This is brilliant 😂😂

My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server

I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.

It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.

One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.

Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.

Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.

Then, next week, it happened again.

My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.

(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).

Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.

I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."

My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.

Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.

Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.

My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.

This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...

So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.

So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.

The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.

One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.

The cleaning staff came in.

Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.

Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.

We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.

You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.

I once worked until 8am to get a demo ready for a client of the client. I knew the client was a bit thick, so I made some comprehensive video demos and sent them over to him, to save him trying to demo it himself. I wake up at 11am with him screaming down the phone at me:

“It doesn’t work, none of it works!”

“What do you mean?”

“I go to login and I can’t enter anything.”

“I haven’t sent you anything to log into...wait, are you trying to log into a video? Tell me you’re not trying to log into a video of a login page.”

“Uh...oh hang on, it just worked. Ok no pr-“

“No wait, what do you mean it worked?”

“I logged in fine.”

“It’s a video. You can’t log into a video.”

“Uh...alright, bye mate, thanks!”

The moral of the story is: never assume any level of intelligence on the part of a client, even if they exhibit signs of it at first. If they are paying you they will forget how to tie their own shoelaces.

iPhone app riddled with memory leaks from a team of interns. Big series of demos coming up. Managements solution?

Send instructions to the person giving the demo to kill the app every 20 mins or so.

I can tell you how I hired one of my employees instead:

During the work interview he mentioned he used to write Amiga demos when he was a teenager. Can I see one? I asked. He emailed one later that I could run on an Amiga emulator.

He got the job! The demo frankly wasn't that impressive but the fact that he wrote stuff like that already as a child was, before college and stuff.

He later told me he would have never guessed as a child his demos would give him a job one day!

Went to hackathon @ Google HQ in NYC. Gotta say it was pretty shitty. Most people are JavaScript nerds and some code in objective-C, xcode (4-5 out of 50). The rest are chemists, scientists and general folks. Not what I anticipated when you know it's more like iOS hackathon. Anyways it was good to see the shittiest demos in my life made in less than 12 hours. We had 4.5 people working on a toilet project called "I gotta go". Public bathroom locator... One guy coded in JS, xcode and react Native. Another dude was pushing all the code to GitHub and doing backend in firebase. The third guy was making a website for no reason and then I see it's hosted weebly. He hand coded first, I looked what he is doing - just HTML tags. Thank God some organizers helped us and we had a 4 click demo with basic text and no real functionality. Plus the website who never seen. What a fucking waste of $100 and two days.

After returning back from the company we were purchasing a new phone system (hardware+software, $100K+, kind of a big deal)
VP: “I need the new phone system software integration for our CRM by next week. I need to demo the system for the other VPs”
Me: “No problem. Were you able to get their API like I asked?”
VP: “Salesman didn’t know for sure what that was, but he said all the developer software documentation is on their site.”
Me: “Did he give you a URL? Their main site is all marketing mumbo-jumbo. I assume there is another one specific for developers.”
VP: “Yea, he might have said something, but I don’t understand why you need it. The salesman said the integration would be seamless. He showed me several demos.”
Me: “No, I mean I need to know, is the API a full client install? a simple dll? is this going to be a web service integration? How will I know what to program against?”
VP: “I think I heard him say something about COM? Does that sound like an API?”
Me: “It’s a start. Did he provide you anything, a disk, a flash drive, anything with the software?”
VP: “No, only thing he told me was our CRM integration would be seamless and our development team would have no problems.”
Me: “OK..OK…I get it…he’s a salesman. Is there an 1-800 number I can call? A technical support email address? Anyone technical I can reach out to?”
VP: “Probably, but I don’t understand what the problem is. I need the CRM integrated by next week. I gave the other VPs a promise we would get it done. I do not break promises.”
Me: “Wait…when are we installing the new system?”
VP: “Well, the purchase order will be cut at the end of the month’s billing cycle, the company has about a two month turnaround time to deliver and install the hardware, so maybe 3 months from now? Are you going to be able to have the integration ready for next week?”
Me: “If we won’t see any of the hardware for 3 months, what exactly am I integrating with?”
VP: “That API you wanted or whatever it is. COM…yea, it’s COM. I was told the integration would be seamless and our developers would have no problem. I don’t understand why you can’t simply write the code to make it work. Getting the hardware installed is going to be the hardest part.”
Me: “OK, so I have no documentation, we have no hardware, no software, and no idea what this ‘seamless integration’ means. I’m afraid there isn’t anything I can do right now. ”
VP: “Fine!...I’ll just have to tell the other VPs you were not able to execute the seamless integration with the CRM.”
Which he did. When the hardware+software was finally installed, they hired consultants (because I “failed”). I think the bill was in the $50K range to perform the ‘integration’ which consisted of Excel spreadsheets (no kidding). When approached with the primary CRM integration, the team needed our API documentation, a year’s development time and $300K. I was pissed off enough, and I had the API documentation, I was able to get the basic CRM integration within 3 days. When an agent receives a call, I look up the # in our database, auto-fill the form with the customer info, etc. Easy stuff when you have the documentation.
The basics worked and the VP was congratulated by ‘saving’ the company $300K. May or may not have been bonuses involved, rumors still out on that one, but I didn't see em'. Later my manager told me the VP was really ticked that I performed the integration ‘behind his back’, but because it was a success, he couldn’t fire me.

I've come to a conclusion today: Management are fucking with me. I know it sounds far fetched, but its the only thing that makes sense.

I was in a meeting today, discussing some bad emails back and forth. Part of my issue was the amount of time spent on useless meetings, or waiting around to give demos.

The meeting got cut short, so I could prepare a demo for a VP ... after an hour and a fucking half of waiting around ... theres no time to see my demo.

What the actual fuck, seriously .... seriously what the actual fuck. What if the name of mother fucking christ is going on with this team, that they call me into a mother fucking meeting to discuss the "developers attitude" only to go and cut it short ... so they can fucking waste my time ... for the second time in 3 mother fucking days.

Oh i'd rather fuck myself with a cactus than spend the rest of my days dealing with this utter bullshittery.

For fucks sake I'm getting tired of this company. We have an app that's been developed on a VERY tight budget with a team and it's nearly completed/basically done few fixes here and there. They keep going to meetings with clients and promising more than the fucking app does! BITCH IT TOOK 6 MONTHS OF DEV TIME IF YOU WANTED THOSE OTHER FEATURES WHY DIDN'T YOU PUT IT IN THERE SOME FUCKING TIME.

And now since I'm in charge of the remnants of whats left, they keep asking me to make demos of ridiculous new features to show to new clients. BUT THATS NOT WHAT THE FUCKING UP DOES AND WERE OUT OF BUDGET!!!

I explain this. Every fucking day. I'm told they understand. Then I'm asked to make a fucking glittery demo with some bullshit features we don't have YET FUCKING AGAIN. BITCH I WILL QUIT THIS SHIT!

IF I SPEND ALL MY TIME MAKING THE FUCKING DEMOS, I CANT FINISH THE MAIN APP YOU FUCKTARDS. STOP PROMISING SHIT WE DONT HAVE!

Tty, Catch and what about throw ?? 😄😄

Manager: Could you create the UI for the new feature? The client wants to test it. We need it in 3 days.

*1 week later*

Client: IT DOESNT WORK

Me: This is just a visual demo... but everything will work when we realse the feature.

Client: okay but can I see what it will do?

Of course you can! Just wait until we relase it!

*2 weeks later*

Manager: What are you doing?

Me: Working on the UI for the new feature.

Manager: Wait, hadn't you already done it for the demo?

Me: That UI didn't really work. It was basically a bunch of HTML, without reactivity or abstraction or any functionality.

Manager: Okay, how much where you able to re-use?

Me: almost nothing.

Manager: So... you wasted those 3 days?

Oh so I'm the one who wasted 3 days.
Me: Kinda, yeah

Manager: Why couldn't you have done this when I asked you to do the UI?

You can't expect good quality code in 3 days. Pls stop wasting it on demos.

So we ordered a piece of software from external software house becouse I was low on time and we needed it asap.

So. Long story short, their software was bugged as hell, they deny all the bugs and they have their BDD that they done and anything we say about it like "feature XYZ is broken on firefox" they will deny it "becouse it wasn't on BDD" or "let's get on call" (in which +- 6-7 people participate from their side and we of course have to pay them for this...)

So they fixed like 20% of bugs (mostly trivials/minors) Application is fairly small scope. You have integration with like 3 endpoints on arbitary API, user registration/login, few things to do in database (mainly math running from cron).

They done it in ASP so I don't know the language and enviroment so can't just fix it myself.

2 days ago (monday) they annoyed me to point where I just started to break things. For starters I found that every numeric input is vunrable to integer overflow (which is blocker). I figured most of fields are purefect opportunity to XSS (but I didn't bother to do JS... anything but not JS...). I figured I can embed into my name/surname/phone (none validated) anything in HTML...

So for now we have around 25 bugs, around 15 of them are blockers.

They figured it's somehow our fault that it's bugged and decided to do demo with us to show off how perfectly it works. I'm happy to break their demos. I figured I will register bunch users that have name - image with fixed/absolute position top:0;left:0 width/height 100% - this will effectively brick admin panel

Also I figured I can do some addotional sounds in background becouse why not. And I just dont know what to put in. It links to my server for now so I can freely change content of bricked admin panel.

I have curl's ready to execute in case they reset database.

I can put in GIFs or heck, even videos, dosen't really matter. Framework escapes some things for them so at least that. But audio/image/video works.

Now I have 2 questions:
- what image + audio combo will work the best (of course we need to keep it civil). Im thinking finding some meme with bugs or maybe nuclear logo image with some siren sound
- am I evil person?

Edit:

I havent stated this clearly:

"There is no BDD that describes that if user inserts malicious input server should deny it" - that's almost literally what we get from them....

sooooooooo for my current graduate class we were to use the MVC pattern to build an IOS application(they preferred it if we did an IOS application) or if you didn't have an Apple computer: an Android application.

The thing is, they specified to use Java, while in their lectures and demos they made a lot of points for other technologies, hybrid technologies, such as React Cordova, all that shit, they even mentioned React Native and more. But not one single mention of Kotlin. Last time I tried my hand at Android development was way before Kotlin, it was actually my first major development job: Mobile development, for which we used Obj C on the IOS part and well, Java on the Android part.

As some of you might now, I rarely have something bad to say about a tech stack(except for VBA which I despise, but I digress) and I love and use Java at work. But the Android API has always seem unnecessarily complex for my taste, because of that, when I was working as a mobile development I dreaded every single minute in which I had to code for Android, Google had a great way to make people despise Java through their Android API. I am not saying it is shit, I am not saying it is bad, I just-dont-like-it.

Kotlin, proves a superior choice in my humble opinion for Android development, and because the language is for retards, it was fairly easy for me to pick it up in about 2 hours. I was already redesigning some of my largest Spring applications using half the code and implemented about 80% of the application's functionality in less than 3 hours(login, fragment manipulation, permissions, bla bla) and by that time I started to wonder if the app built on Kotlin would be ok. And why not? If they specifically mentioned and demonstrated examples using Swift, then surely Kotlin would be fine no? Between Kotlin and Java it is easy to see that kotlin is more similar to Swift than Java. So I sent an email. Their response: "I am sorry, but we would much rather you stick with the official implementations for Android, which in this case is Java for the development of the application"

I was like 0.o wat? So I replied back sending links and documentation where Google touted Kotlin as the new and preferred way to develop Android applications, not as a second class citizen of the platform, but as THE preferred stack. Same response.

Eventually one of the instructors reflected long enough on it to say that it was fine if I developed the application in Kotlin, but they advised me that since they already had grading criteria for the Java program I had to redo it in Java. It did not took me long really, once I was finished with the Kotlin application I basically rewrote only a couple of things into Java.

The end result? I think that for Android I still greatly prefer Kotlin. Even though I am not the biggest fan of Kotlin for anything else, or as my preferred language in the JVM.

I just.......wish....they would have said something along the lines of: "Nah fam please rewrite that shit for Java since we don't have grading criterias in place for Kotlin, sorry bruh, 10/10 gg tho" instead of them getting into an email battle with me concerning Kotlin being or not being the language to use in Android. It made me feel that they effectively had no clue what they were talking about and as such not really capable of taking care of students on a graduate level program.

Made me feel dirty.

It was my first time in Berlin. I came as a tourist but started looking for a workplace, with hopes of getting a blue card and continuing work.

I searched online, going through some hiring platforms, and sent out a few messages around. I felt a special connection (I thought I was exactly who they needed), and wrote them a carefully crafted letter of intention alongside my lavish CV.
They got back to me, and I was given this task, to do while at home. I completed it, had a phone interview, and was invited on-site for a face to face interview. Everybody felt warm, I felt a connection. We already talked salary expectations, and all was going great.

They told me they'd get back to me for the next stage. ...
and they actually DID. Yes, they did!
They invited me for a second interview, but this time to prepare a technical topic to present. So I did. I picked one of the 3 topics they offered, which was about performance optimization. I had recently read materials about that, so I felt really empowered.
So far nobody told me what I was supposed to be doing at the new job, I only knew the technologies required, and what the company did for money.
I prepared a thorough presentation, with practical demos of why some things are bad for performance. While I was showing it, many people in the room were learning about this for the first time, which means I did good. The team lead had some extra questions that I wasn't able to answer in full (needed some research), but otherwise it was great.

The CTO then asked me out to lunch, to talk over some more stuff, and we had a general discussion about what drives us, our life story, etc. He said that he'd really like me to be part of the team, and that he's looking forward to working with me.

So I've been at it for almost a month. I've met everyone, got acquainted with the team, knew the biography of some of them, proven my worth, etc. I was ensured with body language, and verbal language that everything was going great. As careful as I was with this kind of stuff, I was positive that I'd get the job. I even started planning my trips, to get the documents ready.

And then I got a message stating the usual stuff "Thank you bla bla bla we don't think we'll need your services". I was shocked, but in good faith I wanted to reply something along the lines "I'm sorry it didn't work out, all the best in finding what you're looking for", but I found out that I was blocked from contacting them.

That's right. Rejected + blocked. After a month of fucking foreplay. I get rejection, even though it hurts. But being blocked?! That's just insane!

Currently I'm working on 3D game engine and making a 3D minesweeper game with it.
I have started creating a compiler not long ago using my own implementation (no Lex no tools nothing just raw algorithms application) to hopefully some day I will be able to make a language that works on top of glsl inside my game engine. I have compilers design class this semester which haven't even started yet and made a lexical analyser generator. I also have another class about geographical information systems which I will be using my engine to create some demos for some 3D rendering techniques like level of details or maybe create something similar to arcgis which we will be using.
Oh man I have many stuff I want to do.
Here is a gif showing the state of my minesweeper game. I clearly lack artistic skills lol. One thing I will be making is to model the sphere as squares not triangles.
Finally I want to mention that I months ago saw someone here at devrant making a voronoi diagrams variant of this which inspired me to make this.
I made long post so
TLDR : having fun reinventing the weel and learning 😀

<rant>why the fuck do live demos NEVER work properly when a day ago the code was fine?? What is this bullshit sorcery!?</rant>

Not directly a dev related rant but needed to write it somewhere. (Also, long long rant, be aware).

I am currently working on a project for a client who is going to launch a new product. He wants us to create the brand and choose the logo, colours, communication... BUT before everything we have to deliver the website design.

We told him several times that the design has to be created AFTER the brand is created, however, he insisted. Then, we offered him to develop the UX/UI patterns but the colors and a few more things would be delivered after, so his 3rd party dev could make the job.

After working on the first draft, we sent it to him and he refused it, calling it "poor designed". We insisted that it was a draft for the UI which he ignored.

He asked for another design by taking as example a website from another (unrelated) company. We worked for another 2 days and delivered a more finished design, which he automatically refused again.

He called us to his office in order to provide us exactly what he wanted in every part of the site. He only gave us the home page and the product page, and ordered us to work through the weekend (Which we didn't as he is being quite petty about everything and bullying us).

We delivered this third draft and he made changes, sometimes going back to things that he refused before.

Now his 3rd party dev has things to work, but he called yesterday today telling us that the rest of the site must be before friday, date in which we will be showing him how the brand will be and what we have created. He didn't care about and demanded the designs.

I helped the designer to develop the designs of the website as I can work in Photoshop (I am mostly front web developer but can design UI) but he is now busy working on the brand and I had to make ALL the remaining designs, knowing that the client will reject them as soon as they are sent to him, since he hasn't given us any indication on how and what he wants.

We developers sometimes make futile work which will be used a few days or months or in order to provide demos, however, the time I wasted today made me get behind other deadlines, which makes me feel bad for not being able to accomplish them.

"Graphics don't matter."

I ranted a while back about gamedev being hard to get into for me, and, today, user @DOSnotCompute posted a similar experience.

I had a couple more thoughts, so thought should post them here (FUCK! It ended up being too fucking long! sorry!)

So I was watching the making of mortal kombat 3 on yt, which was pretty amazing btw because I got to see the actors of the sprites in game which were engraved in my and thousands of others kids minds.

Anyhow, the creators of the series, John Tobias and Ed Boon, were interviewed and what not. And it hit me that while both were the designers, John was the main artist and Ed was the programmer (at least for MK1). Another game that comes to mind Super Meat Boy, and I bet hundreds of others did the same.

And it got me thinking, maybe that's my problem, I just need an artist.

And I think the reason why I never thought of that is because of this idea that graphics don't matter.

"you don't need an artist. You don't need graphics. The most important thing is the gameplay."

What a load of shit.
A lot of people believe that because they got tired of polished AAA games with automatic and predictible gameplay.

People started parrotting this knee jerk of a conclusion since then.

It's dumb. Imagine if Infiminer, one of the games Minecraft was based on, which btw looks terrible, had all the same features Minecraft had.
I would still not touch that shit with a pole.

Graphics ARE important. Games are on the VISUAL medium.
That doesn't mean you're sucking Sony's dick on every AAA release or that every game should be made with UnreUnityCocksReloadedEngine.

Some level of visual craft is required for a game ro be considered such.

(btw, I think most of you guys here get this, not trying to pander, just that I want to make it clear that I'm not accusing this community of being guilty of this)

If a game looks bad (given, bad can be subjective), if it gives the impression that it wasn't seriously made, then you kinda lower your expectations.

People get hyped on games that look good, because it means that the game could be good. Games that look unoriginal or terrible won't get played, wether they're good or not. And I think it's a reasonable reaction.

How many times did I hear things like "Look at x video game from the 90s, the graphics are terrible but it's fun as hell".

That is an absurd statement. The level of production some NES games went through is insane. We're talking millions of dollars for games that today might look primitive.

The graphics weren't shit back then, and even today you could say that they are simpler but also of excellent craftsmanship.

I'm not into creating art, I hate it in fact because you can't quantify the success of produced art.

So, duh, find an artist. Ok, how? This is the part where I have no fucking idea how.

You start spamming shit like "I need an artist" online? I dunno, something for another post I guess.

I guess the most healthy thing I could do is making demos that might look like shit just to get experience so that when I get to find an artist, I have practice already.

My colleague doesn't give a shit about code quality and while I'm busy refactoring stuff after him, he's making flashy demos. Guess who's gonna be senior first

A few of you have used the big-screened TI calculators. Like 1 of those people knows I write demos for the monochrome 6MHz Z80 ones.

I have news for that person.

Great.

I have a demo in an hour for which I need to make some final code changes and tests (about half an hour’s work), and just discovered that XCode killed itself. 🤦🏻‍♀️

Looks like I’m missing the demo.

Dear Panicked Managers,

We are behind. We all know we are behind, and I would love to spend 10 hours fixing our shit.

Instead, your shit riddled brains decided that WAY too many demos, with practice demos, are the correct move! We are wasting 8 hours a week, per person working on them! That means we lose a day of development, but you are not moving deadlines and still complaining about the amount of throughput!

In those 8 hours a week, we could all build the new features, and you could throw an orgy, do lots of cocaine, beat hookers to death, do whatever CEOs do! Instead, you call us to all gather around and listen to you bitch that shit isn't getting done...

Sincerely,
Pissed Off

when PM demos app's dev environment instead of production

I tought I'll buy a new laptop last week.

Went to the mediamarkt. I've choosen one with hdd. That was cheaper and I have a nice ssd at home, so I tought I'm gonna change that so I've asked the salesman about the hdd. I mean if I take it out and replace it with an ssd, it'll invalidate my warranty? Said yes. But they gladly change it to me if I bring my ssd in for a dirt-cheap €79. I said you are defenetly lost your mind. It takes 5 screws and around 5 minutes.

Anyway. I've choose an another one with ssd. But there was a sticker on it too, means it is prepared to use out of the box. It means as always, the windows is full with advertises, demos and annoying settings. And I don't use windows anyway. Ohh and it costs €29. I wanted one without this thing. Said ok, he'll check it. Comes back and said these modells are all prepared with this. I've asked him to show me a product which is 'clean'. He replied "actually all our laptops came prepared".

So I went mad and left them. This whole procedure takes more than an hour with one lesson: never go there again to buy a computer.

But at the end I've found a solution. Configurable laptops with 2 year warranty even if you upgrade it. Thats what I'll buy soon. I've had enough of big brands bullshits about unnecessary features and other bullshit. I'll buy what I need, not more, not less.

I'll write down the brand if anyone interested.

!rant
Update & Thoughts of AngelHack10 Abu Dhabi.
The judges were so non technical they were impressed by an app demo (not ours) that could recognize objects printed in black and white on an A4 paper. The app claimed to read the 3d shape of a device and calculate the running cost based on its power consumption.
I think hackathons must have two pitches one technical and one business. Else every one with hardcoded demos can fool the judges easily.

Then what else is lost... ?😂😂

My last job sucked because of ridiculous deadlines, never-ending demos with hacked together fake sites, etc...but I still get nostalgic and miss it because I worked with some really cool people.

When you write over a thousand lines of PHP to create three different types of user feeds and your friend demos the site and just asks "is that it, just a few pages?" -.-

My boss ask me to demo some project. I named the demo "fuck", and I knew I could change it. In the evening he came to ma desk and asked for anything in progress. Go to test form and slash witch fuck... noooooo. that was ma last time taking things simple.

Gonna make a robotic demo of my most recent ANN project.
Excited and nervous.
GAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!

Being the new guy, I always get stuck doing a majority of the demos..

The place I currently work at has got this culture of ignoring developers.

Deadlines get made by 3rd parties and project managers who don't have the technical nounce or experience of our system to make a call on deadlines.

Demos of products are arranged without a discussion with developers as to whether said component will be ready on that date.

3rd parties make decisions about future architecture, offer to assist, then disappear for days on end, to only come back and make out as though they've not been holding us up.

Upper management take no interest, don't listen to the people they pay to do a job.

Currently just moved a PHP web app into a multi tenant scalable EBS environment, but apparently it's not worth asking our view on technical aspects of the business before the shit hits the fan.

Lies to clients about documentation and policies, for example, claims from Sales we have a DR and BCP plan, client called is out, they sent a 2 paragraph A4 document to the client claiming it was our DR and BCP plan without talking to anyone technical, including myself who has years of DR experience. Embarrassing.

Could go on, but rant over.

So today I spent most of the day "gaming", basically trying seeing what my PC could handle. It was very disappointing and realized I wasted a while day.

1.Somehow the graphics settings even set to Ultra didn't feel realistic.

2. The games take a long time to download even with Steam... 50-60GB... WTF....

The largest game I ever played on PC before was maybe 4-8GB... (DVDs)

And yes I installed Steam and bought a game (Project Cars 2). The videos looked pretty nice I'm videos but not so in game... (Waiting for refund now)

3. I downloaded some other demos but the setup time and cutscenes took too much time

4. Controls for some games seen to have been ported from console (they were mapped to XBOX buttons?).

I should've stuck to my original plan... Programming, no games

But I think one thing if certain... I will never understand console games (the ones with stories/plots). I'm sticking with arcade or the ones I can cheat thru at most.

When somebody demos a new app to the CIO as a functional product but turns out to be a concept prototype made with Origami without any proper code... literally a glorified PowerPoint with animations....

What do you think about this level Inheritance 😃

How old were you guys when you started writing code? What language and what inspired you?

My first programming memories come from writing some QBasic text-based RPG and graphics demos when I was like 12. I remember moving into C/C++ soon after with Borland's C++ compiler and playing around with WinAPI and OpenGL 1.

Demo Driven Development

Now let's hit some deadlines, add the tests later, and the technical debt will probably just be somebody else's problem.

somewhere in this world this happened..

Company lands huge enterprise project
manager: we have a year to get this done.
poor devs : excited and thinks about so much learning with this project it would be.
manager: Lets get work started with (spits planless jargons)...meanwhile another team is working on SRS.
poor devs: So we are doing R&D right..(excited)
manager: No we have a demo scheduled after 15days.
poor devs: What??
manager: Get on it..we need something to show on demo.
poor devs: no words spoken

...after one year of unplanned demos...
manager: we have to stablize project..UAT is nearing.
one of brave poor devs: No no..lets focus on demo...why do you need a stable product.
manager: instant rage

Don't check in a major/ groundbreaking change a day or two before sprint demo! However confident you are about your code just postpone it until after all sprint demos 😷

The Ghost of Live Demos:

A supernatural being with extremely high technical prowess always scouting for live demos and ruining them in ways that has never happened before.

A phenomenon.
An enigma.
A truth.

The only way to survive is to expect him.
Always.

"Hey guys we originally set the demo date to August 5th and thus far I have not seen any previews before that, what's going on here?"

Ok see, that is the kind of thing that I would take to me own lil broken heart IF:
1 It was coming from a product manager at where I work

2 He would never get any sort of updates or would just plain not know about us

3 He would be I dunno....fucking paying us?

This is the thing, a friend offered the chance to help him build a product for a business man somewhere down in the land of tacos. Being in a "fuck it" mood and not wanting to say no since it sounded interesting enough I said yes. The "owner" said that he would not be able to pay since he already had hired a team of developers before that did not deliver and as such he was instead offering a part of the company.....sounds familiar?

Not wanting to let my friend down, I told the owner that I would help just as long I get complete CTO power over the product and not crying about the stack being used or ME NOT GIVING THE PRODUCT MY FULL ATTENTION BECAUSE HE WAS NOT FUCKING PAYING.

He said ok.

Of course he did not like it, but he said ok.

He has been asking for the code, the platform, demos and a bunch of other shit which I continue to refuse since he has not offered me or my boy a copy of the legal documents that we require.

Him: "You will get them soon enough, I still need to see the product just to make sure everything is ok"

Me: "You wouldn't even know where to begin looking unless you have a third party that could verify the code, last time I checked I was to be the only one good for this"

Him: "Yeah and you and <friend> are, but I just need to see the product"

Me: "I send you videos and demos, sorry dude, but no binding document == no code. I know you think I am young, give me some fucking credit because this is not my first rodeo"

Him: "I am not trying to play you or anything, you can trust me"

Me: "No, not really. Talk to me about this when you get the documents"

Him: "Well its cuz this is taking too long...."

Me: "Tssss I know!!! It sucks right? Want a good product, built with all the bells and whistles and YOU DON'T WANT TO PAY? guess what dude, I do have a full time job, your product gets my minimal attention, right there at the bottom next to taking a shit, meaning that I will give your product the same time and attention as I would going to the throne. Aye don't feel that bad, I normally take about 1 hour on the shitter, you get that for fucking free."

To be fair ladies and gents I normally don't just explode on people like this. But I just can't fathom not paying someone for a rather large software product, with only a promise that "it will sell" and then telling them to hurry up.

Far as I am concerned this product will flop, but he seems to think it is the next big thing(of course).

He can go choke on some chode.

Fucking prick.

A tale of silos, pivots, and mismanagement.

Background: Our consultancy has been working with this client for over a year now. It started with some of our back-end devs working on the API.

We are in Canada. The client is located in the US. There are two other teams in Canada. The client has an overseas company contracted to do the front-end of the app. And at the time we started, there was a 'UX consultancy' also in the US.

I joined the project several months in to replace the then-defunct UX company. I was the only UX consultant on the project at that time. I was also to build out a functional front-end 'prototype' (Vue/Scss) ahead of the other teams so that we could begin tying the fractured arms of the product together.

At this point there was a partial spec for the back-end, a somewhat architected API, a loose idea of a basic front-end, and a smattering of ideas, concepts, sketches, and horrific wireframes scattered about various places online.

At this point we had:
One back-end
One front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
No task-management for UX

You might get where this is going...

None of the teams had shared meetings. None of the team leads spoke to each other. Each team had their own terms, their own trajectory, and their own goals.

Just as our team started pushing for more alignment, and we began having shared meetings, the client decided to pivot the product in another direction.

Now we had:
One back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
Two functional prototypes
One front-end Jira board
One back-end Jira board

No worries. We're professionals. We do this all the time. We rolled with it and we shifted focus to a new direction, with the same goals in mind internally to keep things aligned and moving along.

Slowly, the client hired managers to start leading everything in the same direction. Things started to look up. The back-end team and the product and UX teams started aligning goals and working toward the same objectives.

Then the client shifted directions again. This time bigger. More 'verticals'. I was to leave the previous 'prototypes' behind, and feature-freeze them to work on the new direction.

One back-end
One conceptual 'new' back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
One product Jira board
One UX Jira board

Meanwhile, the back-end team, the front-end team overseas, all kept moving in the previously agreed-upon direction.

At this stage, probably 6 months in, the 'prototypes' were much less proper 'prototypes' but actually just full apps (with a stubbed back-end since I was never given permission or support to access the actual back-end).

The state of things today:
Back to one back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One 'working' front-end
One 'QA' front-end
One 'demo' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
Two front-end Jira boards
One current product Jira board
One future product Jira board
One current UX Jira board
One future UX Jira board
One QA Jira board

I report to approximately 4 people remotely (depending on the task or the week).

There are three representatives from 'product' who dictate features and priorities (they often do not align).

I still maintain the 'prototype' to this day. The front-end team does not have access to the code of this 'prototype' (the clients' request). The client's QA team does not test against the 'prototype'.

The demos of the front-end version of the product include peanut-gallery design-by-committee 'bug call-outs', feature requests, and scope creep by attendees in the dozens from all manner of teams and directors.

First they make it difficult to do your job. "Only use this server for your testing with twenty other engineers". And when you adjust to that, they change it to impossible. "The server is off limits while demos are on going" .. But you're expected to continue working at full speed ahead.

I fucking hate when my project manger makes me do demos on sprint reviews. I have enough fucking things to focus on. I don’t need this extra pressure. Fuck this. I hate public speaking. He thinks that it helps me to grow. Fuck him. 😒😒😒😒

So I just finished my degree and started working here at a small game development company that makes board games for mobiles (android/ios) using Unity. I love Unity and have built some demos and all for my college projects before.

They said there will be a training period but all they make me do is integrate firebase and other ad network plugins into their shitty game project.

And above that I'm offered only $200 a month. My college made me believe that you must get employed however low the salary is, no matter what. Fuck this shit.
I'd rather like to make my own game someday and make money off that than to work at this nihilistic place.

What the fuck is up with all these fucking shit-posts lately. devRant used to be fucking sick as and now it's just meme after meme and random shit everywhere. No true rants most of the time.

P.S. I'm back. Welcome to me.

My old boss who somehow has gotten his small team of 4 PHP development contracts with Vodafone and Tesco etc. No QA, no tests, no frameworks allowed.

Sets random deadlines and used to suddenly drop demos on me for projects I'd just started and he had no idea of the state of them. Needless to say one project I was so rushed with no idea what I was actually making (for real) that I got sacked.

My poor developer 😢😂

I hate weekly demos. Why not wait until something is done and ready to show, and then schedule a show an tell?

Otherwise you're just racing around to get some half-ass, not working rubbish in to make things look good. Yet it probably doesn't work at all, and is filled with technical debt that will make it to production.

Having a look at electron again after giving up on it months ago.

I must say, the documentation has improved a lot since then, and it looks---dare I say---intuitive to use?

The electron api demos app is surely some help, but I'm not really all that sure how much it lives up to its name. It doesn't really demonstrate anything, and it doesn't cover the whole api, just small chunks of it.

Loving the event system though!

I prefer starting from theory and then proceed with practicing. For example, to learn haskell and deeply understand it, I started by taking a course in category theory and I already have a degree in computer science and then start writing actual code. The same with JS. I started with theory for JIT compilers and studied how V8 works, how it utilizes event loops and how they are implemented in the kernel. Then I started experimenting with code and demos. It's a success path for me, that has worked every time with every new technology.

FUCK idiotic "prospects" who send tons of requests for API specs and feature docs and contracts and custom quotes and demos and SLA-related questions and security audits and hardware questions when they actually don't have 3 bucks in their whole rancid sewer of a village to at least pay for the sales call and have their whole fucking communal tent micromanaging a malnourished donkey running around to power their fucking 286 they use to send emails. I'll fucking buy your whole family of 37 and turn you all into dog food for wasting my motherfucking time.

Today is one of those days where I realize there are hundreds of free APIs and tools to make something amazing and revolutionary, but you can't think of anything that isn't already done or is too advanced for an indie developer. Seriously, I watched Microsoft's Connect event keynotes and demos for these easy and amazing structures, but not a single app idea comes to mind. 😐

If I'm going to make a profit and a good resume, somethings needs to happen.

UI control packs. They look amazing in the demos, and are so easy to add...

And then they start breaking for no reason. Documentation is outdated. Examples never cover real world uses. There are a million versions, and the one you use is suddenly no longer available for download.

In the end you realize you could either have lived without that one feature you wanted it for, or rolled your own with much less work.

Time to learn how to write an MVC Windows Console App in C++ in just a few days while also having 1 presentation, 2 technical demos, and 4 exams this week...

Like age 8?
As a kid I really liked flash games and animations and wanted to get into it. I couldn't do flash, it looked too complicated but I found a little software by the name od KoolMoves that was just a simpler flash animation tool.

I did a bunch of shitty stick figure animations in it (hello to everyone from stick figure death theatre) but eventually I realized that I can make it do things (interactive menus, choose your story kinda things, move the player around, shoot...!)

I fell in love with AS1 and later AS2.0 and made bunch of demos and proof of concepts for systems and games. Most are lost to time and datarot by now)

Age 12
Eventually I found out I can make the entire Windows machine do what I want using first Batch files and later Visual Basic script (made a skype bot!) At this point I was also really into graphics and logo/web design

Age 15 - 20 or so
Then it was pretty natural to move to actual Visual Basic, then C# and finally I to C++. And I had the C family in my heart forever. I managed to get a but into 3D graphics too and got a part-time in archviz

Even by this point I never believed I could be a programmer as a profession. I thought of it just as something I love, but have no chance getting into compared to some of the names out there. I half expected to be either doing graphics (cause I found it simple at the time) or some shitty random job in an office.

20+
Finally I decided to go to uni and study software development, see if I can touch the future I always dreamed of! And... Well... I found out more than 80% of the people there never touch a language up until now and most people are just as retarded as I thought..

For a while I also worked as a game designer (still not being comfortable calling myself a programmer, so I chose a non programming position) but I ended up going into the code and improving and fixing game designer tools (it was unity and C#)

After seeing actual programmers at work in a company, and talking to a bunch of them I realized I already have everything I need to do this seriously and with that experience out of the way I breezed through uni, learned to love Linux and landed a proper job :)

I kinda hope my experience with long lasting self doubt will be useful for someone

Stupid timeline, there is this company I was working for. It was sub-contracted by another company to do a government project. Government only pays after you deliver in my country. It was a complex system I must say. We were to work with my buddy on this project...now the timeline we were given were not feasible since another company had been given the same project and were not able to deliver. We had a meeting and discussed with our CEO about the project timelines. From the workload the feasible timelines were around 8months if we were to work as two devs. My CEO said that was not going to happen.. The only timelines that was allowed was not more than 3 months. So we suggest use an existing system to customize. .The meetings with the clients were to be weekly demos. So we choose to go with google docs api for the document management part. We were working around 20hrs a day to be able to achieve the target deadline..we management to complete the project within the given timeline..on the commissioning date of the project we faced a government panel and this was my worst disappointment. At the point of login we had to use Google email for business to obtain the API. Just as I was logging in the guy noticed and yelled. "Is that google account ?" and I replied yes..and he said "no need of proceeding since it will be of no use and they won't approve the system". That was my lowest moment in programming. I thought I had done the best project in my life as a programmer only for stupid man to declare my project as null. I felt like calling him son of a bitch but I knew that would have made me more angry...i just walked out. I went to the toilet and all I did was cry for the first time as I can recall.. My question was I was doing weekly demos. Why didn't they raise any questions by then so as to change the entire system??? Later after that demo we went and discussed about the issue and there was time extension. I redid the project using 'open office' but just before deploying the system I got a better job. I wasn't feeling like working on that project anymore. I want to release that project as open source. Recently after one year they haven't yet deployed the system. They are calling for my help. And I don't feel like helping after the humiliation...

Atm we're merging everything straight up to production because we only have our first client going live tomorrow. No problem except for the fact boss is using production to give demos to clients already. And so some JavaScript change that broke search made it to production and cropped up during a demo. So what does boss do? Call HR/support and yell at her that everything which works needs to keep working. Which is fair if we were live and we go back to merging to production being rare. So HR/support was in tears during our meeting where we were taking about the new live branch structure. GG boss. We consoled HR/support but really boss man knew how we work but ignored it.

Question for everyone though: what can we use or do to prevent changes to more general JavaScript breaking things around the code? We talked about unit tests and maybe code linters but is there more? Because it seems now might be the time to improve our working and even get budgets for tools.

I want to start a devRoulette project: basically something telling you what to code, in what language, and with some challenges if specified. Feel free to put your suggestions here :)

NEW: @SADAVA, who has been bashed quite a lot for their initiative of building demos for my project, didn't mean harm. In fact, I might consider a collab, so yeah :)

there should be a dev show like the voice but instead of the voice it's a hackathon and people vote for who they want to win

and you can view the players in real time and play all their demos when judging

Personal Observation
=======
Today morning I was looking through different React UI frameworks for my next hobby project. MUI React has been my favorite but I wanted something informal for this project, so I opened up all the two dozen suggested ones by Google searches.

Since reversing on committing to a UI framework, later on, is a huge headache so I was going through the component demos to shortlist a handful for final consideration, and in that, I almost skipped out all the frameworks which weren't showing a preview of their component on the documentation page itself.
========
I wonder how many frameworks are genuinely good but are passed over due to others having better and more illustrative documentation. In a market with vast abundance, one cannot rely on the sincerity of the consumer to invest time and determine the best possible product, for there are plenty of 'good enough' products that the user does not really worry about false negatives.

I'm so over Fibonacci demos. It's become the Northwind database of algorithm examples.

Maybe a Rubik's Cube solver as a change of pace, perhaps?

My first project was a veterinary web app ( CRUD ) in a really small company, supposedly to replace the clients junk software, the client was a friend of the money guy of the company, after 18 months doing whatever the client asked, and monthly demos, that fucker said I don't like it, I wanted something equal to what I have been using just with internet connection.
At the same time there was other project to create the workflow of commercial orders with other friend of the money guy ( lol...) But in this case the guy was the salesman, Almost same history. When the technology director and the investor asked the sales guy he said " the client said he is not going to pay a shit, there are a lot of free apps for something like this", of course both of them got fucking mad and blamed us, they invested more than 3 millions ( Mexican pesos ) and got nothing in return.

What is all the hype around Blazor in .Net Conf,
Have not seen anything special except these boring demos and presenters and the fact that it will be based on Web Assembly. Has anyone caught anything exciting other than that!

Tried out the node.js code demo in this book.
🤦‍♂️
Terrible format, use tab for indentation, very very long function, redundant code (eg: new Buffer vulnerability)...
The major issue is none of the total.js nosql code works. Eg:
db.clear()
db.insert({...data})
Without any asynchronous call, how do you expect this to work?!
Just fixed the code and updated npm modules for demos in Chapter 3 btw... Took way longer than expected.

How can i learn to use all kali linux softwares with their demos

I got yet another interesting question today:
"Why do people make demos with such old machines? No one's using an Amiga or C64 anymore."

I can't really answer this one.

Is it better to have a lot of small separate demos for your portfolio or one big app that contains all of them?