, I must be the great hacker.

Long long time ago when recharge coupons we a thing, I used to try out more codes in the series and waste my time. After failing a lot over this, I started trying out different USSD codes to see what other stuff is out there. This got me to stumble upon facebook and twitter on USSD. I'm not sure now but, twitter was probably *515# from my carrier.

Facebook. I remember chatting for quite a long period using this. Very slow and limited yet, fun. The USSD message expires within ~60secs. so you have to type the chat message before that or you lose everything you typed. The phone was no smartphone that would allow me to copy the text from the USSD input. On top of that panic, was a character limit to these messages. I remember hitting send while being midway through a message just so I don't lose what I typed, on a T-9 keyboard. Still miss those!

The person on the other side would receive a half message due to this, and would start replying without any patience, to which I panicked as now there's a new thing to respond to, and a half message which I'm waiting to complete.

Later over the weekend when I was allowed to visit the cyber cafe for an hour or two with 15-30 INR, reading the chat threads, being able to use the five sticker packs:) and thus continuing on a computer was fun. But, as the time at the cafe expires, I had to immediately shut off my session or I'd be charged more. Thus, I was left in the middle of a conversation again, and had to continue over USSD.

Using social media without any internet like this was quite fun in a weird way. If I get a new message, I'd get a USSD alert, and then an sms if I didn't reply in some 10-15mins!

This had all the features like like and comment. Friend requests too. For the posts in a "timeline" which was new and fancy in those days, all you see is the caption of a post which also gets truncated quite a bit as USSD also has to show it's options like:
1. Like
2. Comment
3. Next Post
4. Main Menu

This was around '13 or '14 I guess. After which I later got my first computer- a laptop. Anyways, the tactile feel of pressing the buttons on a T-9 keypad is nostalgic to me. 😅 And if you were a pro at texting, u must hv used shrtcts lyk dis too w/ emojis lyk :-) <3

Windows being like... "60secs left! Nonono wait it's 50mins! Aaah i wanted to say 10. It's definitely 5 now, i am sure this time, 16 is correct!"

God damn it stop wasting computation power for this boolshit and copy faster instead!!!

Question for vim veterans:

I am fairly confident with vim. I know a couple of commands like delete line, delete under cursor, copy, paste, undo and stuff like that.

So in command mode it's hjkl to move the cursor, which is a good idea because I won't have to move my right palm to the arrow keys.

However, in insert mode, if I needed to move the cursor, I would still have to move my left palm to the esc key in order to use hjkl. Why not just use the arrow keys then?

I left class early today

I understand me and this kid are both students and both of us are still learning. But when he asks me to help him solve an issue I fucking expect him to listen then try what I’m saying unless he knows for certain that my idea won’t work

I don’t expect him to start ignoring the person HE asked for help to try things on his own and end up DELETING THE FUCKING GRADLE FOLDER because the 1.5.1 version of Android studio my teacher makes us use told him gradle was corrupt

I also didn’t expect him to tell the professor I didn’t tell him not to And them end up with the professor fucking assigning me to help him fix everything even though the kid won’t listen to me anyway refusing to just copy he java and XML to a new project so I grabbed my stuff and left Fuck that bullshit

I understand we’re both students and in the grand scheme of things we’re both idiots. But when I’m asked for help I expect the person to at least listen and not do something absolutely stupid like delete something we don’t understand how to fix

Now I’m making common sense a requirement to ask me for help I don’t need any extra stress I’ll deal with the consequences of walking out tomorrow But I can’t say I regret it

I am sick of misrotated videos.

Sometimes, the phone camera software saves a video vertically because the user hits "record" before the software has detected that the user is holding the smartphone horizontally, because the software stupidly launches in vertical orientation by default.

So the software wants the user to wait until it has finally detected horizontal orientation, which causes the user to miss out on a moment.

How about the camera software actually saves the video in the orientation it was recorded in for the most time, rather than only the beginning of the video?

If I can think of this idea, billion-dollar companies surely can.

In the meantime, misrotated videos can be fixed using this ffmpeg command on Linux or Windows:

ffmpeg -i input_file.mp4 -metadata:s:v rotate="0" -c copy output_file.mp4

And if the phone was held with the home button to the left side:

ffmpeg -i input_file.mp4 -metadata:s:v rotate="180" -c copy output_file.mp4

This solution is superior compared to using -vf (video filters) because it only touches the metadata of the video. No re-encoding. This means no quality loss and no CPU/GPU power needed to process the video again. It just passes through.

My first job was 3 years ago.
I was tasked to create feature updates for a referral system.
There were two programmers in that project , both had left the company before I started.
There left no documentation whatsoever. They gave me a copy of user manual as my guide. HAHA!
Half of the code was in code igniter framework(wasn't even familiar with it then), the other half was hard coded.
It was a total nightmare. Wish I had the guts to call it quits then and there. XD

There was a task to upgrade, refactor and rewrite azure functions project. It was assigned to guy who was about to leave the company. After 2 weeks at his last day at 16:50 he committed the changes. He literally copy pasted the old project into new file structure and left the building. FUCKING ASSHOLE.

I like how software is smart so I have to do things twice instead of once.

Automatically putting quotes works only if you put quotes and then paste inside it, the problem is I usually paste then put first quote and then need to remove second quote and put it on back and remove second quote from back.

Video start from where you left automatically fires and shows closing credits because you obviously want to see them.

Evaluate variable removes old evaluation because why you want old one when you have new.

Collapsing imports or functions in ide so you need to expand them all the time because who needs to look at functions when we have ai

AI models suggesting and adding meaningless annotations and code suggestions to distract me.

Randomly running some console command because I entered keyboard shortcut I don’t know even exists.

Literally every web browser address bar becomes advertising network instead of showing me history results.

Shadowing browsing history when you click back and forward button.

Search results are now buy results.

Suggesting me useless crap to watch because I watched one video in that topic.

Showing me 10 minutes videos as a solution to my problem where I want to find exact line of text to copy paste it. If I’m lucky I need to write text from video into my computer.

Stack overflow infinite loop of answered in #some-different-question

I think it’s about time for me to slowly retire from programming and software as a whole or switch to notepad because I don’t want to use this crap anymore.

Looks like software is now meant for entertainment and distraction instead of doing actual work where you need precise data and information.

Luckily if everything goes good I can retire soon and throw everything away for a while.

I want to torture very painfully anyone who uses Word to send me content expecting that their exact formatting can just be copy/pasted into any old CMS or web page quickly and easily because the press release is going out NOW and I only got this to you NOW so just quick copy/paste it onto the website and we're good to go, right? You can do that, right?

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO! I CANNOT! AND YOU LEFT TRACK CHANGES ON WHICH CARRIES OVER SPECIAL CHARACTERS THAT I HAVE TO REMOVE BY HAND BECAUSE MICROSOFT HIDES OR HAS REMOVED THE ABILITY TO TURN OFF TRACK CHANGES IN SHARED DOCUMENTS! AND YOU INCLUDED TABLES, WHICH I HAVE TO REBUILD BY HAND OR TURN INTO LISTS! YOU WENT TO UNIVERSITY AND NOBODY EVER TOLD YOU THAT YOU CAN'T PASTE DIRECTLY FROM WORD TO A WEBSITE AND HAVE EVERYTHING LOOK EXACTLY AS IT DID IN WORD? WHAT ARE YOU SOME KIND OF MORON?! IT'S BEEN OVER 30 YEARS SINCE THE WEB WAS INVENTED AND YOU STILL HAVEN'T FIGURED THIS OUT?!

At least I get to bill more time.

Background:
I graduated high school from a technical school. And my teacher asked me to come in a few times a week and assist (which I LOVE doing)

So they’re working with circuits and raspberry pi’s and when I can in they pointed out that there was a project they couldn’t get to work. So I had to look at it. Now I was not given the original it was one a student tried to copy in (like they were supposed to) but it was awful. All the indentation was even more off than the original and on top of that. The original and what I was given wouldn’t give an error code.. and so I had no idea what was happening so I just decided to try to fix the indentation and take out stuff that didn’t look right (what else was I supposed to do when I didn’t know where to start?) and while I was doing it another student started to try to fix it and it legit barely took 5 minutes and now my spirit and confidence is broken. I wasn’t petty I observed the result and congratulated him cause he deserved it. After I took the code and put it on my laptop and figured out it was an “inconsistent use of tabs and spaces” error which is fucking stupid and I’ve never seen that in python before so after I debugged that there wasn’t really anything left to debug. So I guess I somewhat redeemed myself but I still feel like shit

Omg fucking Microsoft Teams shit. Stop it with your auto pop op Emoji menu shit you utter cunts.

I just want to copy the bit of chat…not critique the fuck out of it

Why did our company sign up to this filthy mess? Cunt CTO taking backhanders…when he retires we will be left with this shit…what a wanker!

I'm finishing up the most depressing client engagement ever. Ultimately it all traces back to their worthless Expert Beginner EA who thinks he's a genius but can't write code. I don't mean that he's not great at it. It's some of the worst I've ever seen by a person in his position.

In the time I have left here I could do so much to help them clean this stuff up so that future developers could ramp up more easily and there wouldn't be tons of duplicate code.

But I've just given up. You can't help someone who thinks their code is perfect. I don't even bother suggesting stuff any more (like don't have two methods in a class - a "real" one and one for unit testing) because he gets mad or just says that's his "pattern."

If I have a useful improvement, first he'll want me to put all new code in some new library, which is fine as an end result but you don't start with putting single-use code in a library separate from where you're using it. You work with it for a while to see what's useful, what's not, and make changes. But, you see, he just loves making more libraries and calling them "frameworks."

He tells me what he wants me to name classes, and they have nothing to do with what the classes do. When you haven't done any development yet you don't even know what classes you're going to create. You start with something but you refactor and rename. It takes a special breed of stupid to think that you start with a name.

I've even caught the dude taking classes I've committed and copying and pasting them into their own library - a library with one class.

The last time we had to figure out how to do something new I told everyone up front: Don't waste time trying to figure out how you want to solve the problem. Just ask the EA what he wants you to do. Because whatever you come up with, he's going to reject it and come up with something stupid that revolves around adding stuff to his genius framework. And whatever he says you're going to do. So just skip to that.

So that's the environment. We don't write software to meet requirements. We write it to add to the framework so that the EA can turn around and say how useful the framework is.

Except it's not. The overhead for new developers to learn how to navigate his copy-pasted code, tons of inheritance, dead methods, meaningless names, and useless wrappers around existing libraries is massive. Whatever you need to do you could do in a few hours without his framework. Or you can spend literally a month modifying his framework to do the same thing. And half the time his code collapses so that dozens of applications built on his framework go down at once.

I get frameworks. They can be useful, but only if they serve your needs, not the other way around.

I've spent months disciplining myself not to solve problems and not to use my skills.

Good luck to those of you who actually work there. I am deeply sad for the visa worker I'm handing this off to. He's a nice guy and smart. If he was stupid then he wouldn't mind dragging this anchor behind him like an ox pulling a plow. Knowing the difference just makes it harder.

Things I wish I knew when I was younger:
- no matter how clean your teeth are, bad breath won't go away until you clean your tongue. Buy a tongue cleaner and use it after you brush your teeth
- whitening toothpastes don't work, while desensitizing ones work well.
- after you brush your teeth, spit but do NOT rinse!
- when brushing your teeth, keep the toothbrush angled 45 degrees. The bristle ends should touch the area where your gums meet your teeth.
- use sunscreen every morning.
- don't waste money on acne-treating products unless they contain salicylic acid, benzoyl peroxide, tretinoin or adapalene.
- if you want to lose weight, you have to eat MORE, not less. But, that “more” should be protein.
- showering every morning feels like “humanity restored” thing from Dark Souls. Also, clean your damn room and wash your damn windows.
- APS-C DSLR cameras make no sense. For their weight, you can get a full-frame camera, and for their price you can get an APS-C mirrorless cam that will be way lighter.
- If you want a damn thing, save up and buy that damn thing. Don't buy the alternative thing you don't want. You'll be asking “what if” till you either die or buy the original damn thing.
- people aren't replaceable, but many people can fit their designated role. Not being able to replace your ex-boyfriend with his exact copy doesn't mean no one else can be your boyfriend.
- try a MacBook & iPhone as soon as you can to check whether it's your thing or not, because if it is, oh boy are you in for a treat.
- added sugar is evil, but it's beneficial for the economy. It makes you fat, so you need a car, so you buy fuel. Also, you feel guilty because you're fat, so you buy diet products & things to compensate because you hate your reflection in the mirror. You also pay medical fees to treat your newly developed health problems, and you die a day before retirement. Everyone makes a buck on you eating added sugar but you.
- you can use the freshly removed sticker to remove the sticky residue left by that same sticker.
- static typing doesn't solve jack shit.

!!rant life toptags bottags
My tags seem to be okay. Let's go.
I'm 14. I live in a place where nobody smart lives, and the school I go to has no coders.
Last year, all my friends moved. The only friend I had left now hates me, simply because they yelled at me everyday and I yelled at them once.
I am in the middle of my exams. I also have the flu, but thankfully it's not the e-flu, otherwise you guys should prepare for 24/7 headaches.
Due to the medications I am taking, I'm half-asleep all the time, and I probably am messing up all of my grades.
My entire extended family is in India, and I go there 2 times a year. I miss them so much right now :(.
At the same as doing exams, I am trying to keep my laptop (primary) and PC (secondary, desk) configuration and setup approximately synchronized. In order to do that, I am setting up my dotfiles repository.
Except that all my laptop config (which works) is written horribly, and I need to rewrite it all.
At the same time, I have 3 other projects going on: An OS written in D, a source-based package management system written in D, a small website (not online), and a whatever's cooking in my mind at this moment.
Right now, I'm supposed to be studying for my French exam.
Instead, I'm here, typing this out on my phone.
I have a classmate in school who can type QWERTY at 80WPM. I'm learning Dvorak (Programmer's!) and my current speed is 33WPM, after about 2 months of half-hearted practise during work time and at school.
Sometimes, I look at the world we have here, and what we're doing to it, and I wish that sometimes we could simply be content with life. Let's just live, for once.
I find ~60 random songs in one go, simply by finding a song I know on YouTube and going to the 'Mix - <song>' playlist. I download them all (youtube-dl), and I listen to them. Sometimes, I find this little part in a song (Mackelmore & Ryan Lewis - Can't Hold Us beginning instrumentals, or Safe and Sound chorus instrumentals) that make me feel so happy I feel like all's good in the world. Then the song moves on and with it, my happiness.
I look at Wayland, and X, and I think - Why can't we have one way of doing things - a fixed interface to express anything, so that one common API exists for everything of that type? And I realise it's because they feel that they're missing something from the others. Perhaps it's a bug nobody's solved or functionality that's missing, and they think that they can do better than that. And I think - Well, that's stupid. Submit a fucking bug report or pull request instead of reinventing the wheel. And then I realise that all the programming I've ever done in my life IS simply reinventing the wheel. And some might say, "Well, that guy designed it with spokes and wood. I designed it with rubber and steel," but that doesn't work, because no matter what how you make it, it's just a wheel. They both do the same thing. Both have advantages and disadvantages, because nothing's perfect. We're not perfect because we all have agendas and wants and likes and dislikes and hates and disgusts and all kinds of other crap, and our DNA's not perfect because it manages to corrupt copy operations (which is basically why we die of old age, I think).
And now I've lost my train of thought and this is too large to scroll over so I'm just going to move on to the next topic. At this point (.), I have 1633 letters left.
I hate the fact that the world's become so used to QWERTY because of stuff that happened 100 years ago that Dvorak is enough of a security to stop most people from being able to physically use my laptop.
I don't understand why huge companies like Google want to know about me. What would you do with this information? Know how to take over my stuff when the corporation-opocalypse comes around? Why can't they leave me alone? Why do I have to flash a ROM onto my phone so that Google cannot track me? What do you want, Google?
I don't give a shit any more, so there's my megarant.
Before anybody else (aside from myself) tells me that this is too big, all these topics are related simply because my train of thought went this way. There's a connection between each of these things, but I just don't know what it is.
Goodnight, world. 666 is the number of characters I have left. So is 42, for that matter (thanks, Douglas Adams!). Goodbye.

So here I work with this colleague that , at first , had a reasonable résumé. Whatever.

Time goed by and he is just doing tickets, clicking left and right, the usual grind of a shitty monitoring system which I am working intensely on deprecating that shit. Anyhoo

The last few days it became apparent that his resume was basically a hot air cake and he knows basically nothing intrinsically.
As I have stated before in previous rants, "everyone was a noob once"... But this guy...

He wants to do "something with Ansible"... "Ok what do you want to do?" , I asked (and I regret to have asked).
He basically wants to write new files on targets. Easy enough, I show him how he could do it with playbooks, inventory and role just for demonstrating the entire chain.

This guy chanes everything up, thereby breaking host group assignment, he launchea it on ALL machines...

Luckily it's a harmless file, so dodged a bullet there.

But the real wtf ia that he did it with the root account for our systems, without understanding the difference between "authentication" and "authorization"...

I am now explaining him what the difference is and how he can be able to check it. I give him the commands literally! ( sudo -l -U <user>)

Manages to fucking open up each sudoer file in vim , mistype or whatever he did in an attempt to leave vim... Breaks sudo...

Now he tries to spin it in such a way that I have steered him to break things.

"Dude you just fucking failed a copy/paste and you did absolutely fuckall without understanding what you are doing, then splurge out accusations because you did it wrong!"

FML

DAMMIT WINDOWS! WHY EVERY TIME I DO A LENGTHY FILE UPLOAD OR BACKUP OR COPY OPERATION YOU GOTTA FREEZE THE HELL UP SO I HAVE TO RESTART AND TRY TO FIGURE OUT WHERE THINGS LEFT OFF?!

It’s like the Microsoft programmers wrote a function:

userDoingSomethingImportant {
reboot();
}

Our mascot for the commercial approach to a teight deadlined project. I even got a framed copy when I left 😃.

Some people are just inherently retards and there's nothing that can be done about it.

So this intern of mine (not really an intern because she is older than me but new to the field so whatever), is driving me nuts.

There's a file on cloud, she was given to refer during the initial training.

The current link is no longer accessible because whoever the fuck owned it has left or revoked the access.

So I ask her if she has a copy of the file because I want to refer it.

She replies saying:
"Can you share anither link, the current links shows some error"

Holy freaking lord. The keyword in my request was COPY. Why on this sweet sunny earth I'd ask you if the link worked and file was available!!!!

And she couldn't even comprehend that the error is about access. Just says SOME error.

I'll be spending next 2.5 hours reviewing her 1 week of work submissions (which has been ongoing since 3+ weeks now and should have taken 3 hours to finish).

This has got nothing to do with anyone's gender but all about my experience with them.

I had this boss once who called himself a sitting bull sometimes. He was about 60, an absolute dictator, strong right wing and building an aura of fear around him. He had this emberassing macho attitude which was especially delicate since he was a protective of the female ceo. He talked to everyone, colleagues, customers, partners like they where enemys and was extemely aggressive towards everyone. Meetings where extremly emberassing because he insulted everyone (except us devs), talked much bs an didn't let anyone else speak - including customers.

He was also paranoid af. Once he talked the ceo into firing a team lead he disliked. Before the guy got to know this, he called me, and wanted me to sneak in his office, copy everything from his computer in case he would destroy everything when I realized he's fired. As if everything relevant wasn't on GitHub anyway and is if the poor guy would be uprofessional as sitting bull.

The sitting bull lead the department like a ponzi scheme: He required constantly new projects with funding for some years to maintain the old ones and their piles of tech debt. Dev team grew and grew but every insider knew the bubble will explode at one point. One of the last projects was a partner project with another institution. Naturally he didn't want us to do anything for this project but use our man power to rescue older ones. One pm guy was employed fifty percent as ours and fifty at the partner. So while months passt by and we delivered absolute nothing but lame excuses, his other employer started to ask questions. At one point I told him, and told his other employer afterwards, that the sitting bull never intended to anything for the project. When the sitting bull learned the pm. Guy told them the truth he called him a traitor and fired him instantly.

I left shortly after and the bubble imploded eventually. The sitting bull retired after an heart attack. From over twenty dev positions a single one remains and his main job to shit down one broken service after another...

About 3 years ago, we had 4 different WordPress sites for various clients.

My colleagues thought it'd be a genius idea to keep them all in one repo. Even more genius, for local development, a single installation which implements a switcher for the wp-config.php files so we can switch between sites. Not bad in theory.

Fast-forward to present day. 1 client left; another site got converted to using Laravel because they always asked us to update their content so no point using a CMS; whereas the remaining 2 sites use differing versions of WordPress on their live sites, no less than 18 months out of date, have no dev sites, different collection of plugins and themes and both modified to the deepest darkest depths of fucking hell that's barely recognisable as WordPress anymore and next to no documentation or comments around the changes.

The functions.php file of one of these themes is over 4000 lines long!!!

We're keen to upgrade our servers to use Ubuntu 16.04 which defaults to PHP7, so all the already deprecated WordPress functions will then fail to work completely as will have been removed.

Both of these clients have agreed that they wish to convert Laravel as well so there's not really much point in going through the clean up process of their WordPress sites. Just copy the database nuke it all and start a fresh with Laravel FFS!

They also wish to completely redesign and discuss what features to keep/add/remove. With no date for these redesign meetings in sight, we won't be converting to Laravel any time soon, nor upgrading our servers in the foreseeable future either!

This is all because of one dev in the office and his history of failing to keep on top of breaking changes!

Fuck you! Seriously, fuck you!!!

If I was your superior, then you'd have been fired long ago!

After brute forced access to her hardware I spotted huge memory leak spreading on my key logger I just installed. She couldn’t resist right after my data reached her database so I inserted it once more to duplicate her primary key, she instantly locked my transaction and screamed so loud that all neighborhood was broadcasted with a message that exception is being raised. Right after she grabbed back of my stick just to push my exploit harder to it’s limits and make sure all stack trace is being logged into her security kernel log.
Fortunately my spyware was obfuscated and my metadata was hidden so despite she wanted to copy my code into her newly established kernel and clone it into new deadly weapon all my data went into temporary file I could flush right after my stick was unloaded.
Right after deeply scanning her localhost I removed my stick from her desktop and left the building, she was left alone again, loudly complaining about her security hole being exploited.
My work was done and I was preparing to break into another corporate security system.
- penetration tester diaries

I really hate working with learning management systems (LMS).
I make training simulations for retail companies and some of these have the worst, backwards LMS's out there.
The providers who install and manage these LMSs for the companies always insist we make our training run inside their own environment, but we can't since it's a 3D training made in Unity that doesn't run well in a browser.

Luckily some of these are fine to figure out. Just a few API calls here and there for authorization and reporting progress, but some are an absolute nightmare.

Just now one of the providers provided me with a 2000 page documentation of all the functions of the LMS's API that our customer is using. All I need are like 5 pages that explain what URL to call with what data and the responses, but now I'm stuck spending days trying to find the 0.5% of this documentation that I need to communicate with their API.

And of course, the documentation is vague as all hell. minimal descriptions of what each endpoint does. Subjects names are super vague, as in do I look for course progress or lesson completion state. What the heck is a Learning Event, is it relevant to me?

And the errors in this document, too.
Bullet-point lists with duplicate items.
language errors everywhere.
Property lists where they copy-pasted the description of properties.
An entire EMPTY chapter, literally a page with only the chapter's title.

I just can't stand how these providers barely seem to know anything about the API of the LMS's they provide to customers.
(for clarity, the LMS is produced by some big tech company, it's installed and maintained by some 3rd party which is our main line of communication when rolling out trainings to these).

It always goes like: "Hey, we want to use your training." "Oh, that's great, we have our own, simple LMS where you can view your employee's progress." "Nah, we want to use our backwards LMS. Here's a giant manual about it's API, go figure it out!"
And then I'm left here tearing my hair out trying to figure out which 3 calls I need to send their API from the tons of extra stuff it can do which is completely unnecessary and being unable to rely on the provider because they lack the knowledge and have such thick skulls about the implementation of the LMS itself that they also seems completely unwilling to help to begin with!

Just another day at the office.

That moment when your intern blatantly ignored your directions, copy pasted code into the wrong section, then gets annoyed that you fixed it for him when he was at lunch (needed to make a deadline, he left for food and I stayed to finish it)

so, I am new to servers.. and I was watching this video on how to setup dspace..

And literally this guy is teaching how to copy..
his instructions were.
first hold left click and drag along the text
then leave the left button and click on right button then select copy

Worst enterprise software experience... I was fresh out of college, and needed money. I was working in a call center, fielding IT helpdesk calls for a major US telecom company, who had just acquired a competitor. One day I got to work and about ten of us were given a new desk, new phone number, an an email address at the newly acquired company. My manager said to us "We have no clue how any of their proprietary systems work, what servers they run on, or how to login to them. Your phones are ringing, make sure you take good notes so the Tier-1s can help out next week. Good luck."

Trial by shit-storm fire, all while trying to convince the caller that yes, I did know what I was talking about. It was a lot of cold calling random employees whose job title in the corporate directory looked even remotely close to somebody I could escalate a ticket to. They didn't use the same ticketing system we used, so it was a lot of copy/pasting between two ticketing systems. To this day, I still have no clue what happened to their original call center staff. I'm sure they must have had one, but it seemingly just dissolved overnight.

That job was the springboard to my development career. I left for a gig in software helpdesk, then to quality assurance, automated testing, and now I'm a senior DevOps engineer. It was worth it.

What was your process to learn to code?
I started out modding Pokemon games for the good old Gameboy Advance around the age of 11. With basic scripts like; walk 3 steps left etc.

After that starten to use Unity 3D (with C#), just copy everything from Google. After a while I could edit some scripts and stuff (painful process...).

I started to do a study Software Engineering, didn't learn that much, just got some errands and little projects from people (the usual, 'oh you can code, I need bla bla) learned pretty much most of my skills there (JavaScript, python, PHP). In the meantime creating games (C#, C++).

Did an internship in game dev. got a job now. Only a bit more that a year from now I have my degree (if everything is going to plan).
That is more or less my process of learning to program.

What are your favorite weak copy-left licenses and why?