Ok so 10 yrs ago:-

Professor: Make this web front-end with blah blah blah pages.

*I create the thing and submit it*

<Next lecture i come in class and the projector is showing my website>

<I get excited that im bout to be praised for my work infront of whole class>

<I grab a seat>

Professor: I had high hopes from you. I did not expect PLAGRISM from YOU.

Me: Wwwwwwhaaaaaaaaaat the faaaaaaaaaaaaq??? Where is it which part????

Professor: Ive seen "lorem Ispem" before somewhere else. This is fucking plagrism.

<I sat 15 mins in disbelief>
<Got out of class>
<Dropped out of the course>

Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

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

Church proyect...

Client: we want our logo in our new website

Me: ok no problem just give me the....

Client: but we dont want ppl to be able to download it.

Me: excuse me but that is not posible cuz...

Client: where is your faith! Nothing is imposible.

Me: proceed to stare in disbelief....

Not so much screaming as staring in disbelief, mumbling profanity in his direction...

When my department lead said "I don't think this unit testing hype or code reviews make much sense, it's more efficient to just make a checklist and test the application yourself"

This was the QA department of an aerospace company, we wrote NDT software to do image recognition on xrays of alloy welds and micrometer laser measurements on fuel tank surfaces. Software which is quite mission critical, a single misrecognized welding fault could literally cost up to half a billion dollars — not to mention that it's a very sabotage & espionage sensitive industry.

After raising some hell he was replaced though.

New rant = Rant.type(['non-dev', 'public transportation']).init()

So i am taking the bus now to see a friend, and this fucking whale woman comes on board with a baby caddy, except, it wasn't for a baby, but for a fucking dog the size of a brick. That already in itself makes me grumble because dogs have fucking legs and there is no fucking real need to carry them around like newborns.... Anyways this woman sits and takes up a lot of space for the 'handicapped' persons for her fucking baby dog... So far no real issue there since people with disabilities hardly get on this bus line. A fzw bus stops later an equally whale black woman gets on the bus, obviously struggling with her size and her caddy filled with groceries...

There is enough room to accomodate the baby caddy and her groceries.
That fucking white whale says to her 'there is no room there, move someplace else'... The black woman stands there in disbelief, and this is the first time i look up, giving the 'the fuck you just say bitch' look to the white whale. I mention there is enough room and the black whale sits carefully next to the dog caddy.

Now the bus takes a sharp turn, the dog caddy tips over due to the g-forces it causes...and inmediately this white whale shouts to the black whale 'fucking retard, don't tip my dog over!' this while the black woman apologises for the fall of the caddy not even being her fault...

This angered me so puch that i rantzd to this woman: 'madam, thzre is such a thing called physics, the bus made a sharp turn and your stupud useless space-wasting dog caddy tipped over bzcause of that. Don't just go accusing people for your own degenerate racist lifestyle. I suggest you hold on to it and apologise to the lady'

She then murmles incomprehensibly and gives a butthurt look, rhe black woman thanks me and tries to remain very quiet on her seat, eventually she gets off

This fucking thing makes me angry to a level i wanna toeturz that whale by peeling off her skin with garden fence metal wiri g, suck the fat out of her body and brain with an industrial vacuum cleaner and put her in the fucking oven baking in her own fat, of course without any anesthetics...

Damnit all to hell!

Also, why on earth do dogs need caddy's? They got perfectly fine legs!

I know, sadist inside

A real interaction I just had...

Team Member: "Can you handle this ticket for a bug fix?"

Me: "Whats the problem?"

TM: "We aren't exactly sure..."

Me: "Ok, so can you show it to me?"

TM: "We can't get it to happen again, and when it does the machine freezes and we can't debug it..."

Me: "So, if I find a fix then how do we test to make sure it worked?"

TM: "I'm not sure..."

Then today,

Product Manager: "How's that bug fix going?"

Me: "Well, let's see. The problem still hasn't been defined. I have never been able to recreate the issue. I have a hacky fix in a PR..."

PM: "Great, so we can deploy today?!?"

Me: "No, because we have no way to reproduce or test this issue at all..."

PM: "Do you think your fix will work?"

Me: "Honestly, no. If you're asking for my opinion then you can have it. IMO this is NOT a bug fix but a change to how the system operates altogether. This system was built by someone who didn't know what they are doing. We have done our best with it but it is a house of cards. And now the solution is to replace a card at the bottom layer. It is likely that no matter what fix we do (even when we can fucking test it) that it will topple the house of cards..."

PM: ~Looking at me in disbelief~

Me: "If you ask me for my honest professional opinion then you will get it. Keep that in the future if that honest response was outside what you expected."

PM: "I will do that, thanks for your assessment"

Where do we go from here? God only knows.

Praise Joe Pesci

Me: Fix this for me and I'll send you a cookie.
Collegue: Deal!
(5 mins later)
Collegue: Done, give me cookie.
Me: send MUIDB4T.txt ..... Long cookie file on Skype.
( Munches chocolate chip cookie)
(Collegue stares in disbelief....)
Me: hey I Even gave you a big one.

( Passes cookie jar )

So, as some people here probably know, I don't use any of the mainstream, mass surveillance integrated social media and messaging services. Since I'm located in the Netherlands especially whatsapp is nearly a life requirement but Facebook and such come close as well and I don't use anything related to Facebook, Google, Apple and any of the other companies related to mass surveillance programs which often puts me in awkward positions.

Every time someone wants to stay in touch and the fact that I don't use whatsapp comes up again, it usually turns into an explaining session with much disbelief from the other party but more and more often, I'm getting rather tired of that.

Recently, I had one of those moments and instead of saying 'sorry, I don't use whatsapp', i went for 'sorry, I'm old school, i only do texting and calling!'.

No discussion, just got a "ah, fair enough!"

😮

I started doing this more and more and I get the same response every time!

I find it quite astonishing how bringing something another way can get one a completely different response, especially in this context.

> Bang head against issue for days
> Finally get help from lead
> Watch them bang their head against it on video for 40 minutes
> Watch them shake their head in disbelief at how difficult to follow and objectively wrong the existing code is
> Talk through approach to fixing it and patching in the new functionality
> Listen to a short recap
> Ask question, get answer
> Chat about next company meet
> Meeting adjourns
> Jot down implementation notes before I forget
> Remember answer to question, forget everything else

FFFFUUUUUUUUUUU 😭

So before today, I'd never used GoDaddy before. Not even once. My supervisor walks in and happily informs me that I'm going to be adding photos to a website that she does editing for. Okay, fine, that's stupidly easy. What I did not realize, however, is that this entire website had been built using GoDaddy's site builder, and if you're not familiar with it, thank whatever gods you worship that you've dodged that bullet. I hardly want to go wandering around somebody else's web hosting, so I search about for a bit praying that there's SOME semblance of a normal text editor someplace, because text editors make me happy and all, and find very little on the regular site. Already not thrilled. So I figure, how bad is this site editor? Really, how bad can it possibly be?
Oh, you poor misguided son of a -
Anyway, I go in and look at the site. Slideshows everywhere, nothing is aligned correctly, it's a web designer's nightmare. Thankfully, I'm not a web designer, so I press on and reorganize a little bit. I try slapping a new slideshow on their, and discover that unlike the way it SHOULD work, elements do not move to allow for other elements, they just sit there and let you throw things on top of them. I stare at my neatly-stacked slideshows for a second in utter disbelief, knowing but not really accepting that I'm going to need to take every last one of those slideshow elements and slide those little so-and-so's down by hand. ....why? Who designed this? Who decided that was a good idea? I do some Googling to see if there's anything out there to make this less horrid, and lo and behold I find a GoDaddy page about their FTP file manager! It's under web/classic hosting, which apparently means it's deprecated because I spent the next ten minutes hunting around for the "web hosting" link those chicken-lickers were so proud of and it's nowhere to be found.
Alright, so they want to do this the hard way.
At this point I'm screaming internally and PRAYING that I'm just being stupid and not seeing anything to make it easi-
No, not even easier. Just less stupid. This website builder makes no sense. It's like hiring a contractor to build a bridge and handing him a box of Legos and a banana.
So I do more googling and find instructions on getting to the file manager. FINALLY. The first step is find "Hosting" under "My Products." I rush over to My Products joyfully, hoping I can get this stupid website up and running reasonably quickly, and...!
There's no hosting tab.
No button.
Not even a little hard-to-see link. At this point my brain is screaming. WHY would you give me a website builder but absolutely no way to actually write the website? Do people actually use this thing? I mean, I get it if they want to make it nice and accessible for people to make websites without overwhelming them with HTML but if they know how to edit the website and they don't want your help, why would you force me in to this? Why? Then it occurred to me that maybe the organization just hasn't ever had a web developer in it, ever, or at least not one who was willing to help out with the website, so they purposefully signed up for hosting that deprived them of any kind of HTML editor. Then on top of all of that, I noticed that on the home page, which had been edited by someone else long before I ever looked at it, ALSO had one of these stupid slideshows that I had to reorganize by hand, and some sad, angry little man had put in one of the photos sideways. It was SIDEWAYS. Just sitting there on its side, the photo's occupants staring at me with sad eyes begging me to turn them facing up again. I sat there and stared at a badly-designed website in a questionably-designed editor. And I wondered. I wondered who put this all together, and I wondered why *I* was the one doing it, when I work for a university and the website was for some beach homeowner's association. And I wondered if this job was a task that my supervisor had agreed to do and just passed off onto an office monkey. And I wept bitter tears at the realization that I am that office monkey.

Been reading devrant posts for a month or so, this is my first actual post. I'm hoping it will be therapeutic. ☺️ I need something to keep me from killing my boss when I see him again tomorrow..

Some backstory: Currently working in HR for the last 7 or so years with complete shit for brains boss, even worse when it comes to anything related to technology. For almost two years I've been working to get another bachelor's degree. This time in computer sciences, to make a career switch to systems and software engineer. Last week I roughly had the following wonderful conversation:

Boss: we've needed new Recruitment software for a while now. Can't you make us one as a school project?

Me: 'Make us one?' It's not really that simple.. I'm barely halfway through my education, maybe I could do it, but it would take me quite a long time even if I could work on it fulltime.. Combining a halftime job with a fulltime education is taking up enough of my time as it is and I have more than enough school projects btw..

Boss: it would be a win-win. Work a little harder in your spare time and when you graduate you have a real-life project on your resume.

Me: I'm sorry, i'm failing to see the 'win' for me here.. I work 10 hours a day, 7 days a week on average, trying to combine work and studies. I'm pretty much maxed out..

Boss: Your coworker(also extreme dumbass) told me you wrote some quick code the other day that helped him out. Don't underestimate yourself, I'm sure you can do this.

Me(in complete disbelief by now): I wrote him an Excel-macro! They don't even teach me that at school. It's a very very very long way from actual software development! I'm sorry, it just can't be done.

Boss: Thats too bad. I expected you to welcome an opportunity like this and be more motivated towards this company..

Me: ***more disbelief and silence, just staring at him***
I'm sorry you feel that way.
***walked away***

WTF, I work my ass off for 7 years for this fucking shithead.. Even before I started this bachelors degree I had at least some understanding of the work developers put in their software. It blows my mind, no, it fucking angers me how people think making software is so simple.. Why do you think it's a 3-year education you fucking cunt?

Please, someone tell me how I can keep myself from ramming his fucking head through a wall tomorrow...

I'm been hacking together software for the last year or so now and I've never considered myself to be a good programmer.

Today however I had to implement an A* search from scratch and with only the knowledge of how the algorithm should function I put together some code that looked correct.

I went to run my code expecting one of the typical "Index out of bound", "null reference", "something has not be initialised" BUT I was shocked to find that the code worked flawlessly.

I went into a weird state of shock and disbelief. I'm not naturally gifted at this stuff, so it was just really hard for me to accept that I might actually be getting better to the point where I might be able to say "I am a programmer"

Does anyone else get bad imposter syndrome?

Story Time:

When I first started working where I currently am, the manager at the time decided to send us off to a conference about one of the products our institution was purchasing at the time. She also thought that it would be a good way for me, the new guy, to bond with the rest of the staff.

During the presentations we found out that the people surrounding us were not exactly developers because of a couple of things:

1. Some examples were done with php and javascript for adding functionality to said product. The product gave you the opportunity to script on top of it (think of some sort of CMS, but it does not use PHP as its backend language) EVERYONE from the "class" in this particular workshop said they were developers. But at the sight of php in a group of 80 people or so, only about 7 recognized it, including myself and my team.

2. When they showed an example with Javascript, in particular jquery, one of the dudes in the workshop said (with extreme senior level confidence might I add) "yeah I never liked Javascript because you really can't connect it to any database in a website" <--- my face went 0.o and one of the actual developers doing the presentation did a Jim from the Office and looked at some out of screen camera.

3. During a conf talk, one PHD dude showed an example in the template language the CMS used (an obscure Java based template language)in which he was proudly calling out a technique he used to include one snippet of code into another one.....at that time, one of my coworkers squinted his eyes in disbelief, got close to me and said "is this man telling everyone in here that he discovered how to include a file? like, as a new thing?" me: "lol yes", him: "this is a waste of time, do the docs for this thing show how to do it or is he doing some sort of strange maneuver for something the platform does not support?" me: "let me check....nope, it is included, for some reason he made a function that takes the...name of the file he wants to include and passes it over to that call inside of the body....which as per the docs it is the include function...." him: ".....fuck, what a waste of time and money, fuck it lets spend a couple of more minutes here and then go get a drink or something"

That last part was my favorite really, the man speaking was not just any phd holder, but a comp sci phd holder. To this day my dude would walk into my office and say shit like "I DISCOVERED HOW TO INCLUDE A FILE WITH PHP!"

Fidget spinners are stupid.

But what do you have on your desk instead?

The challenge of a Rubik's Cube? A classic Newtons Cradle? A stack of empty pizza boxes? Magnets, because how do they work? The one and only devRant stress ball?

I'm looking for something to mess with when I'm staring in disbelief at horrible PRs.

Preferably something semi-creative, tactile and stress-relieving. The three-dimensional material equivalent of the doodle.

Something which is less annoying for coworkers than the clicky switches in my keyboard. And a bit more appropriate than my genitals.

Rant about a german problem in english

I think we as the people should just sue the german government for neglect of progress and neglect of the education system. If your not familiar with the state of german IT we have worse internetspeeds than uganda or the notoriously shitty australia, our neighbourstates look at us in disbelief while laughing in optic fibre. Our school system seperates all students after 4th grade in 3 tiers, the lowest one gives you the future perspective as a social security case. The second and highest tier require masses of useless knowledge, so called "competences"(Kompetenzen) which are totally useless skills with no real world application because they are derived from real skills, a median ground between all possible applications of that skill. And while doing that they terribly insist on doing everything the "proper" way, meaning handwritten. Most people you would expect to have basic computer literacy, meaning age 40 and below, are incapable of using basic functions of a non-smartphone computer and do not understand the slightest of what they are actually doing or supposed to do. And I mean nothing technical. Germans are the reasons they still put word as a job requirement for devjobs because this disqualifies half of our population. This leads to many people having the archaeic "we versus the machines" mentality, thinking that if they ever let the computer do parts of the job, they will then lose all of it to the machines. Thats why you never strive past basic mathematical principles in mathematics, which is a big misnomer because you never do actual mathematics, only calculating and basic calculus and statics. If you get to use your calculator, its some basic casio with no actual functionality then standard operations. And even using that is shunned upon. How is this country ever supposed to become something more than it was in the 90's, if we teach people nothing of use and kill all progress in its root.

When you work for a long while in a convoluted piece of code and then compile and it just works...

*wink, wink*

Then you spend another 30 minutes going through the code in disbelief trying to figure out why it didn't break 😵

Imagine if, when a Windows version became outdated (So anything before Windows 8, I guess), Microsoft made it available in the public domain.

We could have Windows distributions, just like Linux! Imagine how weird it would sound if you just said to your Linux-using friend, 'Oh yeah, I use arch!' and they replied 'Oh, me too! I love Arch Linux!', and you just stare at them and say:

'What's Linux? I only use Arch Windows.'

...
...
...

'Arch Windows? Are you stupid?', they would reply in utter disbelief.

We all know someone's gonna blurt out 'Yeah guys! I just downloaded Kali Windows so I could learn to hack, I don't know what you're talking about!'

Ah, good times.

Ok so I've been working on this bug for the past four days, fucking non-stop. I wanted to fucking die, was wishing I could just "pkill -f mylife". I tried fucking everything, did what the documentation told me to, stack overflow, tried different versions of the API, read through more lines of documentation than lines in the bible, to no avail. Start comparing screenshots of error logs from the past four days, notice that I started getting a line saying that it's connecting to the config file in a different location from default. I realize that the config file does not match the config file provided by the package installed, so I switch it to the default location. IT FUCKING WORKED, I've tested it nearly 10 times now and I am still in disbelief. It was a rollercoaster of emotions fixing the bug but now I'm just smiling like a fool in my chair at work now.

Has anyone felt the astonishing effect that is writing a whole bunch of test classes, hitting run for the first time and they all pass.

I'm kinda sitting here staring at my screen in disbelief, either these tests all passed, or I've really missed something and they passed anyway, or it's just a lying piece of shit trying to question my own abilities... all are possible right now.

And no, they are not " assert(1,1) "

Looking through our gitlog today and see 3 PR's from our "lead developer". 2 of these were removing a single blank line from a class, and the 3rd was adding one back in. None of these had any title or commit messages on the PR's. This is a guy that talks down to everyone and deliberately makes other devs feel insignificant, saying he's too busy to write documentation and it's not needed because his uncommented code is self documenting. But hang on he's not too busy to waste time with pointless non-functional PR's that only remove a couple of blank lines? Scratching my head in disbelief that some devs think they can get away with shit like this. How about you drop the ego and actually try and work in collaboration with the other devs.

Spent a lot of time designing a proper HTTP (dare I even say RESTful) API for our - what is until now a closed system, using a little-known/badly-supported message-over-websocket protocol to do RPC-style communications - supposedly enterprise-grade product.

I make the API spec go through several rounds of review with the rest of the dev team and customers/partners alike. After a few iterations, everybody agrees that the spec will meet the necessary requirements.

I start implementing according to spec. Because this is the first time we're actually building proper HTTP handling into the product, but we of course have to make it work at least somewhat with the RPC-style codebase, it's mostly foundational work. But still, I manage to get some initial endpoints fully implemented and working as per the spec we agreed. The first PR is created, reviews are positive, the direction is clear and what's there already works.

At this point in time, I leave on my honeymoon for two weeks. Naturally, I assume that the remaining endpoints will be completed following the outlines/example of the endpoints which I built. When I come back, the team mentions that the implementation is completed and I believe all is well.

The feature is deployed selectively to some alpha customers to start validation testing before the big rollout. It's been like that for a good month, until a few days ago when I get a question related to a PoC integration which they can't seem to get to work.

I start investigating and notice that the API hasn't been implemented according to the previously agreed upon spec at all. Not only did the team manage to implement the missing functionality in strange and some even broken ways, they also managed to refactor my previously working endpoints into being non-compliant.

Now, I'm a flexible guy. It's not because something isn't done exactly as I've imagined it that it's automatically bad. However, I know from experience that designing a good/clear/future-proof API is a tricky exercise. I've put a lot of time and effort into deliberate design decisions that made up the spec that we all reviewed repeatedly and agreed upon. The current implementation might also be fine, but I now have to go over each endpoint again and reason about whether the implementation still fulfills the requirements (both soft and hard) that we set out to meet.

I'm met with resistance, pushback and disbelief from product management and dev co-workers alike when I raise the concern that the API might actually not be production-ready (while I'm frantically rewriting my integration tests and figuring out how the actual implementation works in comparison to what was spec'ed).

Oh, and did I mention that product management wants to release this by end-of-week?!

We've all had shitty jobs at one point or another, maybe some of us already had software engineering experience while having to work in a different field for a variety of reasons.

Well check this shit.

At one point(during my second year of school) for various reasons I had to work in retail. For those that know, retail can be a soul crushing experience...the trick is not letting management to convince you that it is an actual good job, it is not, and I have respect and sympathy for everyone currently working in it. The mind numbing retarded customers that we get are absolutely fantastic in every sense of the word.

My position in retail was as a phone salesman, for MetroPCS (which for all of y'all european ninjas is one of the low end phone carriers here in the U.S) and the people that we get as customers where I live are normally very poor which apparently in Mexican culture stands for annoyingly ignorant (I am Mexican myself, so I can really vouch for this shit)

One day a customer came in telling me that there was an app that he was using that kept giving him troubles, it was a map application for truck drivers. Now, obviously, this had nothing to do with my line of work(phone salesman) and as such I normally tried to explain that and let them be, but I imagined that it was a settings issue so I reluctantly agreed to help him. I explained to him that the app was no longer maintained and that the reason for it was probably that the developer abandoned it and that he would just have to look into the app, upon closer inspection the app itself was nothing more than a wrapper over google maps with trucker icons and a "trucker" interface, he was using the app as a GPS navigator and he could as well just have been using google maps.

The conversation was like this:

Me: Well this app is no longer supported, it will probably be taken off the google store soon, you can look for something similar or just change to Google maps

Retard: What? no! I came here in order for you to fix it, Metro needs to fix their own apps!

Me (in complete disbelief): We have no control over third party apps, and even for the ones that we provide the store has no control over them. But this app is not ours and so we can't really do anything about it.

Retard: Well WTF should I do? I have been having many issues with youtube and spotify, shouldn't Metro fix their Google store?

Me: Those apps are not ours.....wait, you seem to believe that we own youtube and spotify, those are not ours

Retard: How the fuck they are not yours! its your phone isn't it?

Me: Eh no.....Metro does not(at this point I was sort of smiling because I wanted to laugh) own youtube or spotify or the play store or even this phone, metro does not own Android or Samsung(his phone was a samsung core prime)

Retard: Well You need to fix this

Me: No I do not and I can not, the developer for this app abandoned it and has nothing to do with us

Retard: Well call the developer and tell him to fix it

At this point I was on a very bad mode since this dude was being obnoxiously rude from the beginning and it annoyed me how he was asking for dumb shit.

Me: Did you pay for this app?

Retard: No

Me: So you expect that some developer out there will just go about and get working for something that you did not pay for?
Why don't you just use Google maps as your GPS?

Retard: Don't be stupid, Google has no maps

At this point I show him the screen where there is a lil app that said maps, pressed it and voila! map comes to life

Retard: Well....I did not know

Me: Yeah....but I am the stupid one right?

** throws phone for him to catch

Me: Have a good one bud.

And my manager was right next to me, he was just trying to control his laughter the whole time. I really despised working in there and was glad when I left. Retail man.......such a horrible fucking world.

I found it yesterday that 6 and null is false and 4 is true in our database in addition to a previous rant. I went to see how it's stored. I assumed it was an integer.

It was a nvarchar(6). I just sat there in disbelief and felt disgusted.

It kept me up later than usual last night

Why tho? 😐

internal recruiter reaches out to me

have a good screening

reach the salary question

ask them for the range they have allocated for this role

they refuse to answer

give them a range i took off their glass door page

they're unhappy/in disbelief and then proceed to ghost my ass

welp

I fucking hate morning people like the one in the story below!

Before we begin story time I want to acknowledge some things.

This is largely a case of a person having a lack of awareness and giving in to their base instincts (which are wrong).

People all tend to think that everyone else is like them (most children below a certain age cannot make this distinction and many adults never learn it either).

To take it a step further, anyone who isn't just like them is Lazy/Bad/An Asshole/etc.

FUCK THOSE PEOPLE

Now it's story time...

---------

I worked for a startup. We used a modified SCRUM, and we had standups every day @ 10 AM, the other team had then at 11:30 AM.

We get a new product owner. He is a morning person. But basically, he is a day-trader so he wakes up at 5 AM to trade and is in the office by 8 AM every day.

The problem is, he uses this as a reason to leave every day at 3 PM when EVERY other member of the team is there until at least 5 PM.

So he says one day (when I am not there) that we are moving our standups to 8:30 AM...

"Because he wants to make more use of the time and wants to get more done!"

So the next day a bunch of us miss this standup, the second day I was there in time but instead of going to the standup I sent them a picture of myself sitting in a coffee shop across the street with a message saying...

"I will be holding a meeting today at 10 AM, I expect EVERYONE to be there. If anyone on our team is absent then we will sit there and that absent person will be responsible for the time we waste waiting for them."

10 AM rolls around and the Product Owner is nowhere to be seen. The team starts complaining about the early standup and I tell them that this meeting is for me to take care of it. I tell them to sit silently and let me handle it.

We all message the PO saying the same thing...
"Come to the meeting, You are wasting our time!!!"

So he shows up at 10:20 AM and it begins.

(Now I'm going to do this as a conversation)

PO: "So I assume this is about the standup?..."

ME: "Feel free to ramble on as long as you want, you have already wasted 20 minutes of our time so we will sit here quietly and wait for you to decide you are ready to stop wasting our time with your ramblings. That's fine."

<PO then shuts up in disbelief>

ME: "So are you finished?"

PO: ...

ME: "I'm expecting an answer PO!"

PO: Yes, for now.

ME: I am moving our standups to 5 PM, end of discussion.

PO: Becuase your too lazy to be here by 8 AM?

<I expected this>

ME: No because I'm an asshole who expect everyone to conform to my schedule.

PO: ..., Well, I am not here at 5 PM.

ME: Sounds like your too "lazy" be here at 5 PM, eh?

PO: I have other things I do then.

ME: Ah, now the truth comes out. You care more about your life than our business. That's unacceptable! I personally don't care what you want to do. The fact is that we are working here and every day we end up having PO questions that need to and can't be answered because you are not here.

PO: <To the team> The standup is still at 8:30 AM.

ME: <To the team> The standup is at 5 PM. End of story. And from now on whenever we have questions before 5 for PO and he is not here we will be recording it and putting it in his report.

Then I walk away.

That day we held a standup at 5 PM. He wasn't there. He held a standup at 8:30 AM and he didn't even show up. He stayed home a video in. He then arrived in the office and said...

PO: Since no one was in the standup today we will be moving it back to 10 AM.

ME: Since PO has seen the selfishness of his ways, We will be moving the standup from 5 PM back to 10 AM.

FUCK THOSE PEOPLE

Let me recap everything i learned after graduating college with a computer science degree and entering the corporate world

---

1) College is a scam. Literally NOBODY EVER asked me on ANY interviews if i have a degree and if i had graduated university. Nobody cares. They treat me as if im a slave clown who didnt finish any school and thats how they view and treat everyone

2) By having a computer science degree, i do NOT have a privilege of getting hired, I do NOT have a privilege of getting more interviews, i do NOT get a privilege of having a higher salary, i do NOT get ANY benefits or privilege other than wasted time and brainwash.

3) Literally a senior technical software engineer told me on a technical interview "college is not meant to teach you anything useful or valuable, college is there just to teach you how to learn"

The FUCK? I was extremely shellshocked when i heard him tell me that in my face. I was in disbelief and too stunned to speak. if somebody told me that truth before i started college i would have never started college. I can do that on my own for free

4) I have applied to over 100s of interviews and nobody wanted to hire. Everyone wants a Google-Level Senior engineer in 2023 with 50+ years of experience and then pay him 600$ a month.

5) What is happening in this corporate world is absolutely fucking disgusting, sickening and immoral. This is no different than 1800s slavery. This is how modern day slavery looks like. And even when i accept working for 600$ a month i can barely afford to pay to live. I'd get like 50$ leftover every month if im lucky. This is SICKENING

6) "Engineering will make you rich" is a BULLSHIT saying that our parents and friends say. It is FAR from making you rich. You only get "rich" (but slave level rich) once you turn 40-50 years old. Is that success to you?

7) Engineering is so saturated that nobody appreciates this hard work anymore. You're a slave and you have to compete with other slaves by telling your master (employer) that you'll work for slave salary AND you'll work 10x more in exchange to earn 20x less. This is IMMORAL and DISGUSTING

Arghhhhhhhh! What the hell is becoming of today's world?

So I have registration form that relates to parents signing up for a service and asking for ages of their children. Children are never older than 5 years old.

So, for each child the user specified the child's sex/gender (Boy or girl) and their age.

I'm still in disbelief over my client's request, that is marked "urgent".

I basically need to add to the list of options, as "boy" and "girl" are no enough and the question is now "too limiting".

I apparently need to add several more options including: "prefer not to specify", "geneder neutral", "bigender" and "genderfluid".

I mean how can a child aged 5 or less identify as "gender neutral" or "bigender" - how on earth are they able to decide.

Fine, if you're an adult and signing up to something like Facebook, have your 80 odd options. But for children under 5 how have no idea wtf any of this means, stuff like this really annoys me.

I'm facing a conundrum. I saw a job posting for <Company A> weeks ago, but wasn't really interested and moved on.

Got in touch with a standalone recruitment company today who had an exciting job offer. The recruiter refused to tell me the name of the company until he spoke to me as they directed him to not disclose the name of the company or any details until he has verified the candidate is genuine. To my absolute shock and disbelief it was <Company A>!!!!

So heres the conundrum. External recruiters don't lie, why would they? Clearly this company MUST keep their hiring top secret, and some poor employee didn't get the memo before posting that job publicly. Should I report the <Company A> employee?

I don't want to report them and get them in trouble, but feel I must in order to help the company fix this leak ... before its too late ... and people find out the are hiring!

Thoughts?

Hitting a really deep, deep low in the manic-depressive roller-coaster of the development cycle:

There comes the crunch time. No meeting goes by hearing the odious: "We don't have time for that." - One critical component needs to be finished for Big Sur and instead of addressing the real issues we keep changing design and goal. One main dev already gave up fighting the PO and team lead(!) - and now I'm next. So that dev build this really clean and minimal library as the core part. But now it's just like, yeah, take that nice Porsche engine put it on the old rusty bicycle from the shed,.. but maybe because that's so shitty we need that specially formed exhaust pipe to tune it. Yeah, very 'agile' - Only thinking about it makes me shudder in disbelief and anger. I shouldn't take that shit so serious, be emotional about shit code, I know, but I can't. Let them drive some rounds around the block, if it runs at all,.. because until now we still didn't make it run on the fuckin' street. It's all so insane. Will make some nice fireball, when it goes up in flames.

Well, I have been part of quite some shitty projects. Real suicide commandos set out to fail, and somehow stood them through or made it even "work" though it should never have. But what enrages me here is, that it needn't to be that way. We had plenty of time. Our team was often rowing along in good rhythm. And now I just feel drowned in resignation and sarcasm.

the look of disbelief you get from non devs when you Google how to fix a "generic computer problem" they have asked for help with... as though it's your job to just know every minute detail

After demoing a PoC of a new approach in our flagship product the CEO begged me to shoehorn it into the product. Complete do-over of the core architecture of our product. Spent two weeks basically living at work. Two weeks of pouring everything I had to deliver. Beaten, battered, bruised, I got the impossible done. As I'm walking out to go home to my family Friday afternoon, visibly exhausted and frazzled, the project manager calls me into her office. "Oh no" I thought. With a straight face, she proceeds to inform me some meaningless text wasn't the right color. I stared at her a second, shook my head in disbelief and went home.

As developers/architects we move mountains and perform miracles, but it's the color of the text that _really_ matters.

Wait, you mean to tell me, here I am with imposter syndrome, and some people can't even write a test for is-odd? Like people who are *less* competent than that are actually passing interviews?

The source engine is interesting, because it has reached that stage of life where it's old enough to be remarkable-- in the sense that it could be called 'legacy', a sort of milestone in development practices and thinking, both in software, and design.

That said, a better look at it might be from the lense of *uses today*.

A lot of former source engine (SE) devs are now going to unity or unreal, I don't blame them.
But it's interesting to examine examples of games that haven't.

One such game is the freeware "No More Room In Hell". A couple online play throughs shows a wealth of well designed maps (and an even greater horde of shovelware maps, but hey, you take the good with the bad).

The age of the engine itself shows. Even in games like Left 4 Dead the engine's age can be seen. This, in some respects has been a drag, but also a blessing. Where other games could rely on their effects, shaders, and other tech, modders, map makers, and designers have had to rely on wit and creativity.

Enter "situated environments."

In an age where many people desire to travel, to go places, and have grown up doing the exact OPPOSITE, there is a great desire for variety of locations in games: not merely 'environmental' in the shallow sense of a 'theme' such as 'lava', 'tundra', etc. But in the sense of setting in general.

We want places that are both out of reach and yet familiar. Fire-fights happen in city streets. Apocalypses happen in neighborhoods where the skyline is both broken and at once something we know by sight. Open air markets, grocery stores, neighborhoods, all of these provide the back drops of popular games and series such as COD, Battlefield, The Last of Us, and yes, the example game, NMRIH.

I call this idea of 'familiar but out-of-reach level design', "situated environments", because familiarity with them, but *lack of real life experience* with them, on a day to day basis, allows people's expectations to fill in the gaps.

No one for example would argue the layouts of 7 Days To Die are familiar, but most of us don't spend all day in a junkyard or a high rise hotel.
So they *feel* familiar. Likewise with Skyrim, the villages and towns, both iconic and strange, our expectations formed by cultural inheritance, hollywood films, television shows, stories, childrens books, and yes, other games.

In a way, familiarity-without-real-in-person-experience is a shortcut for designers, one that lets them play with the player's head-space, the players subconscious idea of how a space and setting *should* work, what to *expect* out of the area, how to *operate* within the area. And the more it conforms to expectations, the more surprising an overdesigned element appears to be, rather than immersion breaking. A real life example of this is people's idea of chernobyl. When they discover the amusement park and ferris wheel they're blown away by the juxtaposition of the wasteland that surrounds them and the associations ('nostalgia' as it were) that such a carnival ride carries for many of us. It simultaneously *doesn't belong* and is yet all at once *perfectly situated in the environment*.

It is to say 'surreal', which is adjacent to the idea of *being real*, in terms of our "perception of what is and isn't plausible, if not possible."

This is at the heart of suspension of disbelief, because in essence, virtual worlds are a lie, like fiction, and good fiction violates expectations in order to tell us truths about reality. As part of our ability to differentiate bullshit from reality, there is to say an element in our bullshit detectors (doubtless evolved over many 10's of thousands of years), that is designed to not merely detect what is absurd in our limited experience, but to incorporate absurdity into everyday experience. In that sense part of our rationality is the acceptance of irrational experiences, learning from it, and discovering 'a proper place for each thing' in the "models of the world" we all carry around in our heads. Eventually we normalize the absurd, it becomes the new reality, and what remains unassimilated becomes superstition (real or otherwise), a figment, or an anomaly.

One of the best examples I've encountered is The Last of Us: Left Behind, a good chunk of which is spent in a mall. And they nailed the environment perfectly I would say.

Or for those who don't own a PS4, a more accessible example is a map in NMRIH aptly called "the museum", and few words better do it justice than to go play it yourself--that is, if you really want to know what I mean by a 'situated environment'.

What better way, during this pandemic, to get out of the news cycle and into your own head? Sometimes the best way to escape isn't outside, it's within.

Client email: so you know that custom thing I wanted on my website that you made and I refused to pay for? Could you just send me the code, I'm gonna write my own.

*Staring at screen in disbelief and laughing*

Even if you were an awesome client, and you had paid, I still wouldn't just "give you my code" so you can write your own. You hired me to do it because you CAN'T not because you didn't want to, not because you're lazy, but because you are not mentally capable of making your own.

Me: I'm sorry, but I'm not sure you would even know where to start with this, what was wrong with the one built?

Client: I wanna put the code in my Salesforce so it can run the API request and automatically make a lead for me.

My code takes fields from a form, runs the data over to the API, gets the response, allows for user confirmation that the information is correct, and then sends all the relevant data to Salesforce as a lead.

Me: But that's exactly what mine does, just does it from your website where users will be entering the info, and once they've confirmed it you get a Salesforce lead.

Client: well some of my leads come from other places and I want to simplify everything.

Me: no, not possible, sorry.

If you didn't have 25 different websites for one company then all your leads would come from the same place and it would be simple.

For the first time, after 4 years, i have installed tinder. I feel depressed for having to do vengeance. And i also feel depressed for not having to do it. I feel sad for being forced to find another girl. This is not how i imagined it to be

Right now its 1-0 for my blonde ex gf. I have to have a random hookup at least a 1 night stand to make this 1-1. This is what i did before but now after experiencing love for the first time, true love in the first 2 years with her, for the first time that somebody genuinely loved me other than my parents, is very hard for me to go back to random hookups

Hookups are meaningless to me now. But i am forced. I have been given a check mate

⚠️Why do i have to be forced to fuck another girl in order to prove my girlfriend that other girls still want me, so that my girlfriend will love and want me again as well?....⚠️

Please reread this paragraph above 3 more times. Let it sink in. That is saddening to me. The more she sees how no other girl wants me, the less interest she has in me....

Im literally sitting. Listening to sad depressing "music" which is more of nature and dark rain sounds. I also started working out aggressively. I couldnt eat for 5 days due to finding chats on my blonde ex gfs phone with the other guy...

Now 8 days later... I have lost 6 kg and counting. I am barely eating. I am using the screenshots of their chats as an overdosed injection of adrenaline every time pre workout and during workout

Today she didnt text me at all. I always start the conversation first. I have to move on and i am still in disbelief that i have to do it.

My birthday is next week and the last thing i need is to spend being depressed....

I feel lost

But i have a feeling all i need to do is get rich. All i need is to get my money up and that way find more easily a new better behaved normal gf.

God help me

Forgive me God for everything

Thank you God for everything

Guide me God on the right path, for i am lost

Please.

.

A classmate of mine from college actually did this...
I'm in disbelief 🙅

wasn't a fight, really, just me having gotten frustrated after half an hour of trying to explain to a 2D animator what smear frames are, since we were making a flying hummingbird, found out that multiframe animations for the wingflaps looked like crap for its flapping speed, so i was like "oh, i know, let's just make the whole wing flap a 3frame anim, one frame wings down, one smear frame, one frame wings up, done"

cue the UNIVERSITY EDUCATED ANIMATOR looking at me with confusion, asking what are smear frames.

cue half an hour of repeated attempts at explanation, each attempt imagining him to be a younger and younger child, last 3 attempts i was actually sketching it out for him in photoshop and playing it to him (via photoshop's timeline for making animated gifs) so that he could see how it looks, which still didn't help him get it.

it turned very unpleasant towards the end, due to me getting very dumbfounded and irritated and interlacing the last couple of explanation attempts with remarks on my fascinated disbelief that a university educated and graduated animator not only had no idea what smear frames are, but isn't even getting it after having it explained multiple times as if he was an elementary school child.

at that point my boss stepped in, told me to go have a smoke, and when i came back, he managed to explain it to the animator by some of the interpersonal magic he (the boss) had.

that dude (the boss) was amazing.

p. s. the hummingbird turned out looking amazing, thanks to the smear frames.

My monday started with boss calling me at 0730 asking if I could do a support-mission at the offices of the local landfill - this because 2 of the support people had called in sick and we where short on manpower. RIGHT! I said, with a sense of dread and disbelief. ended up spending much of the day there. fixing everything from default reader of pdf to calibration of mouse sensitivity.

It's not like I need to code or anything, since I am working on two different projects and in competition of a third. Finally came back to the office after been at the landfill until lunch and got another support mission; this time internal mission. namely write out from our companys database and import the data to an absolute atrocity called PowerBI so our accountant get the numbers......... FINE!!! I'll do that too, but dont come to me and cry when the project delivery date gets postponed into eternity!!!

"Tips" are fucking stupid. Any waiter or anyone who expects me to "tip" them is a fucking clown hobo. Full disrespect

You're telling me i should pay you extra money or else you're not gonna do YOUR job right? A job where you already receive stable monthly salary?

Whoever standardized "tipping" is a fucking CLOWN. Must have been a restaurant business paying billions for this marketing scam to normalize as if tipping 2$ is normal

Who the fuck are you? Are you my fucking friend? A relative? A family member? Why the fuck should i pay you extra money just because you want some extra money?

Guess what fucktard. I want some extra money too. Has anyone ever tipped me in my job? No. Has a client or will a client who paid for a software i develop ever tell me "hey youve done such a great job heres some extra $$$"? No. Will a client ever tell me "hey your software earned me 100k$ heres a $100 tip or a $1000 tip"? NO

If i dont get tips Fuck you. Rough world and live with it.

Anyone who wants or expects tips I immediately view him as:
- beggar
- gypsy
- homeless

What the fuck are you gonna do with 2$ 5$ 10$ tip bro? You're broke and your job sucks go and learn some skill and you might earn more if you're so stubborn about a tip

Today i paid for coffee $7 but the price was 6.25$. Expecting a change, the waiter just went off. I told him give me my fucking 0.75$ back you fuck. And so he did. But he gave me back 0.7$. Where the fuck is my 0.05$????? Fucking retard. You want to take extra money from me just for a COFFEE. YOURE HOMELESS BRO TF U GONNA DO WITH 5 CENTs???

Also the reason why i get so pissed off about this is

1) The other day i was at some other coffee shop also paying for coffee. Dont remember the price but i paid. However i miscalculated. I paid 0.10$ less than i was supposed to. She was standing there and telling me I'm missing 10 Fucking cents. Confused, i calculated again and realized i made a mistake. So i round it up to 1$ instead of 0.10$ and she kept everything instead of giving me the change of 0.90$. So its NOT ok that you're a gypsy for not accepting the payment because its missing 10 cents, but its TOTALLY fine that you take 0.90$ extra money just because you want to. GET FUCKED

2) The other day i was in a store buying food. At the cashier i paid $27. However i was missing 0.02$. The cashier told me do you have 0.05$ to coverup the missing funds. In disbelief, i was looking at her could not believe my fucking eyes what she asked. How fucking POOR can you get. I gave her more than 2 fucking cents and proceeded with my shit

Very valuable shit i learned from these stories: NO ONE will give a shit to accept a payment even if its missing 1 FUCKING CENT. But its totally fine that they dont return me however much they dont want to.

How about you sometimes fucking say "hey i know you you come to this store very often heres a discount"???

Or "its fine that you dont have 0.01 fucking dollars, you can take your food"???

Or "hey i seen you buy here often heres a fucking discount just for you today"????

Because of that i have decided to take ALL of my fucking hard earned money and ask for the exact change. I dont give a FUCK just as much as THEY dont give a FUCK.

For reference:
0.01$ = 1 in my currency
0.90$ = 90 in my currency
27$ = 2900 (4 figures) in my currency

My currency is shit. My country is shit. People in my city are shit. The whole vibe here is shit. And perhaps that is why i shit so much because i get stuffed with too much daily BULLSHIT

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

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

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

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

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

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

When my lecturer ask me about something new , i'm here just sitting in disbelief 😑😂

I was watching an Ancient Aliens episode called "Beyond Roswell". The show described the idea of some of our tech being seeded slowly by introducing alien technology to specific companies. They suggested that computing technology has advanced very fast and introducing this tech could be part of that.

At first I was kinda pissed about this. I have read about the creation of the first transistor back in the 40s or 50s. WWII really advanced our need for computing devices such as what Turing built. Then I realized a lot of the explosion of computer tech did occur after key ET events. This kind of made me wonder how much is "us" and how much is ET tech. I also realized it can take a lot of effort to understand something really advanced. So reverse engineering can take a LOT of effort to figure these things out. Being seeded by external tech does not take away from humans at all.

A parallel to this is a programmer that learns how to use a C++ compiler. They could go their whole career without ever understanding how the compiler itself is doing its job. I find myself wanting to learn how compilers work and started down this path. I look at the simple grammar I have learned to parse. Then I look at the C++ grammar and think "How can I ever learn to do that?" So I see us viewing potentially advanced things and wondering how the heck can we ever learn to do that. The common reaction when faced with such tech would be disbelief and in some cases ridiculing the messenger. When I was a kid the idea of sending a picture over a phone was laughable. Now this is common and expected. It was literally a scifi concept when I was a kid.

So, back to the alien tech. I am now thinking it would be cool to be working with alien technology through computing. This is like scifi stuff now! So what if what we have was not all invented here (Earth). If anything this will prepare us programmers to get jobs working for alien corporations writing ship level programs and brain interfaces. Think of it as intergalactic resume building. 😉

The 7 stages of Computer Debugging:

Shock and denial. This is a state of disbelief and numbed feelings.(task is assigned nothing to it it's nothing..)

Pain and guilt. ...(shit I knew I needed to the a sick day)

Anger and bargaining. ...
(Ok let's see if we can get this fucker fixed ....Get fixed now you asshole)

Depression. ...
(Oh man I never going to leave this office today 😭)

The upward turn. ...
(Well sec let's try stack overflow 💡)

Reconstruction and working through. ...
(Yay I found an actual fix after browsing 23 answers)
Acceptance and hope. (Fixed is in code repository... It's 21 and also hope to get some Xbox time)

P.S
It's a striking resemblance the grief stages 😜

Ok, so for past 1 whole day I am trying to make vhost work on my brand new laptop, running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS... When I installed OS, I've set hard disk encryption, and on top of it - user home folder encryption. Don't ask me why I did both.

Setting up vhost is simple and straight forward - I did it hundreds, maybe thousands of times, on various Linux distros, server and desktop releases alike.

And of course, as it usually happens, opposed to all logic and reason - setting up virtual host on this machine did't work. No matter what I do - I get 403 (access not allowed).

All is correctly set - directory params in apache config, vhost paths, directory params within vhost, all the usual stuff.

I thought I was going crazy. I go back to several live servers I'm maintaining - exactly the same setup that doesn't work on my machine. Google it, SO-it, all I can see is exactly what I have been doing... I ended up checking char by char every single line, in disbelief that I cannot find what is the problem.

And then - I finally figured it out after loosing one whole day of my life on it:

I was trying to setup vhost to point to a folder inside my user's home folder - which is set to be encrypted.

Aaaaaand of course - even with all right permissions - Apache cannot read anything from it.

As soon as I tried any other folder outside my home folder - it worked.

I cannot believe that nobody encountered this issue before on Stackoverflow or wherever else.