Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*

We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:

- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings

Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!

*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*

Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason

*audience: ooooohhhhh*

You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.

*audience: laughs*

Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.

Backstory:

We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!

... oh to have a time machine

Working with C:

- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.

- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".

- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.

- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.

- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.

- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.

- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.

... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.

- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:

Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"

... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?

- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.

- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).

- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.

- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.

- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.

- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?

You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.

I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.

Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

*sitcom audience cheers*

Thank you, thank you. Ok so far we've had a developer from hell and a CEO who shot to fame for being the first rectum to receive a passport and be given a job.

2 pretty strong entrants if you ask me. But its time to slow it down and make sure everyone gets a fair chance. Its not all just about the psychopaths and assholes, what about the general weirdo's and the stoners who just made life awkward?

So here we go, Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 3, "A".

"A" was a bit of an unusual developer, despite having a few years experience in his home country, he applied for an unpaid internship to come work with us ... probably should have rang alarm bells but hey we were all young and dumb back then.

I had to say I felt very bad for A, as he suffered from 2 very serious, and job crippling personal conditions / problems

- Email induced panic attacks
- Extreme multifaceted attachment disorder (also known in layman terms as "get the fuck away from me, and do your job" syndrome)

While he never openly discussed these conditions, it was clear from working with him, that he had gone undiagnosed for years. Every time an email would come in no matter how simple ... even the services team asking to confirm his staff ID, would send him into a panic causing him to drop everything he was doing and like a homing missile find me anywhere in the building and ask me what to do.

Actually "A" also suffered from a debilitating literacy issue too, leaving him completely unable to read our internal wiki's himself. Every week we had to follow a set of steps to upgrade something and every week to mask his issue, he'd ask me what to do instead ... no matter how many times I sat with him previously ... must have been truly embarrassing for him.

But "A"'s finest moment in the company, by far, was the day where out of the blue, at the top of his voice (as if wearing headphones ... without wearing headphones) he asked

"DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO SELLS POT?"

... why no, manager of the entire department standing behind you, I do not

... why no, tech lead talking to manager, I do not

... why hello 50% of my team staring at me ... no "A", I do not!

Needless to say all our team meetings were a little awkward for the next few weeks after that but hey who doesn't like being thought of as a stoner / drug dealer by their team mates huh?

Will A make it to the top of the list of most incompetent? Well he has some truly logic defining competition yet to be announced.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

Drug dealer : yo, you code right?

Me: yeah, why

Drug dealer: can you hack into the police station.. You know, see if they are checking me out.. If they know I'm dealing.. I'll just move

(I've never hacked but I know i could learn if I have to)

Me:... That's actually brilliant

I love in a small town at the moment.. I bet the police security is a joke

Kinda high risk though

Dude, remote work in a country side city makes me feel like people think I'm a drug dealer or something

I never leave my house

Most satisfying bug I've fixed?

Fixed a n+1 issue with a web service retrieving price information. I initially wrote the service, but it was taken over by a couple of 'world class' monday-morning-quarterbacks.
The "Worst code I've ever seen" ... "I can't believe this crap compiles" types that never met anyone else's code that was any good.

After a few months (yes months) and heavy refactoring, the service still returned price information for a product. Pass the service a list of product numbers, service returns the price, availability, etc, that was it.

After a very proud and boisterous deployment, over the next couple of days the service seemed to get slower and slower. DBAs started to complain that the service was causing unusually high wait times, locks, and CPU spikes causing problems for other applications. The usual finger pointing began which ended up with "If PaperTrail had written the service 'correctly' the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess."

Only mattered that I initially wrote the service and no one seemed to care about the two geniuses that took months changing the code.

The dev manager was able to justify a complete re-write of the service using 'proper development methodologies' including budgeting devs, DBAs, server resources, etc..etc. with a projected year+ completion date.

My 'BS Meter' goes off, so I open up the code, maybe 5 minutes...tada...found it. The corresponding stored procedure accepts a list of product numbers and a price type (1=Retail, 2=Dealer, and so on). If you pass 0, the stored procedure returns all the prices.
Code basically looked like this..

public List<Prices> GetPrices(List<Product> products, int priceTypeId)
{
foreach (var item in products)
{
List<int> productIdsParameter = new List<int>();
productIdsParameter.Add(item.ProductID);
List<Price> prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, 0);
foreach (var price in prices)
{
if (price.PriceTypeID == priceTypeId)
{
prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, price.PriceTypeID);
return prices;
}
* Omitting the other 'WTF?' code to handle the zero price type
}
}
}

I removed the double stored procedure call, updated the method signature to only accept the list of product numbers (which it was before the 'major refactor'), deployed the service to dev (the issue was reproducible in our dev environment) and had the DBA monitor.

The two devs and the manager are grumbling and mocking the changes (they never looked, they assumed I wrote some threading monstrosity) then the DBA walks up..

DBA: "We're good. You hit the database pretty hard and the CPU never moved. Execution plans, locks, all good to go."
<dba starts to walk away>
DevMgr: "No fucking way! Putting that code in a thread wouldn't have fix it"
Me: "Um, I didn't use threads"
Dev1: "You had to. There was no way you made that code run faster without threads"
Dev2: "It runs fine in dev, but there is no way that level of threading will work in production with thousands of requests. I've got unit tests that prove our design is perfect."
Me: "I looked at what the code was doing and removed what it shouldn't be doing. That's it."
DBA: "If the database is happy with the changes, I'm happy. Good job. Get that service deployed tomorrow and lets move on"
Me: "You'll remove the recommendation for a complete re-write of the service?"
DevMgr: "Hell no! The re-write moves forward. This, whatever you did, changes nothing."
DBA: "Hell yes it does!! I've got too much on my plate already to play babysitter with you assholes. I'm done and no one on my team will waste any more time on this. Am I clear?"

Seeing the dev manager face turn red and the other two devs look completely dumbfounded was the most satisfying bug I've fixed.

Alright, so my company wanted to redesign its old website, so we (the dev team) got tasked with making it happen.

Talking with the people making the marketing decisions for the site (think clients but in-house) :

CLIENT : We don't want any colors, black and white only, it's trendy.

US : Okay, but you actually do need colors for call to actions, to achieve the effect of levels of importance and such.

CLIENT : No colors.

Why would they listen to us, not that we are the experts are anything... Oh and they scrapped pretty much all of our CTA, why would you need those anyways, right?

Sometimes later, while coding the Dealer Locator :

CLIENT : The more important dealers will be shown on the map in black, the ones a little less important in white, and the ones we would rather not send people to will be in blue.

US : In blue? Blue, the only color in a sea of black and white? You do realize that the only thing the user is going to see are the blue ones, achieving the exact opposite of what you want?

CLIENT : We have decided.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

My mother is so ashamed of me.
she tells everybody that I'm a Drug dealer.

PHP Developer here.

So, my plans:

Life
* to have my firstborn child and do my best as a father
* to pay off ~half of my 5yr lease (my brand new car arrived at the dealer yesterday, I will be picking it up within 2 weeks, yay!)
* not to die from starvation while paying it off

Work:
* to become more comfortable and fluent in my current position to reduce stress and save time for personal goals (learning another language / technology so that I'm not a prisoner of the field I'm good at)

Hobby:
* to publish my first Android game (or at least be close)
* to make indie game development my hobby, a way to vent off after work and hopefully a source of additional income
* learn to draw just a little (for my game dev)

The year was 1983. My best friend and neighbour at the time invited me over to see an amazing device that his father had brought home from work, an IBM PC. We played a game called Track & Field, and I was amazed that the machine remembered my name once I've entered it. (Uptil then the only machines with any kind of memory that I've come in touch with, were arcade games and my cousin's video game console, which was also the first electronic gaming device I've ever played, back in 1978). In the early 1980s, computers were anything but commonplace in Åland Islands, but I think that it was in 1983 that people became aware of them, and there was a budding interest to buy one, at least among us kids. It was my sister who wished for a home computer for Christmas, so the same year Santa gave us a ZX Spectrum. It came with a game called Thro' the Wall, an Arcanoid clone(, that has inspired me to make my own clone "Wall" for all the different home computers I've had, ranging from Commodore 16 and Canon V-20 to Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200). Unfortunately, we only managed to load the game (delivered on a C cassette) like once or twice after several attempts. It turned out that the hardware was faulty and dad got a refund after first having had to complain a lot at the dealer (which went out of business some ten years ago), and then bought the Commodore the next Christmas. Anyway, I wrote my first code on the ZX Spectrum. It doesn't really count for programming as all I did was typing examples and running them. I do recall altering one example though, a program drawing the Swedish flag on the screen, by adding an inner red cross thus turning it in the Åland flag. But, with the Commodore 16 (which had an excellent Basic interpreter) I got started with programming almost immediately and by the end of 1984 I had written my fist very own Basic programs. In 1996 I got my first IT job, and am still a dev. So, what became of my childhood friend and neighbour? He runs a successful computer dealership :)

Developed web shop for weed dealer
once. Paid me in weed. His plan was to sell cosmetics through the site and move away from drug dealing altogether. Not sure if he actually did it, as I was too high to finish it..

Drug dealer

It was 1987. I was 13. My first dev project started with a $1,300 IBM PC XT clone I bought from a relative who was a “dealer” of PCs for some company. It took all the savings I had from birthday money and mowing lawns for several summers at $5 a pop.

My mom wanted to encourage me to learn it more in depth, and she also wanted to know more for her job as a librarian, so she bought us a bunch of books about DOS, BASIC, and Assembler.

I first got familiar with DOS and then dove into Assembler without realizing what it really was (and how much easier BASIC would be). After hours and hours of typing in what, to me, then, was complete gibberish, I grabbed the BASIC book to see what it had to offer.

I never went back to the Assembler book.

A kid at school had given me a BASIC program he had typed in from a magazine. It was a flight simulator of sorts but with a helicopter, IIRC. I loaded up that bad boy and got to hacking. I didn’t get much done with it but I did build a few other menu navigation programs to explore the language more.

That led to PROLOG, C, PASCAL, Visual Basic, Perl, ASP, ColdFusion, and now PHP.

In the war of AI-race, NVIDIA has decided to be the arms dealer.
Good for them.

Today may be the day I walk the fuck out... Almost done with the 3rd revisions of the fucking website and guess what?

To - “Anony”
Subject - website

Hey, here’s a list of changes we’d like for the website. Instead of following the theme of “WhateverTheFucksHopsital.html” we’d like for it to look similar to “AnotherFucksWebsite.html”. The board would like to see this up and running in the next week.

How’s about you sit and spin. You haven’t given me any information on a website only that you want it to look like some other hospitals. Then, you add photographer to my fucking job description as well as information hunter. You can fuck yourself and higher an outside company to create your website from scratch again for the now 4th fucking time. Then, you’ll understand and see just how fucking expensive it is... Nor will that company take your shit with the lack of information coming from your end. You can kindly, suck my dick.

Working on a marijuana dealer website and there's an order of 420€ on it.
I bet she did it on purpose

I bought some shoes from a drug dealer. I don't know what he laced them with, but I was tripping all day!

I bought some shoes from a drug dealer. I don't know what he laced them with, but I was tripping all day!

So my new car has now chevystar which is quite expensive, is fine and that, I don't really use it to be honest. Though it has a nice service to remember me if I'm on my 'no car day'-like with a google assistant -like voice.

But today while driving with my wife, we were listening music and the music stopped.

then, the fucking chevystar voice started:

"Remember you can get your new car now and start paying it in a year"

"Pay us a visit to your XXXX chevrolet dealer"

Over 10 000 Club, here I go! I wanna thank God, my mama and my dealer.

When the domain you want to buy has been taken from a domain-dealer who takes ownership of unused domains. When that dealer sells it for more than 10.000€ but also would accept ... 70€?🤔 When you see that the offer decreases automatically a couple 100€ every once in a while. Let's see how cheap it can get ...

Disclaimer: This is all theoretical. Neither me nor my friend (with whom I discussed this) are stupid enough to even try to pursue this, but as an idea, i believe it might generate cool/new ideas/ways for handling secure communications across social groups.

Let's do some role play. Let's design a delivery app for drug dealers, think Seamless or Uber Eats, but for drugs. Not for big deliveries, like kilograms of coke, but smaller stuff. Maybe a few grams of it or something. The clients could rate dealers, and vide-versa. This would build a level of trust within the system. There would be no names, just anonymous reviews, ratings, and prices. Only the info you'd need to know.

The biggest (only?) problem we found (besides legality) was that, how would you prove that you're a client and not a snitch (or cop). This would have to somehow be handled both on signup, as well as when ordering (let's imagine that all who are clients are pure and won't ever snitch).

One of the ways we found to combat this was to have the app invite-only. This would, in theory, do away with the problem of having snitches signing up. However, what if the phone got stolen/breached by a snitch, and they also got full access to the account. One way we thought we could combat this would be with a "dispose number" or something similar. Basically, you call a number, or send a text, or message a Signal bot etc, which would lead to the account's instant termination, no traces of that user left. Hence, a dispose number.

The flow of the app would be as follows:
A client wants some amount of heroin. He opens the app, searches for a dealer, sends the him the desired amount, and in return gets back a price from the dealer. If both parties agree on the amount and price, the deal would start.

The app would then select a random time (taken from the client's selected timeframe and the dealer's "open" time) and a location (within a certain radius of both them, somewhere in between them both for convenience). If both of them accept the time and place, they'll have to meet up at said time and place.

The actual delivery could also be done using two dead drops - the client drops the money at one of them, the dealer drops the goods at the other one. Yes, this might be subject to abuse, but it wouldn't be that bad. I doubt that clients would make huge orders to unknown/badly rated dealers, as well as dealers accepting offers from badly rated clients. My idea is that they would start small, just so if they do lose their money/goods, the actual loss wouldn't be as big for them, but for the other party, having bad ratings would mean less clients willing to buy or dealers willing to sell.

A third way would be to use crypto, but the reason I left this as the last one is because it's not that wide-spread yet, at least not in local drug dealing. With this method, the client would initiate the order, the crypto would be sent to either the dealer or an escrow account, the dealer would then drop the goods at a random place and let the client know where to go to get them. After the client has gotten the goods, they could both review/rate the quality as well as the overall experience with that dealer, which would either make or break the dealer's upcoming deals. This would be pretty much like other DNM's, but on a local scale, making deliveries faster.

So far, this would seem like something that would work. Are there any ideas that might improve this? Anything that might make things more secure/anonymous?

My reason for this post is to spark a conversation about security and anonymity, not to endorse drugs or other illegal stuff.

Cheers!

PS. Really loving the new PC design of devRant

When I accompanied my Dad to buy a laptop. I listened to the conversation between him and the dealer an I was like "will I ever understand anything to do with pc specifications".

I keep seeing news story after news story talking about the progress we’re making in AI and how there are not enough developers to fill the jobs in demand for it. I tossed my alternate career choice of aerospace over two decades ago because there were no interesting career paths in what I was capable of doing (not much because I suck at math). And here I am 22 years deep into a Web Dev career that I feel is going to be completely obsolete well before my retirement age. I either need to do the impossible and get good at advanced math so I can even understand the very basics of AI or I need to win the lottery.

This is the story of me discovering devRant by accident.
---
I have never meddled with php before and I never intended to do so. For some reason, I accepted this consulting and chose Ci4 as the framework. All hell broke lose on my life. I could be a fucking idiot or the framework is a real ass wipe.

The setup took me hours and when I tried adding myth/auth, the real shit hit the giant fucking fan. WHAT THE FUCK PHP AND CI4? I tried all the weird fucking suggestions from the internet and you still fucked me in the ass with a bigger stick EVERY FUCKING TIME. I spent an whole night figuring you out and now I have my real job to login to with NO FUCKING SLEEP. You royally fucked my night and also my day without an ounce of A FUCKING CLOSURE.

Once I figure this out, Imma fuck the fucking project dealer and throw the weird ass shit on his ugly ass face and yell "FUCK YOU".

I am so depressed that this made me find an app to rant about it like a maniac.

-BrainlessIdiot

If someone sells code, can we call him a code dealer?

How do all you other devs deal with sleep? Because I am losing my fucking mind I work for myself so I don't go to work at 9am leave at 6pm.

I normally work until 6am and then sleep till 12 drink 3 strong coffee to start functioning again try and do something productive which at the moment involves catching up on the NBA playoffs and then starting work at 6pm.

Due to resent baby I thought shit my life is fucked I haven't left the house in 3 days I need structure routine I need to work 9am to 6pm become human again but I just can't FUCKING sleep it's now 1:30am and I'm trying to sleep.

I know what your thinking why are you on devRant but I've been trying to sleep for the past 3 hours but all I can think about is work code, refactoring, new languages, security, support shit that can wait but I can't get it out my head, keep thinking "ah your not tired you could work", and YES I have a list which get bigger every day wish I had a drug dealer or was still in contact with my old mates so I could get some Valium but it's hot milk and sleeping tablets for me, life is so much easier when you can just fuck of home at the end of the day and forget about work, not having your laptop next to you trying to trick you into opening it. How do other people who work for theirselves deal with the life work balance?