Being 100% serious, I saw a guy in my Computer Programming I class using MS Word to write code that he would copy, then paste into notepad. When I asked him why he did that, he said, "Microsoft Word is easier to read than notepad."

He ended up dropping the class and changed majors.

It hurts my brain when people use him as an example of successful drop outs.

For starters, this dude's a literal fucking genius. The average person that considers dropping out is far away from the level of intelligence that Bill had when he dropped out.

average_person != bill_gates

Fun fact:

In the game Civilization, Gandhi had a aggression rating of 1 which means he didn't declare war on anyone. Now whenever someone Researched Democracy their aggression rating dropped by 2. Now instead of it dropping to - 1, it caused an integer underflow and the aggression rating became the highest possible value, making Gandhi into a nuclear warlord. He nuked everyone!

So this was a couple years ago now. Aside from doing software development, I also do nearly all the other IT related stuff for the company, as well as specialize in the installation and implementation of electrical data acquisition systems - primarily amperage and voltage meters. I also wrote the software that communicates with this equipment and monitors the incoming and outgoing voltage and current and alerts various people if there's a problem.

Anyway, all of this equipment is installed into a trailer that goes onto a semi-truck as it's a portable power distribution system.

One time, the computer in one of these systems (we'll call it system 5) had gotten fried and needed replaced. It was a very busy week for me, so I had pulled the fried computer out without immediately replacing it with a working system. A few days later, system 5 leaves to go work on one of our biggest shows of the year - the Academy Awards. We make well over a million dollars from just this one show.

Come the morning of show day, the CEO of the company is in system 5 (it was on a Sunday, my day off) and went to set up the data acquisition software to get the system ready to go, and finds there is no computer. I promptly get a phone call with lots of swearing and threats to my job. Let me tell you, I was sweating bullets.

After the phone call, I decided I needed to try and save my job. The CEO hadn't told me to do anything, but I went to work, grabbed an old Windows XP laptop that was gathering dust and installed my software on it. I then had to build the configuration file that is specific to system 5 from memory. Each meter speaks the ModBus over TCP/IP protocol, and thus each meter as a different bus id. Fortunately, I'm pretty anal about this and tend to follow a specific method of id numbering.

Once I got the configuration file done and tested the software to see if it would even run properly on Windows XP (it did!), I called the CEO back and told him I had a laptop ready to go for system 5. I drove out to Hollywood and the CFO (who was there with the CEO) had to walk about a mile out of the security zone to meet me and pick up the laptop.

I told her I put a fresh install of the data acquisition software on the laptop and it's already configured for system 5 - it *should* just work once you plug it in.

I didn't get any phone calls after dropping off the laptop, so I called the CFO once I got home and asked her if everything was working okay. She told me it worked flawlessly - it was Plug 'n Play so to speak. She even said she was impressed, she thought she'd have to call me to iron out one or two configuration issues to get it talking to the meters.

All in all, crisis averted! At work on Monday, my supervisor told me that my name was Mud that day (by the CEO), but I still work here!

Here's a picture of the inside of system 8 (similar to system 5 - same hardware)

We were talking about harddrives at work when someone was wondering if filling them with helium would make them spin faster... Then imagination took over!

"But helium balloons float, right... So would helium filled hard drives float..? Probably not due to weight but imagine dropping a hard drive and seeing it float towards the ceiling.."

"John, the delivery guy has a box with new harddrives downstairs, could you go get them?
*shouts* John did you get them? Just don't open the box outside!! No, no, NOOO DON'T OPEN IT OUTSIDE! JOHN, THE HARDDRIVES, BE CAREFUL, DON'T OPEN THE BOX OUTSI.....
*harddrives floating by the window into the air*
NOO, JOHN, WHAT DID YOU DO?!

"*walks into the office, harddrives floating against the ceiling* goddammit John, not again"

"John, why are you putting one kilometer long cables on those harddrives?
*John let's them float into the air towards the clouds*
We offer cloud storage!"

(We have a usual office building ceiling)
"John, I need a 1tb harddrive, where are those?
Uhm... C12!

*takes a ladder and walks towards c12 to pluck one from the ceiling*"

😆

If you think you know the most idiot person in the world, you haven't met my brother.

His brain absolutely can't comprehend anything!

He forgot his Roblox password and told me to do something. I said I can't do anything about it. Then he yelled at the top of his lungs saying, "you don't know technology! You're too stupid and selfish. Fix it!"

I said I can't do anything about it. He throws the mouse at me and says, "I never get to have fun. You ruin my life!"

He's not a little kid btw. He's fucking 14.

Today my mom forgot to pay the wifi password, and she thinks its better not to pay it today so it can stop my brother from playing games. (He plays it from morning to night. No homework, no cleaning, no nothing. Just games all day.)

So he told me to fix it. I said I cant. There's nothing I can do. Then he punches my arm really hard. (He's taller and stronger than me so it really hurt) then he threw a shoe and said, "you're useless and stupid! You have your laptop so you can have fun but I never get to have fun. You ruin my life, and I hate you. I hate my life."

Then he ran to mess up my room by tossing things from the self, removing clothes from my closet, and messed up my bed. He pushed my sister, pulled my hair, and ran to his room, slamming the door.

Please. Please someone give him a brain! He desperately needs one. I said I can't fix it, and that my mom has to pay the WiFi bill, but he thinks I'm being mean.

He has the mind of a 5 year old. Dropping to the ground crying.

Computer Science is probably the only major where if you suck at it and end up dropping out, you're more likely to be a leader than someone who is good at it and sticks with it.

There were roughly 200 people in my freshman class majoring in CS, by my sophomore year that number had dropped to about 120. A lot of people dropped out because it was too damn difficult for them, and they switched to less technical majors like "Business Information Technology" or "Management Information Systems." Almost without exception, the people who dropped out are now managing teams of developers, they actually have programmers reporting to them. Seriously, WTF?

This isn't even the worst of it, there are people who majored in art history who are now "product managers," who take the word "manager" in their job title literally, they think they're above developers. Some of them will even profess with no small amount of pride that they "know nothing about technology." You can hear the pride in their voice when they say it, as if they're saying "I'm a lot of things, but at least I'm not a geek." Is there any other field of study where people boast with such pride that they know nothing about it? I mean, very few people will say "I know nothing about history" or "I know nothing about literature", and if they do say it, they'll say it with a bit of humility. When it comes to Computer Science though, knowing nothing about it is almost a badge of honor.

Rant the f**k over.

My girlfriend keeps dropping hints that I should commit, but I still haven't gotten around to learning to use git.

The first time I decided to hack around a bit:D

One of my teachers made a quiz software, which is only used by him(his lectures are about databases), and it is highly unsecure. When I heard that it is written in C# I decided to look in it's source code. The biggest problem I ran into: this program is only available on the computers in his classroom, and he monitors the computers display. However, I successfully put it into my pendrive without getting caught.

So when I got home, I just had to use a .NET decompiler(in this case: dotPeek) to get the fully functional source code. The basic function of the program was to download a quiz from his database server, and when it was finished, grade it client-side. Than, I realized how bad it was: It contains the number of questions, the number of correct and incorrect answers.
I've just made a modified .exe, which contained really little modification(like correctAnswers=maxQuestions, incorrectAnswers=0). Everything looks the same, you just have to click over it, and everytime it will return with 100%.

And the bonus: The program connects to the database as a user with root access, and without password. I was able to log in, download(dropping was available too, but didn't try) databases(with all the answers) and so on.

Never had to use it though, it was just a sort-of experience gaining.:)

It’s official. I’m dating a girl.

She’s damn smart, tasteful, hot and really into tech.

Honest, talkative, a real keeper.

Studying IT-Security. Fuckkk I’m dropping spit out my mouth. ALL. DAY.

Had a meeting with my boss earlier. Got yelled at for:
a) Working on a high-priority, externally-committed ticket (digit separators) that i was 85% done with on the Friday afternoon before my vacation instead of jumping to a lower-priority screwdriver ticket that just came in. Even though my boss agreed with me that what I did was exactly what I should have done, it's still bad because I was apparently rude to product by not doing as they asked?
b) Taking too long on that digit separator ticket that amounts to following a gigantic mess of convoluted spaghetti and making a few small changes, and making sure it doesn't break the world because it's all so fucking convoluted and fragile as hell. Let's not even mention my 4-10 hours of mandatory useless meetings every week.
c) Missing something that wasn't even listed in that same ticket -- somehow my fault? -- so I very obviously didn't test my work. Even though specs all passed and QA also tested and signed off on it as working and complete. Clearly half-assed and untested. Product keeps promising/planning UATs and then skipping them, and then has the audacity to complain about it.
d) Not recovering fast enough from burnout and daily mental breakdowns. I can still barely get out of bed and you want me to be super productive? Got it. Guess what? I'm being amazingly productive for my mental health. But my boss, Mr. Happy-go-lucky, thinks depression is dropping your icecream cone on your clean kitchen table, and this three-ton pile of spaghetti is "maybe a little messy, I guess."

So I need to somehow "regain the confidence" of both him and product because I'm taking awhile on difficult tickets (surprise), while having these ridiculous breakdowns (surprise), and because I don't fix things that aren't even listed in the fucking tickets (fucking surprise) -- and worse, that the lack of information is somehow entirely. my. fault. (surprise fucking surprise)

GOD I HATE THESE PEOPLE.

A few years ago:

In the process of transferring MySQL data to a new disk, I accidentally rm'ed the actual MySQL directory, instead of the symlink that I had previously set up for it.

My guts felt like dropping through to the floor.

In a panic, I asked my colleague: "What did those databases contain?"

C: "Raw data of load tests that were made last week."

Me: "Oh.. does that mean that they aren't needed anymore?"

C: "They already got the results, but might need to refer to the raw data later... why?"

Me: "Uh, I accidentally deleted all the MySQL files... I'm in Big Trouble, aren't I?"

C: "Hmm... with any luck, they might forget that the data even exists. I got your back on this one, just in case."

Luck was indeed on my side, as nobody ever asked about the data again.

As a backend dev, I have this habit of just dropping script & style tags all over the place, and using inline style attributes on divs.

Then when I'm done I just link the code to a frontend dev, they'll hate it so much it will be cleaned up within minutes.

You know side projects? Well I took on one. An old customer asked to come and take over his latest startups companys tech. Why not, I tought. Idea is sound. Customer base is ripe and ready to pay.

I start digging and the Hardware part is awesome. The guys doing the soldering and imbedded are geniuses. I was impressed AF.

I commit and meet up with CEO. A guy with a vision and sales orientation/contacts. Nice! This shit is gonna sell. Production lines are also set.

Website? WTF is this shit. Owner made it. Gotta give him the credit. Dude doesn't do computers and still managed to online something. He is still better at sales so we agree that he's gonna stick with those and I'll handle the tech.

I bootstrap a new one in my own simplistic style and online it. I like it. The owner likes it. He made me to stick to a tacky logo. I love CSS and bootstrap. You can make shit look good quick.

But I still don't have access to the soul of the product. DBs millions rows of data and source for the app I still behind the guy that has been doing this for over a year.

He has been working on a new version for quite some time. He granted access to the new versions source, but back end and DB is still out of reach. Now for over month has passed and it's still no new version or access to data.

Source has no documentation and made in a flavor of JS frame I'm not familiar with. Weekend later of crazy cramming I get up to speed and it's clear I can't get further without the friggin data.

The V2 is a scramble of bleeding edge of Alpha tech that isn't ready for production and is clearly just a paid training period for the dev. And clearly it isn't going so well because release is a month late. I try to contact, but no reaction. The owner is clueless.

Disheartening. A good idea is going to waste because of some "dev" dropping a ball and stonewalling the backup.

I fucking give him till the end of the next week until I make the hardware team a new api to push the data and refactor the whole thing in proper technologies and cut him off.

Please. If you are a dev and don't have the time to concentrate on the solution don't take it on and kill off the idea. You guys are the key to making things happening and working. Demand your cut but also deserve it by delivering or at least have the balls to tell you are not up for it.

I really, honestly, am getting annoyed when someone tells me that "Linux is user-friendly". Some people seem to think that because they themselves can install Linux, that anyone can, and because I still use Windows I'm some sort of a noob.

So let me tell you why I don't use Linux: because it never actually "just works". I have tried, at the very least two dozen times, to install one distro or another on a machine that I owned. Never, not even once, not even *close*, has it installed and worked without failing on some part of my hardware.

My last experience was with Ubuntu 17.04, supposed to have great hardware and software support. I have a popular Dell Alienware machine with extremely common hardware (please don't hate me, I had a great deal through work with an interest-free loan to buy it!), and I thought for just one moment that maybe Ubuntu had reached the point where it just, y'know, fucking worked when installing it... but no. Not a chance.

It started with my monitors. My secondary monitor that worked fine on Windows and never once failed to display anything, simply didn't work. It wasn't detected, it didn't turn on, it just failed. After hours of toiling with bash commands and fucking around in x conf files, I finally figured out that for some reason, it didn't like my two IDENTICAL monitors on IDENTICAL cables on the SAME video card. I fixed it by using a DVI to HDMI adapter....

Then was my sound card. It appeared to be detected and working, but it was playing at like 0.01% volume. The system volume was fine, the speaker volume was fine, everything appeared great except I literally had no fucking sound. I tried everything from using the front output to checking if it was going to my display through HDMI to "switching the audio sublayer from alsa to whatever the hell other thing exists" but nothing worked. I gave up.

My mouse? Hell. It's a Corsair Gaming mouse, nothing fancy, it only has a couple extra buttons - none of those worked, not even the goddamn scrollwheel. I didn't expect the *lights* to work, but the "back" and "Forward" buttons? COME ON. After an hour, I just gave up.

My media keyboard that's like 15 years old and is of IBM brand obviously wasn't recognized. Didn't even bother with that one.

Of my 3 different network adapters (2 connectors, one wifi), only one physical card was detected. Bluetooth didn't work. At this point I was so tired of finding things that didn't work that I tried something else.

My work VPN... holy shit have you ever tried configuring a corporate VPN on Linux? Goddamn. On windows it's "next next next finish then enter your username/password" and on Linux it's "get this specific format TLS certificate from your IT with a private key and put it in this network conf and then run this whatever command to...." yeah no.

And don't get me started on even attempting to play GAMES on this fucking OS. I mean, even installing the graphic drivers? Never in my life have I had to *exit the GUI layer of an OS* to install a graphic driver. That would be like dropping down to MS-DOS on Windows to install Nvidia drivers. Holy shit what the fuck guys. And don't get me started on WINE, I ain't touching this "not an emulator emulator" with a 10-foot pole.

And then, you start reading online for all these problems and it's a mix of "here are 9038245 steps to fix your problem in the terminal" and "fucking noob go back to Windows if you can't deal with it" posts.

It's SO FUCKING FRUSTRATING, I spent a whole day trying to get a BASIC system up and running, where it takes a half-hour AT MOST with any version of Windows. I'm just... done.

I will give Ubuntu one redeeming quality, however. On the Live USB, you can use the `dd` command to mirror a whole drive in a few minutes. And when you're doing fucking around with this piece of shit OS that refuses to do simple things like "playing audio", `dd` will restore Windows right back to where it was as if Ubuntu never existed in the first place.

Thanks, `dd`. I wish you were on Windows. Your OS is the LEAST user friendly thing I've ever had to deal with.

That's a new one on me fixing a website on my phone whilst on a train , internet dropping in an out

I did it 😎

Hey yo guys, Legion here dropping you some lit tips for yo dev job interviews

VSCode dropping casual truth-bombs

As I was walking to the store, I found yet another piece of evidence of nature rape (aka fucking nature by littering of harmful substances). Just like last time I brought it home for proper disposal.

But if I ever find the motherfucker who did this, I have a nice punishment for you. I'll knock you unconscious, drag you home, take your phone and desolder its battery. Then I'll strap a plastic bag around your stupid face, and put the battery in there while it's being shorted. Quickly it'll heat up and you'll start to turn blue with that little bag being your only oxygen source. And when that battery puffs, boy are you going to fucking gasp it all in. Hopefully that'll be poisonous enough to kill you on the spot. If not, I'll have some fun watching you die from oxygen deprivation. Or I'll jam that very same AA battery that you dropped down your throat - you choose.

Call me a psycho all you want, but what does that make you, whoever attempted to further fuck nature by uncaringly dropping a battery on the sidewalk? Oh and let's not mention the results of it - a heatwave that's been going on for over a month now. Thank you so much for bringing the place that you deserve to be in - hell!

Managment...

Where do I start?

So I have a task they set to priority "P0 - drop everything". Okay, dropping everything, doing the thing.

It's 11 and I already had 3 calls and meeting...

GOD FUCKING DAMINT LET ME WORK ON THE THING
and please let me focus -_-.

Oh, oh, also, calls were like "hi, we have a really dumb question to you, we know we could sit down for 10 seconds and use so-called logic but calling you is easier." Oh and also whats the progress on this P4 task?

holly motherfu... eghm. I mean.. They really like to piss me off. Best part of call #2. I prompt them "hey, please message me on slack, it does not destroy my focus and allows me work more efficiently"
and response... "I prefer talking than typing"

The list would be quite long.

I think Google is still making good tools, but just like Apple the integrations get all so tight and constricting... And with their data, if it goes wrong, it will go wrong hard.

I feel like YouTube is gliding into a state where cheap clickbait floats to the top and finding quality gets more difficult as well, their algorithm is more and more tuned to choose recent popular stuff over good older gems.

Microsoft is all pretend lovey dovey cuddling open source, but I'm still suspicious it's all a hug of death. I was never a big fan, but they're seriously dropping balls when it comes to windows-as-a-service, taking away so much personal control from end users even though they can't be trusted to babysit either.

Amazon is creeping it's way through the internet, charging $10/m to join the vip club infesting houses with spytubes to sell more plastic crap. Bezos' only right to keep wasting oxygen is BlueOrigin, but he'll probably fuck that up as well turning spaceflight into a decadent prime consumer orgy instead of something inspiring.

Facebook... Well, that's self explanatory. Fuck it, everything it pretends to be, and everyone who still has an account with a rusty spike.

Uber and AirBnB, with their fake ass mission of a green shared economy, but they trample over employees, customers and neighbors to build their ivory towers of progressive illusions.

Then there's a million declining brands.

I liked Skype for example when it was first released, Just like how I started out liking (and then hating) Discord, Slack, etc... They're all tools which seem fast and easy, but then they get us further away from solid protocols, get us entrenched into limiting, bloated and sometimes even dangerous tools. As my dad used to say: "Companies are like women, if you go for cheap, fast and easy you'll end up with a burning dick and half your savings gone"

You know what, fuck all tech companies.

OK, devrant is still pretty nice... For now.

Worst coding mistake would be me dropping an entire table of customer names because I forgot to double check the table name in the script. I felt my soul leave my body.

(Written March 13th at 2am.)

This morning (yesterday), my computer decided not to boot again: it halts on "cannot find firmware rtl-whatever" every time. (it has booted just fine several times since removing the firmware.) I've had quite the ordeal today trying to fix it, and every freaking step along the way has thrown errors and/or required workarounds and a lot of research.

Let's make a list of everything that went wrong!

1) Live CD: 2yo had been playing with it, and lost it. Not easy to find, and super smudgy.

2) Unencrypt volume: Dolphin reports errors when decrypting the volume. Research reveals the Live CD doesn't incude the cryptsetup packages. First attempts at installing them mysteriously fail.

3) Break for Lunch: automatic powersaving features turned off the displays, and also killed my session.

4) Live CD redux: 25min phonecall from work! yay, more things added to my six-month backlog.

5) Mount encrypted volume: Dolphin doesn't know how, and neither do I. Research ensues. Missing LVM2 package; lvmetad connection failure ad nauseam; had to look up commands to unlock, clone, open, and mount encrypted Luks volume, and how to perform these actions on Debian instead of Ubuntu/Kali. This group of steps took four hours.

6) Chroot into mounted volume group: No DNS! Research reveals how to share the host's resolv with the chroot.

7) `# apt install firmware-realtek`: /boot/initrd.img does not exist. Cannot update.

8) Find and mount /boot, then reinstall firmware: Apt cannot write to its log (minor), listed three install warnings, and initially refused to write to /boot/initrd.img-[...]

9) Reboot!: Volume group not found. Cannot process volume group. Dropping to a shell! oh no..

(Not listed: much research, many repeated attempts with various changes.)

At this point it's been 9 hours. I'm exhausted and frustrated and running out of ideas, so I ask @perfectasshole for help.
He walks me through some debugging steps (most of which i've already done), and we both get frustrated because everything looks correct but isn't working.

10) Thirteenth coming of the Live CD: `update-initramfs -u` within chroot throws warnings about /etc/crypttab and fsck, but everything looks fine with both. Still won't boot. Editing grub config manually to use the new volume group name likewise produces no boots. Nothing is making sense.

11) Rename volume group: doubles -'s for whatever reason; Rebooting gives the same dreaded "dropping to a shell" result.

A huge thank-you to @perfectasshole for spending three hours fighting with this issue with me! I finally fixed it about half an hour after he went to bed.

After renaming the volume group to what it was originally, one of the three recovery modes managed to actually boot and load the volume. From there I was able to run `update-initramfs -u` from the system proper (which completed without issue) and was able to boot normally thereafter.

I've run updates and rebooted twice now.
After twelve+ hours... yay, I have my Debian back!

oof.

A recent project actually taught me how HORRIBLY STUPID it is to store large bodies of text in a SQL Server database. There were millions of records with pages of compressed text each.

More and more text records pile on every single day. Needless to say it was becoming super slow and backups were taking WAY too long.

After refactoring them out as compressed files to disk storage (I love you, micro-services) and dropping them completely from the database, the backup size went from 90gb to 3gb!

It's not every day you get to see a dramatic result like that from a refactor.

Lesson learned, and yes it was quite cool.

I got an email a couple days ago about a tweet a made about how web developers are unanimously very happy that Microsoft is dropping IE. I got a very angry email from someone who really loved Internet Explorer, apparently 🤔, saying that my tweet was, and I quote "offensive to those who used it loyally for years". That was hysterical for me to read.

Sometimes I think back to all the funny shit that happened and how simple stuff fucks everyone

- tired Database engineer deleting (not dropping, literally rm -rf) the database files on the wrong server

- Microsoft delivering viruses through updates

- Pissed and stubborn dev deleting his one line library repo which does something like removing a char left side of string fucking an unmeasurable amount of other projects

- Adobe getting hacked and exposed for storing passwords in plain texts

- a doubled line causing a bug called heartbleed in a fuckton of webservers

- a Tutorial Company getting kicked from github because their repo got so big github staff had to maintain the repo manually

- and an old one: bad code crashed a space shuttle

Got a call while on vacations, the main server is down.
*holy shit* I thought.
As I opened my MacBook, the phone kept ringing and slack was going crazy.

“What should I do? Where is the problem?”, the voices in my head said..

I opened the terminal and tried to get a ssh connection.
Sweat was dropping down from my forehead.

“Connected” the terminal said.

“Fuck yeah, the server is up, only the app is not responding”, I thought and opened the log files.

Suddenly, “STOP” I shout at the log files that were appended way too fast.

Then I saw it.
TimeOutExceptions..

I added an index to the modification date column,“ kill -9“ed the process, started again and went back to vacation mode 🙂

And of course I was the office hero for a while💪

For the smart asses, I’m aware that it’s a bad idea to -9 the app process in prod, but it was so overloaded that i was not able to kill it any other way. And we needed that server up again.

The fucking SECOND i buy ethereum its price starts dropping.

//sidenote: yay 25k++, i wonder if trogus ever thought about adding a pet shark

Hello.

Is there anyone else who starts massive amount of projects and never finishes one?

It's a big problem when you lose time you should spent on orders because you work on that-amazing-idea that you'll drop few hours later.
I'm lucky as my employer thinks that all these unfinished stuff are pushing my experience forward, but for me it's depressing to not be able to focus on my work.

What do you do to fight with the urge to code that one more project? What do you do focus on the current work?

I've tried making myself a system for better client-programmer communication to keep myself motivated with better organised feedback and deadlines but ended up dropping it and sticking to terribly messy mailbox.

>be me
>drop out of uni studying civil engineering
>"self-taught" "web programmer"
>start freelancing in 2010
>Make money, feels good man
>clients keep me busy, feel important
>Code just for the fun of it
>be 2019. Married, code to make ends meet
>lose all interest
>mere sight of the ide makes me want to bash the screen
>have zero motivation
>never get any projects done
>become broke af
>look at old friends on fb. They are "Something".
>look at real software engineers and programmers with education
>realize I am an imposter
>start dropping all projects and studying theory
>become more broke
>start taking "motivation pills" to just start working again
>lose all motivation and pissed at all the real programmers and engineers for their success
>be me on May 20, 2019 at 2:56 AM
Yep, this is the end.

I'm from the UK. My CS teacher took a dislike to me in junior high school, dissuading me from taking the classes I needed to take computer science at college. I ended up starting an economics major and then dropping out.

With the support of my family and friends I started over as a self taught as a developer.

I'm now a Tech Director in New York and love my job.

Dropping out of college because it was useless, and getting a job in the industry while continuing to teach myself.

That way I was paid to learn instead of the reverse — and I learned newer and actually useful things. I also saved time to boot.

I might not have a masters degree, but that doesn’t matter, either. Experience is always better than a comparable amount of education.

Honestly, none of the good devs I have worked with held masters degrees. To a one, they were all self-taught.

Just got my Christmas present from Shopify:

You have 45 days to integrate with our new Billing API or lose your app on our app store.

Because I just LOVE dropping everything to deal with yet another mandatory Shopify change. Have you guys not heard of backwards compatibility?

My coworker just spent *weeks* getting our app approved, including submitting an obscene amount of information and multiple live reviews and now they're threatening to remove our listing from their app store if we don't adopt their new API by the end of January, requiring a complete re-submission and review to get it back on.

This is apparently a completely normal way to do business to Shopify.

So… I released v2.0.0 of devRant UWP a few weeks ago.
Then I got a lot of reports of problems on Windows 10 Mobile and older (than 1809) versions of Windows 10 on Desktop.
I decided to resubmit v2.0.0-beta16 to the store, and try to find the issue in the update… I didn't find it.
The code seems the same as the working version (at least the part I try to test is 100% equal).

So it seems I fucked up the vs project.

This means that to find the issue I can spend weeks to search it over and over inside the latest project (using shitty emulators of older Windows 10 builds to debug it), or I could just restore it to the old v2.0.0-beta16 (released in august) and implement again every single new feature and fix (something like 5 new features, dozens of improvements, changes and bug fixes).

In any case, this will require a lot of time (which I don't have at this moment).
I'm really sorry for this inconvenience, I know some of you use my client daily (~3.000 users I guess), I'm really glad someone likes it, and thanks a lot for the awesome reviews and feedback, but stable v2 (v2.1.0 at this point) will be available not earlier than in February.

Probably some of you have already download v2.0.0 while it was available in the store, and maybe it works on your device (please let me know in the comments below if you did, how is it going, and also if you like the new features and improvements).

After this epic fail, and more than 1 year (way too much) of v2 public beta, I want to throw the current project in the trash, and start it from scratch.
Which means I will start to work on v3 as soon as you will see v2.1.0 in the store, making it faster, lighter and with better support for the latest Windows 10 (Fluent Design and not) features, dropping the support for the very old UWP API.

Thanks for your attention.

Have a good day (or night)!

This freaking server migration has been going on since Thursday night (it's now Sunday afternoon, for reference).

I've been on the phone since 1830 last night, which means I'm away about 18 hours in. I'm finally eating dinner, breakfast, and lunch.

People who theoretically should know the environment better than I do argued with me in front of customers and then tried to say she was agreeing with me all along. She tried dropping off the call SHE WAS RUNNING 6 hours before she should have, because I was on and she thought it was becoming my responsibility. HAD SHE LISTENED, we could be done by now.

That moment when your supervisor gets back to you so fucking late that you consider dropping out literally days before finishing your degree.

Lol. Kill me right now please.

PM: Oh, i got news about project xyz.

Me: Oh good, are we finally dropping support for that shity legacy system?

PM: No you gotta make a copy of it and convert all the currency symbols and add a bunch of new features, we selling it to a new client.

Craziest bug, not so much in the sense of what it was (although it was itself wacky too), but in what I went through to fix it.

The year was 1986. I was finishing up coding on a C64 demo that I had promised would be out on a specific weekend. I had invented a new demo effect for it, which was pretty much the thing we all tried to do back then because it would guarantee a modicum of "fame", and we were all hyper-ego driven back then :) So, I knew I wanted to have it perfect when people saw it, to maximize impressiveness!

The problem was that I had this ONE little pixel in the corner of the screen that would cycle through colors as the effect proceeded. A pixel totally apart from the effect itself. A pixel that should have been totally inactive the entire time as part of a black background.

A pixel that REALLY pissed me off because it ruined the utter perfection otherwise on display, and I just couldn't have that!

Now, back then, all demos were coded in straight Assembly. If you've ever done anything of even mild complexity in Assembly, then you know how much of a PITA it can be to find bugs sometimes.

This one was no exception.

This happened on a Friday, and like I said, I promised it for the weekend. Thus began my 53 hours of hell, which to this day is still the single longest stretch of time straight that I've stayed awake.

Yes, I spent literally over 2+ days, sitting in front of my computer, really only ever taking bio breaks and getting snacks (pretty sure I didn't even shower)... all to get one damn pixel to obey me. I would conquer that f'ing pixel even if it killed me in the process!

And, eventually, I did fix it. The problem?

An 'i' instead of an 'l'. I shit you not!

After all these years I really don't remember the details, except for the big one that sticks in my mind, that I had an 'i' character in some line of code where an 'l' should have been. I just kept missing it, over and over and over again. I mean, I kinda understand after many hours, your brain turns to mush. and you make more mistakes, so I get missing it after a while... but missing it early on when I was still fresh just blows my mind.

As I recall, I finally uploaded the demo to the distro sight at around 11:30pm, so at least I made my deadline before practically dropping dead in bed (and then having to get up for school the next morning- D'oh!). And it WAS a pretty impressive demo... though I never did get the fame I expected from it (most likely because it didn't get distributed far and wide enough).

And that's the story of what I'd say was my craziest bug ever, the one that probably came closest to killing me :)

> pic related
This is what I've been putting up with on my personal machine for months.

tl;dr: Suggestions for a wlan card/adapter for Debian9? My current RealTek wnic is barely functional, and my replacement (a TPLink... something) is completely incompatible.

I don't need anything super fancy, though I would ofc love support for AC/AD if at all possible.

I don't care (too much) about price, since I'm only going to buy one and very likely won't replace it for years.

------

I'm running Debian9 and have a have a RealTek card. Even when it's not arbitrarily dropping packets like in the screenie, it randomly caches them for up to 90 seconds and dumps them hilariously out of order. I can't play games like that. I can barely even browse devRant. Steam goes offline about once every 30 seconds, and therefore spams all of my friends with online/offline notifications. Streaming "works" on good days. Git works fine, however, so most days I don't notice the connection issues.

And yes, I'm using a community-patched driver (rtl8188ce) that's supposed to fix some of RealTek's more major screwups and increase the transmit power by ~20x. The driver helps, but only a little.

I've done some reasearch on wlan linux support, but haven't found anything very reassuring. Mostly just forum posts saying things like "Intel cards usually work fine!" I don't want to gamble. I just want to buy a card that will work and be done with it. :(

Suggestions? Insight?

Turns out that dropping all tables on the production database wasn’t such a good idea. 😅

Thank god we had a backup from 10 minutes before it happend.

Dropping out of school. So many lost years on keeping up with stupid and incompetent shits, with the piece of paper at the finish line not obtained. I did that twice and lost.. what, 5 years on that? Time I could've spent doing self-study instead. I'm not saying that anyone else should drop out - don't! - but for me, going to school doesn't seem worth it when I can learn on my own, and do it much faster. Unfortunately however those stupid pieces of paper are still regarded as valuable by some.. so whether refusing to get those is a good or a bad idea, only time can tell...

Hey, I had a question. How social are you all IRL?

I'll explain myself. IRL, I don't talk to anyone unless they talk to me (which I don't seek) for example. And regarding friends, I've never had more than one "buddy" each school year, unconsciously dropping them once we weren't linked by school anymore. There is only two people I have kept throughout the years and that I'd call friends, one of them is my girlfriend.

That being said, I know I'm especially asocial, but I'm curious how everyone is here :)
We often hear "Computer people don't have many friends blabla" but I'm curious about that ^^

I hate when idiots make assumptions without basis. My company so higher up idiots decided not to use Python. I said why they said it’s not scalable. I asked have anyone of you ever wrote micro service which can handle millions request every hours? Have you ever wrote service in Python? Have you ever worked on Python? Architect said but Python doesn’t have type support? I said there is use Python3. He said I want to validate my request payload. I told have you tried form and decorators. I told, I have 8 years experience. I worked in every language and I one has advantage over others depending on situation. Then they said, but we want only Java as finding resources is easy. I said have you checked git Python overtook Java in case resources, you are outdated. I don’t want to leave company but even after so many argument these idiots just dropping Python and because of that I am loosing so many good resources.

*sees how Facebook kicked me out of my Bitlbee session again*
Me: "Motherf-..."

Still there's some friends of mine on Facebook who apparently got really hooked.. can't for the love of the holy Raven seem to get them away from that shithole.

"Alright then Facebook.. your win. I'll install Messenger and Pages Manager again to at least have your shit be semi-usable again 😑"

*installs said apps*

"Holy shit that battery is draining fast, and I'll have to go out in half an hour"

*plugs phone in fast charger*

*phone while charging keeps on dropping battery level*

FACECUNTS!!!!!! 😤

*powers off phone to conserve battery life and goes off to cook a meal*

*comes back to boot up the phone again and uninstalls those Face-crapps*

*phone immediately starts raising its battery level super fast*

Coincidence? I think not 🤔🤔🤔

Fresh out of dropping out of uni with a real heaping of newly diagnosed depression.

Get job in the industry.

Absolute joke of a company, spiral even further.

Thus begins the saga of boom / bust and the universe / myself fucking me over just as things get good that has been the last 8 years of my life.

Maybe one day I’ll write properly about my experience of mental health, in industry, in welfare and in my family too.

Suffice it to say, anything that leads you to take a whole year out, as well as makes you question whether what you thought was your dream job is actually right for you - is, ultimately, the definition of burnout.

tl;dr - the last 8 years have been a fucking burnout episode.

Ladies and gentlemen.

Back in 2009 when I started coding, some dickhead told me to not learn Vim because professional developers normally use IDEs for shit instead of text editors.

Being the kind of person that I am, I shrugged him off as the cocksucker that he was and decided to learn Vim anyway.

Fast forward to 2015 up to 2018

I
Use
That
Bitch
Religiously

At work. For fucking everything since it is what you have when you ssh into a server and lemme tell ya this:

I you guys thought being a Vim master ain't dropping no one's panties....boy u wrong af.

And nano is fine too, but why settle for less when you can be a complete vim black wizard?

when i was fired as an external contractor with half an hour notice, because i didn't process enough tickets. I didn't process many tickets because:
1. In the morning everyone grabs tickets just to stop the timer.
2. I worked on some complicated tasks that involved multiple third and fourth parties(not to forget an fucking dropping firewall)

If living and working in the UK wasn't hard enough as is for a student. This now happens and has, pretty much, screwed everything over.
Promoted lies, PM stepping down, value of pound dropping.
All going great! ☺️🔫

TFW you spend 30 minutes debugging an app that isn't working right only to find out it's working exactly as it's supposed you, you just forgot you put that bit in there that does that thing.

One character change later and it's working perfectly. ONE CHARACTER! THIRTY BASTARD MINUTES! I just spent thirty minutes driving through every line of code and coming closer to the conclusion that Java was doing some kind of strange thing with dropping objects from memory. No, it wasn't Java that had memory problems, it's me! Just check me into the old peoples home now so I can spend my day pissing my pants and making lewd comments at the nurses because that's all I'm fucking useful for at this point!!

I need a coffee.

Because MS is dropping support and updates for Windows 7, I finally decided to install something else! Wanted to do it earlier, but I was clearly to lazy to do it.
I choosed Ubuntu, I know a lot of you hate it, but it is the one i'm used to, and i didn't want to search too complicated

Damn, GitHub is on rampage lately. After dropping tls < 1.3 support, they are expected to drop IE support by July.

Praise GitHub 😍

100% honesty

I feel as if my friends from school are dropping me one by one and it's boiling down to my IT friends. I really like my friends and stuff but they're treating me like I'm invisible so I'm not posting this on instagram, not on twitter, and I'm not texting this to anyone, because I'm really starting to realize how big of an impact the life of IT studies has on me, and how amazing the community is. Thank each and every one of you for simply being here on devRant and I appreciate all of you.

Tldr; make sure what you study is relevant to the field and you enjoy it otherwise don't waste your time.

BTW: devrant is awesome it gets me through the day.

So I am almost 3/4ths through a master's in cs and I am contemplating why I went to school in the first place/dropping out.

My program is basically an extension of the bs I got from the same school meaning we learn very general cs topics. There is only one ai class for example.

I had a junior developer position before I even got my bs so now that I am this far along and looking at job openings I'm wondering what why and how my school is able to get away with teaching us this shit.

After all my schooling I learnt more on my own and through Google. I have little to show for my school work other than a degree that says I did a bunch of busy work. And the specific things that I did learn I will never ever remember. Seriously. Who here knows what a MIB and OID are and have actually used them?

I wish I tried harder to get into a school like Berkeley but just looking at their applications is depressing. I always had issues with school and they expect my to have the grades, extra curriculars and other shit. I'll build you a robot or make you a website but I'm not doing that nonsense.

And then there's Google and apple and all these big tech companies expecting me to have written full Enterprise software and know every single algorithm and programming language because everyone uses something different. Sure I wish I had experience in all 50 languages that are popular right now but I don't. And I'm not gonna learn it from school that's for damn sure.

Who here actually went to a good school and can say it helped them in the real world? How many employers actually care about school over actual experience?

Who knows how to burn a school down and get away with it? Or at least make teachers with Phds stop reading off slides all lecture. I know how to fucking read for fucks sake. Not too mention they use shitty software made in 2003 that's no longer supported. And I could go on about the teacher last quarter who graded the midterm on final day while he flirted with the 3 girls in class. And I could go on and on and on but I feel like I need to start being productive so I don't waste away.

Just so done.

I was noticing some slow network and it was dropping some connections. So I booted up my old XP install with Java 6 so connect to the ASA 5505, I see it’s logging max connections of 10000 has been reached.

Fine, I recon it’s my colleague backing up his entire machine to Google Drive.
Because when he shut it off, n connections dropped.

I check back in the log, and I see there’s 4-500 connections happening per second, I think WTF and check the source IP. Lots of random IPs from Vietnam, all going to a Windows2008 Server using rdp.

(I didn’t setup our servers, so I didn’t know which server it was accessing)

Ask my other colleague, he told me it’s a windows server from an earlier project that’s not used anymore.
I rdp into it, see there’s users logged in from around the world, and I immediately do a shutdown.

Would you look at that, connections per second dropped to about 50.
I guess that server isn’t going back online ever.
And I now need to ask management for a budget to update our network infrastructure, because the old ASA 5505 is begging me to die.

TL;DR gg previous employees didn’t shut down old servers and left them open to the world to enjoy

Fuck my life sometimes.
I'd just finished my work for an ongoing project, it's been over 6 months only to be dragged out to be told another system needs an immediate change which at best will take 3-4 weeks.

Like seriously just let my mind come off down from the completion of previous project before dropping a new barrel of insanity on my desk 😬

I like being busy, don't get me wrong. but damn not even a day of recovery 😓

After dropping my c++ book, I just gifted my python book to a store keeper, in the hope that one day may be her twelve year son will become one of us, a programmer.

I have this side project that I’ve been working on for the past 6 years part time but over the past 2 years just as a sysadmin to keep it running, it’s unpaid work but whatever, dropping in once a month or so doesn’t worry me.

Well the owner of the domain hasn’t been reachable for nearly 9 months and the domain expired a while back, not much I can do about that, so I pushed everything over to work at the IP level while I reach out and wait - that was 2 months ago while I waited for the owner to renew it or for the domain to fall.

Today the domain fell, so I jumped on to buy it back up only to find its already purchased... 😦

so I find the owner, it’s fucking parked on a shitty “buy me” page with a price tag of $4500 USD. Fuck these slimy hoarding domain parking bastards.

I know the site was on its last legs, low membership and traffic but I’ll be fucked if I’m paying that much to reacquire it.

there's this club at my school, called STEM, and another called "science olympiad." both are pretty cringey, bad, or boring. science olympiad was just for the college credit. during the intro to the club, they said there was a coding section. "game on!" is what they dubbed it as, where basically you're timed to make a game in scratch. i'm fucking tired of it. why is scratch considered programming? don't get me wrong, i'll write an OS in PHP before i say code.org is better than scratch, but fuck it. its a fucking interpreted language that's interpreted by another interpreted language. i don't understand why this shit is still used. scratch isn't good. please codecademy or w3schools or just write in binary directly, but not scratch. my hand hurts from dragging and dropping, my eyes hurt from the light theme, my imaginary cat committed suicide after learning about scratch's mascot. fuck it. now onto stem club, fuck it too. not for being bad (well, kinda), but for not being more recognized. it should be above science olympiad, and other clubs because you actually have to think instead of just memorize. but alas, we still were offered the choice of scratch to program the robot. sigh. arduino much? i guess not. challenging much? nope. was i elected "leader"? with three of my friends out of the eight there, i could have been, but no. effort in this would be depressing.

This one ticked me off because of the sheer rudeness of a demand they made of me. I had been building a personal freelance brand around myself and my skills for many years. I had in the prior 3 years developed it from a freelance to a lean agency model. That was running in parallel with full time work and the FT employer was happy to allow it. Eventually that employer downsized me and almost everyone else on staff. But they liked me and gave me mini-projects to do on a contract basis. I began interviewing for FT work with other companies.

One agency I applied at gave me a phone screen interview. The main hiring person was also an investor in the agency. He noted my lean agency and said that a second interview would be contingent on my dropping my clients that I was working for on my own time, disposing completely of my personal brand, and even giving up my domain name.

I told him I’d think about it. But the more I thought about it the more angry I got about such a stupid request. Why does this new company I don’t even know I will like working for get to tell me to abandon my “Plan B” option for if I quit or they decide to lay me off?

They never called back but I wished they had so I could have had the satisfaction of telling them no.

I have an exam today. I'm not prepared. Also some cunt almost hit me with their car when I was on my way to uni and had the fucking audacity to yell at me over it. I wish many painful things on that whore who drove her car into a pedestrian zone with 50 km/h and blamed me for being there. I did not need to be spooked further before my exam. Just end me now please.

>Throw my phone on the bed in preparation for going to sleep
>Turn the lights off and quickly pull the blanket off the bed to straighten it
>Hear this un-earthly sound of my phone crashing to the floor and sliding across the floorboards
>.....

We just got into a malicious bots database with root access.

So guard duty gave us some warnings for our tableau server, after investigating we found an ip that was spamming us trying all sorts. After trying some stuff we managed to access their MySQL database, root root logged us in. Anyway the database we just broke into seems to have schemas for not only the bot but also a few Chinese gambling websites. There are lots of payment details on here.

Big question, who do we report this to, and what's the best way to do so anonymously? I'm assuming the malicious bot has just hyjacked the server for these gambling sites so we won't touch those but dropping the schema the bot is using is also viable. However it has a list of other ips, trying those we found more compromised servers which we could also log in to with root root.

This is kinda ongoing, writing this as my coworker is digging through this more.

Instead of a rant I have a story for you.

I was browsing my emails and eminently pissed off, as I usually am. Came across an email from
michael@michaelnthiessen.com

and thought "fuck this guy and his adverspam!"

Because whats more rational than hating someone you don't know, over something they didn't do, because of something completely unrelated to them of which they have no control?

Totally human.

The email looked like this

"I have some fantastic news for you:
Clean Components will be released again on April 21!
"

With a "🎉" emoji. I'm in a more vile mood than usual today.

It goes on.

"Even better, I'm significantly dropping the price, so you'll definitely want to pick it up!"

How presumptuous.

I fire off a quick reply.

"What a bunch of bullshit.
I decide to change careers and a month later, just like in 2008, this fucking pandemic happens and the economy and hiring
Starts collapsing.

And here I am getting sent this bullshit.
"

I had to rewrite and shitcan the response a few times for civility. I guess this is me being polite, but I was suddenly compelled to vent to this total stranger over what in all likelihood was an *automated* email.

Six and a half hours later I got a reply.

"Hey James, I'm sorry this pandemic has been rough on you.

I hope things turn around for you soon.

If it would help, I'd give you the course for free, but if you've switched careers I'm not sure it's relevant any more?

Michael
"

My god. A lone voice of calm in a wasteland of 24/7 bad and worsening news. Sometimes simplicity is the soul of class.

Hes got it in spades.

And here I was thinking "today might be the day. Thank god for giant bottles of hydrocodone."

It's not true that all gingers are soulless demons.
Some of them are angels in problem glasses.

No but seriously, hes a cool guy in my book.

Check out his site if you're interested in Vue at

michaelnthiessen.com

I spent the last three weeks+ (literally THREE full weeks, weekends too) building something I thought was really cool, powerful, and useful. Made a blog post, posted a giant thread on the company Twitter.

Literally one person gave it a like.

I don't know why I give shit anymore, cuz nowadays if it isn't about getting rich quick, cHaTgPt, or some other made up hype, no one cares. Apparently I shouldn't either...

Meanwhile my 16 GIGABYTE RAM MAC, yes 16 GIGABYTE RAM can't even hold power while plugged in, and I'm still clowning around with an ancient iPhone 6 (actually one of my mom's old iphones) that barely stays above 20% battery for more than an hour...

And FINALLY, my FUCKING ISP is for sure screwing me, since I've been doing some hard core data streaming and broadcasting, even though I pay $60+ month for that shit it, keeps dropping out, shit doesn't load.... I mean wtf this isn't 1990 dialup AOL anymore

When I step back I just feel like the worlds biggest loser, maybe the world's biggest 🤡

I’m LOLing at the audacity of one of our vendors.

We contract with a vendor to build and maintain a website. Our network security team noticed there was a security breach of the vendor’s website. Our team saw that malicious users gained access to our Google Search console by completing a challenge that was issued to the vendor’s site.

At first, the vendor tried to convince us that their site wasn’t comprised and it was the Google search Console that was compromised. Nah dude. Our Search Console got compromised via the website you maintain for us. Luckily our network team was able to remove the malicious users from our search console.

That vendor site accepts credit card payments and displays the user’s contact info like address, email, and phone. The vendor uses keys that are tied to our payment gateway. So now my employer is demanding a full incident report from the vendor because their dropping the ball could have compromised our users’ data and we might be responsible for PCI issues.

And the vendor tried to shit on us even more. The vendor also generates vanity urls for our users. My employer decided to temporarily redirect users to our main site (non vendor) because users already received those links and in order to not lose revenue. The vendor’s solution is to build a service that will redirect their vanity urls to our main site. And they wanted to charge us $5000 usd for this. We already pay them $1000 a month already.

WTAF we are not stupid. Our network service team said we could make the argument that they do this without extra charge because it falls in the scope of our contract with them. Our network team also said that we could terminate the contract because the security breach means they didn’t render the service they were contracted to do. Guess it’s time for us to get our lawyer’s take on this.

So now it looks like my stakeholders want me to rebuild all of this in house. I already have a lot on my plate, but I’m going to be open to their requests because we are still in the debrief phase.

In my office there's a dev who regularly takes figurative shits on other devs — stuff like publicly shaming others for their mistakes, or dropping a conceited "I told you so" whenever his solution turned out to be the right one.

He's a young guy, still has lots to learn about office etiquette, and I know he usually means well (he privately apologized to me once after I told him to fuck off), but I'm not sure he knows of the effect it's having on the other devs he talks down to.

I like him enough that I don't want to go to HR about it, but I don't know how to approach the situation in a one-on-one level with this guy. I do know that something needs to happen, but I'm not sure how I can help the situation.

For now, he shuts up when I point out his flaws in logic and reveal that he's still got lots to learn about his demeanor.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

pms always tell the higher ups that I"don't have passion". I don't know how to show passion for their photoshop mock ups, one line requirements with no definition of done, their talking for hours about "leveraging" and name dropping about the top brass they are schmoozing with. I just ask if we are going to show our MVP to real users and she morphs to the bride of chuckie. I say we ought to pair program and she says it cost double to make a feature. Testing and code reviews are taking too much time but they hover over your shoulder while you try to fix a "mission critical bug" that occurs because they wanted us to skip practices that could have prevented the bug. Woo I feel better now!

I never liked when rappers do the bridge on emotional songs.

the song starts like "ooohh, baby I love you, you know we're for each other, bla bla",
then the rapper comes up with some raw shit like
"baby you know that this cum is only for you,
we're meant for each other, you suck me so good,
you know that you moan when I raw in your ass"

bro, wtf... it was a gentle romantic song...

or when the singer is depressed, has dilemmas about life
and the rapper's like "im rolling on my mercedes bitch"

it actually sounds like rapper is intentionally making the singer look like a pussy.

now, before some troll comments that I'm an idiot dinosaur that can't understand hip hop, let me say:

I like hip hop, I'm not gonna make a fool of myself by name dropping rappers from the past or today, as if you needed credentials to emit any option about the genre. I will only say that I've been listening on and off since I was 15.

And I like emotional songs as well, any genre.

The problem is that I feel a sort of disconnect between the singer and rapper of a song.

You can't have one performer be like "I feel sad, life is hard" and then the other like "I GOT HELLA MAD DICK NIGGA, CHOKE ON MY CUM", in the SAME fucking song.

They are completely opposite emotions,
That works in movies, eg: a romantic slasher film, but that shit works because it's feature length.

There's enough time to make transitions and to let the mood slowly change.

Meanwhile, these guys are trying to stitch these things together in 3 fucking minute songs.

But this shit dominates the charts, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

All is well until one of the interviewers starts dropping questions like:
- Where do you see yourself in x years
- What gets you out of bed every day
etc.

that give you some nice mid interview existential dread.

Dropping a cup of coffee on iPhone, iPad and MacBook at once..
My wife can do that..

At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.

Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.

Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.

After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.

Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.

My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V

Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.

New ticket:

Ticket: "I just spoke with-"

Me: "LET ME STOP YOU RIGHT THERE! IM NOT GONNALET YOU FINISH! IS THERE A PROBLEM? THEN HAVE THE PERSON YOU SPOKE WITH / SAW THE FUCKING THING HAPPEN CONTACT ME! ALMOST NEVER IN MY LIFE HAS A GAME OF TELEPHONE EVER DONE ANYTHING BUT FUCKING DRAGGED OUT THE PROBLEM! WIDGET DOESN'T WORK? THING DOESN'T DO A NON SPECIFIED THING? FUCK YOU FOR DROPPING ALL THE INFO I NEED AND SENDING A VAGUE EMAIL!!!"

-ticket set to not gonna do shit until someone who saw the thing gets off their ass and says what is actually happening-

Dropping several production tables at my first job. Nobody died but I thought I was headed for Guantanamo..

Officially dropping jQuery. Porting to ES6 and transpilers. Burn in hell bloody witch!! hahaha

So, it's time to fucking rant!

Location: A small startup where direct contact with C-Level members is frequent.

A while back we had a customer using our SaaS product who had gripes about the way it worked.

He contacted our CEO and made a bunch of claims based on bad assumptions.

In the end, he wanted all images removed from his site. I was pulled aside by the CEO and asked if I could handle this for him and make a new screen for them without images.

So I did. I tried to discuss and get deeper into the problem by saying "this seems like a symptom of a problem and not the actual problem. What do you think?" He responded with "That was his request so it must be the problem if it won't take long then let's fix it for him.

- a week later

The problem is fixed and in the wild. No more images. Now he has another request :/

He does not like the pagination on his site. He says " I shouldn't have to click a button when I scroll so I want the be able to scroll and see all my products!"

This time the CEO asks me if this can easily be done and I take him aside and say "no, this will be a big change to our system and will need to be discussed with the team."

The main point I make is that we should go down and spend some time with this customer to find out what the real problem is.

After a half hour of discussion about the real issue he decided to bring in the CTO.

In the end, we implemented infinite scroll, dropping our current product building tasks to service one customer (yeah, it's a bad scene). But we got infinite scroll built and shipped.

- 2 Weeks later

This time he demands that infinite scroll isn't good enough. "If I scroll fast then I have to wait for them to load, they should all load at once!"

This time I have had enough. I can see the CEO is coming over to me to as me how much work is in this. I tell him there are 3 things I have to say...

1. I'm going to implement exactly what he asked by the end of the day.
2. We will only release it to him because it is going to be a shit-show loading everything at once, the load times will be mental!
3. We should fire this customer, right now.

So, I built it. Customer hated it (of course, who the fuck wants to wait 30s for loading. That's basically a lifetime). We changed it back and he was still mad.

- 2 weeks later

Customer leaves. Good riddance.

- sometime later

I am in the customer's store on a road trip. I get a feel for how their store works and they have a different system for making things operate.

It turns out that they did not know what the real problem was. They actually needed a completely different system (from a UX perspective) for accessing their data.

To top it all off, the system would have taken less time to build than the shitty fixes we made over weeks of work. FFS

I guess the moral of the rant is to find the problem, not a symptom of the problem.

Today I dropped and updated a database to override it with local changes. Turned out the same dB was used by another project.

I just destroyed a week worth of work and content.

Good thing I took a dump before dropping everything. Got it running in 5 Minutes

I'm really sick of the "six-figure" advertisement that the industry uses to encourage more people to go into programming. The amount of people who hate coding with a passion but are in it because they want money is staggering. A lot of them end up dropping out. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who dearly loves this field. Truthfully, this approach won't resolve our retention problems.

Ok, this is my first post here...and I came here to rant - I had heard about this place, but I guess I just hadn't had a bad enough day...until today...the day I found my ec2 instance was playing hide and seek with me. I just found out that my aws billing dashboard is going to swoosh 2000rs (30$) out of my wallet. Imagine ranting about this to a layperson... ok anyway, I had taken a t2-medium (my first one ever) for a hackathon and I was just playing with the regions I guess and it somehow ended up in the ohio region. I had given IAM access to some of my teammates and they were using it. We were supposed to shutdown the instance after 1 day. The next day I check the dashboard (for N.Virginia - which is the default) and I see no running instances. I thought ok my teammates must've turned it off and I left it at that. A month after the hackathon, I login today and I have this jaw-dropping moment. I now have to pay 30$ for nothing!

!rant

The efficiency of every dev stack in the world will never compare to just dropping my folder of php code into a server, with proper configurations, routes envs and everything else into a folder and watch it run.

I a pops shop wants me to build something for them? php

If an enterprise grade with a lot of users comes about? php

I have yet to have a single issue with it as most of you evee poluted, herd ready, mob mentality mfkers want to make believe.

Legit, the language is flawed, but has yet to fuck with me, i have memorized the quirks and fuckups of the language (much like I have done with JS) to know that a lot of you just bandwaggon over shit.

"It DoeSnt hAve proPer geNerics"

boom, deployed a form to a customer for his site, charged $2k for a one day job with no issue. But go ahead, setup an entire fucking pipeline of dependencies, a .net app and/or an entire bs app in node or rails(which I love btw) or an entire fuckState centric app in Go that gets messier the more you look at it and it would not be as easy or as simple to deploy.

Legit, in my entire career, nothing makes my life simpler for the web.

Best: dropping out of college
Worst: probably the same

Time will tell.

What were some of your "OH MY GOD I'M AN AWESOME CODE WIZARD!" moments?

For example, I can remember two or three:
One was when I, with only cursory knowledge of C, never having worked with it but having been exposed to it (and having lots of experience with C# therefore familiar with the c-family syntax), took 5 minute look at a source code and pointed out a bug that the student working on it was trying to solve for the past 2 hours. Sadly, I don't remember what the bug was anymore.

Second one was on reddit, someone posted to gamedev group a 2minute video from his voxel+ai framework he was working on, I watched it, and without any idea what it's written in, or how, I was like "you seem to be dropping frames in a pretty regular manner unrelated to anything I see happening on the screen. You're creating too much garbage on frame-by-frame basis (probably while your AI is exploring what to do), look into object pooling, it'll help".

And the guy responded in a few hours like "by gosh, you're right! thank you! and what do you think about the source code?" (he linked git repo below the video.

And I was like OMG I'M A MAGE, I DIDN'T EVEN CLICK THE REPO LINK, ONLY NOW AFTERWARDS, AND yeah, it's c++ so sadly nothing for me, but OMG I JUST WROTE THE FIRST THING THAT CAME TO MY MIND, DIDN'T EXPECT IT TO BE CORRECT, I'M AWESOME.

=D and the feeling stayed with me for about two days.

(If it's not clear yet, it's perfectly okay, in fact, required, to brag about yourself in answering this question ;) )

Create my own company with the stuff I'm learning....
Just need:
Inner strenght!
Been lacking that a lot , and with all the medication....
Else I would be dropping like one app a week, have my webportal already built, a few CNCs already producing pieces to sell...

Yea it’s totally cool. Dropping a conference call on me 30 minutes before it happens. And then you (and everyone else in the call) should be late too. And then do this stuff all the damn time and ask me why I have to push the deadline back. But get super pissy when I give you a realistic deadline that factors these bullshit experiences in!

Then after I wait 10 minutes on the line, tell me it’s been moved to the bottom of the hour which doesn’t really leave me enough time to do anything but play on DevRant. Fucking insanity.

Me: Hmm... My Android phone has been acting strange lately, cell signal keeps dropping... Maybe I picked up a virus... let's flash the latest update.

Phone: Updating Done

Me: Hm... signal is still bad... maybe it's hardware... *Angry*

Phone: By the way you lost root

Me: @#$%$&&$%^#$!#$@$%$#%^ OK LETS SEE, SUPERSU, REINSTALL THE BINARIES... YES!!!

Phone: Reinstalling... Restarting...
......................................................
......................................................

Me: it's not loading.... why? NO! I bricked it..... NO NO NO NO.....

*1 hour of flailing...*

Hey Recovery still works! OK, let's try to reflashing the OS

Phone: Flashing... Restarting...

Me: Please, please... let this work.... it's not starting............. wait. IT LOADED!!!! WOOT!!!! AWESOME...

Phone: still no root...

Me: Eh...

And there went my most of my evening which I was supposed to spend preparing for an interview tomorrow....

Which are one of the most badass , kickass, inspiring, jaw dropping quote about programming/coding/hacking which you have heard?

It is sad to say, but programming in C# using Visual Studio basically consists of clicking buttons, dragging and dropping files and checking / unchecking checkboxes in order to get everything generated.
Where are to good old days, when code still had to be typed. :(

If I see one more Laravel dev I'mma commit a war crime
If I see one more Laravel dev dropping env(something) around the code I'mma commit _SEVERAL_ war crimes

Remember kids: you don't work with Laravel. If you do (you don't, but let's assume), ENV IS USED ONLY IN CONFIGURATION FILES, OR LARAVEL CACHING SYSTEM FUCKING BREAKS. Ok?

Fuck, every time I read something about NFTs I lose another bit of faith in humanity I didn't even know I had.

I mean, I guess someone could make a bunch of cartoon characters (lets say, some sort of "pookey-man") using compatible styles and colour palettes. And I guess you could buy some of those if there is a product that makes trademark recognition a plausible dream (let's say, a videogame and/or anime).

But if the chance of success is akin to the chance of becoming a billionaire solemly from lottery wins, shouldn't the assets be priced accordingly?
Like a couple bucks a pop, at most?

Dropping a cool 30000 quid on a single lotto ticket sounds like the dumbest thing ever.
And yet at least a couple hundred hollow heads did it.
Fuck everything.

Being told that we'll be dropping Spring Framework in favour of Java EE.

Well, all right then.

Hello DevRant community! It’s been a while, almost 5 years to be exact. The last time I posted here, I was a newbie, grappling with the challenges of a new job in a completely new country. Oh, how time flies!

Fast forward to today, and it’s been quite the journey. The codebase that once seemed like an indecipherable maze is now my playground. The bugs that used to keep me up at night are now my morning coffee puzzles. And the team, oh the team! We’ve moved from awkward nods to inside jokes and shared victories.

But let’s talk about the real hero here - the coffee machine. The unsung hero that has fueled late-night coding sessions and early morning stand-ups. It’s seen more heated debates than the PR comments section. If only it could talk, it would probably write its own rant about the indecisiveness of developers choosing between cappuccino and latte.

And then there are the unforgettable ‘learning opportunities’ - moments like accidentally shutting down the production server or dropping the customer database. Yes, they were panic-inducing crises of apocalyptic proportions at that time, but in hindsight, they were valuable lessons. Lessons about the importance of thorough testing, proper version control, reliable backup systems, and most importantly, owning up to our mistakes.

So here’s to the victories and failures, the bugs and fixes, the refactorings and 'wontfix’s. Here’s to the incredible journey of growth and learning. And most importantly, here’s to this amazing community that’s always been there with advice, sympathy, humor, and support.

Can’t wait to see what the next 5 years bring! 🥂

OK people, I don't need a novel written for every line of code, but PLEASE STOP trying to tell me that "yOuR coDe sHouLd bE sELf dOcUmeNtiNg aNd cOmMenTs mEaN iT's aUtoMaTiCaLLy bAd". That's a bunch of BS. I can't begin to tell you how many times I've saved my own butt by dropping a "this call can't be awaited; causes the library's internal API to throw an error" comment in my C#, or a "can't use double quotes here; doesn't work right for some reason" line in my JavaScript. Sometimes there are very good but un-obvious reasons why something was done a certain way, even though it looks like it could be done better. And don't try to tell me "the tests will catch it". Let's be realistic here, nobody has 100% test coverage on any project that's much more than "Hello World". And even if the tests DID catch it, why waste the time when you could just write a comment?

P.S.: This is not directed at anyone on here specifically. It's directed at all the devs I've met IRL and the comments I've seen on SO, who think that comments must be bad.

Story time:

I worked at a firm that had an infernal off the shelf CRM system that they collaborated with the dev company to customise.

They were seriously behind the competition, and didn’t have any app or web presence for interacting with their system, instead relying on people calling (fine for the nature of the business, but competition was leaving them in the dust).

They decided that they needed to redevelop it in-house, with a focus on supporting the web and apps.

I was hired for this purpose.

It was me and one other dev, who was also the head of IT.

He’d built a small prototype, and was new to the whole WPF / MVVM thing for the in-house app, so with my previous experience it was clear it needed to serve as an example only, and that it would need redeveloping.

I was only there three months.

In that time I singularly (he was pulled away to troubleshoot their VOIP installation - yes, for three months as other companies kept dropping the ball) built:

- A WebAPI with JWT auth
- An MVC skeleton frontend
- A WPF desktop app

It had all sorts of cool shit in it, 2FA, Reactive UI, Reactive extensions, server push to desktop, a custom workflow and permissions system.

It was pretty dang cool.

End of the three months rolled around, and the non-technical managers were concerned about time to market, so they decided to drop me as I’d “not made enough progress”.

I’d also had a bit of absence which they were aware of and were supposedly supporting me through.

But MFW three months is assumed to be enough time to build such a system with one dev.

When our org got sold to another company, and we weren't informed about anything that was going on. There were whispers of emails that went out, that we first thought meant we were keeping our jobs, but it turned out emails = severance packages. Friends that I have worked with for years were dropping like flies and all we could do was wait.....it was awful, and extremely emotional 😢

Why would some companies advertise a job post as Software Engineer, and only to find out deep in the process after doing multiple interviews, that it’s actually a support job??

Seriously why the fuck do that? That’s disingenuous and misleading as fuck?
And why would a dev be dropping a dev job and experience to do tech support ? Is it even worth it?

Even if it is, can you easily switch back to an actual dev job afterwards?
Wow the things some of these companies do 😶🙄😑🤦🏾‍♂️

@jenochi this is for you

Due to a recent suggestion by the above-mentioned @jenochi, I though that this deserved to be a rant.

Dropping support for IE will once and for all ease web developers lives and it has got to start somewhere. Who's with us!?

Ok, first rant, about my struggles getting reliable internet over the past 6 years. It's not too interesting of a topic, but here we go:

I'm living in a more rural part of Germany and internet here is shit. I pay more than 50 bucks a month for 700kb/s downstream (let's just not talk about upstream...), which is meh by itself but it gets worse. Before this I had roughly 230kb/s downstream using DSL. My provider came out with a new oh-so-fucking-fancy solution for giving people faster internet without upgrading their lame ass fucking backbone and POS infrastructure from 70 years ago: they sell you hybrid internet which combines your shit DSL and an LTE connection using TCP Multicast. Not only do I get only 6 of my promised (and payed for) 50 Mbit, no, It's also a fucking piece of nonworking shit!!!

Let me illustrate:
You constantly have problems with web content (or any remote content) not loading because the host server does not support TCP Multicast. It either refuses connection altogether or it takes about 30-50 seconds to establish a connection. Think about your live when it takes two or three fucking minutes to load 5 YouTube thumbnails or load new tweets at the bottom of the Twitter page! Also, you never know if you a) have an error in your implementation of a new API or if b) the remote host doesn't support TCPMC (there's never an error for that! Fuck you!), your SSH sessions ALWAYS drop in the most inopportune fucking moments because the LTE thing lost connection, you always have to turn on a VPN if you want to visit specific websites (for example your school's website) and so on....

Oh and also, my provider started throttling specific services again these days with Netflix and YouTube struggling to display 240p, fucking 240p video without buffering when I get 600kbit down on steam (ofc the steam download is paused when watching videos). When using a VPN, YouTube 720p and Netflix HD work like a charm again. Fucking Telekom bastards

Then there is the problem with VPNs. The good thing about them is that they solve all the TCP Multicast problems. Yay. Now for the bad things:
First of all, as soon as I use a VPN, access times to remote go up by like fucking 500%. A fucking DNS lookup takes 8-15 seconds!!! The bandwidth is there but it takes forever.. because reasons I guess. Then the speed drops to DSL speeds after a while because the router turns off my LTE connection when it is unused and it does not detect VPN traffic as traffic (again because... Reasons?) And also, the VPN just dies after an hour and you have to manually reconnect (with every VPN provider so far)

And as if that wasn't enough, now the lan is dying on me, too, with the router (the fucking expensive hybrid piece of shit, 230 bucks..) not providing DHCP service anymore or completely refusing all wifi connections or randomly dropping 5Ghz devices, or.....

You get the point.

The worst thing is, they recently layed down 400mbit fiber in my neighborhood. Guess where the FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT CABLE ENDS??? YEAH, RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY NEIGHBORS HOUSE. STREET NUMBER 19 IS SERVED WITH 400MBIT AND MY HOME, THE 20, IS NOT IN THEIR FUCKING SERVICE REGION. Even though there is a fucking cable with the cable companies name on it on my property, even leading up to my house! They still refuse to acknowledge it! FUCK YOU!!!!

Well anyways thanks for reading. Any of you got the same problems? :/

I’ve spent 2 weeks trying to simply automate logging into my damn school’s blackboard but this ducking popup won’t freaking let me access it. I’ve tried selenium. I’ve used beautifulsoup and requests. I’ve even tried a tool called mechanize with python
But I’ve now realized I simply have no damn idea what I’m doing. I’ve read and tried way too many stack overflow articles and I’m just sick of this damn popup

If I can’t figure it out by the end of the upcoming thanksgiving break I’m dropping this damn project until I learn enough to utilize the blackboard API’s. I’m a little sure those will help

Just dropping by to say that my mother gets married today and that I hate wearing fancy clothes ^^

According to my university professor a reliable connection(secure connection) and an established connection (which gives ACK) is same......I feel like dropping out

Has anyone here paid for a font? I'm thinking about dropping $200.00 for the Operator Mono font, I use Fira Code but that cursive typeface is SOOO FANCY.

I lost 2TB of family photos and videos a few years ago by dropping a single hard drive. Nearly all of it was later found on people's computers who forgot to clean them up when we got the NAS. I'm not so eager to delete data once it's backed up ever since.

I'm about to get a burnout I suppose.
I just can't handle the amount of things we need to master in very near dead lines anymore. It's too much.
I've spend about 3 years with this year now. I am thinking of dropping it, because my grades only get worse, but on the other hand I had my dream of attending an university plus all the years that I've kind of lost here...
I can feel how the veins around my brain are full with pressure.

BTW. I'm thinking of dropping it and beginning an apprenticeship as a developer. But before that maybe an internship in that company xor taking one year free to fly to China and to the US to get my brain free.

Just a short "dafuq?" about VS Code.

I have a MacBook Pro from last year, so it's a capable machine. And there I was today, sitting on the train, coding some Python in VS Code.

Suddenly it got all laggy. Like, one second behind my typing, dropping keystrokes, stuttery scrolling... the whole deal. The system itself was perfectly responsive and the activity manager showed the CPU at 30%. After a minute or so, it magically recovered and worked as if nothing ever happened.

What the actual fuck was VS Code doing? I mean, it's a fucking text editor. In 2019 this should be a bloody solved problem! There's absolutely no reason to use around 30% CPU in the first place, and use that much and still *lag*. Holy crap, and people ask with a straight face "what's wrong with reinventing everything based on web technologies?" Fuck everything Electron-based. Make it ElectrOFF already.

*takes deep breath*

So, editor suggestions are welcome. I used Sublime Text 3 before VS Code, I'll likely return to that.

Just dropping into say love you 😘

Also to remind you that the only things companies are the most productive at is destroying the moral compass of a nation and producing millions of fucking morons with a sense of greed, incessantly arrogant behavior, and unbacked sense of accomplishment. The only way to make it to the top is to be a ruthless, soul sucking demon who couldn’t care less about anyone else’s feelings and health. Your coworkers don’t give a single fuck about you.

Also, Sid show us your titties 🅱️itchhhhhh

!dev related

I think I might need to visit the doctor soon.

I just can't get hungry and if I do try and eat I feel like shit not even 10 minutes after. Only after many hours of going by without eating do i really feel hunger and can eat without my stomach wanting to kill myself.

Yesterday for example. Ate at around 1 o clock (without being hungry) and not even 5 mins later i was lying down in my couch feeling like absolute shit.

Didn't eat anything throughout the rest of the day and today I am feeling like I could eat an entire horse by myself.

I don't know what is happening to me. I am dropping pounds like crazy and been feeling super tired. Really creeped out at what the doctor might say about why this is happening.

I would like to think that is stress and nothing more.

I'm tired of meth. I mean math. MATH.
I'm sick and tired of everything.

"First!" numerous blog comments shout to no-one, from the colorful abyss of the internet.

And for me, this is a first. But lets rewind.

It's 2 AM, about a month ago, spring in Akron Ohio. Someone reading this is no doubt shocked "You just revealed where you live, ON THE INTERNET! The weirdos will find you." Anyway, it's a dark and stormy night, as the cliche goes. Like most people up after midnight, I'm browsing facebook posts and useless productivity sites. (lifehacker)
I yearn for something more out of life, somewhere deep down inside..maybe in my colon?

All the articles are saying "10 tips to supercharge your life", "how to discover your life purpose in three easy steps", mixed with an ad about ron jeremys one secret tip to grow a massive cock, and exhortations to buy such-and-such's "new ebook!"
I am not moved by any of this.

Scrolling, and tabbing, and intermittently dropping f-bombs because of js ads locking up my browser, I stop and lean back. In the blue afterglow of my shitty compaqs screen, a thought appears, like a cheesy genie, popping out of a brass toilet. "Start a blog! A youtube channel! A podcast" the ad proclaims. "Yes. Thats what I have to do" I whispered (I'm embarrassed to admit I really did say this).

Then I Control+W'd out of it, and flopped onto my mattress. This was the wasteland of my life. I couldn't help but think The whole internet was like some seedy back alley 2.0, where boxcar willie with his train of needle marks had been replaced by more upstart, greasy-haired gurus. Each peddling 'ebooks' of 'advice', stuffed in between ads to buy 'this one hot stock you have to own' and porn. And that alley was really the 'blogosphere' and 'youtubers'. As I drifted off, the last thought was 'We're all just bottom feeders,leeching and whoring on the attention of faceless anonymous users, hoping for another quick fix.'

I fell asleep, these racing thoughts fading into sweet oblivion, but never too far away.

Welcome to My Back Alley

That title is only twice as dirty, and half as thought-out as I planned. As you imagine, the lure of being the electronic equivalent of a conman never quite faded. And the more I read, the stronger the message "Start a youtube channel!" grew. As if everyone and their grandmother having a youtube channel would somehow make the world right, cure cancer, and save kittens from animal shelter gas chambers. Everyones an expert, everyones an agent of change. Maximizing productivity, Evangelizing Technology, ninjas collaborating to socialfy your community diversification benchmark for target traffic
through user-engagement and authentic grass-roots, blah, blah, blah, blah, money. Thrusting, moaning, screaming. Money. Pumping at the center of it all.

Wake up and smell the bullshit.

This blog is not a blog. This blog is the anti-blog, and we are the anti-streamers. 'We' (read "I") resist your bullshit lingo bingo, call out the Truth (Tm) and refuse to be satisfied with any standards of decency, journalistic integrity, or common sense.

Every blog, every channel, every podcast is Starbucks And I'm tyler durden, pissing in your coffee, and calling it a 'latte'.

Freaks, and anarchists, laymen and losers. If you feel as I do, then this is the place for you. Welcome to devrant.

This whatsapp snapchat-like feature really made me consider dropping it.

So, we've been on Deutsche Telekom for about 9 months. Shitty connection in the countryside but literally not one outage.

For the last 6 weeks our internet has been dropping out with no obvious cause.

Just this week we start getting calls if we'd like to upgrade to a package with LTE...

I'm finding the coincidence just a little too convenient.

In 2015 I sent an email to Google labs describing how pareidolia could be implemented algorithmically.
The basis is that a noise function put through a discriminator, could be used to train a generative function.
And now we have transformers.

I also told them if they looked back at the research they would very likely discover that dendrites were analog hubs, not just individual switches. Thats turned out to be true to.

I wrote to them in an email as far back as 2009 that attention was an under-researched topic. In 2017 someone finally got around to writing "attention is all you need."

I wrote that there were very likely basic correlates in the human brain for things like numbers, and simple concepts like color, shape, and basic relationships, that the brain used to bootstrap learning. We found out years later based on research, that this is the case.

I wrote almost a decade ago that personality systems were a means that genes could use to value-seek for efficient behaviors in unknowable environments, a form of adaption. We later found out that is probably true as well.

I came up with the "winning lottery ticket" hypothesis back in 2011, for why certain subgraphs of networks seemed to naturally learn faster than others. I didn't call it that though, it was just a question that arose because of all the "architecture thrashing" I saw in the research, why there were apparent large or marginal gains in slightly different architectures, when we had an explosion of different approaches. It seemed to me the most important difference between countless architectures, was initialization.

This thinking flowed naturally from some ideas about network sparsity (namely that it made no sense that networks should be fully connected, and we could probably train networks by intentionally dropping connections).

All the way back in 2007 I thought this was comparable to masking inputs in training, or a bottleneck architecture, though I didn't think to put an encoder and decoder back to back.

Nevertheless it goes to show, if you follow research real closely, how much low hanging fruit is actually out there to be discovered and worked on.

And to this day, google never fucking once got back to me.

I wonder if anyone ever actually read those emails...

Wait till they figure out "attention is all you need" isn't actually all you need.

p.s. something I read recently got me thinking. Decoders can also be viewed as resolving a manifold closer to an ideal form for some joint distribution. Think of it like your data as points on a balloon (the output of the bottleneck), and decoding as the process of expanding the balloon. In absolute terms, as the balloon expands, your points grow apart, but as long as the datapoints are not uniformly distributed, then *some* points will grow closer together *relatively* even as the surface expands and pushes points apart in the absolute.

In other words, for some symmetry, the encoder and bottleneck introduces an isotropy, and this step also happens to tease out anisotropy, information that was missed or produced by the encoder, which is distortions introduced by the architecture/approach, features of the data that got passed on through the bottleneck, or essentially hidden features.

So we are building this website that basically allows customers to draw wardrobes(dragging and dropping). The clients wanted an image to be generated as well. So we used a screenshot plugin that basically extracts html and css of the drawing and generates a file. As the wardrobe gets complex(more html), it takes some time to save. So if the internet speed is slow, there are chances of failure.
Just last week they kept complaining that it keeps getting stuck, so we checked the problem multiple times to find that it worked fine and got a max time of 15s to save. So we had a video call with them.. Well they were frozen the entire time with 'trying to connect' issues! Now we know the cause after spending hours reproducing the issue. So the client kept telling us that our internet is fine. So she casts her screen switching preloaded tabs in her browser, claiming ''see, my internet is fine''

Normally you would have:
- Management
- SysOps
- DevOps
- Devs

In the company (30-50 workers) we only have:
- Management
- SysOps (they don't know how to deploy apps beyond FTP to a webhost either)
- Devs

Jepp, management does not want a specific DevOps department, because he thinks every single "I just finished the Javascript course on codecademy" person knows how to deploy an app beyond dragging&dropping it to a webhost with FTP...

I tried to propose to them that I handle DevOps and teach it to others, so we can deploy code that we deem "production ready" in a more proper manner...
They refused...
They rather stick to "just use FTP to push any changes we made directly to the production server and test changes there"

So I've just finished a long day at work (warehouse) from 5.45 till 1.30, got home, had some herb tea, started dropping off, then my cunt of a mate sets a firecracker off IN MY TUPPERWARE, CRACKING THE BASTARD, THEN FUCKING THREATENS ME WHEN I TELL HIM TO SIT DOWN BEFORE I BREAK HIS NOSE. I don't know whether to just kill him or beat the shit out of him, but I'm sick of him doing shit like this when I finally manage to drop off to sleep (I don't sleep well).

FUCKING COCK SUCKING CUM STAIN.

I really want to try to beat the shit out of him but at the same time he's my best mate, what should I do, because I'm FUCKING SICK OF IT?!?

I hate Apple since they dropped OpenGL and Nvidia support. My question to them:

WHAT THE FUCK IS THE PURPOSE OF DROPPING IT? YOU ARE JUST GETTING MORE HATE

I have tried hard to show my ex boss a better way to build web apps. I really tried.
I understand that some people just don't want to lose their investment, and in my opinion classic ASP was bad but not nearly as bad as a lot of people made it out to be. I enjoyed it, was fascinated by the ammount of shit I had to do by hand when using it and the lack of more modern paradigms as the ones found in more mothern languages, but really believed that it microsoft wanted they could have continue to provide updates to the language and ecosystem rather than dropping everything in favor of .net ( which is awesome really)

But his time is ticking and I really liked him as a person, he was kind and willing to adapt to my schedules and pay considerations. I really don't want him to lose clients because his stack does not conform to the new and shiny.

I guess he is scared of me offering to rewrite portions in newer tech since he does not want me to leave and leave him without a developer that knows that stuff. So i have offered myself a position along him as a partner, not a worker, since that way it will be my product investment and I will not leave it just like that.

Dude is really wealthy so he can afford it and he knows I will not do him any wrong.

I nust wish he would reconsider promptly since it would suck to have me as competition.

I’m one of maybe the 10% of dev boot camp graduates that had a successful outcome. Most people think it’s as easy as just showing up, write mediocre code, get a certificate then you’re automatically an “engineer” with job offers being thrown at you. It’s not. I already had experience writing code throughout high school and took 2 years of cs classes at university before dropping out. TLDR; only worth it if you already have some technical knowledge or experience otherwise your just pissing away your money.

Oh man, its been forever since I've had an actual rant.

so my work ethic is to the point where it's all last minute. My eduction is all last minute. Personal problem, and don't know how to fix that. but it's just getting out of hand.

tbh, I'm at the point of considering dropping uni like this is no joke. maybe transfer to a cheaper because the financials are no good either.

I also need a new job because the place I'm at is no good. here a few things about it:
1) Its Industrial, not really tech related
2) the dudes expect ME to GO TO THEM and ask for help. Not how I roll
3) not the best atmosphere -- I don't really like the 4 total employees, including myself
4) nearly minimum wage

the pros?
1) I learn about my car
2) I can use the shop to fix my car
3) Free stuff (for example, a projector and lunch everyday
4) We're getting a server (soon?)
5) I buy computers for them, they pay me

But seriously, my grades in school are slipping (nowhere dangerous yet) and I am too stressed. At least I'll be getting in more dev work

Moreover, I want to get in some actual learning with Swift, but I can never manage to make time. Plus, games are a thing that I do, also family and friends, also religion is a thing, also work and school, also sleep. No time? Me neither.

Like the organization of this rant? Me too.

If the computer freezes during a drag-and-drop operation, you have to hold the mouse button and wait until it is unfrozen to avoid dropping the file in a wrong place.

Computer freezes can be unpredictable. For example, you might click on a location on screen that will have a different effect after the computer unfreezes because something moves or a window is opened/closed, or a keyboard press is not registered. For example, if you start dragging a file and then press CTRL during the freeze, it might not register the CTRL press and end up moving the file instead of copying it.

On thursday i spent 5 hours on a function. It was about to include in production build which was due on friday.

On friday PM informed me that we are dropping this function from application. It will not be included in any build now. So just prepare the build without that function.

So, instead of commenting it out or make it hidden i deleted the source code for the function entirely.

Today morning it has been decided that we are including that function in our next build.

I am fucked. I am very bad Developer i guess.. i am laughing on my mistake. It will not happen again though.

The default USB voltage hould have been specified to 6 instead of 5 volts.

Six (6) volts would allow for longer cables than five (5) volts do, since the spare voltage compensates for the resistance of cables. This is even more crucial for USB hubs. USB hubs are highly dependable upon these days due to laptop vendors dropping the number of USB ports down to two or even one. I am looking at you, Medion.

If several devices are connected to a USB hub, the voltage can quickly drop below 4.5 volts due to the resistance between the USB hub ports and the computer's USB port, causing some devices to restart themselves even if the computer's USB port is not over capacity. If it were over capacity, it would just regulate down its output voltage to prevent overcurrent.

Lithium-ion batteries need at least 4.3 volts arriving at the battery terminals to fully charge, and mobile devices are typically not equipped with a boost converter. Even if they were, they are rather inefficient, meaning they would produce significant heat and waste a power bank's energy. Other USB devices such as flash drives and peripherals might power off below 4.5 volts. However, 6 volts have solid 1.7 volts of margin to 4.3 volts, more than twice the margin of 0.7 volts that 5 volts have. On the way from the power supply to the end device, the voltage has to pass several barriers which weaken it, including the cable, connector endings, and the end device's internals such as the charging controller.

Sure, there are quick charging standards such as by Qualcomm and MediaTek which support elevating voltages to nine (9), twelve (12), and even twenty (20) volts. However, they require support by both the charger and mobile device. If six (6) volts were the default USB voltage, all devices would have been designed to accept this voltage, and longer cables could have been used anywhere. Obviously, all USB devices should be able to run on five volts as well.

Six volts would have been more stable, flexible, and reliable.

Not dev, but a perf-eng confidence boost.

Our company was hired by a client to onboard perf-testing process and do some perf-related go-live stuff. Basically, make sure the app meets the SLAs.

Our company mobilized some internal resources for the task. The had 3-4 months. 2 months later they realized they won't pull it off. What a shame...

When the threat of dropping the ball and losing the client and recommendations became very real, they engaged us. Half the time, half the resources, a worried and annoyed client who now wants to control the whole initiative.

During the first 2 meetings we get the general idea of what they have, what they want. We take some time to prepare a plan to make it on time. The client argues our plan, mostly because one of the main points was mocking downstream dependencies [integrations]. He asks, then demands to do it all with live integrations. We explain why this is an incredible risk and why we should do it the proposed way. He disagrees.

Alright then... Maybe he knows smth we don't. Let's do it the risky way...

A month later test results are far from the target. I did my best with app de-bottlenecking and fine-tuning. But since the live integrations do not deliver, they hide other bottlenecks. The initiative is stuck.

Finally, the client agrees to do it with mocking. But now there's no time left as it will take almost a month to prepare mocks...

The client agrees we should have done it our way from the start. They postpone the go-live and we carry out our testing and tuning the right way.

That was one expensive and long "I told you so". But it boosted our [perf team's] confidence to the top and beyond :)

don't tell us how to do our job, unless you do want extra expenses

In the grim dark future cryosleep or hypersleep or something similar will probably be used to extend peoples lives (and thus politicians careers) before it is ever used for space travel.

Give it time and you'll eventually have, through repeated extensions, term limits of one thousand years or even ten thousand, for congress/senate/president/etc.

You'll have CEOs and upper executives who have lived for 80k years dropping out of hypersleep once a century to document how the shoreline of north america changes near their beach home, as a sort of hobby.

Fart huffing professors (it's a professional sport in the year 28,841 AD) will come out of sleep once every millenia to track the evolution of something irrelevant, like gnat penises.

Big game hunters will wake up every 100k years to hunt new big game prey that just evolved--back into extinction. That and to check with their portfolio managers who will be AI or a highly evolved mongoloid goblin race of slave-quants.

I'm still working on the game btw. Anyone up for testing some prototypes when they're ready?

Major rant incoming. Before I start ranting I’ll say that I totally respect my professor’s past. He worked on some really impressive major developments for the military and other companies a long time ago. Was made an engineering fellow at Raytheon for some GPS software he developed (or lead a team on I should say) and ended up dropping fellowship because of his health. But I’m FUCKING sick of it. So fucking fed up with my professor. This class is “Data Structures in C++” and keep in mind that I’ve been programming in C++ for almost 10 years with it being my primary and first language in OOP.

Throughout this entire class, the teacher has been making huge mistakes by saying things that aren’t right or just simply not knowing how to teach such as telling the students that “int& varOne = varTwo” was an address getting put into a variable until I corrected him about it being a reference and he proceeded to skip all reference slides or steps through sorting algorithms that are wrong or he doesn’t remember how to do it and saying, “So then it gets to this part and....it uh....does that and gets this value and so that’s how you do it *doesnt do rest of it and skips slide*”.

First presentation I did on doubly linked lists. I decided to go above and beyond and write my own code that had a menu to add, insert at position n, delete, print, etc for a doubly linked list. When I go to pull out my code he tells me that I didn’t say anything about a doubly linked list’s tail and head nodes each have a pointer pointing to null and so I was getting docked points. I told him I did actually say it and another classmate spoke up and said “Ya” and he cuts off saying, “No you didn’t”. To which I started to say I’ll show you my slides but he cut me off mid sentence and just yelled, “Nope!”. He docked me 20% and gave me a B- because of that. I had 1 slide where I had a bullet point mentioning it and 2 slides with visual models showing that the head node’s previousNode* and the tail node’s nextNode* pointed to null.

Another classmate that’s never coded in his life had screenshots of code from online (literally all his slides were a screenshot of the next part of code until it finished implementing a binary search tree) and literally read the code line by line, “class node, node pointer node, ......for int i equals zero, i is less than tree dot length er length of tree that is, um i plus plus.....”
Professor yelled at him like 4 times about reading directly from slide and not saying what the code does and he would reply with, “Yes sir” and then continue to read again because there was nothing else he could do.

Ya, he got the same grade as me.

Today I had my second and final presentation. I did it on “Separate Chaining”, a hashing collision resolution. This time I said fuck writing my own code, he didn’t give two shits last time when everyone else just screenshot online example code but me so I decided I’d focus on the PowerPoint and amp it up with animations on models I made with the shapes in PowerPoint. Get 2 slides in and he goes,
Prof: Stop! Go back one slide.
Me: Uh alright, *click*
(Slide showing the 3 collision resolutions: Open Addressing, Separate Chaining, and Re-Hashing)
Prof: Aren’t you forgetting something?
Me: ....Not that I know of sir
Prof: I see Open addressing, also called Open Hashing, but where’s Closed Hashing?
Me: I believe that’s what Seperate Chaining is sir
Prof: No
Me: I’m pretty sure it is
*Class nods and agrees*
Prof: Oh never mind, I didn’t see it right

Get another 4 slides in before:
Prof: Stop! Go back one slide
Me: .......alright *click*
(Professor loses train of thought? Doesn’t mention anything about this slide)
Prof: I er....um, I don’t understand why you decided not to mention the other, er, other types of Chaining. I thought you were going to back on that slide with all the squares (model of hash table with animations moving things around to visualize inserting a value with a collision that I spent hours on) but you didn’t.
(I haven’t finished the second half of my presentation yet you fuck! What if I had it there?)
Me: I never saw anything on any other types of Chaining professor
Prof: I’m pretty sure there’s one that I think combines Open Addressing and Separate Chaining
Me: That doesn’t make sense sir. *explanation why* I did a lot of research and I never saw any other.
Prof: There are, you should have included them.
(I check after I finish. Google comes up with no other Chaining collision resolution)

He docks me 20% and gives me a B- AGAIN! Both presentation grades have feedback saying, “MrCush, I won’t go into the issues we discussed but overall not bad”.

Thanks for being so specific on a whole 20% deduction prick! Oh wait, is it because you don’t have specifics?
Bye 3.8 GPA

Is it me or does he have something against me?

When it's ur bday and ppl call you instead of dropping a msg.. 😣

Microsoft buys npm
Am I the only one seeing a tendency of a few big companies (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yandex, Tencent and 10-15 more) slowly (or not so slowly) acquiring more and more small companies? I hope however that it stays as transparent to the end user; I also hope it even helps, because I hate getting used to a product/service and then the company dropping it because they have no resource and/or interest in supporting it (Google Inbox anyone?)

I get punched in the face by my phone (free falling on my face) so often that I should start suing the mofo for physical damages.

Like, what is wrong with my muscles? Why can't I keep a goddamn phone at a goddamn safe distance and type without goddamn dropping it while lying down? 😠😠

Ugh time for my first google chrome rant... thing...

Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, finished an arch linux install, fixed my slow internet connection in linux, installed only the things I need, vs code and google chrome but fuck me!

Google chromes performance is sinking like a rock, dropping about 25-40% of frames in youtube, slow page loading and the sort.

Installed firefox to ensure it wasn't my system and its all running perfect, I don't like using firefox and want to go back to the warmth of chrome, anyone able to help on this one :-(

Just dropping by to say "hi, hope you guys are well and ranty".

Bye again.

Worst prod scenario experienced - on site in small African country working on CRM/billing system my colleague was testing some new SQL and after finishing decided to drop and recreate the DB. She thinks the process is very slow and suddenly realizes she is dropping the prod DB. In a panic she shuts down the system and starts doing a restore from tape, but is so stressed out she writes "tar cv" instead of "tar xv" and overwrites the backup with the broken DB. Took a while to clean that one up...

Just as the virus started, shitton of companies just cancelled our services. We already started dropping the price and I will probably have my week reduced to 10h (with an accordingly lower pay) .

At least it will be remote.

"Hello,

it turns out we probably caused the downtime ourselves. I didn't know dropping 170 databases and deleting 80 entire projects at once could do that"

Gave me a hearty chuckle. Especially as the client adamantly refused to have SSDs installed for the DB to run on top.

Just imagining the poor read-write heads jerking back and forth in vain attempts to find all the data to delete... So yes, dropping 170 databases at once does in fact take a database server down to its knees, as deleting is all the drives will be doing for a while.

At least it wasn't my or my colleague's mistake this time.

Dropping an external hdd with my yr 12 media assessment on it.

Okay, had a freelance JavaScript gig (with Three.js 3d lib). Usually I put the code on github so I have easier time switching between Desktop and laptop during work, unless I have to sign an NDA or something. Today at 5 AM I got mail from freelancing site support that client reported me for having code on public repo (but it's not like it is a proprietary software, it's based on threejs editor). I made repo private and went to sleep. Later I'm reading through messages, guy was cursing me, threatend to sue me etc. Ended up dropping the client. Did I do something really unprofessional? Unless I'm told not to, I want to show my code and I don't believe in not showing it by default. What do you guys think?

Experiences of owning a private server with JFK!

Dropping a prod db: 1
Misplacing passwords: 3
Config errors: Over 9'000
fail2ban banned me: 2
Not reading the docs first since: Forever
Setting up a sever again because I fucked up: 4
Formating the wrong USB stick, which had needed data: 1
Resetting lost DB root password: 2
Server crashes due to insufficient psu: 3
Not knowing the firewall is enabled again, so near to nothing works: 2

The actual struggle of working in a non-english team who prefers to keep their variables named in our native language. Currently trying to think of a better way to phrase 'sjaafoerAerend' as dropping any part of it makes it more vague.

Is this a thing in asian countries as well? I'm guessing it's more common to just stick to english naming there.

I figure it's safe to assume that anyone who will see the code are going to be proficient in english. If they aren't, natively named variables isn't going to make a difference. Hell I even write my personal reminder comments in english.

Dropping out of college for a semester or two.
2 Broke 2 Fast.
Poor as dirt.

!Dev

So I'm at Brazil Day in NY, took me $6 and 1.5hrs to get here but know what I'm here I feel spending $5 for street food snacks is too much... Like they're price gouging too far...

But in other contexts, I have no problem dropping $$$ for food... Pretty much daily...

I'm not sure how I should make sense of this or justify it. Maybe that's the difference between paying cash and swiping?

iOS 10 pulls this 3D Touch shit on me and they're dropping headphone jacks. What's next? Vegan iPhones? Gluten free home buttons? Over engineered shit. Nobody wants 3D Touch. It's stupid.

My company is getting a new website. This involves getting new hosting.

I made the old one, and it's all just static html. I'm not that attached to it but it's an important detail.

The bosses want the switch to the new site to happen instantly, but I pointed out that with DNS propagation times etc it can't really happen that way.

So I suggested the new web guys host our old site for a few days and we change the DNS now. Then when they want to launch we don't have to wait for the DNS and they can just swap it out.

This involves dropping 10MB of html files into the web directory on the new server.

For this service they are charging us for 2 hours of their time!

I guess I'm in the wrong business...

We have a external demo this thursday. We still need to merge a lot of branches and somehow get a online environment working.
It's 30C and my motivation is dropping by the hour.

At least im not the one to actually have to demo this for people in suits giving you a hard time.

But there are a lot of responsibilities open and no one is taking a lead or having somekind of plan.

Why are we even using JIRA?

It's clear from the behavior of the rest of my team that nobody ever has it open, looks at it, or thinks about any tasks that would improve the product other than sputtering out the occasional "mArKeTiNg HyPe" with incomplete horrible tickets that are at best barely decipherable.

Honestly, we can save the $50 a month and I'll just use my own personal trello board, the outcome would be the same.

I mean my life is a joke: we had to have a near hour-long google hangouts for literally dragging and dropping the 'demo/review' tickets to 'done' because my colleagues are so incompetent they can't read the tickets and realize which tickets HAVE LITERALLY ALREADY BEEN SHIPPED TO PRODUCTION WEEKS AGO.

Watching people creating a UI in XAML by dragging and dropping controls from the toolbox makes me want to hit them.

Cracked a nut by dropping Laravel framework on it. This framework is fucking heavy.

So just now I had to focus on a VM running in virt-manager.. common stuff, yeah. It uses a click of le mouse button to focus in, and Ctrl-Alt-L to release focus. Once focused, the VM is all there is. So focus, unfocus, important!

Except Mate also uses Ctrl-L to lock the screen. Now I actually don't know the password to my laptop. Autologin in lightdm and my management host can access both my account and the root account (while my other laptop uses fingerprint authentication to log in, but this one doesn't have it). Conveniently my laptop can also access the management host, provided a key from my password manager.. it makes more sense when you have a lot of laptops, servers and other such nuggets around. The workstations enter a centralized environment and have access to everything else on the network from there.

Point is, I don't know my password and currently this laptop is the only nugget that can actually get this password out of the password store.. but it was locked. You motherfucker for a lock screen! I ain't gonna restart lightdm, make it autologin again and lose all my work! No no no, we can do better. So I took my phone which can also access the management host, logged in as root on my laptop and just killed mate-screensaver instead. I knew that it was just an overlay after all, providing little "real" security. And I got back in!

Now this shows an important security problem. Lock screens obviously have it.. crash the lock screen somehow, you're in. Because behind that (quite literally) is your account, still logged in. Display managers have it too to some extent, since they run as root and can do autologin because root can switch user to anyone else on the system without authentication. You're not elevating privileges by logging in, you're actually dropping them. Just something to think about.. where are we just adding cosmetic layers and where are we actually solving security problems? But hey, at least it helped this time. Just kill the overlay and bingo bango, we're in!

App development in 2019:

1. Open app A
2. Open completely unrelated app B.
3. Scrolling in App B changes the sound in App A. Not raising or lowering volume, mind, but full on dropping samples and warbling the sound.

It's almost impressive how fucked up that is.

Random guy messages me on WhatsApp that he needs help, that his friend told him I'm good at blah blah blah.........

the issue: he paid for some random php bitcoin thingy blah blah, sent me a link to the site, pretty straightforward instructions on how to use it. I explained everything to him and he says he wants to tweak the php script before he puts it out.
me: then do it

him: how do I start?

me(in my head): did you not think of this before paying for the script?!

also me: oh well, download xampp, good for beginners, easy to setup.

him: not working! please help me

I knew from the onset that he was a windows user.

he started by running it without admin privileges
I had no idea and kept solving problems that didn't exist until I asked him to snap the log, after explaining how to run a software as administrator, we Solved it

port 80 was taken. had to go through the process of changing the ports, I had to validate every single change.

going through the procedure of reinstalling because he installed to some crappy directory. after all the headaches and then redoing all the processes stated above, it still doesn't work.

one final solution left and I am dropping him like a hot potato. I must have close to a hundred pictures of someone's screen on my phone.

little question: when he types localhost on his browser windows IIS page thingy pops up. I was thinking of changing the server name to localserver: new port address

Do you think dropping off in person your resume to companies have slight edge or not? If you did drop off your resume how did you do it?

Specially in big companies like amazon or other big companies?

Hello, folks, I'm starting to learn Android Studio and for the same, I've attended this workshop held at University which was not very helpful in certain aspects. The guy/mentor assumed that we all knew what is Firebase and started dropping knowledge bombs about firebase and integration with Android Studio(Apps).

So, coming to the fundamental question i.e. I'm reading SO 'Documentation' which is still in beta, I find it useful, as it is scratching the basic surface. What are other sources to learn about Android, of course, sources which are not deprecated?

going from totally broke to at least enough capital supply so i can go into city and walk around shopping centers after 6 years and feel like i just entered from a caveman world into the year 2718 and being isolated from dev world and work environment and bein relaxed from studying without constant stress and pain and agony and worries and burnouts and rage and dropping off all the negativity and ignoring it to become a normal person again at least for a day, makes me appreciate life again

Microsoft is at the Edge of dropping Internet Explorer.

So today at work, a dev proposed some solution to a performance problem by using divide and conquer. But the way he said it was came across like "this is a brilliant, algorithmic solution, I bet you'd never think of this because no one else knows algos".

So then I just reply to him mentioning Big O and how it seems the performance is N^3, exponential. In which case the optimal size is like 1. But basically like starting an algo discussion to see if he can keep up... Or if he's just dropping some algo slang to look good.

Still studying, but considering dropping out. I've been working part time in the field since last months of highschool. Going to University seems like a waste of time. I just sit at lectures and listen about things I already know. Worst part of it is that it's extremely depressing, seems like I'm just wasting time I could be spending doing something actually productive. Seems like the only thing keeping me there currently is sunk cost fallacy.

Last week went to a startup conference and set up multiple interviews in some startups and if they go well I'm finally saying goodbye to University.

Has anyone else noticed salaries dropping a bit for devs on job listings? Seems to be 20k less a year than they were advertising before!

Recession hitting it seems!

9pm I REALLY needed to get some work done... Head was dropping like a nodding dog at my laptop... Gave up and went to bed.... Now its after 2am and I've been watching YouTube for 5 hours and still awake.... Just what even....

!Rant - I'm looking for some advice 🤔

So this kid he's 13 interested in building cool things programming etc hasn't had any real start in it.

So I'm like ! Great! 🤔

Another programmer in this world would be lovely ... Before I used to take this approach of, you should do ... This.

Now I'm taking the approach, well what do you like what interests you 🤔 what do you find yourself needing?

Effectively trying to find an in, Into what might drive him to keep with it.

I find people get to ... Uninterested in it. Fast. I've literally had 10-20 people go 🤔 I would like to find out more I really like this etc .

But most don't stick with it I feel because I suggest they make this start and they aren't interested in.... That specifically even though it's a steeping stone

Normally I suggest html CSS right. It's a simple easy thing to learn

Then JavaScript then ... Another language like c# and move to c++ etc.

It's not what I did but I think it's... A smoother transition then my c# start then dropping to c++ then web

So opinions ? Is this the right move 🤔 he has this project in mind now. This app. Which I said could be built in html CSS really if he wanted to. Or though I suggested looking at some native stuff to, then pick.

I've left it open said he can ask anytime. I sent him codeacademy fyi

I told him to get this app to 😂 so might be on here

What I can't stand is when someone "name drops" a company they previously worked at. Such as, "...back when I worked at <insert Xxxsoft>" or "At <so and so place> we did things differently..."

We get it, your résumé is impressive. But it especially peeves me when they've been working at their current job for over a year and still mentions their old jobs.

1. I also worked at <XXXX-place> and it wasn't all that impressive.
2. If it was SO great, why aren't YOU still working there?

In about 12 hours I have to make, which would currently be, the biggest decision of my life (so far).

Either I shut down my company. Or I closer new signups to my service until further notice.

I can't believe I'll be dropping the bomb on my partner soon.

In all fairness to macOS. To it's weird design choices, both Linux and Windows should copy way of installing most of macOS programs. Downloading and mounting .DMG file, drag & dropping the app into Applications folder and done! Life would be so much simpler with it. And yes, I know apt install/pacman -S/dpkg -i/any other package manager is quicker, but average Joe doesn't care about it!

Then again, it would create yet ANOTHER package managing method supported by two distros that no one really cares for...

They keep training bigger language models (GPT et al). All the resear4chers appear to be doing this as a first step, and then running self-learning. The way they do this is train a smaller network, using the bigger network as a teacher. Another way of doing this is dropping some parameters and nodes and testing the performance of the network to see if the smaller version performs roughly the same, on the theory that there are some initialization and configurations that start out, just by happenstance, to be efficient (like finding a "winning lottery ticket").

My question is why aren't they running these two procedures *during* training and validation?

If [x] is a good initialization or larger network and [y] is a smaller network, then
after each training and validation, we run it against a potential [y]. If the result is acceptable and [y] is a good substitute, y becomes x, and we repeat the entire procedure.

The idea is not to look to optimize mere training and validation loss, but to bootstrap a sort of meta-loss that exists across the whole span of training, amortizing the loss function.

Anyone seen this in the wild yet?

This is why we can never have enough software developers

It's true. No matter how many people learn to program, there will never be enough people who know how to program. They don't have to be very good at it either. It is now a required skill.

Minimum wage in first world countries is way above 5$ per hour. A Raspberry PI 3B costs 40$, or at most 1 day of work for the worst paid jobs. And it will run for years, and do routine tasks up to thousands of times faster than any employee. With that, the only excuse that people still do routine tasks, is the inaccessibility of coder time.

Solution: everybody should know how to write code, even at the simplest level.

Blue-collar jobs: they will be obsolete. Many of them already are. The rest are waiting for their turn.

Marketing people - marketing is online. They need to know how to set up proper tracking in JS, how to get atomic data in some form of SQL, how to script some automated adjustments via APIs for ad budgets, etc. Right now they're asking for developers to do that. If they learn to do that, they'll be an independent, valued asset. Employers WILL ask for this as a bonus.
Project Managers - to manage developers, they need to know what they do. They need to know code, they have to know their way around repositories.
QA staff - scripted tests are the best, most efficient tests.
Finance - dropping Excel in favor of R with Markdown, Jupyter Notebooks or whatever, is much more efficient. Customizing / integrating their ERP with external systems is also something they could do if they knew how to code.

Operations / Category Management - most of it would go obsolete with more companies adopting APIs as a way to exchange important information, rather than phone calls and e-mails.

Who would not be replaced or who wouldn't benefit from programming? Innovative artists.

A lot of it might not be now now, but the current generation will see it already in their career.

If we educate people today, without advanced computer skills and some coding, then we are educating future deadbeats.

With all this, all education should include CS. And not just as a mandatory field or something. Make it more accessible, more interesting, more superficial if needed. Go straight to use cases, show its effectiveness in the easiest way possible. Inquisitive minds will fill in the blanks, and everyone else will at least know how to automate a part of their work.

Thinking about dropping Google cloud console and Google domains and just go back to namecheap, just pay the $80 a year to have them host it and not have to worry about the server's and databases personally...

Anyone else got good recommendations other than namecheap?