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1995: Viruses create funny VGA effect
2000: Viruses send SPAM e-mails
2010: Viruses steal credentials
2016: Viruses launch DDoS attacks
2017: Viruses demand ransom
2018: Viruses mine crypto coins6 -
"Jim, can you tell me why my e-mails aren't getting to clients?"
They're being marked as spam...
"oh damn, how can we fix that?"
You can't. You can change the structure of your e-mails to look less spammy, but it's on their end.
"This is a disaster, we can't have our marketing e-mails marked SPAM!!"
Have you tried not spamming people?
"WE'RE NOT SPAMMING PEOPLE, THEY EXPRESSED A LEGITIMATE BUSINESS INTEREST"
No, you bought a mailing list and put together an e-mail campaign.
"But we aren't spamming people!"
IT VS Marketing 100% of the time13 -
Come back from vacation to find that 80+ e-mails were sent out to the entire team for a critical process that was failing to run due to an incorrect password. No one did anything for a week. Fixed it in 30 seconds.
5 -
Let's see if I have any new e-mails at outlook.office365.com
* gets redirected *
* gets redirected *
* gets redirected *
* gets redirected *
"You have been successfully logged out of all your accounts, have fun getting back in loser"5 -
One ex-co-worker disappeared for one month. No e-mails, no phone calls, nothing.
Next month came back like nothing, when the boss ask him "Where the hell did you go?" He replied "I was sick"
of what? The flu...
He of course got fired, absolute zero medical proof.1 -
So, as the lead UX/UI designer, I was working with the marketing officer on the new e-mail template of the company. It took us at least one week to get a good settle – 'cause, you know, she's so skilled on that – doing back and forth and arguing on every detail.
Then she sent me a PPT file with the content and wording for each kind of e-mail.
After 3 days of work, I finished implementing the template and pushed the project in production.
~3 months later
MO: How's your work going on the template?
Me: Erm, sorry? You mean, the e-mails?
MO: Yes! Can you show me the result?
Me: Well, the result is online for...like...3 months?
*Surprised* MO: Hum, yeah? But I didn't validate it!
*Wince* Me: Well, yes, you did, we worked together on it and we finally found a nice settle.
MO: Yes, but the content? Can you send me one of each kind so I can double-check?
Me: ...
*to the rescue* CEO (and husband of MO): It's OK, I've already validate them.
MO: Oh, ok. But I want to double-check. I'll do it later, ok.
~3 weeks later
MO: Can you tell me how I can receive the registration e-mail?
Me: ...
*to the rescue, joking* CTO: Well, did you try to turn your computer off and on again?
MO: Oh, you really think this will work? Let me save my work first!
Me: *BOOOOM*
TL;DR: The marketing officer of my company does nothing productive and is making the company losing a lot of money, but she also make me lose my time for bullshits.
At least I can laugh about it on devRant.2 -
My start at one of the Big Four (accounting firms).
The first two days of each month they organise "onboarding days" for the new starters of that month. (I so hate upper management buzzwords!) They sent me a formal invitation that looked like I was being invited to a ball with the royals, and they included the following super-smarty-pants line: "Dress code: would you wear jeans and t-shirt when you meet a client?"
And I thought: "I'm an effing hardware and software engineer for internal services. I will never meet a client." But I dressed formally nonetheless, and I went to the onboarding, and I hated every second I spent in those effing high heels, and don't get me started on how I managed to get a run on my stockings in the first hour.
The first day of the onboarding we sat through eight hours of general talks from senior employees who wanted to explain the "culture" and "values" of our company, but the worst of all was the three-hour introduction to IT services where they "helped us set up our new laptops" and taught us how to send e-mails and how to use the Company Portal.
On the second day, they divided us into groups depending on our speciality (assurance, taxes, legal, etc) and exposed us to further 8 hours of boredom related to our speciality. However, since the "digital services" thing was still new to them, we didn't have a category of our own, and we had to attend the introduction to one of the other categories, and I didn't understand one word of what was being said.
On the third day I finally went to my office and they provided me with a second laptop. It turns out that we engineers got different laptops and were allowed to manage it ourselves instead of letting central IT manage it for us. So I simply returned the laptop they had given me the first day and started working. However, for some reason, the laptop I returned was not registered, and two weeks later they started pestering me with emails asking where was the laptop "I had stolen". It took me 3 weeks of emails and calls to make them understand that I had returned the laptop immediately.
Also, on the two onboarding days we had to sign attendance, and since I forgot to sign the paper list on the second day, they invited me to the event the next month again. I explained to them that I had already attended the onboarding and didn't go, so they invited me again on the third month, and they threatened me with "disciplinary action" if I didn't go. After a week of lost time writing emails and calling people, I ended up going to the onboarding again just to sign the effing list.
In the end, I resigned during the probation time. That company was the worst experience of my life. It was an example of corporate culture so absurdly exaggerated that it sometimes reminded me of Kafka's Trial. I think they have more "HR representatives" than people who do actual work.6 -
A co-worker at the city-government just chose the wrong mailing list and send an e-mail to EVERY SINGLE emlpoyee (about 20'000 people, including our police-department, hospitals, councils etc.).
Within A MINUTE hundrets of people responded to the mail by using the "reply all" button, pointing out that this mail obviously wasn't meant for them.
After another minute the same douchebags sent another mail (of course using the "reply all" button AGAIN), asking to be removed from the mailing list and stop spamming them.
Even two hours after blocking the mailing list immediately, our mail servers still are processing all those damn mails.
RIP exchange servers
RIP inbox
RIP faith in humanity
Edit: typos13 -
My most f*cked up client process I ever had to deal with:
Digitalizing E-Mails.
I seriously asked if they were joking on me… Wasn't the case.
The process was: Get E-Mail, print out, scan, archive (digitally).
Nobody could explain to me the necessity for this bullsh*t.
"Hmm... Kinda always worked this way, I guess"
The client was a big company. My coworker aged 5x faster during that project. I swear to god, I'm not joking.14 -
N e v e r, fucking e v e r chmod/ chown permissions recursive on the linux /etc folder❗
I did yesterday (, because I am fucking dumb and know little about linux systems) and got the result today. My whole mailserver wasn't working.
After fucking tons of googling and searching and log-digging I found that postfix and opendkim require specific permissions on their respective folders and files.
After changing a fucking amount of permissions on those fucking files the fucking mailserver worked and I can send and receive mails, now. 😤😤😤
What a torture. Lesson learned. Never will repeat this mistake.16 -
One of my favorite things on vacation is to lazily read through work e-mails, spot threads where my opinion/decision is required, and completely ignore them as my boss spirals into utter panic.1
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A brief, and biased opinion of what love is in the dev world:
Love is my employees bringing me something to eat when they know I stay back so that they can all go out do whatever they can do.
Love is my CMS admin getting his ass up and walking all the way to my office when the director walks in to say some STUPID FUCKING SHIT to me that he(CMS Admin) knows would have me 2 fucking seconds away from getting out of my chair and drop kicking the fuck out of him.
Love is the rest of my employees getting up to follow along in case(certainly) one dude is not able to hold me down.
Love is them knowing that I know that their mere presence there will make me chill the fuck out and not choke the fucking director
Love is the CMS Admin proof reading every email I send to a bitch that was trying to get smart, to make sure that I was not being agressive.
Love is said CMS Admin bringing me coffee or a coke congratulating me on listening to him about X email not being aggressive (there is no passive in my vocabulary, just balls out "isn't this your fucking job" aggressive)
Love is my lead developer showing to work after medical treatment fucked up as all hell because he knows that if he is not there I will do a billion things myself in order to give him some rest.
Love is taking my CMS admin and lead dev out to eat when a major stakeholder shits on something I damn well know it took them a while to finish. Love is also letting me open up to said stakeholder to tell them how much of a fucktard they are, sometimes they let me loose, and I appreciate that.
Love is every small person in the company approaching you to tell you of their issues, becuase they care more about the productivity they give to their users, rather than the bullshit numbers their managers care about.
Love is the staff of other places taking care of you because you are not a VP dickhead that treats them like shit.
Love is the HR reps sending you personal e-mails asking you for help because their shitbag of a boss does not count for help and leaves them in the blank with shit software, for which said HR go above and beyond for you later on even though said shitbag manager said no.
Love is your team getting angry and responding respectfully at people when they talk shit about their manager on their emails (manager being me)
Love is your employees closing your door for you when they know you are overwhelmed and you need a quick second to pull yourself up.
Love is not wanting to leave this miserable place because you know some dickweed will be left in charge of the people that care for you, trust you, work for you regardless of the date, and confide in you.
They got me locked in, this shitty institution, for now. Until I find a way to bring my entire team with me.8 -
OH MY FUCKING GOD XD
My female coworker was in an phonecall with my boss and he was sharing his desktop.
He is not the smartest so he forgot about sharing his desktop after the phonecall.
We are watching since half an hour while he is answering his e-mails :D and he don't even notice XD11 -
Job Interview for a CTO role for a premium employer, a big law firm.
All is going well, I am telling them about my years of experience doing complex software integrations in business environments. Talking CRM/ERP, project management and development with external service providers. I tell them I want a salary of 100k and they nod in silence.
Then out of the blue one of the three stakeholders/managers leans over for a final question:
"Soo, we have this really big IT problem and if you would happen to know a solution to it, you would really prove your worth: I have these 10k+ E-Mails in my Outlook folder which doubles as an archive and Outlook keeps getting slower all the time. What can we do?"6 -
Holy fucking shit! What the actual fuck is this?!!!
The funny part: this is not the worst e-mail I got from them, the person who is responsible for these e-mails should have been fired 2 years ago.
7 -
I've accomplished something I thought I'd never do.
I convinced my boss to switch from SVN to Git. (before SVN we've even been using CVS if someone remembers)
Only requirement: it needs to stay in house and I'm the one setting up the server, writing documentation and teach everyone how to use it.
What? Why should I setup the server? Don't we have someone whose job it is to... OK ok... I'll do it.
So after some painstaking arguments with the guy whose job it should have been to do that, I've managed to install a virtual machine running Gitlab.
Long story short: I've just found out about the joys of mail configuration to send E-Mails to established mail providers. Every... single... one of them has a different problem with the way the mails are sent.
Fml
I think I'm going to ask that guy again to use our mail servers SMTP. There should be a possibility to use my gitlabs domain for that somehow.
Really looking forward to Monday. Ugh... -
i rant that i live in a dictatorship with an idiot president who bans whatsapp and facebook to prevent protests (in reaction to having arrested opposition party members of parliament), and github (yes, github) to prevent the spread of a minister's leaked e-mails. now the government is seriously considering shutting down vpn services to prevent by-passing the bans.
on the other hand, it's a nice time and place to continue ms studies on ad-hoc networks - that is of course if i can avoid being arrested or killed before i even start my thesis.9 -
Theoretically I can build multicloud, geo reudant, load balanced, auto scaling infrastructure. But most of my workday I spent in outlook writing E-mails and arranging up meetings.1
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So, got yet another one of those, "Ha! Sending this from your own e-mail address is proof I've infected your machine and recorded video of you synced to your browsing history! Send me bitcoin!" e-mails today. Just with a fun twist:
He claims to have infected my computer on November 8th, 2018 (for later readers: 4 days after the e-mail was sent).
Was about to give them points on creativity the other day; got a Japanese translation of it that was actually pretty spot-on all things considered, and then a Korean copy of it again the next day (just in case I couldn't read English or Japanese, I guess?).
But seriously, you're trying to pull this kind of scam, and can't even tell your bot to successfully pick a date *in the past*?5 -
These bloody form designers.
I was filling in this form earlier and there were some fields which were not marked mandatory so I didn’t fill them in (because why should I ?)
And then later, I received a dozen automated e-mails one for each non-mandatory field I did not fill asking me to provide them that information.3 -
devRant is awesome, but Disney also manages to light-up my day.
This is how Wall-E became a beloved member of our team, and helped me put a smile on my face throughout a very frustrating project.
It all started in a company, not so far far away from here, where management decided to open up development to a wider audience in the organization. Instead of continuing the good-old ping-pong between Business and IT...
'not meeting my expectations' - 'not stated in project requirements'
'stuff's not working - 'business is constantly misusing'
'why are they so difficult' - 'why don't they know what they really want'
'Ping, pong, plok... (business loses point) ping, pong'
... the company aimed to increase collaboration between the 2 worlds, and make development more agile.
The close collaboration on development projects is a journey of falling and getting back up again. Which can be energy draining, but to be honest there is also a lot of positive exposure to our team now.
The relevant part for this story is that de incentive of business teams throughout these projects was mainly to deliver 'something' that 'worked'. Where our team was also very keen on delivering functionality that is stable, scalable, properly documented etc. etc.
We managed to get the fundamentals in place, but because the whole idea was to be more agile or less strict throughout the process, we could not safeguard all best-practices were adhered to during each phase of a project. The ratio Business/IT was simply out of balance to control everything, and the whole idea was to go for a shorter development lifecycle.
One thing for sure, we went a lot faster from design through development to deployment, high-fives followed and everybody was happy (for some time).
Well almost everybody, because we knew our responsibility would not end after the collection of credits at deployment, but that an ongoing cycle of maintenance would follow. As expected, after the celebrations also complaints, new requirements and support requests on bug fixes were incoming.
Not too enthusiastic about constantly patching these projects, I proposed to halt new development and to initiate a proper cleaning of all these projects. With the image in mind of a small enthusiastic fellow, dedicated to clean a garbage-strewn wasteland for humanity, I deemed "Wall-E" a very suited project name. With Wall-E on board, focus for the next period was on completely restructuring these projects to make sure all could be properly maintained for the future.
I knew I was in for some support, so I fetched some cool wall papers to kick-start each day with a fresh set of Wall-E's on my monitors. Subsequently I created a Project Wall-E status report, included Wall-E in team-meetings and before I knew it Wall-E was the most frequently mentioned member of the team. I could not stop to chuckle when mails started to fly on whether "Wall-E completed project A" or if we could discuss "Wall-E's status next report-out". I am really happy we put in the effort with the whole team to properly deploy all functionality. Not only the project became a success, also the idea of associating frustrating activities with a beloved digital buddy landed well in our company. A colleagues already kickstarted 'project Doraemon', which is triggering a lot of fun content. Hope it may give you some inspiration, or at least motivate you to watch Wall-E!
PS: I have been enjoying the posts, valuable learnings and fun experiences for some time now. Decided to also share a bit from my side, here goes my first rant!
3 -
-Friday
Me: *pushes fix for an issue in app*
-Tuesday, the next week
Colleague: "Hey, dude, fid you fix that issue?"
Me: "Yeah, it's available since Friday morning"
Colleague: *e-mails me screenshot with the issue still present*
Me: "That's odd, let me check that on your machine"
Me: *opens the app on his machine, the issue really is there, starting to freak out that I messed up the repo*
Me: "Why the hell would that not work... wait a sec, lemme check something.."
Me: *checks the app version and discovers that it's from 2 months ago*
Me (turns on colleague): "I guess, you should update it to see the newest functionality"
Me: *goes to the toilet, locks himself up, cries*2 -
I miss old times rants...So i guess, here it goes mine:
Tomorrow is the day of the first demo to our client of a "forward-looking project" which is totally fucked up, because our "Technical Quality Assurance" - basically a developer from the '90-s, who gained the position by "he is a good guy from my last company where we worked together on sum old legacy project...".
He fucked up our marvellous, loose coupling, publish/subscribe microservice architecture, which was meant to replace an old, un-maintainable enormous monolitch app. Basically we have to replace some old-ass db stored functions.
Everyone was on our side, even the sysadmins were on our side, and he just walked in the conversation, and said: No, i don't like it, 'cause it's not clear how it would even work... Make it an RPC without loose coupling with the good-old common lib pattern, which made it now (it's the 4th 2 week/sprint, and it is a dependency hell). I could go on day and night about his "awesome ideas", and all the lovely e-mails and pull request comments... But back to business
So tomorrow is the demo. The client side project manager accidentally invited EVERYONE to this, even fucking CIO, legal department, all the designers... so yeah... pretty nice couple of swallowed company...
Today was a day, when my lead colleague just simply stayed home, to be more productive, our companys project manager had to work on other prjects, and can't help, and all the 3 other prject members were thinking it is important to interrupt me frequently...
I have to install our projects which is not even had a heart beat... not even on developer machines. Ok it is not a reeeeaaally big thing, but it is 6 MS from which 2 not even building because of tight coupling fucktard bitch..., But ok, i mean, i do my best, and make it work for the first time ever... I worked like 10 ours, just on the first fucking app to build, and deploy, run on the server, connect to db and rabbit mq... 10 FUCKING HOURS!!! (sorry, i mean) and it all was about 1, i mean ONE FUCKING LINE!
Let me explain: spring boot amqp with SSL was never tested before this time. I searched everything i could tought about, what could cause "Connection reset"... Yeah... not so helpful error message... I even have to "hack" into the demo server to test the keystore-truststore at localhost... and all the fucking configs, user names, urls, everything was correct... But one fucking line was missing...
EXCEPT ONE FUCKING LINE:
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=false # Whether to enable SSL support.
This little bitch took me 6 hours to figure out...so please guys, learn from my fault and check the spring boot appendix for default application properties, if everything is correct, but it is not working...
And of course, if you want SSL then ENABLE it...
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=true
BTW i really miss those old rants from angry devs, and i hope someone will smile on my fucking torture5 -
!rant
Hey guys, sorry for disappearing... I haven't been in my good days lately.
Other than that... two days ago I said fuck you to my burn out, got tired of doing nothing and start job hunting.
Yesterday I've sent 3 e-mails.
Today I got phone calls for 2 Interviews.
That's the good part of being good at a specialized job :D1 -
Notice :
All citizens are hereby informed to check all of their e-mails and click on each and every link in the e-mail so as to check where does the link redirects you.
Active cooperation is expected from everyone.
Thank you for Cooperating, have a nice day :)3 -
My university has a internal developed system, where everything is managed from e-mails, exams to personal data.
What I'd like most about it, they talk all day about Internet Security and store our passwords in plain text and if you press the "I've forgott my Password button", they even send your password unencrypted, plaintext via e-mail. (Hello Wiresharks)
I don't know how to feel about this, it just hurts :(1 -
What the fuck is wrong with these kind of people?!
So I recently appeared for an android dev job interview in a start-up; the whole time the interviewer (he was the CTO) looked super excited and into my work. I am a fresh graduate with 0 experience in a professional working environment but have a history of a couple of successful apps on the play store since 3 years. The entire time we discussed future plans for the startup and how I was going to contribute towards it. He seemed very interested in my deep learning projects for android and wanted to have similar projects for his products. In the end, he asked me to develop some 'test' projects that can be integrated into his start-up products and told me he'll hire me if he finds it to be as per his need. So I worked on these 'projects' for a month and submitted it to him. He replied that he's impressed with them and will contact me shortly to confirm my job.
That fucker has been ignoring me ever since. He's not responding to any of my e-mails or messages. I feel like a shit right now. How to deal with these assholes?5 -
It all started with an undelivereable e-mail.
New manager (soon-to-be boss) walks into admin guy's office and complains about an e-mail he sent to a customer being rejected by the recipient's mail server. I can hear parts of the conversation from my office across the floor.
Recipient uses the spamcop.net blacklist and our mail was rejected since it came from an IP address known to be sending mails to their spamtrap.
Admin guy wants to verify the claim by trying to find out our static public IPv4 address, to compare it to the blacklisted one from the notification.
For half an hour boss and him are trying to find the correct login credentials for the telco's customer-self-care web interface.
Eventually they call telco's support to get new credentials, it turned out during the VoIP migration about six months ago we got new credentials that were apparently not noted anywhere.
Eventually admin guy can log in, and wonders why he can't see any static IP address listed there, calls support again. Turns out we were not even using a static IP address anymore since the VoIP change. Now it's not like we would be hosting any services that need to be publicly accessible, nor would all users send their e-mail via a local server (at least my machine is already configured to talk directly to the telco's smtp, but this was supposedly different in the good ol' days, so I'm not sure whether it still applies to some users).
In any case, the e-mail issue seems completely forgotten by now: Admin guy wants his static ip address back, negotiates with telco support.
The change will require new PPPoE credentials for the VDSL line, he apparently received them over the phone(?) and should update them in the CPE after they had disabled the login for the dynamic address. Obviously something went wrong, admin guy meanwhile having to use his private phone to call support, claims the credentials would be reverted immediately when he changed them in the CPE Web UI.
Now I'm not exactly sure why, there's two scenarios I could imagine:
- Maybe telco would use TR-069/CWMP to remotely provision the credentials which are not updated in their system, thus overwriting CPE to the old ones and don't allow for manual changes, or
- Maybe just a browser issue. The CPE's login page is not even rendered correctly in my browser, but then again I'm the only one at the company using Firefox Private Mode with Ghostery, so it can't be reproduced on another machine. At least viewing the login/status page works with IE11 though, no idea how badly-written the config stuff itself might be.
Many hours pass, I enjoy not being annoyed by incoming phone calls for the rest of the day. Boss is slightly less happy, no internet and no incoming calls.
Next morning, windows would ask me to classify this new network as public/work/private - apparently someone tried factory-resetting the CPE. Or did they even get a replacement!? Still no internet though.
Hours later, everything finally back to normal, no idea what exactly happened - but we have our old static IPv4 address back, still wondering what we need it for.
Oh, and the blacklisted IP address was just the telco's mail server, of course. They end up on the spamcop list every once in a while.
tl;dr: if you're running a business in Germany that needs e-mail, just don't send it via the big magenta monopoly - you would end up sharing the same mail servers with tons of small businesses that might not employ the most qualified people for securing their stuff, so they will naturally be pwned and abused for spam every once in a while, having your mailservers blacklisted.
I'm waiting for the day when the next e-mail will be blocked and manager / boss eventually wonder how the 24-hours-outage did not even fix aynything in the end... -
I recommend the writing of e-mail templates as an alternative to frequently writing similar e-mails; I have found that this is a good method of saving time.5
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Client: Can I see an update of the work?
Me: Mails the client the first update has been published.
Me: Mails the client the second update has been published.
Client: Can I see an update of the work?
Me: Did you see the last e-mails I sent this morning?
Client: *crickets*
Yet another client that expects we do cheap and fast work, mails us daily he wants to see updates, and constantly requests new features... but can't be bothered to give us the feedback we need for those features, or even read his e-mail.
Next week we'll get an angry mail that the features aren't exactly what he expected, mark my words.2 -
TL;DR Calendar services sucks.
Imagine yourself as startup. You don't want to spend fortune on paying $5 per user per month for Google Services. Also you don't want to pay that to Microsoft for O365. You want to run it itself because you already have droplet running with your other services (ERP for example. Funny story too btw.) Ok, decision has been made, let install something.
I have pretty good experience with OwnCloud from past as Cloud file sharing service. Calendar is not bad for single user purpose (understand it as personal calendar, no invitations to others, sharing is maximum I tried) What can possibly go wrong when I deploy that and use its Calendar?
Well, lot. OwnCloud itself runs well (no rant here) but Calendar is such pain in ass. Trouble is with CalDav under hood and its fragmented standards. So, you want to send invitation to your team for recurrent meeting. Nothing weird. It sends as one invitation to each one, good. Now you realize you have a conflict, so you need to change time of one occurence. Move it, send update. And here comes shitstorm. It is not able to bisect one occurence from series. So it splits it to separate events and send invitation for every single one. 30 INVITATIONS IN 2 SECONDS! Holy sh*t! You want to revert that. Nope, won't do. So you accept your destiny and manually erase every single one with memo in head about planning recurring events.
Another funny issue is when SwiftMailer library (which is responsive for sending e-mails from OwnCloud) goes to spamming mayhem. It is pretty easy to do. When e-mail doesn't comply to RFC, it is rejected, right? So if because of some error CalDav client passes non-compliant e-mail (space as last character is non-compliant btw) and SwiftMailer tries to send it to multiple recepients (one of them is broken, rest is fine), it results in repetitive sending same invitation over and over in 30 minute interval. Sweet.
So now I am sitting in front of browser, looking for alternatives. Not much to choose from. I guess I'll try SOGO. It looks nice. For now.5 -
Fucking gratuitous interface changes:
In Zoom, when you leave a meeting, now it has a read 'Leave' button, and when you click on it, a second 'Leave meeting' button pops up which you have to click as well.
In Outlook, there used to be a search bar above the list of e-mails. Recently I noticed it wasn't there anymore, and it took me a while before I found it… they moved it to the title bar!
WTF are these people thinking? Seems like they change interfaces just for the sake of changing something.5 -
I'm currently between jobs and have a few rants about my previous job (naturally). In retrospect, it's somewhat therapeutic to range about the sheer brainfuckery that has taken place. Enjoy!
First, let me set the scene: legacy B2B web app made with LEMP stack and sencha ext.js 3 + 4 (don't ask) and a lot of madness. Let's call that app "Alpha".
Alpha is a self made CMS build for typical ERP stuff. Yes, a self made CMS: entities are containers, containers have types and fields and values. Like so many legacy PHP apps, it does not have a dedicated FE: the HTML is rendered on the server and then spewed out to the browser.
Easy right? Coding like it's 1999! But there was a twist: Because everything is basically a container, the HTML-templates are saved in the DB. Along with the nessary JS and the CSS. And the translation variables. Why? Because fuck you! That's why. Who needs a git history anyways.
For some reason, Alpha was kinda slow.
There was also an editor, that allowed you to modify templates (web, mail, pdf) on the fly in prod. Because templates contain repeating data (header/footer), one template could contain additional templates. Much confusion. You could change templates via migration (slow, boring) or just ctrl-c/ctrl-v that sucker (fast, much excitement).
Did I mention Alpha was slow?
On with the rant: e-mails! How do they work? Noone knows. How to send mails asynchronous in PHP? Witchcraft is the only possible answer to that riddle. Here is your enterprise™ solution:
1. create mail
2. insert mail into DB
3. WAIT UP TO 59 SECONDS FOR A FUCKING CRON TO SEND MAIL
Why? "Because that way, we can resend mails in case the network is down :)"
Same procedure for the SOAP-API (db-queue + cron). You read that right: all requests to various other systems are processed once a minute.
Alpha slow.
Alpha was only one of several systems. Imagine a bunch of monolithic php apps, interconnected via SOAP, REST and GraphQL like a godamn intergalactic orgy. Image having to debug that cluster fuck.
Let's say there is a bad request. These things happen. No biggie. Remember the db-queue? Let's try to send the bad request a second time! And a third time! Still no luck? How odd. Let's create a specific file in a specific directory: a LOCK-file. Now, "the db-queue is on hold and no request gets processed :)"
Golly gee thanks Alpha.
Anyhow, did you know that MySQL has a join limit of 61 tables?
3 -
So here we go again.
Same "web designer", same me, same website (based on wordpress, completely redone front-end UI, full of ACF to keep their fucking data).
WD: ok, I'll need you to add an information on the project page template in order to show a gallery with slider at the bottom and "film+visuals" at the top if there is a gallery.
Me: ok
1 week later, after like 40 e-mails between us deciding if it was ok or not on DEV server and pushing it to PROD
Me: ok, done
WD: hey, if it's just a film there should be written "FILM" while there's nothing showing, also the gallery must have same height as the film above
Me, internally: why the fuck didn't you fucking tell me before pushing to PROD? are you fucking dumb or something?
Me, via email: ok, i'll check it now...2 -
These fucking calendar e-mails. Fuck. Right. Off.
They never display correctly in all clients.
If the meeting is at 1pm, just fucking say that. I don't want to pick through a load of shit only to find that the calendar app lied about UTC.
Just missed a sodding call due to this crap.4 -
Facebook sends me e-mails suggesting me friends and groups. I'm not even on Facebook 😂.
When i tried to reset the password, Facebook does this...
9 -
Fucking travel auditors and yous stupid rules for travel reports. I've sent you countless e-mails explaining the situation and you can't fucking read?! YOU told me how I was supposed to fill the report and I did it as you told me to, but dare to reject it?!
Fucking incompetent and useless morons, you ain't worth shit! Fuck you and your stupid travel report! -
Trustico CEO emailed private key which is used to sign TLS certificates, making more than 23k certificates compromised!
This makes me think, that we should not trust others for our security (like ca), failure of CA can put our website at risk. What is the better way to do it?
https://arstechnica.com/information...11 -
Gmail > create new rule > Subject contains "Privacy Policy" > move to [Privacy Policy BS]
Hooray! I was going fucking mental from the daily Privacy Policy e-mails. Computaas help us. -
Have you ever experienced receiving this type of footer in mail?
Img is a sample.
Hate it. Especially first time email contact. It feels like bragging.
"Hey! I'll send it to you via iPhone!"
I know you got an iPhone but if you are an applicant, a proper signature would've been great.
2 -
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. -
I am a senior dev, so I’m used to deleting 2 recruiter e-mails per day, not really thinking about them.
The last 3 weeks, however, dead silence in my Inbox.
Coronavirus? Recession? Or have I managed to get on a blacklist?
I don’t believe that recruiters learned not to spam.
Do you guys observe the same?5 -
"Please unlock my account."
"You locked it by ignoring our password policy and having it not changed it within 24 hours."
"Please unlock it!"
"Please follow the instructions to unlock in the many E-Mails we sent you. You can unlock yourself."
"Please!"
"I filed a support ticket for you. Someone will get in touch with you and guide you through the process described in the mails. You still can decide to read the Mail and help yourself."
"Ey f@@"€& you! All I want is to have my account unlocked..."
Every day one of them. But I love you all. :) -
My father mainly believes I'm the one fucking his settings up. I only use his computer to read my e-mails. Once a year.
My mother keeps asking me: "what about your work? Shouldn't you be doing something about THAT instead?" -
I am put to the task of creating a Chat Robot in ChatFuel.
Cool, I thought at first.
Cool is not what I would call it at this point..one week later.
The size is a factor at play, for sure, it needs to point to 27 cities and give individual information, handle e-mails, phone, automate e-mails.. a bunch of stuff.
Now, I am located in Sweden.
{{city}} as a set user attribute acknowledges Gothenburg and geolocation thusly worked fine for my boss. But not for me, and won't work for any other city.
So..Global AI calling for static blocks it is... 27 blocks...
For two languages.. 54 blocks...
Static pointing to the first answer for every individual block multiplies this by a factor of two. 108 static blocks. Fine.
I have since realized that my ChatFuel-Luddite ways were limiting the expected performance of the end result and learned that most other set attributes in ChatFuel work fine. Yay.
So we set up everything the last 54 blocks need to do with user attributes and to my surprise it works, really well at that. The answer from a user that is a correct city puts you into a block that is a series of questions using user attributes, both {{first_name}} and {{last_name}}, asks for e-mail and phone, displays an image and stuff like that.
Now.. as I attempt to copy these blocks..
THEY JUST POOP OUT CHUNKS OF THE ORIGINAL BLOCK. IT'S INCONSISTENCY IS STAGGERING. IT NEVER REALLY COMPLETES THE DUPLICATION, NO ERROR MESSAGE OR ANYTHING.
Which then reminded me of when my boss asked why everything was botched earlier in the project, at that point I copied the entire bot as a fallback and worked with my change in the copy first for safety reasons, didn't work, copy wasn't entire.
Wasted fucking hours on this.
I'm glad my boss is cool, and the job is easily worth it. I actually think that the design aspect of ChatFuel is nice, and the people behind it are kind in the facebook group and all. I don't think they're trying to be mean. But holy shit.
This has been a mental anguish that levels pissing bleach filled with fire ants.
" You could've easily solved this with APIs and third-party geofencing services ", yeah, but their services won't stack for the customer, nice attempt though.
Deep breaths.
1 -
Hey guys
spent all day with a new project, maybe you guys can help.
I have two p2p cameras that I want to setup and access when my family goes on vacation.
Cameras are working (with mildly success) , now, what Is the best option to access them from the Internet?
I can send e-mails, but can't config the SMTP server (don't know why always gives connection error, but guessing that maby this kind of products are blocked from sending e-mails), tried Gmail, mail, and Hotmail.
ftp-server.. don't have any online (have a VPS with 200 mb free ram...)
Tips? ideas?
Thanks, guys12 -
Not necessarily a work related rant but fuck me for choosing me become a developer…
I’ve basically become the go-to tech support for senior family members who can’t bother to even remember their e-mail password.
And the excuse “Oh that wasn’t around when I was your age” is a bullshit at best.
You didn’t fall asleep in the 80s and magically wake up when Gmail was launched.
I’ve legit had to go through a maze of 30 different e-mails and reset the password on all of them just to get fucking OneDrive working so that I could see a dumb picture of fish stew my dad made.
Fml.4 -
My previous employer went bust.
As soon as it was announced, I got flooded by e-mails, messages and calls with job proposals. I went through a lot of interviews, half of which were interrupted by the potential employer, and half by me.
In the end, after a good recommendation and a short 1h interview, I got hired by my current employer, in a rush that made me quit the old company before my contract ran out due to it being bust.
Now if someone I worked with recognize this story, I say to you: Hiya! And probably congrats to reaching the same island as me :) all devs from all departments were absorbed into this company. -
Co worker asks, why he can't send e-mails to a particular address. others cant't either
Turns out that the other company has blocked us.
*We are no spam senders, it was an issue they had with our company before* -
Tip of the day:
If you want to keep your E-Mails private from Google, but need a Google Account:
1. Register an E-Mail at tuta.io
2. Use your newly created E-Mail by registering here: https://accounts.google.com/SignUpW...
Enjoy! -
Mesosphere sold every e-mail who registered with them to Tech Global Leads. Either that or Tech Global Leads stole a list of leaked e-mail addresses. In either case I unregistered/unsubscribed from Mesosphere and still got e-mails to those two specific accounts from Tech Global Leads with Mesosphere consulting soliciting. (So they keep e-mail information, even for accounts that unsubscribe).
TGL doesn't even have a website up. They're either amateurs or scammers. Either way, fuck you and your spam, both TGL and Mesosphere. Go die in a fire.1 -
Manager took a week off to work on his house. Today he doesn't show up on Slack until after noon and says he's "catching up on e-mails." He praises how there are fewer DNS issues what what we did must have worked .... all praise from him feels hollow and meaningless.
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Shipping company sending e-mails regarding cases to our ex-Intercom addresses instead of our registerd contact e-mail.
Intercom was turned off months ago.
I can not reach any old communication.
Of course certain claims expire... and we're ending up with sad and mad customers.
Let me be the shitpole to fix it... again.
FML, where's my long awaited customer service colleague!? /sadface -
I like making money, I just don't like the bullshit administration that goes along with it. Maintaining letters can be so annoying. Salary letters, insurance letters, bs e-mails I don't care about, bla, bla and bla.
How about: I just don't give a fuck? Yeah. I only care about the money, not about all the extra shit. -
When I graduated and I applied for jobs, companies were all over me and I was flooded with phone calls and e-mails of recruiters. For each job I applied for, I would get a reply 9 out of 10 times.
Now, 2 years later, 1 year in the field and jobless, I get zero replies and no one is interested in me anymore. Most of them say that they don't want someone who's worked for only 6 months in one company and a few months in others. It isn't even my fault.
Weird..
Has anyone experienced this?8 -
How would you approach choosing a fairly short but meaningful domain name? Common words are obviously going to be taken.
I have a handful of domain names used for different things, but my main one is 17 characters long and made up of 2 words and not particularly interesting (my surname + another word). It's relatively easy to read out to people over the phone, but inputting it in a phone handset or on a device without a keyboard (e.g. setting the hostname + domain of a media centre with a remote control) is a bit tiresome.
Doesn't even have to be something I can say easily as I mainly want it just for "infrastructure" purposes rather than to host a website etc.
I'd probably use it for sign-up e-mails to reduce the amount of spam/newsletter mail (I do generate a separate address for signing up to most services) but other than that wouldn't be using it regularly for e-mail.
But I don't want something meaningless like abcxyz.1 -
I pretty much had my spam under control for quite a while, receiving only a few spam mails per week. However, in the last month or so the volume has picked up significantly, and now I just saw 16 new spam mails in the last two hours! Fookin shyte…
Of course I suppose they don't realize that at least Gmail is quite effective in filtering that crap right into the Spam folder so I don't have to deal with it. Come on, I know e-mail is cheap but mails that are never read might as well not have been sent in the first place…2 -
I am currently weeks apart from releasing my pet project, which I am working on for almost 6 years now. Of course, there were a few stops here and there, but overall I've spent a lot of time and effort on this to make it work. It is far from complete but I am really happy with the results.
Now, since I am not a professional by any means - it is all a hobby for me - I was wondering, that how much my work would cost, if it were to made by professionals. Below the details so you can get a grasp of the thing.
The whole system is for our family business. We are selling parts for an old-timer truck model. The website was pretty much done already, people like it, it only needed some polishing and adding of the new features. But the thing behind it is monstrous (at least for me).
Apart from the custom-made CMS for the website (most of it was done already and didn't need to change), we can handle orders, partners, prices, stocks, overdue partners, pretty much anything a CRM would do.
There is a logic to automatically make orders based on import prices, or give the customer a custom discount based on the price gap of each product. There are products, which can contain other products, and their prices are dynamically changed based on a given formula, once an underlying product price changes. We can send e-mails when an order status changes, and there is also a page, where a user can interact whit their order, like changing the shipping or the delivery address. The system is (or will in the following weeks) also connected to multiple shipping companies' API, so we can order deliveries and print labels directly from our system. The whole thing is a custom made Laravel project by the way. There are countless more features, but I've just spent 2 hours explaining all to my father and was only be able to cover like half of it.
And why it is all custom made, you ask? Well, the business logic is a bit twisted, so it would be hard to operate as a regular web shop, since the availability of the products are uncertain, given the fact that it is a model, which isn't manufactured in 30 years. So, we can't just accept and send orders without confirming. It is also a thing, that people usually don't know what they need to order for their truck, so we have to help them, so they don't waste their money and the precious last pieces of a part unnecessarily.
Sorry for this rather long post, and it might feel like I just want to brag (well, I kinda do), but I am honestly interested in what such a custom product would cost in the market.
Thank you for your time answering.6 -
Why is customer support sometimes so shitty? A coworker good a Win10 Laptop (Win7 before) and one program wasn;t working there anymore. So we reached out to the support asking to help us fix it. After over a month later and x-amount of E-mails back and forth. The answer was, you have to upgrade everything (Webserver, Database, Client) to use Win10 (no backwards compatibility). Which is fine, I don't mind upgrading and understand that software sometimes is not backwards compatible. BUT THAT IS SOMETHIGN TO STATE IN THE 2nd E-MAIL. Not an infinity later after a tiring back and forth of nonsense.
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Any suggestions for an open source/free version control/git kinda thingy?
I'm working on a project and wanna share what I have so far with another developer, so he can add his work too without sending a billion e-mails with attachments.
Basically a cloud for developer teams.5 -
Some developers incopetence can be limitless. I found e-shop which uses creative but totally silly way of integrating with e-mails. See my last rant (they send e-mail with my 'From' to themselves). As I sent them delivery report (I have SPF enabled) and wrote them what is wrong, they apologized when I came to pick up the goods and were glad that I forwarded the report (otherwise my order would be quite delayed). But hey, everything is fine, they are working on new e-shop. I said great, hopefully it wouldn't be this messed up. And I was told that yeah, the new one will block .net and .com addresses right away. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK? How can somebody use their incompetence as a reason to screw up even more! So next time, I'll probably use my local e-mail with SPF enabled to tech them to blick all e-mails and do stuff properly.
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How do you deal with multiple git identities?
Im working fulltime + freelancing + working on my own projects and all of them are on different gitlab emails. It was very annoying to keep remembering to set my git email to a proper one each time I switch to work on another project.
Right now I came up with something easier:
I started using just 1 gitlab profile (personal one) and added my both company e-mails as secondary emails to my personal gitlab profile.
This way I can keep my git identity the same (personal e-mail address) and if I push to company1 repo or company2 repo the commit author e-mail addres is shown email@company1.com and email@company2.com as these emails are given access to private repos and they are added to my personal gitlab account.
Just wondering if these companies will see my commits to other repos by viewing my personal gitlab profile or no? Or if there is an easier way to handle multiple git identities without having to switch between them each time I open another project and want to push some commits.7 -
When You just finished writing Your part of the code, and team leader e-mails You, that the he needs to make major changes in the part You've been assigned to
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When you're so busy with work that you haven't had time to shower in a week, your eyes have purple sockets, you've had 20 hours of sleep over 5 days and you've missed an entire week worth of e-mails.
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