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Most embarrassing and lucky moment on the first week of job.
Me and my best friend were selected in the same company as developers. I was having some trouble with my system. So I mailed the description to our support department. Pop up was displayed from our chat client and person on the other end happened to be a lady. She wanted me to share a team viewer link with click access. So I did it and within 2 minutes of efforts she solved it. I thanked her, closed the chat conversation and started installing few packages. Meanwhile, I was curious to see her as she was really nice throughout the conversation. So I opened LinkedIn, searched for her name and found her profile. I zoomed in her photo and she was a pretty chick. I didn't stop and found her on FB too, and quickly saw all her DPs. I just copied her profile URL and sent it to my friend ( the one that got selected with me ) and told him about my conversation with her. Then I asked my friend
"She's hot. Should I send her a friend request or have to find some more troubles in my pc and talk to her few more times ? :P "
He replied "Dude what are you wanting for ? "
Out of no where, a pop up showed up. It was the girl we were talking about. The exact message was
"You can now close your team viewer session, and we can talk over FB :)"
Embarrassing AF!30 -
We will no longer be accepting contracts which have an internet explorer or edge support requirement.
All of the front end devs are going hysterical and celebrating 😂 🎉🎉19 -
Was irritated and annoyed because of a client.
Someone called the support line and I was ready for some temper-holding practice.
A very sweet lady was at the other side and she couldn't figure something out and was overwhelmed by all the options she had in her new hosting package.
Very calmly helped her and guided her to the right place, step by step. She did exactly what I said instead of playing a smartass.
She finally found it and said that she appreciated it and a ton of thanks 😊.
Now that's a good way to end a work day!10 -
@Devintrix , congrats and happy lifes with your wife. this joke is for you :)
Dear Tech Support:
Last year I upgraded from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 and noticed that the new program began running unexpected child processing that took up a lot of space and valuable resources.
In addition, Wife 1.0 installs itself into all other programs and launches during system initialization, where it monitors all other system activity. Applications such as PokerNight 10.3, Drunken Boys Night 2.5 and Monday Night football 5.0 no longer run, crashing the system whenever selected.
I cannot seem to keep Wife 1.0 in the background while attempting to run some of my other favorite applications. I am thinking about going back to Girlfriend 7.0, but un-install does not work on this program.
Can you help me please?
Thanks,
Joe
——————————————————–
Dear Joe:
This is a very common problem men complain about but is mostly due to a primary misconception. Many people upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 with the idea that Wife 1.0 is merely a “UTILITIES & ENTERTAINMENT” program. Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM and designed by its creator to run everything.
It is unlikely you would be able to purge Wife 1.0 and still convert back to Girlfriend 7.0. Hidden operating files within your system would cause Girlfriend 7.0 to emulate Wife 1.0 so nothing is gained.
It is impossible to un-install, delete, or purge the program files from the system once installed. You cannot go back to Girlfriend 7.0 because Wife 1.0 is not designed to do this. Some have tried to install Girlfriend 8.0 or Wife 2.0 but end up with more problems than the original system.
I recommend you keep Wife 1.0 and just deal with the situation. Having Wife 1.0 installed myself, I might also suggest you read the entire section regarding General Partnership Faults (GPFs). You must assume all responsibility for faults and problems that might occur, regardless of their cause. The best course of action will be to enter the command C:\APOLOGIZE. The system will run smoothly as long as you take the blame for all the GPFs.
Wife 1.0 is a great program, but very high maintenance. Consider buying additional software to improve the performance of Wife 1.0. I recommend Flowers 2.1, Jewelry 2.2, and Chocolates 5.0.
Do not, under any circumstances, install Secretary With Short Skirt 3.3. This is not a supported application for Wife 1.0 and is likely to cause irreversible damage to the operating system.
Best of luck,
Tech Support11 -
A "support" guy my boss got in. I had told my boss numerous times, "Get rid of this guy, he's only wasting our time and money. And he's going to end up doing something where we will end up having to put out the fires."
Sure as a pair of nuts on a squirrel, this crazy bastard goes and DELETES a client's database. Yes folks, in fucking production. A live database. The heart of the business' transactions are... *poof*... GONE!!!
No backups for the day! No synchronisation beforehand! No nothing... just GONE!!! Fucking flat-lining!
Well, when I realised what he has done, I had to remove myself from the room before shit got outta hand!
I told the boss man that is the last straw and he needs to go...
The long and short of it...
- The client had luckily only lost about half a days data.
- I'm no longer at the company.
- This dumb fuck still is.
18 -
Last day on the contract from hell. I'd written a project with one other person in our spare time that performed a critical business function. The following conversation was had between myself, the job thief who was handed my job and their manager, with the 10 other IBM GS "dev domain experts" assigned to that team sitting silently on zoom:
Moi: hey all, what seems to be the problem?
JT: how to update the java for requirement?
Moi: I would assume a text editor, have you tried intellij
JTM: she's talking about ticket BS-101, the data is wrong
Moi: ah, well, you might want to fix that
JT: how to fix?
Moi: update the database and update the logic that depends on it
JTM: what changes are those?
Moi: the ones described in the ticket, I would assume, I'm no longer on that project
JTM: didn't you write this application?
Moi: yes.
JTM: ok, so do you know how to fix the issue?
Moi: definitely
JTM: ok... ... Can you tell us how to fix it?
Moi: yes.
*The sound of silence*
JTM: *will* you tell us?
Moi: I would, but I'm already off the clock, and as of an hour ago I no longer have a contract. And even if I did, I don't have a contract or authorization to work on that system. I'm not actually being paid for this call.
JTM: ... What are we going to do about this?
Moi: I have no idea
JTM: ok, so we can look at getting a 1 month contract to support this
Moi: I'm sure our firm has someone who can definitely help you out
JTM: *heavy raging* ... Can you do the work?
Moi: Unfortunatley, I'm already committed to a new contract at another customer. I also don't do one month contracts. I'm an engineer, not a car wash employee
JTM: well, I don't understand how you can just leave us in the lurch like this?!
Moi: well, respectfully, it was your decision to cut me from the budget because you thought you were close enough to end of the project to get it across the line with junior resources.
Interjecting-JT: I am senior!
Moi: Right. So, basically, you took ownership of the product before go live. We advised against it, in writing, numerous times. We also notified you that we would not carry a bench, so the project resources are now working on other things. We can provide you with new resources for a minimum 6 month duration who can help you out. Also, since we've cycled out, our rate has increased per the terms of our MSA.
JTM: we don't have budget for that! How are we supposed to do this?!
Moi: *zoom glare at JT* that question is more appropriate for your finance officer and the IT director. I can send a few emails and schedule a call with your account representative and the aforementioned individuals so you can hash this out.
-_---------------
I'm free! 🥳 That said, still plenty of residual fodder I need to get out of my system on these guys. Might need to start my own Dilbert.12 -
Remember the Ububtu mobile OS ?
I remember working on the community UI drive for this project. To know that something as awesome as ubuntu would come down into the form factor of a phone , was just ecstatic.
The first build was out , people liked it. People nagged a bit about the performance issues , but it was going fine. Then the second build .. then the third no one heard about and the 4th that never came.
The interface for this system was unique because after Wondows , this is the only other OS developer that embraced the one ecosystem mantra of design.
Using Ubuntu phone was natural , it was a small desktop OS.
I remember logging on to launchpad one day and seeing the Ubuntu mobile channel with it's last post " Thank you and goodbye "
It was heartbreaking , but i could understand. Like windows phone ( which if you guys weren't aware of , had APK support by the end of its lifecycle ) felt crushed under the weight of android and iOS.
Waiting for a day when there will be a third champion in game. I miss having to see Ubuntu being on my phone , but they seem to be doing great in everything else , so good on that. 😄
Ok done .. thanks
30 -
I’m kind of pissy, so let’s get into this.
My apologies though: it’s kind of scattered.
Family support?
For @Root? Fucking never.
Maybe if I wanted to be a business major my mother might have cared. Maybe the other one (whom I call Dick because fuck him, and because it’s accurate) would have cared if I suddenly wanted to become a mechanic. But in both cases, I really doubt it. I’d probably just have been berated for not being perfect, or better at their respective fields than they were at 3x my age.
Anyway.
Support being a dev?
Not even a little.
I had hand-me-down computers that were outmoded when they originally bought them: cutting-edge discount resale tech like Win95, 33/66mhz, 404mb hd. It wouldn’t even play an MP3 without stuttering.
(The only time I had a decent one is when I built one for myself while in high school. They couldn’t believe I spent so much money on what they saw as a silly toy.)
Using a computer for anything other than email or “real world” work was bad in their eyes. Whenever I was on the computer, they accused me of playing games, and constantly yelled at me for wasting my time, for rotting in my room, etc. We moved so often I never had any friends, and they were simply awful to be around, so what was my alternative? I also got into trouble for reading too much (seriously), and with computers I could at least make things.
If they got mad at me for any (real or imagined) reason (which happened almost every other day) they would steal my things, throw them out, or get mad and destroy them. Desk, books, decorations, posters, jewelry, perfume, containers, my chair, etc. Sometimes they would just steal my power cables or network cables. If they left the house, they would sometimes unplug the internet altogether, and claim they didn’t know why it was down. (Stealing/unplugging cables continued until I was 16.) If they found my game CDs, those would disappear, too. They would go through my room, my backpack and its notes/binders/folders/assignments, my closet, my drawers, my journals (of course my journals), and my computer, too. And if they found anything at all they didn’t like, they would confront me about it, and often would bring it up for months telling me how wrong/bad I was. Related: I got all A’s and a B one year in high school, and didn’t hear the end of it for the entire summer vacation.
It got to the point that I invented my own language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet just so I could have just a little bit of privacy. (I’m still fluent in it.) I would only store everything important from my computer on my only Zip disk so that I could take it to school with me every day and keep it out of their hands. I was terrified of losing all of my work, and carrying a Zip disk around in my backpack (with no backups) was safer than leaving it at home.
I continued to experiment and learn whatever I could about computers and programming, and also started taking CS classes when I reached high school. Amusingly, I didn’t even like computers despite all of this — they were simply an escape.
Around the same time (freshman in high school) I was a decent enough dev to actually write useful software, and made a little bit of money doing that. I also made some for my parents, both for personal use and for their businesses. They never trusted it, and continually trashtalked it. They would only begrudgingly use the business software because the alternatives were many thousands of dollars. And, despite never ever having a problem with any of it, they insisted I accompany them every time, and these were often at 3am. Instead of being thankful, they would be sarcastically amazed when nothing went wrong for the nth time. Two of the larger projects I made for them were: an inventory management system that interfaced with hand scanners (VB), and another inventory management system for government facility audits (Access). Several websites, too. I actually got paid for the Access application thanks to a contract!
To put this into perspective, I was selected to work on a government software project about a year later, while still in high school. That didn’t impress them, either.
They continued to see computers as a useless waste of time, and kept telling me that I would be unemployable, and end up alone.
When they learned I was dating someone long-distance, and that it was a she, they simply took my computer and didn’t let me use it again for six months. Really freaking hard to do senior projects without a computer. They begrudgingly allowed me to use theirs for schoolwork, but it had a fraction of the specs — and some projects required Flash, which the computer could barely run.
Between the constant insults, yelling, abuse (not mentioned here), total lack of privacy, and the theft, destruction, etc. I still managed to teach myself about computers and programming.
In short, I am a dev despite my parents’ best efforts to the contrary.30 -
Navy story time, and this one is lengthy.
As a Lieutenant Jr. I served for a year on a large (>100m) ship, with the duties of assistant navigation officer, and of course, unofficial computer guy. When I first entered the ship (carrying my trusty laptop), I had to wait for 2 hours at the officer's wardroom... where I noticed an ethernet plug. After 15 minutes of waiting, I got bored. Like, really bored. What on TCP/IP could possibly go wrong?
So, scanning the network it is. Besides the usual security holes I came to expect in ""military secure networks"" (Windows XP SP2 unpatched and Windows 2003 Servers, also unpatched) I came along a variety of interesting computers with interesting things... that I cannot name. The aggressive scan also crashed the SMB service on the server causing no end of cute reactions, until I restarted it remotely.
But me and my big mouth... I actually talked about it with the ship's CO and the electronics officer, and promptly got the unofficial duty of computer guy, aka helldesk, technical support and I-try-to-explain-you-that-it-is-impossible-given-my-resources guy. I seriously think that this was their punishment for me messing around. At one time I received a call, that a certain PC was disconnected. I repeatedly told them to look if the ethernet cable was on. "Yes, of course it's on, I am not an idiot." (yea, right)
So I went to that room, 4 decks down and 3 sections aft. Just to push in the half-popped out ethernet jack. I would swear it was on purpose, but reality showed me I was wrong, oh so dead wrong.
For the full year of my commission, I kept pestering the CO to assign me with an assistant to teach them, and to give approval for some serious upgrades, patching and documenting. No good.
I set up some little things to get them interested, like some NMEA relays and installed navigation software on certain computers, re-enabled the server's webmail and patched the server itself, tried to clean the malware (aka. Sisyphus' rock), and tried to enforce a security policy. I also tried to convince the CO to install a document management system, to his utter horror and refusal (he was the hard copy type, as were most officers in the ship). I gave up on almost all besides the assistant thing, because I knew that once I left, everything would go to the high-entropy status of carrying papers around, but the CO kept telling me that would be unnecessary.
"You'll always be our man, you'll fix it (sic)".
What could go wrong?
I got my transfer with 1 week's notice. Panic struck. The CO was... well, he was less shocked than I expected, but still shocked (I learned later that he knew beforehand, but decided not to tell anybody anything). So came the most rediculous request of all:
To put down, within 1 A4 sheet, and in simple instructions, the things one had to do in order to fulfil the duties of the computer guy.
I. SHIT. YOU. NOT.
My answer:
"What I can do is write: 'Please read the following:', followed by the list of books one must read in order to get some introductory understanding of network and server management, with most accompanying skills."
I was so glad I got out of that hellhole.6 -
This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.
Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.
I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.
The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).
Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.
He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.
After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".
I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.
So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.
I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.
And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.
And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).
I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.
I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.
With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!
I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!15 -
Please don't make junior developers feel they're a burden.
Have you ever googled "how to mentor junior developers"? It's quite mind-blowing how many articles, talks and panels are on this topic. And yet still junior developers are not feeling welcomed in their companies.
Yup, you guessed it, we also have something to add (based on our own experience):
1. Asking for help is not easy. Please don't blow juniors off by telling them to read docs when they ask a question. Always assume they've read it and did a sprint to solve the problem. They ask you, because they see you as a mentor and really need your help. If you can, spend more time with them and guide through the entire problem solving process.
2. Please don't think "I learnt it this way so you should too". If you're in charge of teaching a junior developer, don't expect them to be a carbon copy of yourself. Because even though in your opinion your approach is more "pro", they might not be there yet to use it properly. And last, but not least:
3. Of course, juniors will compare themselves with seniors on their team. And there'll be moments they feel so guilty and so afraid that they cost the company too much, that they need training, and supervision, or are between projects and are not bringing in any money, and they'll fear that their company regrets hiring them. Make sure they don't feel like a burden. As juniors, we often
have this misconception what is expected from us.
Dear tech companies, please set very clear expectations and tell your juniors you're happy. Don't get us wrong here. We don't expect unicorns, roses and pats on the back from companies. We do understand- this is business, and at the end of the day we all are here to make money. To do so, companies need to make smart investments. Junior dev with a great assistance, planned support, and a clear training program will become a great asset. It really is as simple as that.12 -
We're using a ticket system at work that a local company wrote specifically for IT-support companies. It's missing so many (to us) essential features that they flat out ignored the feature requests for. I started dissecting their front-end code to find ways to get the site to do what we want and find a lot of ugly code.
Stuff like if(!confirm("blablabla") == false) and whole JavaScript libraries just to perform one task in one page that are loaded on every page you visit, complaining in the js console that they are loaded in the wrong order. It also uses a websocket on a completely arbitrary port making it impossible to work with it if you are on a restricted wifi. They flat out lie about their customers not wanting an offline app even though their communications platform on which they got asked this question once again got swarmed with big customers disagreeing as the mobile perofrmance and design of the mobile webpage is just atrocious.
So i dig farther and farthee adding all the features we want into a userscript with a beat little 'custom namespace' i make pretty good progress until i find a site that does asynchronous loading of its subpages all of a sudden. They never do that anywhere else. Injecting code into the overcomolicated jQuery mess that they call code is impossible to me, so i track changes via a mutationObserver (awesome stuff for userscripts, never heard of it before) and get that running too.
The userscript got such a volume of functions in such a short time that my boss even used it to demonstrate to them what we want and asked them why they couldn't do it in a reasonable timeframe.
All in all I'm pretty proud if the script, but i hate that software companies that write such a mess of code in different coding styles all over the place even get a foot into the door.
And that's just the code part: They very veeeery often just break stuff in updates that then require multiple hotfixes throughout the day after we complain about it. These errors even go so far to break functionality completely or just throw 500s in our face. It really gives you the impression that they are not testing that thing at all.
And the worst: They actively encourage their trainees to write as much code as possible to get paid more than their contract says, so of course they just break stuff all the time to write as much as possible.
Where did i get that information you ask? They state it on ther fucking career page!
We also have reverse proxy in front of that page that manages the HTTPS encryption and Let's Encrypt renewal. Guess what: They internally check if the certificate on the machine is valid and the system refuses to work if it isn't. How do you upload a certificate to the system you asked? You don't! You have to mail it to them for them to SSH into the system and install it manually. When will that be possible you ask? SOON™.
At least after a while i got them to just disable the 'feature'.
While we are at 'features' (sorry for the bad structure): They have this genius 'smart redirect' feature that is supposed to throw you right back where you were once you're done editing something. Brilliant idea, how do they do it? Using a callback libk like everyone else? Noooo. A serverside database entry that only gets correctly updated half of the time. So while multitasking in multiple tabs because the performance of that thing almost forces you to makes it a whole lot worse you are not protected from it if you don't. Example: you did work on ticket A and save that. You get redirected to ticket B you worked on this morning even though its fucking 5 o' clock in the evening. So of course you get confused over wherever you selected the right ticket to begin with. So you have to check that almost everytime.
Alright, rant over.
Let's see if i beed to make another one after their big 'all feature requests on hold, UI redesign, everything will be fixed and much better'-update.5 -
The Linux Kernel, not just because of the end product. I find it's organizational structure and size (both in code and contributors) inspirational.
Firefox. Even if you don't use it as your main browser, the sheer amount of work Mozilla has contributed to the world is amazing.
OpenTTD. I liked the original game, and 25 years after release some devs are still actively maintaining an open source clone with support for mods.
Git. Without it, it would not just be harder working on your own source code, it would also be harder to try out other people's projects.
FZF is possibly my favorite command line tool.
Kitty has recently become my favorite terminal.
My favorite thing open source has brought forth though is a certain mindset, which in the last decade can be felt most heavily in the fact that:
1. Scientific papers with accompanying GitHub urls, especially when it comes to AI. Cutting edge research is one git clone away.
2. There are so many open hardware projects. From raspberry pi to 3d printers to laser cutters, being a "maker" suddenly became a mainstream hobby.12 -
At work today, a colleague was talking to a customer. Only maccer in the building (every other Linux (support) engineer uses Linux).
CW: ahhh we understand eachother, Mac is the way to go!
*Gets nasty looks from about all Linux engineers*
CW: I'm going to retract that since I want to make it to the end of this day alive 😅
*Everyone laughing*3 -
I'm a lawyer, like a year ago I was home alone (wife and kid went on the trip) and from boringness, I decided that I should learn to program (was thinking about that earlier because of some ideas for apps I had - I was fucking naive then :P).
So I start googling best way to do it and I decided to start CS50 course on edx. And that was a real blast for. Best learning experience ever happened in my life.
Anyway, I was going through CS50 curriculum (at the start I thought I will quit it after few weeks) and every day was like so exciting. This whole programming thing seems like the best thing happens to me in many years. There were so many interesting things to learn, I felt like I discovered whole new word.
So after few months while I was finishing CS50, one day I decided, fuck it, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life (I'm 35+ btw ;)). I chose frontend path as it seems easier for a person without technical education. If everything goes as planned I will start looking for a job at beginning of next year. So where I the rant you could ask?
Well, you should guest what my family thinks about it. My wife was like at first: I'm proud you learning something new, now she hates it, making fights about me always sitting in front of computer (which is not true as I learn most in work in my spare time - I can do it as I work on my own), she even told my parents that I cheat her because she started family with a lawyer, not a programmer (supposed to be joke, but really not fun for me) . WTF - where is the fucking support ? ehhh. My parents on the other side still don't believe I will do it (after more than a year of my learning) and they still think I will quit the idea in the end....
So thats it my rant about what my familly thinks about me become programmer.
(sry for my English)20 -
Although this is gonna sound like bullshit, this happened to me for real. Since that moment I use even more backup services AND I regularly check EVERYTHING.
Had a backup of my important data (still used mainstream services back then) on:
- Hotmail email attachments
- Google Drive
(Both link to another email account).
- A few data backup services
- DVD
- USB
- External HDD.
I wanted to copy some backup data over again:
1. Walk to my staple of HDD's, tried to grab it, somehow missed and knocked the whole fucking pile over. HDD broken.
2. Well fuck, let's go put some of my clothes in the washing machine for clean clothes at study/monday. After this shit being in the washing machine for just a few minutes, I realized my backup USB stick was in one of my pockets, in the washing machine. FUCK. Couldn't stop it so I waited till the end, tried it and well, it wasn't working at all anymore.
Fuck my fucking life slightly right now.
3. *remembers about the backup disc*. I forgot to keep it in its case, very deep scratches and so on, unreadable. FUCKING FUCK.
4. Right, I still have those online services! *tries to login to all of them (including hotmail/gdrive) but forgot the password. Well, let's login to my backup account then (hadn't used that one in years). Account was suspended for some reason.
Started to get really anxious because every online backup service was linked to that email address.
Contacted customer support. They really couldn't restore it because of some issues they weren't allow to tell me. Sorry but I couldn't retain access.
5. Well this is fucked up. Couldn't get into any of the backup/hotmail/gdrive accounts anymore.
I tried contacting their support but never got any replies.
This was the moment I realized I fucked up big fucking time because damn, this stuff at this level hardly happens to anyone.
FUCK.39 -
We had the most fucking retarded client today. No, seriously, if you ever beat their level you have a serious mental issue.
They had a mail problem for which they'd need to check at the side of another company since we don't have those fucking logs.
Their statements:
- they entered an email address In the text field of mail-tester.com and were furious that they didn't get the results sent.
Note: it says right on that page that YOU JUST NEED TO SEND THE EMAIL ADDRESS WHICH IS PRE-ENTRRED IN THAT TEXT FIELD AN EMAIL.
- their company has been a reputable 'conservative' company which hasn't done anything wrong since 19xx so the fact that they'd end up on a blacklist was FUCKING OUTRAGEOUS and bullshit.
- our support wasn't willing to help and only willing to tell them outrageous lies.
- the other it company was only reachable at a premium number and thus expensive to call.
Emails back and forth and finally they CC'd the other company. They're reply was fucking priceless:
"we never had a premium number. Feel free to call us on *number* any time during the week between *time* and *time*.
Then he told us that we should just go back to sleep.
It was way worse than that but due to privacy and my own memory this is all I can tell.
Just wow.3 -
My dream is to build a shopping cart for web stores that doesn't fucking suck.
Seriously Bigcommerce, Shopify, Magneto, etc. All of you can eat bag of dicks and burn in hell for ever.
I don't care what languages you fancy, all of their stacks are a pile of shit, monkey patched together with popsicle sticks and duct tape and it all falls apart with high concurrency.
All their greasy haired sales teams will throw all manners of horse shit at the poor bastards who are trying to run a business so they can pad their commission checks... "High availability", "scalable", "reliable", "Increased conversation rate"... Lying dick fucks, all of them! I am calling them the fuck out on that snake oil they're all peddling.
The only thing worse than their shit APIs is the shit documentation and the shit support that accompanies them.
Support of these platforms are pretty much all the same, sure mayhaps one has 24*7 phone support and another closes at 9 or some shit like that, either way the only people they put on the phone are monkeys that will freeze up and say "I'm not a developer so I can't help you"... Guess what, "Eric"! I didn't ask if you're a fucking dev! I'm calling because one of your devs fucked up and I need you to tell him to unfuck it so I can get the fuck on with my day!
Their app/plugin market places are shameful to say the least. The overall quality of software is somewhat dire and it's mostly dominated by oversees developers who speak English about as well as the language they're developing with (not very well usually).
I could go on until I hit the character limit but I'm gonna end it here by saying, all shopping carts suck and they should burn for eternity in the depths of hell so that a savior can free all developers from this agonizing torment.9 -
Seriously, just how exponentially fucked did this world just become.
I'm pretty sure that this post's format would be more tailored towards devrant.com (well, hereby). But I wanted to vent about it, here, now.
A copy of this post is available at https://facebook.com/irc.condor/....
Just the other day the EU Parliament accepted that widely disapproved copyright directive - article 11 and 13. Despite direct lobbying on our end. And by whom? Not by young, competent parties like the Pirates. No, instead the old fucks from the conservative party had their say, driven by nothing but incompetence and lobbying from label companies.
Then the whole ordeal with the Master/slave issue in Python started. Again met with significant outrage - and again approved while completely ignoring the voices of everyone else. I even ended up making a fork for it at https://github.com/toloveru/cpython. Please star it to show your support for the cause. It is made in response to a denied revert at https://github.com/python/cpython/....
And then we had the issue of Linus Torvalds leaving the Linux project. The single most important person when it comes to Linux.. and he left, just because he admits to be an asshole - something which apparently needs to be changed?! Dude, be a fucking asshole! That's what made the Linux kernel great in the first place!!! Yet even you give in to those SJW cunts?!!
AND THEN... If Linus' disappearance wasn't enough already, core developer at the LLVM project Rafael Avila de Espindola leaves the project as well, because of an influx of SJW's and political correctness.
It started with feminism in the past century. Now it's superiority and pink-/blue-haired warriors going for OUR SUPERIORITY AND UNIQUENESS and being offended by whatever they can possibly get offended with. Fucking cunts they are. You heard that right. FUCKING CUNTS!!! Because yeah, in my house I swear like that. Anyone who doesn't like that can fuck right off.
But what good does my criticism towards all this still serve.. nothing, does it. Those live wires that I've avoided touching for so long.. they suddenly don't feel all that repulsive anymore. Thanks society!24 -
More sysadmin focused but y’all get this stuff and I need a rant.
TLDR: Got the wrong internship.
Start working as a sysadmin/dev intern/man-of-many-hats at a small finance company (I’m still in school). Day 1: “Oh new IT guy? Just grab a PC from an empty cubicle and here’s a flash drive with Fedora, go ahead and manually install your operating system. Oh shit also your desktop has 2g of ram, a core2 duo, and we scavenged your hard drive for another dev so just go find one in the server room. And also your monitor is broken so just take one from another cubicle.”
Am shown our server room and see that someone is storing random personal shit in there (golf clubs propped against the server racks with heads mixed into the cabling, etc.). Ask why the golf clubs etc. are mixed in with the cabling and server racks and am given the silent treatment. Learn later that my boss is the owners son, and he is storing his personal stuff in our server room.
Do desktop support for end users. Another manager asks for her employees to receive copies of office 2010 (they’re running 2003 an 2007). Ask boss about licensing plans in place and upgrade schedules, he says he’ll get back to me. I explain to other manager we are working on a licensing scheme and I will keep her informed.
Next day other manager tells me (*the intern*) that she spoke with a rich business friend whose company uses fake/cracked license keys and we should do the same to keep costs down. I nod and smile. IT manager tells me we have no upgrade schedule or licensing agreement. I suggest purchasing an Office 365 subscription. Boss says $150 a year per employee is too expensive (Company pulls good money, has ~25 employees, owner is just cheap) I suggest freeware alternatives. Other manager refuses to use anything other than office 2010 as that is what she is familiar with. Boss refuses to spend any money on license keys. Learn other manager is owners wife and mother of my boss. Stalemate. No upgrades happen.
Company is running an active directory Windows Server 2003 instance that needs upgrading. I suggest 2012R2. Boss says “sure”. I ask how he will purchase the license key and he tells me he won’t.
I suggest running an Ubuntu server with LDAP functionality instead with the understanding that this will add IT employee hours for maintenance. Bosses eyes glaze over at the mention of Linux. The upgrade is put off.
Start cleaning out server room of the personal junk, labeling server racks and cables, and creating a network map. Boss asks what I’m doing. I show him the organized side of the server room and he says “okay but don’t do any more”.
... *sigh* ...20 -
Today was hell on earth as for user support. Phone going non stop, tickets coming in faster than we were able to process.
At the end of the day I had to make a symlink for a customer which is fine. But, the day was so busy that I just couldn't focus anymore.
I've made 1K+ symlinks in my life probably but I couldn't remember if the source or destination comes first with a symlink.... The day has been hell and I just couldn't bring up a single second of focus anymore..
Fuck it, I'll do it tomorrow. I know I can do this but I don't trust myself with this right now in case of a huge webshop (swap the source/destination: webshop gone).
I think I'll thank myself for this tomorrow.13 -
===rant
So I have been freelancing as web developer for 5 years. I was also playing basketball professionally so I was only working part-time, building websites here and there, small android apps to learn the job and I was also reading a lot to challenge my brain.
When I stopped playing basketball about a year ago, I thought I would really enjoy coding full time so I pursued a job.
With no formal education and just a basketball background on paper, in the collapsed Greek economy, as you may assume chances of landing a job are minimal.
After about 40 resumes sent I only got an internship. It was a 4 month, part-time, no pay deal, and then the company would decide if they would like to hire me later.
The company had 4 employees and they are one of the largest software distribution businesses in my area. They resell SaaS bought from a third company, bundled with installation support, initial configuration, hardware support, whatever a client may need.
I was the only one with any ability to code whatsoever. The other people were working mostly on customer support with the occasional hardware repair.
After the 4 month period they owner (small company, owner was also manager and other roles) told me that they are very happy with my work and would like to keep me part-time with minimum pay.
Just to give you and idea if the amounts of money involved, in Greece, after taxes, my salary was 240euros per month. And the average cost of surviving (rent, cheapest food possible, no expenses on anything but super basics) is about 600euros.
I told him I needed more to live and he told me ok, we will reevaluate a few months later, at the end of May 2017.
I just accepted it without having many options. The company after all was charging clients 30euros per hour for my projects so I kept thinking that if I worked a lot and delivered consistently I would get a full time job and decent money.
And I delivered. In the following months I made a Magento extension, some WordPress themes, a C# application to extract data from the client's ERP and import it to a third application, a click to call application to use Asterisk to originate calls from the client's ERP, a web application to manage a restaurant's menu and many more small projects. Whatever they asked, I delivered.
On time, version controlled, heavily documented solutions (my C# ones are not exactly masterpieces but it was my first time with the language and windows).
So when May ended I was pretty excited to hear they wanted to keep me full time. I worked hard for it, I was serious, professional, I tried a lot to learn things so I can deliver, and the company recognized that. YAY.
So the time comes to talk money. The offer was 480euros per month. Double my part-time pay, minimum wage. I asked for about 700. Manager said it's hard but I will see what I can do. So we agreed to keep the deal for June while they are working on a better offer.
During the first half of June I finished my last project, put all my work on a nice folder with a nice readme on every project's directory, with their version control and everything.
The offer never improved, so I said no deal, and as of today, I am jobless.
I am stressed as fuck and excited as fuck at the same time.
I will do my best to survive in the shitstorm that is called Greece.
Bring it on.9 -
When I opened my digital agency it was me and my wife as developers, I had no savings and I needed to get long contracts ASAP which luckily I did straight away.
Lovely client, had worked for them before as a consultant so i thought it would be a breeze. Let's just say the project should've been named "Naivete, Scope Creep and Anger: The revenge".
What happened is that when this project was poised to end I naively thought I would be able to close the job, so I started looking for a new full time consultancy gig and found one where I could work from home, and agreed a starting date.
Well, the previous job didn't end because of flaws in my contract the client exploited, leaving me locked in and working full time, for free, for basically as long as he wanted (I learned a lot the hard way at that time) and I had already started the new agreed job. This meant I was now working 2 full time shifts, 16 hours per day.
Then, two support contracts of 2 hours per day were activated, bringing my work load to 20 hours/day.
I did this for 4 months.
The first job was supposed to last one month, and I was locked into it, all others had no end in sight which is a good thing as a freelancer, but not when you are locked into a full time one already. I could've easily done one 8 hours shift and two 2 hours jobs per day, but adding another 8 hours on top of it was insanity.
So I was working 10 hours, and sleeping 2. I had no weekends, didn't know if it was day or night anymore, I was locked in my room, coding like a mad man, making the best out of a terrible situation, but I was mentally destroyed.
I was waking up at 10am, working until 8pm, sleeping 2 hours until 10pm, working until 8am, sleeping 2 hours until 10am, and so on. Kudos to my wife for dealing with account and project management and administration responsibilities while also helping me with small pieces of code along the way, couldn't have survived without the massive amount of understanding she offered.
In the end:
- I forcefully closed the messed up contract job and sent all the work done to another digital agency I met along the way, very competent people, as I still cared about the project.
- I missed a deadline on my other full time contract by 2 days, meaning they missed a presentation for Adobe, of all people, and I lost the job
- The other two support contracts were finished successfully, but as my replies were taking too long they decided not to work with us anymore.
So I lost 4 important clients in the span of 4 months. After that I took a break of one month, slept my troubles away, and looked for a single consultancy full time contract, finding it soon after, and decided I wouldn't have my own clients for a good while.
3 years since then, I still don't have the willpower or the resources to deal with clients of my own and I'm happily trudging along as a consultant, while still having middle of the night nightmare flashbacks to that time.2 -
Two years ago I moved to Dublin with my wife (we met on tour while we were both working in music) as visa laws in the UK didn’t allow me to support the visa of a Russian national on a freelance artists salary.
After we came to Dublin I was playing a lot to pay rent (major rental crisis here), I play(ed) Double Bass which is a physically intensive instrument and through overworking caused a long term injury to my forearm which prevents me playing.
Luckily my wife was able to start working in Community Operations for the big tech companies here (not an amazing job and I want her to be able to stop).
Anyway, I was a bit stuck with what step to take next as my entire career had been driven by the passion to master an art that I was very committed to. It gave me joy and meaning.
I was working as hard as I could with a clear vision but no clear path available to get there, then by chance the opportunity came to study a Higher Diploma qualification in Data Science/Analysis (I have some experience handling music licensing for tech startups and an MA with components in music analysis, which I spun into a narrative). Seemed like a ‘smart’ thing to do to do pick up a ‘respectable’ qualification, if I can’t play any more.
The programme had a strong programming element and I really enjoyed that part. The heavy statistics/algebra element was difficult but as my Python programming improved, I was able to write and utilise codebase to streamline the work, and I started to pull ahead of the class. I put in more and more time to programming and studied personally far beyond the requirements of the programme (scored some of the highest academic grades I’ve ever achieved). I picked up a confident level of Bash, SQL, Cypher (Neo4j), proficiency with libraries like pandas, scikit-learn as well as R things like ggplot. I’m almost at the end of the course now and I’m currently lecturing evening classes at the university as a paid professional, teaching Graph Database theory and implementation of Neo4j using Python. I’m co-writing a thesis on Machine Learning in The Creative Process (with faculty members) to be published by the institute. My confidence in programming grew and grew and with that platform to lift me, I pulled away from the class further and further.
I felt lost for a while, but I’ve found my new passion. I feel the drive to master the craft, the desire to create, to refine and to explore.
I’m going to write a Thesis with a strong focus on programmatic implementation and then try and take a programming related position and build from there. I’m excited to become a professional in this field. It might take time and not be easy, but I’ve already mastered one craft in life to the highest levels of expertise (and tutored it for almost 10 years). I’m 30 now and no expert (yet), but am well beyond beginner. I know how to learn and self study effectively.
The future is exciting and I’ve discovered my new art! (I’m also performing live these days with ‘TidalCycles’! (Haskell pattern syntax for music performance).
Hey all! I’m new on devRant!12 -
A room full of mostly old male stressed out engineers sat in chairs, and the presenter said:
"So who watched Judging Amy last night?"
The presenter went on to express her surprise that nobody in the room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.... and wasn't going to drop the topic.
The meeting, if it ever had any, now had no chance of going anywhere good.
By the end of the meeting someone would walk out and "retire" shortly there after, and it certainly wasn't going to be the presenter....
Backstory:
The company built on the IBM model of sell pricey custom hardware (granted it worked really well) and sell expensive support contracts wasn't doing as well as it had hoped. Granted it was still doing better than most of its neighboring companies, but it was clear that with the .com bust the days of catered lunches every day were over.
The company had grown fat and everyone knew that while the company had a good enough product(s) to survive, there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone to survive.
In the midst of this an HR department that took up nearly 20% of the office space at HQ felt it needed to justify its existence / expenses.
They decided to do this in the same way they always had, by taking funding from other departments, this time not by simply demanding more direct budgets for themselves.... they decided to impose mandatory 'training' on other departments ... that they would then bill for this training.
When HR got wind that there were some stressed out engineers the solution was, as it always is for HR.... to do more HR stuff:
They decided to take these time starved engineers away from their jobs, and put them in a room with HR for 4 days. Meanwhile the engineer's tasks, deadlines and etc remained the same.
Support got roped into it too, and that's how I ended up there.
It would be difficult to describe the chasm between HR and everyone else at that company. This was an HR department that when they didn't have enough cubes (because of constant remodeling in the HR area under the guise of privacy) sat their extra HR employees next to engineering and were 'upset' that the engineers 'weren't very friendly and all they did was work'.
At one point a meeting to discuss this point of contention was called off for some made up reason or another by someone with a clue.
So there we all sat, our deadlines kept ticking away and this HR team (3 people) stood at the front of the room and were perplexed that none of these mostly older males in this room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.
From there the presentation was chaos, because almost the entire thing was based on your knowledge of what happened to poor stressed out Amy ... or something like that.
We were peppered with HR tales of being stressed out and taking a long lunch and feeling better, and this magical thing where the poor HR person went and had a good cry with her boss and her boss magically took more off her plate (a brutal story where the poor HR person was almost moved to tears again).
The lack of apparent sympathy (really nobody said much at all) and lack of seeming understanding from the crowd of engineers that all they should do is take a long lunch, or tell their boss to solve their problems ... seemed to bother the HR folks. They were on edge.
So then they finally asked "What are your stressers?" And they picked the worst possible person they could to ask, Ted.
Ted was old, he prickly, he was the only one who understood the worst ass hell of assembly that had been left behind.
Ted made a mistake, he was honest with folks who couldn't possibly understand what he was saying. "This mandatory class is stressing me out. I have work to do and less time because of this class."
The exchange that followed was kinda horrible and I recall sitting behind Ted trying to be as small as possible as to not be called on. Exactly what everyone said almost doesn't matter.
A pedantic debate between Ted and the HR staff about "mandatory" and "required" followed. I will just sum it up that they were both in the wrong for how they behaved for a good 20 minutes...
Ted walked out, and would later 'retire' that week.
Ted had a history and was no saint. I suspect an email campaign by various folks who recounted the events that day spared ted the 'fired' status and he walked with what eventually would become the severance package status quo.
HR never again held another 'training', most of them would all finally face the axe a few months later after the CEO finally decided that 'customer facing, and product producing' headcount had been reduced enough ... and it was other internal staff's time for that.
The result of the meeting was one less engineer, and everyone else had 4 days less of work done...4 -
When pandemic hit in 2020 I found myself out of work. Until then I used to have a java based pirate gameserver of a MMORPG as a hobby.
When pandemic hit I noticed that online players count increased from like 70 to 200 without much advertising because purely of people being stuck in home. So i decided to scale and spent 2 years with that. What a wild ride it was.
So i invested a bit in ads, managed to reach around 500 online players, opened my own company and launched a couple other successful spinoffs of that gameserver.
First year it was a goldmine but I was doing 10-14 hour days because I had to take care of everything (web, advertising, payment integrations, player support and also developing the server itself, ddos protections and etc.). I made quite a bit of money, saved for a downpayment for mortgage and got an apartment.
Second year I noticed that there was a lot of competition and online players count dropped, but I double downed on this and invested a lot into the product itself and spent most of the time developing a perfect gameserver that would be the big bang while also maintaining existing ones. Clasic overengineering mistake. As you can guess, I crashed and burned on all levels, never even managed to launch my final project because simply the scope was too big and I had trouble finding decent devs to outsource it to, since it was a very niche gameserver.
In the end I learned a lot especially about my own limits and ownership, now Im back to being a dev but working as a contractor.
I believe having actual business owner experience allows me to have different perspective and I can bring more to the table rather than focusing on crunching tasks.6 -
Week 278: Most rage-inducing work experience — I’ve got a list saved! At least from the current circle of hell. I might post a few more under this tag later…
TicketA: Do this in locations a-e.
TicketB: Do this in locations e-h.
TicketC: Do this in locations i-k.
Root: There’s actually a-x, but okay. They’re all done.
Product: You didn’t address location e in ticket B! We can’t trust you to do your tickets right. Did you even test this?
Root: Did you check TicketA? It’s in TicketA.
Product guy: It was called out in TicketB! How did you miss it?!
Product guy: (Refuses to respond or speak to me, quite literally ever again.)
Product guy to everyone in private: Don’t trust Root. Don’t give her any tickets.
Product manager to boss: Root doesn’t complete her tickets! We can’t trust her. Don’t give her our tickets.
Product manager to TC: We can’t trust Root. Don’t give her our tickets.
TC: Nobody can trust you! Not even the execs! You need to rebuild your reputation.
Root: Asks coworker a simple question.
Root: Asks again.
Root: nudges them.
Root: Asks again.
Coworker: I’ll respond before tomorrow. (And doesn’t.)
Root: Asks again.
Root: Fine. I’ll figure it out in my own.
TC: Stop making it sound like you don’t have any support from the team!
Root: Asks four people about <feature> they all built.
Everyone: idk
Root: Okay, I’ll figure it out on my own.
TC: Stop making it sound like you don’t have any support from the team!
Root: Mentions multiple meetings to discuss ticket with <Person>.
TC: You called <Person> stupid and useless in front of the whole team! Go apologize!
Root: Tells TC something. Asks a simple question.
Root: Tells TC the same thing. Asks again.
TC: (No response for days.)
TC: Tells me the exact same thing publicly like it’s a revelation and I’m stupid for not knowing.
TC: You don’t communicate well!
Root: Asks who the end user of my ticket is.
Root: Asks Boss.
Root: Asks TC.
Root: Fine, I’ll build it for both.
Root: Asks again in PR.
TC: Derides; doesn’t answer.
Root: Asks again, clearly, with explanation.
TC: Copypastes the derision, still doesn’t answer.
Root: Asks boss.
Boss: Doesn’t answer.
Boss: You need to work on your communication skills.
Root: Mentions asking question about blocker to <Person> and not hearing back. Mentions following up later.
<Person>: Gets offended. Refuses to respond for weeks thereafter.
Root: Hey boss, there’s a ticket for a minor prod issue. Is that higher priority than my current ticket?
Root: Hey, should I switch tickets?
Root: Hey?
Root: … Okay, I’ll just keep on my current one.
Boss: You need to work on your priorities.
Everyone: (Endless circlejerking and drama and tattling)6 -
It's funny. Although I try to only use open source software which is free (at least as in freedom but also as in beer mostly), I'd gladly pay for using it!
But no way on fucking earth I'd pay for proprietary software.
Why?
Because I'd love to support the people behind the free software! They made something awesome and the most awesome thing is, they made it in a way that ensures that the end users can modify it to suit their needs! That's so fucking awesome!
That's why I'd never pay for proprietary software. Can it have awesome features? Yes, of course! But can anyone except for the devs easily modify it to suit their needs? No. And that's why I'd never pay for it.18 -
Freaking tech support.
Freaking sparkhire.
Their 'one-way interview' bs only supports flash. Flash. in production. in 2019. Flash died years ago, and its support ends next year. What the crap?
Anyway, I finally decided I should do the interview since they already have all of my information anyway. Thanks, "privacy-conscious" third party. Totally appreciate it.
I spent half an hour and couldn't get flash working on their site (but all other sites were fine), so I contacted their support. I gave them all the relevant specs (inc. ofc browser), the steps to reproduce, and all of my attempts at fixing the issue.
To their credit, I recieved a response within a few minutes. To their discredit: their response was: "What browser are you using?" This question was followed by my report (including, ofc, my browser and all the other overlooked details), immediately followed by a "debugging info" section appended by their support service that also included my browser, os, and other specs.
Learn to fucking read.
Their suggestion? Use google chrome. Barring that: record your 20-30 minute video by holding your phone in front of your face the entire time. I am so not kidding.
They also asked what page i was having difficulty on. You guessed it: the page url was also included within that "debugging info" section.
It wasn't a form letter, either. I'd understand if it was all automated, but it was a real person who was really typing up the emails, and really didn't bother reading a damned thing.
I did end up getting flash working, but their "tech support" (script-reader) was entirely useless.16 -
ARGH. I wrote a long rant containing a bunch of gems from the codebase at @work, and lost it.
I'll summarize the few I remember.
First, the cliche:
if (x == true) { return true; } else { return false; };
Seriously written (more than once) by the "legendary" devs themselves.
Then, lots of typos in constants (and methods, and comments, and ...) like:
SMD_AGENT_SHCEDULE_XYZ = '5-year-old-typo'
and gems like:
def hot_garbage
magic = [nil, '']
magic = [0, nil] if something_something
success = other_method_that_returns_nothing(magic)
if success == true
return true # signal success
end
end
^ That one is from our glorious self-proclaimed leader / "engineering director" / the junior dev thundercunt on a power trip. Good stuff.
Next up are a few of my personal favorites:
Report.run_every 4.hours # Every 6 hours
Daemon.run_at_hour 6 # Daily at 8am
LANG_ENGLISH = :en
LANG_SPANISH = :sp # because fuck standards, right?
And for design decisions...
The code was supposed to support multiple currencies, but just disregards them and sets a hardcoded 'usd' instead -- and the system stores that string on literally hundreds of millions of records, often multiple times too (e.g. for payment, display fees, etc). and! AND! IT'S ALWAYS A FUCKING VARCHAR(255)! So a single payment record uses 768 bytes to store 'usd' 'usd' 'usd'
I'd mention the design decisions that led to the 35 second minimum pay API response time (often 55 sec), but i don't remember the details well enough.
Also:
The senior devs can get pretty much anything through code review. So can the dev accountants. and ... well, pretty much everyone else. Seriously, i have absolutely no idea how all of this shit managed to get published.
But speaking of code reviews: Some security holes are allowed through because (and i quote) "they already exist elsewhere in the codebase." You can't make this up.
Oh, and another!
In a feature that merges two user objects and all their data, there's a method to generate a unique ID. It concatenates 12 random numbers (one at a time, ofc) then checks the database to see if that id already exists. It tries this 20 times, and uses the first unique one... or falls through and uses its last attempt. This ofc leads to collisions, and those collisions are messy and require a db rollback to fix. gg. This was written by the "legendary" dev himself, replete with his signature single-letter variable names. I brought it up and he laughed it off, saying the collisions have been rare enough it doesn't really matter so he won't fix it.
Yep, it's garbage all the way down.16 -
Allright, I'm pissed.
Warning: more than 4k characters written by a non native english speaker ahead.
Legend:
Storytelling
> Short summary of the current situation
> "Something being said"
> (Something being thought)
* Actions *
-- Background --
In an attempt to reorganize my desktop I accidentally deleted a folder I called "development". In there I stored links to all my IDEs (Not sure how you call these in english), but also some workspaces like unity (Not much stuff there, processing (just some hobby stuff) AND Eclipse (FUCKING EVERYTHING RELATED TO SCHOOL WEB DEVELOPMENT). Now 3 days have passed and I realized this important folder was missing. Cleared that windows trash the instant I deleted the trash on my desktop.
> Shit, Regret
Install a file restore programm. Do every possible search. Nothing found.
> Big shit
Deadline was in like 3 days. Week was fucking rough so:
> "Screw this, the teacher nevet corrects the assignments and also fuck JSP"
Fast forward 2 months to last week. Teacher starts checking assignments.
> Fuck
* Sees pattern: Only students with missing or bad marks are checked. *
* Feels save *
Teacher approaching me while working on current projects.
* Doesn't feel save anymore *
> "Well, I'ld like to see your THAT programm"
> Well fuck
* Tells the truth *
> "Well that's unfortunate, but I must write a mark. Do you really have nothing to show?"
* Remember that I worked on the school pcs when I started *
> (Better than nothing. Gotta try it)
* Teacher checks programm, not pleased *
> (Fuck me, but at least it's over...)
> Nope
* Teacher calls me over *
> "With the mark I had to write today you can't reach that good mark even with a good examination, what are we gonna do about this?"
> "Well, there were other assignments that were never checked. Could we replace that mark with one of those?"
* Teacher agrees *
> (Srly bless this guy for that support)
My best choice was an Android app we had to develop during December in pairs. I did the front end (90% of the whole work) and my partner the backend (10 %). I also did 30 % of these 10 %, because I had to review the shit he wasn't able to debug himself.
> brainlogic.exe provided by windows vista
This distribution was partly my fault since I overestimated the work needed for the backend, but also the fault of that fucker. I mean, he didn't tell me the professor already provided 90 % of the backend...
Rest of the week was really busy (always 1 or 2 things to study for each day, workout and family stuff).
Yesterday (It's past 12 already) I arrived at ~9 pm in the dorm I could finally start reviewing my code.
Internet gets shut down at 10 pm.
Gotta hurry.
* Opens project *
* Sees half a year old code *
* Fights urge to puke *
> (Alright I gotta do this. For the mark!)
* waits for gradle to index files *
* Remembers the fact that I haven't opened Android Studio in the last 2 months *
For those who don't develop with android studio: This is an equivalent to ~10k windows updates waiting to be installed
> (Well, gotta work with this kinda old version)
"gradle sync failed"
> ( Ok, just restart it. You're fine )
* Android Studio doesn't react anymore and/or renders *
* Waits 5 min *
* Restarts laptop *
* Android Studio is reacting again*
"gradle is synching"
9:45 pm: gradle is done and I can finally compile my app
> FML
* Sees App launched on phone *
* Almost pukes again *
> (This was the assigment for the UX chapter, so design doesn't matter)
UX is decent. Proceeds with testing stuff. Save paths work, but some bugs can be caused by going of it
* fixes as much as possible *
* Takes quick look at backend *
Date date = new Date (GregorianCalender.getInstance().getTimeInMillis());
C'mon, I asked you to be the backend. You got 90% of the methods already written by the teacher and had 2 months to write the interfaces to my Front end AND you come up with shits like that.
Note: this example is a minor example of brainlogic.exe
I did what I could to make improve my situation. Hopefully he doesn't discover the bugs. And If it's a backend bug then I could't care less, since that was not my job!
Wish me luck for today!9 -
I informed the CTO that one of the beta features from our Cloud Provider (that we used for free) was released to the public and now we're supposed to pay US$ 0.65 for each 1 million requests.
In our case, this means we would pay ~US$ 6.50 to support a businesses that receives literally millions in Advertising each month.
Then I was hit with "How can we reduce that cost? It's out of our budget!"
Oh, looks like we have a really small budget, so... Let me help them by announcing that I'll leave by the end of the week because I'm moving to another country \o/7 -
Around 27 hours at new customer location.
They had a server failure due to incompetence.
They had fired their own IT guy and called us 6 months later because the server stopped responding.
First diagnostic. 2 drives are dead in a raid 5 with one hot spare. Raid controller then proved to be broken once the disks was replaced.
Waiting for new raid controller and installing.
Backup non existing, no one changed dat tape during the 6 months without IT. The tape was just a transparent plastic band, no media left.
Raid config is stored in static ram on controller, no backup!
Several hours in tech support to find out how to rebuild raid config from existing disks.
Proves to be impossible to rebuild raid set due to some checksum failures.
More hours with support to enable some diagnostic read only mode to mirror low level content to external drive.
Then many more hours to copy parts of the tree until it gets an error, restart after that and go on.
In the end we got around 70% back.
During this time I manage to be in contact with the raid manufacturers all support centers, one in europe, one in the us and one in Taiwan, switching each time one if them closed for the night.
The customer later declined a steady support contract due to us being to expensive ;)
Some just don’t want to learn.6 -
One Thursday noon,
operation manager: (looking at mobile)what the.....something is wrong i am getting bunch of emails about orders getting confirmed.
Colleague dev: (checks the main email where it gets all email sent/received) holy shit all of our clients getting confirmation email for orders which were already cancelled/incomplete.
Me: imediately contacting bluehost support, asking them to down the server so just that we can stopp it, 600+ emails were already sent and people keep getting it.
*calls head of IT* telling the situation because he's not in the office atm.
CEO: wtf is happening with my business, is it a hacker?
*so we have a intrusion somebody messed the site with a script or something*
All of us(dev) sits on the code finding the vulnerabilities , trying to track the issue that how somebody was able to do that.
*After an hour*
So we have gone through almost easch function written in the code which could possibly cause that but unable to find anything which could break it.
Head asking op when did you started getting it actually?
Op: right after 12 pm.
*an other hour passes*
Head: (checking the logs) so right after the last commit, site got updated too?. And....and.....wtf what da hell who wrote this shit in last commit?
* this fuckin query is missing damn where clause* 🤬
Me: me 😰
*long pause, everyone looking at me and i couldn't look at anyone*
The shame and me that how can i do that.
Head: so its you not any intrudor 😡
Further investigating, what the holy mother of #_/&;=568 why cronjob doesn't check how old the order is. Why why why.
(So basically this happened, because of that query all cancelled/incomplete orders got updated damage done already, helping it the cronjob running on all of them sending clients email and with that function some other values got updated too, inshort the whole db is fucked up.)
and now they know who did it as well.
*Head after some time cooling down, asked me the solution for the mess i create*
Me: i took backup just couple of days before i can restore that with a script and can do manual stuff for the recent 2 days. ( operation manager was already calling people and apologising from our side )
Head: okay do it now.
Me: *in panic* wrote a script to restore the records ( checking what i wrote 100000000 times now ), ran...tested...all working...restored the data.
after that wrote an apology email, because of me staff had to work alot and it becomes so hectic just because of me.
* at the end of the day CEO, head, staff accepted apology and asked me to be careful next time, so it actually teached me a lesson and i always always try to be more careful now especially with quries. People are really good here so that's how it goes* 🙂2 -
Most of things I'm about to say are experienced by almost 99% of developers in Africa including my country so I'm going to make it a more general rant.
As an African developer, life is both exciting and frustrating at the same time. Some of the challenges that make life difficult for developers in Africa include:
1). Slow Internet Speed: The internet in Africa can be extremely slow and unreliable, making it frustrating to work on projects that require large file downloads. This is a serious challenge for freelance developers who work from home.
2). Unstable Electricity: Frequent power outages due to inadequate infrastructure, insufficient investment in energy production and distribution, and political instability makes it difficult for developers in Africa to work consistently. Most times I get frustrated because you can experience black out at anytime of the day which could last for hours to days automatically rendering you useless if you have no power backup generator at home.
3). Low Pay: While the opportunities for software developers in Africa are quite high, the salary is often disappointing. Many talented programmers end up seeking better opportunities overseas. In fact I quit my full-time job because of this reason.
4). Lack of Support for Tech Start-ups: There are few venture capital firms in Africa willing to invest in new ideas, which makes it difficult for tech start-ups to get off the ground. It's just sad, you can have an idea and just die with it.
So in summary, it's not a walk in the park to be a developer in Africa, but despite all of that I am glad to be a part of the African journey, having the opportunity to had work at a tech agency firm on various projects ranging from healthcare to finance, I find it rewarding to know that my work has contributed to a better future for my continent. 🤞6 -
After returning back from the company we were purchasing a new phone system (hardware+software, $100K+, kind of a big deal)
VP: “I need the new phone system software integration for our CRM by next week. I need to demo the system for the other VPs”
Me: “No problem. Were you able to get their API like I asked?”
VP: “Salesman didn’t know for sure what that was, but he said all the developer software documentation is on their site.”
Me: “Did he give you a URL? Their main site is all marketing mumbo-jumbo. I assume there is another one specific for developers.”
VP: “Yea, he might have said something, but I don’t understand why you need it. The salesman said the integration would be seamless. He showed me several demos.”
Me: “No, I mean I need to know, is the API a full client install? a simple dll? is this going to be a web service integration? How will I know what to program against?”
VP: “I think I heard him say something about COM? Does that sound like an API?”
Me: “It’s a start. Did he provide you anything, a disk, a flash drive, anything with the software?”
VP: “No, only thing he told me was our CRM integration would be seamless and our development team would have no problems.”
Me: “OK..OK…I get it…he’s a salesman. Is there an 1-800 number I can call? A technical support email address? Anyone technical I can reach out to?”
VP: “Probably, but I don’t understand what the problem is. I need the CRM integrated by next week. I gave the other VPs a promise we would get it done. I do not break promises.”
Me: “Wait…when are we installing the new system?”
VP: “Well, the purchase order will be cut at the end of the month’s billing cycle, the company has about a two month turnaround time to deliver and install the hardware, so maybe 3 months from now? Are you going to be able to have the integration ready for next week?”
Me: “If we won’t see any of the hardware for 3 months, what exactly am I integrating with?”
VP: “That API you wanted or whatever it is. COM…yea, it’s COM. I was told the integration would be seamless and our developers would have no problem. I don’t understand why you can’t simply write the code to make it work. Getting the hardware installed is going to be the hardest part.”
Me: “OK, so I have no documentation, we have no hardware, no software, and no idea what this ‘seamless integration’ means. I’m afraid there isn’t anything I can do right now. ”
VP: “Fine!...I’ll just have to tell the other VPs you were not able to execute the seamless integration with the CRM.”
Which he did. When the hardware+software was finally installed, they hired consultants (because I “failed”). I think the bill was in the $50K range to perform the ‘integration’ which consisted of Excel spreadsheets (no kidding). When approached with the primary CRM integration, the team needed our API documentation, a year’s development time and $300K. I was pissed off enough, and I had the API documentation, I was able to get the basic CRM integration within 3 days. When an agent receives a call, I look up the # in our database, auto-fill the form with the customer info, etc. Easy stuff when you have the documentation.
The basics worked and the VP was congratulated by ‘saving’ the company $300K. May or may not have been bonuses involved, rumors still out on that one, but I didn't see em'. Later my manager told me the VP was really ticked that I performed the integration ‘behind his back’, but because it was a success, he couldn’t fire me.10 -
Java:
Primitive streams. Their need to exist is a monument to legacy failure.
VB.net
OrElse and AndAlso short-circuiting operators. The language designers were too fucking lazy to process logic, so they give specific keywords for those cases.
PHP
Random Hebrew error messages
JS
Eval. It can be used responsibly, but most of the times you see it it's because someone fucked up.
C#
Lack of Tuple destructuring in argument specification. Tuples were added, and pattern matching was added, and it's been getting better. The gear grinding starts with how Tuple identity assignment in arguments is handled. Rather than destructuring into the current scope, it coalesces the identity specification into a dot property of whatever the argument name is. This seems like an afterthought given they have ootb support for ignore characters.
Typescript
This will probably be remedied in the next version or two, but Tuple identity forwarding between anonymous scopes normalizes to arrays of union types, because tuples compile to typeless arrays. It's irritating because you end up having to restate the type metadata in functional series even when there is no possibility for any other code branch to have occurred.13 -
Business User [1 PM]: So I know every month you’ve been using your dark magic SQL skills to transform my monthly data into better monthly data.
Well I know it’s the middle of the month, and this is totally random... but... I have some other data formatted totally differently, almost totally different data! You can just run this through your magic SQL Proc right?? Easy! Also, I need this by end of day... thank you for your support.
Me [1:01 PM]: K.4 -
//
// devRant unofficial UWP update (v2.0.0-beta7)
//
After "Active Discussions" (implemented in v2.0.0-beta5), it was time to implement the last missing app section, "Collabs".
This is the biggest update since the start of the public beta, over 100 changes (new features, improvements, fixes).
Changelog (v2.0.0-beta7):
- Support for Collabs
- Notifs Tabs
- & more... read the entire changelog here: https://jakubsteplowski.com/en/...
Microsoft Store: https://microsoft.com/store/apps/...
I'm really happy to announce that the unofficial UWP client has now 100% of the features available on the official Android and iOS apps (if we don't count Push Notifs 😝 but they will arrive soon too).
It took several months of hard work, but I made it... it's here, it reached the level I wanted to reach since the beginning of this project (May 2016) (if we don't count Push Notifs).
I did it a lot of times, but I think they deserve it everytime, I would like to thank all the people who made this possible, all the active users, who opened issues, suggested features, or just used my app and had fun, posted positives (and negatives, motherfuckers, just kidding, maybe) reviews on Microsoft Store etc.
The entire community who made me want to do this project.
You're amazing guys!
Of course this is not the end of this project, I want to bring the app out of the beta and support it until I will be able to do it, releasing updates almost simultaneously with @dfox and @trogus.
Planned to be done:
- Support for Anniversary Update
- Push Notifs
- Custom Themes
- Close the 15+ issues (features requests, fixes) on the issue tracker on GitHub
- Ranti by @Alice: Your devRant Assistant <- I really hope it will become a thing :)
- Your future suggestions -> post them here: https://github.com/JakubSteplowski/...
Thanks for the attention,
Good ranting!
10 -
Tech support for Friend...
Again...
Ok...
A friend ran down the hallway to my Appartement, I opened the door for him and asked him "What The Fuck... Is wrong with you?!" He was just coughing like...
My... Laptop.... Is... Slow...
When he then eventually came to the point where he could Breath normally again I asked him to login into his by then super with shitty software bloated PC... It was a mess... A Desktop full of Shit... only Shit... I
then opened Chrome and Task Manager...
and holy shit... EVERYTHING! Literally ANYTHING was under 100% Load... Yet his shitty Fans werent spinning up... Shutdown the Laptop and opened it... not to my surprise it was full of Dust... I cleaned it and booted it again... still 100% Load... I couldnt do shit without being bombarded with porn and Hentai Ads... So... I asked him "Did you make any backups to this machine?" He was like.. "*Really long explenation* No *Really long Explenation*"
Great... i thought to myself... Then I said to him his PC was so trash that i only could Reset it to 0... He was like DO ANYTHING YOU CAN LITERALLY ANYTHING!
I then explained him, Resetting this PC Means literally 0 A Fresh start, nothing of your data will be there literally nothing...
He again Was like DO IT!
So I did... When it was done i showed him the result... He FREAKED OUT LIKE THE WORLD WAS GOING TO FUCKING END, HE SCREAMED AT ME WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE? REVERSE IT! REVERSE IT NOW!
I Then said to him, I reset it to 0, I said this would happen...
He then took his now perfectly running Laptop and Ran away...
tl;dr
Tech support for friend, Reset PC to 0, Freaked out AF...3 -
I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...
#1 - Most expensive lesson learned
Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.
This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...
After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.
Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.
#2 - Hardest to find
This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.
Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.
#3 - Most elegant fix
Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.
My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.
So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.1 -
Microsoft be like :
"Oh, you're moving away from your computer for a while with all this stuff open? It would a shame if some were to.. UPDATE it!"
It asks with a pop up, and if you don't answer it, it thinks "Oh, you're not telling me if I should update now or not, but I think you probably want me to update. UPDATE!"
For me, if I keep ignoring the update, it starts to create problems for me out of nowhere. It starts to lag and then the task manager starts to lag. EVERYTHING IS NOT RESPONDING.
When I finally update it, it acts like there were no issues at all. Everything is fine..
Even with Xbox, if it wants to update, it doesn't let you go online until you do. If it loses connection mid-update for some reason, it begins the update again from the friggin START. All that time updating gone to waste. Recently, I'm having a lot of issues with it. It doesn't let me sign in a lot of times. "We couldn't sign you in" for some reason. It JUST CAN'T. If you have a slow internet connection, you can't play any game at all. I contacted Microsoft Support about that issue and they concluded that it was all because of the slow internet connection and there were no issues on their end and they told me to GIT GOOD (Not exactly those words). If it does sign you in, it kicks you out mid-game for some reason with the evil pop up saying "Bye User_Name". The game says that YOU signed out (Dumb game, doesn't understand Microsoft shenanigans) and returns you to the main menu. If your game didn't save, well, GOOD luck to you!
Everything takes forever to load, if it decides it's not gonna load, it gives me a really helpful error saying "Something went wrong".
Maybe it's just me, it just hates me particularly. It makes me think that Microsoft intentionally acts like a douche just to get attention..
(In the end I think, maybe, this all is not a big deal if you surrender and accept Microsoft as your overlord)
I tried a few ways to stop Windows from updating automatically, but nothing worked (Maybe, I should try again).
Maybe I should dual boot Linux, but that brings a whole new set of things that I'd have to deal with, doesn't it?
Sigh7 -
Hey there! I am pretty new but old to the community xD. Let me explain and introduce myself.
The post might be a little longer, depending on my inspiration, read it at your own risk ;)
I am here on devRant for almost a year now but, this is my first post. I wasn't active until a week ago or so. Why? Well, at the time, I didn't find posts interesting enough to keep me from work or school. I must addmit I was either stupid or confused (not uncommon for me).
Well, I am high school student who, when not prepearing for an entrance exam for faculty, is learning and doing indie game developent with my cousin's support.
Even though I was intermediate gamer whan I was younger, passionate but not addicted, I didn't even think about getting into game development until my cousin showed me one secific game and told me a story about it. Let's stop here and let me tell you why I tagged this rant with wk88.
I've already mentioned my cousin, he's my wk88 trouble. Why? I'll tell you only one thing. He studies CS at University of Cambridge, UK. He earned the scholarship by competing and earning multiple medals in programming in International Olympiad in Informatics. And here I am struggling with ******* trigonometric identities. But nvm, let's move on.
I told you about the game but didn't actually tell you the title and who developed it. So, my inspiration for getting into game development was Alexander Bruce , guy who designed Antichamber. If you haven't heard of it before/tried it yet, give it a shot, you probably won't be disappointed of you like fucking with your brain.
Here're some facts:
- Started learning programming at the age of 12, thought by my brother using Free Pascal in Lazarus.
- Have been learning C++ for 4 years and C# for 3, both at the same time.
- While learning these two, started building .NET based back-end and doing SQL stuff; failed to finish it, gave up after I realised I needed some advanced front-end skills, which I didn't want to learn, to implement a lot of things I wanted.
- Played a piano since I was 11 and been playing around with music production recently.
Here I am now, learning Blender and hoping that one day I will publish the game I've been developing for past year and a half.
Hope you didn't waste your time reading this. I will try to keep you up with things I experience durning future development.
Cheers! 🍻13 -
What you see in that screenshot, that was earned.
I'm on the plane and I want an hour of free Gogo (read: crappy) WiFi on my laptop (so I can push the code I'm probably the most proud of, more on that another time). The problem is that the free T-Mobile WiFi is apparently only available on mobile.
So after trying to just use responsive mode, and that still (almost obviously) not working. I realize it's time to bring in the big guns: A User Agent switcher. Small catch: I don't have an add-on for FF that can do that.
So on my phone I find an add-on that can and download the file. To send it to my computer, I initially thought to go through KDEConnect, but Gogo's network also isolates each system, so that doesn't work. So I try to send it over Bluetooth, except I can't. Why? Because Android's Bluetooth share "doesn't support" the .xpi extension, so I dump it in a zip (in retrospect, I should have just renamed it), and now I can share.
After a few tries, I successfully get the file over, extract the zip, and install the extension. Whew! Now I open up Gogo's page and proceed to try again, but this time I change the user-agent. Doesn't work... Ah! Cookies! I delete the cookies for Gogo (I had a cookie editor add-on already), but I had to try a few times because Gogo's scripts keep trying to, but I got it in the end.
Finally that stupid error saying it's for phones only went away, and I could write this rant for you.
22 -
Dear Atlassian Support,
In my life I had a lot of experiences...
But your software manages to replace all these experiences with a unique feeling of depression, hatred, anger... Only negative emotions.
Not once have I said anything good about your software - not once in > 5 years.
Whenever your chum bucket of mismanagement and misanthropy stops working, it's never the fault of the end user, the administrator or someone else.
It's entirely your fault.
Fucked up upgrades, lack of documentation, catastrophic handling of logging, lack of support of current database systems, lack of proper migration and clean up of plugins, ....
I could go on. But it's really just and endless tirade.
I wish I could stop management for even giving you money for the pile of poo you call software, but sadly they don't listen.
But there's hope on the horizon.
Thanks for making people go cloud only.
No one wants that.
It would mean entrusting that pile of poo to the craptastic hands of your irresponsible people.
No one really wants that.
Not even management who blindly paid the license fees all the times.
Thank you for your cloud only movement.
Maybe we can finally find an alternative and I can finally start a therapy for the PTSD I have thx to your software.3 -
Hey Root, remember that super high-priority ticket that we ignored for five months before demanding you rewrite it a specific way in one day?
Yeah, the new approach we made you use broke the expected usecases, and now the page is completely useless to the support team and they're freaking out. Drop everything you're doing and go fix it! Code-complete for this release is tonight! -- This right after "impacting our business flow" while being collapsed on the fucking floor.
Jesus FUCKING christ, what the fuck is wrong with these people?
If I dropped the ball on a high-priority ticket for two weeks, I'd get fired, let alone for five fucking months.
If I was a manager and demanded a one-day rewrite I can only imagine the amount of chewing out I'd receive, especially on something high-priority.
And let's not forget product ownership: imagine if I screwed up feature planning for someone so badly I made them break a support tool in production. I'd never hear the end of it.
Fucking double standards.
And while I'm at it. Some of the code I've seen in this codebase is awful. Uncommented spaghetti, or an unreadable mess with single-letter variables, super-tightly coupled modules so updates are nearly impossible, typos in freaking constants added across sixty+ files, obviously-incorrect comments, ... . I'll have to start posting snippets to show them off. But could I get away with any of it? ha. Hell no. My code must be absolutely perfect. I hear about any and every flaw, doesn't matter how minor, and nothing can go out until everything is just so.
Hell, I even hear about flaws in other peoples' code during my code reviews. Why? Because I should have fixed it, that's why. But if I do, I get yelled at for "muddying the waters."
Just. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.
It's like playing a shell game where no matter which shell I pick (or point to their goddamn sleeve where they're clearly hiding it), I get insulted for being so consistently useless, and god damn, how can I never find the fucking pea or follow the damned rules? I'm so terrible and this is why "nobody trusts me." Fuck you.
I'll tell you why I can't find your damned pea: IT'S RATTLING INSIDE YOUR FUCKING HEADS, you ASSHOLE FUCKING IMBECILES.
That's right: one pea among the lot of them.
goddamn I am fucking pissed off.8 -
!rant
Hey guys I posted back in October that I was starting a hobby that I've always wanted to do making programming related videos and tutorials with a lofty goal of hitting 20 subs by end of the year and you all blew that goal in 24hrs! That sudden support really excited me to do more and I want to say thank you!
Now that it is released l really wanted to make a tutorial over the new Google Assistant API and it is now officially released this month. I'm hoping to make a multi-part series over developing for the assistant and Google home plat form. I'd really appreciate your support and feedback on how I can improve my channel and possible video topics you would might like to see.
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Thank you for your support DevRanters as always!
8 -
Linux desktop fanboys: proprietary hardware support is a huge issue in all major Linux distros. It is the fault of the hardware companies.
Also Linux desktop fanboys: hardware issues are the fault of the beginner/novice end user.
Windows/mac users: *installs any component they want and has it work flawlessly without even having to read a single word from the manual*33 -
!rant !dev
True story. Some years ago I worked, for a network manufacturer in the support department. One of me jobs was to help end-customer (private people) over the phone, who could not get online.
One day a 60+ year old woman called the support line, because se could not get on the Internet. And because our name was on the router, she called our support.
A colleague of mine took the call, and we could quickly see by his expression the it was "One of those calls". The minutes went by and they had gotten no closer to a solution after 45 min.
That was when I herd my colleague say "Well from what you tell, all the settings here are fine. Can you please close all the windows, so we can look at other settings". My colleague the looked weird and said, "She just told me it takes some minutes to close all the windows, so please hang on.".
After 2 min time the woman came back to the phone and said "I have now closed all the windows in the house, except one ceiling window that only my husband can reach. Hope it doesn't matter".2 -
My first job was actually nontechnical - I was 18 years old and sold premium office furniture for a small store in Munich.
I did code in my free time though (PHP/JS mostly, had a litte browsergame back then - those were the days), so when my boss approached me and asked me whether I liked to take over a coding project, I agreed to the idea.
Little did I know at the time: I was supposed to work with a web agency the boss had contracted to build their online shop. Only that he had no plan or anything, he basically told them "build me an online shop like abc(a major competitor of ours at the time)"
He employed another sales lady who was supposed to manage the shop (that didn't exist yet). In the end, I think 80% of her job was to keep me from killing my boss.
As you can imagine, with this huuuuge amout of planning and these exact visions of what was supposed to be, things went south fast and far. So far that I could visit my fellow flightless birds down in the Penguin's republic of Antarctica and still need to go further.
Well... When my boss started suing the web agency, I was... ahem, asked to take over. Dumb as I was, I did - I was a PHP kid and thought that Magento, being written in PHP, would be easy to master. If you know Magento, you know that was maybe the wrongest thing I ever said.
Fast forward 3 very exhausting months, the thing was online. Not all of it worked yet, but it was online and fairly secure.
I did next to everything myself, administrating the CentOS box the shop was running on, its (own) e-mail server, the web server, all the coding required for the shop (can you spell 12 hour day for 8 hour pay?)
3 further months later, my life basically was a wreck, I dragged myself to work, the only thing I looked forward being the motorcycle ride home. The system worked though.
Mind you, I was still, at the time, working with three major customers, doing deskside support and some admin (Win Server 2008R2 at the time) - because, to quote my boss, "We could not afford a full time developer and we don't need one".
I think i stopped coding in my free time, the one hobby I used to love more than anything on the world, somewhere Decemerish 2012. I dropped out of the open source projects I was in, quit working on my browser game and let everything slide.
I didn't even care to renew the domains and servers for it, I just let it die without notice.
The little free time I had, I spent playing video games and getting drunk/high.
December 2013, 1.5 years on the job, I reached my breaking point and just left, called in sick at least a week per month because I just could not see this fucking place anymore.
I looked for another job outside of ALL of what I did before. No more Magento, no more sales, no more PHP. I didn't have to look for long, despite what I thought of my skills.
In February 2014, I told my boss that I quit. It was still seven months until my new job started, but I wanted him to know early so we could migrate and find a replacement.
The search for said replacement started in June 2014. I had considerably less work in the months before, looks like he got the hint.
In August 2014, my replacement arrived and I got him started.
I found a job, which I am still in, and still happy about after almost half a decade, at a local, medium sized ISP as a software dev and IT security guy. Got a proper training with a certificate and everything now.
My replacement lasted two months, he was external and never really did his job - the site, which until I had quit, had a total of 3 days downtime for 3 YEARS (they were the hoster's fault, not mine), was down for an entire month and he could not even tell why.
HIS followup was kicked after taking two weeks to familiarize himself with the project. Well, I think that two weeks is not even barely enough to familiarize yourself with nearly three years of work, but my boss gave him two days.
In 2016, the shop was replaced with another one. Different shop system, different OS, different CI. I don't know why and I can't say I give a damn.
Almost all the people that worked at the company back with me have left for greener pastures, taking their customers (and revenue) with them.
As for my boss' comments, instructions and lines: THAT might not be safe for work. Or kids. Or humans in general. And there wouldn't be much left if you put it through a language filter...
Moral of the story: No, it's not a bad thing to leave a place if you're mistreated there. Don't mistake loyalty with stupidity!
And, to quote one of my favourite Bands: "Nothing matters when the pain is all but gone" (Tragedy + Time by Rise Against).8 -
If nobody hates you, you're doing something wrong ~ House MD
Tl;Dr : I'm pissing the right people off and my God I like it
That's what I've known and have confirmed doing my current side project with my gf, we are working on a ratemyprofessors clone with extra spicy features, one in particular is so spicy some teachers will be put in a position in which they would rather grind hot peppers with their butt cheeks.
Don't get me wrong, there are good teachers (some of which actually showed support) but some are not good teachers and some aren't good people either; I've decided it's time to stop complaining and take action.
We recently released an alpha and I presented it to a teacher I had this semester (one of the "not so great" kind) as a DB proyect cuz fuck it I'm not doing 2 projects.
This teacher is your run of the mill "I'm lazy and I don't care" teacher and she ran the classroom like a shitty kindergarten, so much so, one of the teams was presenting a buggy admin site as their project and she started talking on the phone! Right up on their faces!!
My turn, I go up and handle her a 30 page printed thesis of my project and said that unlike my mates, I was going to start presenting the idea and then the actual software...why is it printed?, She said; Because I won't be projecting the PDF ma'am, I actually made a professional presentation and that way you can read more technical details while I give a broad overview...
I started talking about the huge issues students face and my research about it, undisciplined teachers, no class structure ~ abrupt interruption ~ "yeah I know like, you are giving so much statistics and numbahs but where is the database?"
I got pissed off because the whole purpose of printing and giving her the docs was for her to ask specific questions AT THE END! So I told her I was getting there and to ask questions at the end...I start showing off the system's sweetest features... everyone got quiet...a girl on the front row kept looking at the teacher and then back to the board with her eyes wide open, the teacher was visibly upset.
I asked someone to please help me by using the site being projected for everyone to see, he searched the teacher's name and it obviously popped up cuz I scrapped the whole teacher index site... some people gasp and others start murmuring.
She freaked and started arguing saying that frontend can't be just HTML and CSS, where did you mentioned x and y feature? admit it's just teacher evaluations! where did you get the teacher names? I want the scripts!....it went on even 10 minutes after class and the next class with a police like interrogation.
So yeah, something tells me I'm not getting an A, but I'm happy after all because that's the kind of reaction I want from those types of professors.
Worth it 😎
8 -
I've recently received another invitation to Google's Foobar challenges.
A while ago someone here on devRant (which I believe works at Google, and whose support I deeply appreciate) sent me a couple of links to it too. Unfortunately back then I didn't take the time to learn the programming languages (Python or Java) that Google requires for these challenges. This time I'm putting everything on Python, as it's the easiest language to learn when coming from Bash.
But at the end of the day.. I am a sysadmin, not a developer. I don't know a single thing about either of these languages. Yet I can't take these challenges as the sysadmin I am. Instead, I have to learn a new language which chances are I'll never need again outside of some HR dickhead's interview with lateral thinking questions and whiteboard programming, probably prohibited from using Google search like every sane programmer and/or sysadmin would for practical challenges that actually occur in real life.
I don't want to do that. Google is a once in a lifetime opportunity, I get that. Many people would probably even steal that foobar link from me if they could. But I don't think that for me it's the right thing to do. Google has made a serious difference by actually challenging developers with practical scenarios, and that's vastly superior to whatever a HR person at any other company could cobble together for an interview. But there's one thing that they don't seem to realize. A company like Google consists of more than just developers. Not only that, it probably consists - even within their developer circles - of more than just Python and Java developers. If any company would know about languages that are more optimized such as C, it would be Google that has to leverage this performance in order to be able to deliver their services.
I'll be frank here. Foobar has its own issues that I don't like. But if Google were a nice company, I'd go for it all the way nonetheless - after all, they are arguably the single biggest tech company in the world, and the tech industry itself is one of the biggest ones in the world nowadays. It's safe to say that there's likely no opportunity like working at Google. But I don't think it's the right thing. Even if I did know Python or Java... Even if I did. I don't like Google's business decisions.
I've recently flashed my OnePlus 6T with LineageOS. It's now completely Google-free, except for a stock Yalp account (that I'm too afraid to replace with my actual Google account because oh dear, third-party app stores, oh dear that could damage our business and has to be made highly illegal!1!). My contacts on that phone are are all gone. They're all stored on a Google server somewhere (except for some like @linuxxx' that I consciously stored on device storage and thus lost a while back), waiting for me to log back in and sync them back. I've never asked for this. If Google explicitly told me that they'd sync all my contacts to my Google account and offer feasible alternatives, I'd probably given more priority to building a CalDAV and CardDAV server of my own. Because I do have the skills and desire to maintain that myself. I don't want Google to do this for me.
Move fast and break things. I've even got a special Termux script on my home screen, aptly named Unfuck-Google-Play. Every other day I have to use it. Google Search. When I open it on my Nexus 6P, which was Google's foray into hardware and in which they failed quite spectacularly - I've even almost bent and killed it tonight, after cursing at that piece of shit every goddamn day - the Google app opens, I type some text into it.. and then it just jumps back to the beginning of whatever I was typing. A preloader of sorts. The app is a fucking web page parser, or heck probably even just an API parser. How does that in any way justify such shitty preloaders? How does that in any way justify such crappy performance on anything but the most recent flagships? I could go on about this all day... I used to run modern Linux on a 15 year old laptop, smoothly. So don't you Google tell me that a - probably trillion dollar - company can't do that shit right. When there's (commercialized) community projects like DuckDuckGo that do things a million times better than you do - yet they can't compete with you due to your shit being preloaded on every phone and tablet and impossible to remove without rooting - that you Google can't do that and a lot more. You've got fucking Google Assistant for fucks sake! Yet you can't make a decent search app - the goddamn thing that your company started with in the first place!?
I'm sorry. I'd love to work at Google and taste the diversity that this company has to offer. But there's *a lot* wrong with it at the business end too. That is something that - in that state - I don't think I want to contribute to, despite it being pretty much a lottery ticket that I've been fortunate enough to draw twice.
Maybe I should just start my own company.6 -
Became an uncle to two beautiful girls the other week. But the plan to make them the future tech support of the family is already in play! Hopefully they will exceed me in about 10 years, I'm a front-end dev so it shouldn't be that hard...
-
So, now that companies are used to "WFH", maybe we can agree upon a better office for tech companies?
I do actually think the more "ideal" tech company office wouldn't have to be expensive.
It can be smaller. Any tech company worth it's salt should have discovered in the last few months that it's not just devs who can work from home. Sales, support, management — you really don't need to fight your way through highway traffic or cram yourself into a sweaty subway every day.
There's value in having an office. Not everyone can fit a good workspace in their apartment.
But we could at least center it around:
1. A bunch of small, completely soundproof isolation booths, for those who need a focus space, and can't find a silent spot at home.
2. A social lounge space, a communal living room with couches, a bar, creative relaxing stuff, whiteboards, etc. WFH can become depressing even for the most antisocial employees, chilling on a couch with some coworkers to brainstorm ideas or chat about random tech is valuable for building good relationships with your team.
The "open plan office" with rows of desks and monitors, no matter how luxuriously decorated with vertical gardens and hipster desks from reclaimed wood, can go die a fiery painful death.
I either want to work, or socialize.
Open plan offices (and it's even more dystopian suicide-inducing cousin, the cubicle) are like being unable to choose between fucking and a blowjob, so you end up humping a navel.
Oh, and conference rooms, go fuck yourself as well. I want to be able to minimize your ugly face if you plan to talk about company financial reports for 2 hours.2 -
This rant is inspired by another rant about automated HR emails like "we appreciate your interest [bla bla] you got rejected [bla bla]". (Please bare with me).
I live in an underdeveloped country, I graduated in September, did Machine Learning for my thesis and I will soon publish a paper about it, loved it wanted to work as ML/data science engineer. On all the job postings I found there was only one job related, I sent resume, they didn't answer, couple months later that company posted that they want a full stack web dev with knowledge of mobile dev and ML, basically an all in one person, for the salary of a junior dev.
- another company posted about python/web scraping developer, I had the experience and I got in touch, they sent me a test, took me 3 days, one of the questions took me 2 days, I found an unanswered SO question with the exact wording dating to 6 months ago, I solved it, sent answers, never heard back from them again.
- one company weren't really hiring, I got in touch asking if the have a position, they sent a test, I did it, they liked it, scheduled an interview, the interviewer was arrogant, not giving any attention to what I am saying, kept asking in depth questions that even an expert might struggle answering. In the end they said they're not really hiring but they interview and see what they can find. Basically looking for experts, I mentioned that im freshly graduated from the very beginning.
- over 1000 applications on different positions on LinkedIn across the whole world, same automated rejection email, but at least they didn't keep me waiting.
- I lost hope. Found a job posting near me, python/django dev, in the interview they asked about frontend (react/vueJS) and Flutter, said I don't have experience and not interested in that, they asked about databases, C and java and other stuff that I have experience in, they hired me with an insulting salary (really insulting) cuz they knew im hopeless, filling 2 positions, python dev and tech support for an app built in the 90s with C/java and sorcery... A week into the job while I'm still learning about the app I'm supposed to support, the guy called me into the office: "here's the thing" he said, "someone else is already working on python, i want you to learn either react or vueJS or flutter" I was in shock, I didn't know what to say, I said I'll think about it, next week I said I'll learn react, so I spent the week acting like im learning react while I scroll on FB and LinkedIn (I'm bad, I know).
- in the weekend a foreign company that I applied to few weeks ago got in touch, we had some interviews and I got hired as DevOps/MLOps. It's been a month and I'm loving it, the salary is decent and I love what I do.
Conclusion: don't lose hope.8 -
!rant && rant
I've been doing random HTML/CSS/JS crap since I was 11 (I'm 20 now). And worked with NodeJS/Swift/Java/Typescript for the past 4 years. For some reason, I've always been interested in public transit and the combination between public transit and Development seemed magical to me. I've tried making Departure time apps and trip planners for a few years now. And for that you need open data, for which we have a national data source and a Google Group for support with that.
I quit my study two years ago after a year doing nothing and I was on the edge of getting into depression because I didn't do anything useful for two years. Didn't see myself do anything useful in the next few years apart from some random dev crap (still public transit related).
About half a year ago I ranted on that Google Group about shit being not efficient (weird standards, weird documentation but mostly lack thereof).
For some reason a business saw that rant and sent me an email about two months ago and told me they 'potentially' had 'some' work for me. So I had some really informal conversations with that business but I still was very insecure about myself (had some shitty experience with tons of unfinished projects) and I was worried that they had higher expectations for me than what I could give them.
A week later I received an e-mail with a proposal for an actual, full-time job as a back-end developer and obviously took the opportunity.
I started a month ago with a month-long probation period and after three weeks told me I had passed the probation period.
I'm a super happy boy right now. I got a job, being super insecure, without any certifications, without finishing school (Everyone in the Netherlands tells you you NEED a diploma to get a job), more than double minimum wage (minimum wage is quite high in the Netherlands), and most important, at a business that does a lot of public transit stuff.
Apparently ranting about stuff, not finishing your school and being depressed gives you a well-paid job. :)5 -
I was reading the post made by another ranter in which he was basically asked to lower the complexity of an automation script he wrote in place of something everyone else could understand. Another dev commented that more than likely it had to do with the company being worried that ranter_1 would leave and there would be no one capable of maintaining the code.
I understood this completely from both perspectives. It makes me worry how real this sometimes is. We don't get to implement X tech stack because people are worried that no one would be able to maintain Y project in the event of someone leaving. But fuck man, sometimes one wants to expand more and do things differently.
At work I came to find out that the main reason why the entirety of our stack is built in PHP is because the first dev hired into the web tech department(which is only about 12 years old in my institution) only knew PHP. The other part that deals with Java is due to some extensions to some third party applications that we have, Java knowledge (more specifically Spring and Grails) is used for those, the rest is mostly PHP. And while I LOVE PHP and don't really have anything against the language I really wonder what would it be of the institution had we've had a developer with a more....esoteric taste. Clojure, Elixir, Haskell, F# and many others. These are languages and tech stacks that bring such a forward way of thinking into the way we build things.
On the other hand, I understand if the talent pool for each of these stacks is somewhat hard to come up with, but if we don't push for certain items then they will never grow.
The other week I got scolded by the lead dev from the web tech department for using Clojure to create the demo of an application. He said that the project will most likely fall into his hands and he does not know the stack. I calmly mentioned that I would gladly take care of it if given the opportunity as well as to explain to him how the code works and provide training to everyone for it :D I also (in all of my greatness) built the same program for him in PHP. Now, I outrank him :P so the scold bounced out of the window, plus he is a friend, but the fact remains that we reached the situation in which the performance as well as the benefits of one stack were shadowed by the fact that it holds a more esoteric place in the development community.
In the end I am happy to provide the PHP codebase to him. The head of the department + my boss were already impressed with the fact that I was able to build the product in a small amount of time using a potent tech stack, they know where my abilities are and what I can do. That to me was all that matters, even if the project gets shelved, the fact that I was able to use it at work for something means a lot to me.
That and I got permission to use it for the things that will happen with my new department + the collective interest of everyone in paying me to give support even if I ever leave the institution.
Win.13 -
https://blogs.adobe.com/conversatio...
Adobe Flash Player will officially die in 2020.
No more updates. If there'is a security bug, it remain.30 -
I’m trying to add digit separators to a few amount fields. There’s actually three tickets to do this in various places, and I’m working on the last of them.
I had a nightmare debugging session earlier where literally everything would 404 unless I navigated through the site in a very roundabout way. I never did figure out the cause, but I found a viable workaround. Basically: the house doesn’t exist if you use the front door, but it’s fine if you go through the garden gate, around the back, and crawl in through the side window. After hours of debugging I eventually discovered that if I unlocked the front door with a different key, everything was fine… but nobody else has this problem?
Whatever.
Onto the problem at hand!
I’m trying to add digit separators to some values. I found a way to navigate to the page in question (more difficult than it sounds), and … I don’t know what view is rendering the page. Or what controller. Or how it generates its text.
The URL is encrypted, so I get no clues there. (Which was lead dev’s solution to having scrapeable IDs instead of just, you know, fixing them). The encryption also happens in middleware, so it’s a nightmare to work through. And it’s by the lead dev, so the code is fucking atrocious.
The view… could be one of many, and I don’t even know where they are. Or what layout. Or what partials go into building it.
All of the text on the page are “resources” — think named translations that support plus nested macros. I don’t know their names, and the bits of text I can search for are used fucking everywhere. “Confirmation number” (the most unique of them) turns up 79 matches. “Fee” showed up in 8310 places before my editor gave up looking. Really.
The table displaying the data, which is what I actually care about, isn’t built in JS or markup, but is likely a resource that goes through heavy processing. It gets generated in a controller somewhere (I don’t know the resource name so I can’t find it), and passed through several layers of “dynamic form” abstraction, eventually turned into markup, and rendered as a partial template. At least, that’s how it worked in the previous ticket. I found a resource that looks right, and there’s only the one. I found the nested macros it uses for the amount and total, and added the separators there… only to find that it doesn’t work.
Fucking dead end.
And i have absolutely nothing else to go on.
Page title? “Show”
URL? /~LiolV8N8KrIgaozEgLv93s…
Text? All from macros with unknown names. Can’t really search for it without considerable effort.
Table? Doesn’t work.
Text in the table? doesn’t turn up anything new.
Legal agreement? There are multiple, used in many places, generates them dynamically via (of course) resources, and even looking through the method usages, doesn’t narrow it down very much.
Just.
What the fuck?
Why does this need to be so fucking complicated?
And what genius decided “$100000.00” doesn’t need separators? Right, the lot of them because separators aren’t used ANYWHERE but in code I authored. Like, really? This is fintech. You’d think they would be ubiquitous.
And the sheer amount of abstraction?
Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.11 -
This happened when I got my first IT support job. Naturally as a 1st line support you get to do the fun and not at all tedious thing of resetting passwords.
So I take a ticket from one of our HR people where they say that 3 new employees can't access a certain system.
Without going into too much detail here I reset the passwords according to our procedures and be done with it.
But at the end of the day it turns out that one of those 3 new employees was the new CEO, and he was known to be not the most pleasant of people to work with.
So ofc there was a chain of emails with the words "How can someone not know who I am" in there somewhere.
Had a nice stressful weekend wondering if I'll still have a job after Monday and we had a whole new password reset procedure created because of that.2 -
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 -
I was supporting a legacy CRM app which front end used Visual Basic 6 and almost the entire business logic was written on SQL store procedures.
A "feature" of the product was the open code, anyone with admin access could modify forms, code and store procedures.
We also sold "official" (and expensive) consulting services to modify the code.
A long time customer owned this thing and it was heavily customized. They had hired us to change something, hired a third party to make other changes and decided to modify some stuff themselves because, why not?
Suddenly they came to product support asking to fix a bug. The problem happened on a non customized form.
After reviewing, I realized the form used several of the modified store procedures in the business layer. I tried saying we don't support custom code but my boss was being pushed and said "look into it"
All 3 parties denied responsibility and said their changes were NOT the problem (of course). Neither of them commented or documented their changes.
The customer started to threaten to sue us.
I spent 5 full days following every field on the form through the nested and recurrent SQL store procedures and turns out it was a very simple error. A failed insert statement.
I was puzzled of why the thing didn't throw any error even while debugging. Turns out in SQL 2003 (this was a while ago) someone used a print line statement and SQL stopped throwing errors to the console. I can only assume "printing" in SQL empties the buffered error which would be shown in the console.
I removed the print statement and the error showed up, we fixed it and didn't get sued
:)4 -
As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.
Long rant incoming.
Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.
Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.
About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.
What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.
Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.
Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.
This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.
When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.
Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.
On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.
Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'
After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.
To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.
My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.
Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.
After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.
It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.
Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?6 -
20+ years ago we got a contract to replace an old home grown system for managing rented equipment for a company with offices in two countries with a new standard system.
I was tasked with building a few addon modules to handle import and reporting that the standard system lacked.
Over the course of 8 months and multiple trips to their head office for on premises development along side their people that knew how it should work (there was a lot of waiting for info so it was not 8 months of actual work) we finally was ready to present the finished solution.
After about one hour of demonstration their boss questioned why we did not demonstrate the connection to their corporate group accounting system ...
“Corporate group accounting?”
After some confused discussion it turns out that in one of the first meetings the sales person had they had mentioned this accounting system and that all accounting info was to be exported there.
This requirement was never listed in the specifications we got and looking into it it turned out that the standard system did not support such exports at all.
In the end we had to throw it all away as it proved impossible to get that info out of the system (which was not of our design).
We barely avoided having to repay all fees as their people had approved the specification but standing there without a clue to what he was asking for was a very scary experience, thinking “how could we miss this?”2 -
Yknow, I want to make an android app that I have in my mind for about half a year now and I already tried twice, both with Kotlin and with Java but everytime I try it's just pain and suffering and frustration...
No it's not because of the language, I like Java and I like Kotlin too and I'd say I'm at least decent at Kotlin and really good in Java...
No no.. the issue is the fucking Android SDK and the mix-and-match documentation available online!!!
Every fucking time I want to implement some sort of UI element, user action or a background service and I start googling how to do it It comes with with at least 3 different stack overflow solutions, all of them saying "that way of doing it is deprecated, instead you should X" and looking up the OFFICIAL FUCKING DOCS it will just make me roll up in the corner and cry because of how fucking inconsistent it is and the retarded domain language it uses... fucking transactions for fucking fragments inside fucking activities... because I guess the word "screen"/"view"/"template" or something similar natural just was too mainstream for the all knowing alphabet soup that google is...
And then you start looking up what the fucking difference even is and how to code it up only to find out there's at least 12 other opinions on how fragments should be used and what should be an activity and what should be a damn fragment...
But that's not all, that's just the base... I get a headache even thinking about how the fucking inflating of templates and the entire R. notation works. You want to open a fucking tiny corner menu with the settings options? WELL THEN YOU FUCKING BETTER REMEMBER TO IMPLEMENT IT THROUGH SOME SORT OF EVENT AND INFLATE THE MENU YOURSELF EVEN THOUGH ITS THE SAME FUCKING THING WITH STATIC STRINGS...
AND WHY THE FUCK DO I NEED LIKE 4 NEW FILES TO IMPLEMENT A FUCKING LISTVIEW...
also talking about ListViews... what was wrong with "ListView"... Why do we need a "RecyclerView"... oh right... because the fucks fucked the fuck up and all the legacy components were designed by a monkey and are next to useless! SO WE NEEDED A NEW NAME FOR THE FIXED VERSION, CANT NAME IT LISTVIEW AGAIN... FUCK YOU...
honestly... if I got a dolar for every "what the fuck android" I said during trying to understand that mess I'd be richer by a few hundred...
oh oh oh, but you know what? You don't like the android SDK? that's fine, you can use fucking React or Flutter or something... yeah.. because instead of torturing myself with the android SDK I want to torture myself with an abstraction of the same SDK and JavaScript as the fucking cherry on top... HAVE YOU FUCKING SEEN THE CODE FLUTTER SHOWS ON THEIR WEBSITE AS THE "Introduction" ?!!!
Look at this piece of shit:
[code in attached image, we could really use a proper Markdown support at least for rants]
THAT'S NOT EVEN THE ENTIRE THING, THAT'S JUST THE *REALLY* UGLY PART...
The fucking nesting... What is it with JS and all the fucking nesting everytime?! It looks like shit.... It reads like shit as well...
WHY, in the name OF FUCK, IS THERE MORE THAN 5 ANDROID FRAMEWORKS and ALL of them... used this FUCKING NOVEL idea of programming using A FUCKING BRACKET WALL
It always looks like:
(code(code[code{code(code{code()})}]));
If I wanted to make a fucking app or a website using fucking Haskell I'd do that.... at this point reading assembly code feels like heaven compared to this retardation... Why is this so popular?! WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE SEE IN IT?! Clearly it's not the aesthetics... it looks like a fucking frog vomit running down an emus leg, fuck that.... I don't even hate classic JavaScript, it's a good enough language and it does what I tell it to... but these ugly fucking frameworks like react, angular and whatever else uses this fucking format can go fuck right off. This is not the way JS is gonna get a better name for itself...
So:
Fuck Google
Fuck the marionette that designed the Android SDK
Fuck the Hellspawn the came up with the "functional-like" way of using JavaScript
Fuck everyone that thinks "JavaScript everywhere" is a good thing
And deeply future-fuck everyone that makes a new framework following any of these standards, stucks a .js at the end of the name and releases his hairball.js of an invention into the fucking world....
It's a mess... fuck everything android related...
14 -
Fucking Amazon rant again...
TLDR: Amazon specializes in “the last mile”. They are repeatedly allowing a 3rd party shipper (Purolator) destroy their main value proposition. Thoughts at the end.
Me on the phone with their support...
Me: so it says my package was attempted to be delivered today. I did not get a call or notification or anything and I have been working from home all day to wait for the package.
Support: -Sigh- yes, I can see it was Purolator we have been having trouble with them lately.
Me: ok, so are you able to see what happened?
Support: let me put you on hold.
.......
Support: So they said they will not call for a delivery, did they use your building buzzer?
Me: Nope, just stood outside the building and then left I guess.
Support: -sigh- Well you can pick it up at their depot. Let me get you the address.
Me: The one by the airport?
Support: Yes it looks like it is about an hour away from where you are. And they are only open during work hours.
Me: So, after working from home to get this package you advice is to take 3 hours off work and go there to pick it up?
Support: Well, we can refund it? If thats what you want.
Me: No, I would like the package I ordered please.
Support: There is nothing I can do sir.
Me: So before I hang up let me see if I have it straight. When I order a package from Amazon, do I have an option of who ships it?
Support: No, I’m sorry but that is decided on our end.
Me: And I have had this problem before with this shipping agent. So, your telling me that when I ship things to me with Amazon that I have no control of wether I even get the package? Your telling me it is literally a coin toss as to wether or not I ever get my package?
Support: yes sir, I’m sorry but that is all I can do.
Me: So you realize that, for example, if I went to my local grocery store and it was a coin toss that I could take my groceries home (even after I paid for them) then I will always go to another store....
Support: yes, I know. There is nothing I can do.
Me: So from now on I have to order items, wait for them to be shipped, check the shipper and then cancel the order of it is them?
Support: -sigh- you cannot cancel an order after it has shipped...
Me: wow. Sure is great being a prime and audible member. I get fast delivery of 50% of my packages and no delivery at all of the other 50%. Sorry for the sarcasm...
Support: I’m sorry I can’t help more.
Me: So just to clarify. I can expect NOT to get the package I ordered?
Support: sorry
Me: have a nice day.
————
Here are my thoughts as a student of business...
Amazon specializes in “the last mile” (in their delivery service anyway) and when they deliver the package they also deliver on that value proposition.
However, now it seems that one of their shipping providers is failing at getting packages that last mile, which is resulting and destroying the idea of their value proposition in a customers eyes. (Affecting more than me as the rep said)
Now, instead of believing that Amazon will get things to me, saving me that last mile trip to the store etc., I firmly believe that it is a toss up as to wether I will ever receive my package (based on carrier)
I know that if I was in Amazon’s position (a carrier hurting my overall value proposition with consistently unacceptable service) that I would come down on them with a force they have never seen or drop them entirely.
But of course, every company reaches a point where they have such market share and sway that they take their eye off the ball when it comes to their value proposition to customers.16 -
After I spent 4 years in a startup company (it was literally just me and a guy who started it).
Being web dev in this company meant you did everything from A-Z. Mostly though it was shitty hacky "websites/webapps" on one of the 3 shitty CMSs.
At some point we had 2 other devs and 2 designers (thank god he hired some cause previously he tried designing them on his own and every site looked like a dead puppy soaked in ass juice).
My title changed from a peasant web dev to technical lead which meant shit. I was doing normal dev work + managing all projects. This basically meant that I had to show all junior devs (mostly interns) how to do their jobs. Client meetings, first point of contact for them, caring an "out of hours" support phone 24/7, new staff interviews, hiring, training and much more.
Unrealistic deadlines, stress and pulling hair were a norm as was taking the blame anytime something went wrong (which happened very often).
All of that would be fine with me if I was paid accordingly, treated with respect as a loyal part of the team but that of course wasn't the case.
But that wasn't the worst part about this job. The worst thing was the constant feeling that I'm falling behind, so far behind that I'll never be able to catch up. Being passionate about web development since I was a kid this was scaring the shit out of me. Said company of course didn't provide any training, time to learn or opportunities to progress.
After these 4 years I felt burnt out. Programming, once exciting became boring and stale. At this point I have started looking for a new job but looking at the requirements I was sure I ain't going anywhere. You see when I was busy hacking PHP CMSs, OOPHP became a thing and javascript exploded. In the little spare time I had I tried online courses but everyone knows it's not the same, doing a course and actually using certain technology in practice. Not going to mention that recruiters usually expect a number of years of experience using the technology/framework/language.
That was the moment I lost faith in my web dev future.
Happy to say though about a month later I did get a job in a great agency as a front end developer (it felt amazing to focus on one thing after all these years of "full-stack bullshit), got a decent salary (way more than I expected) and work with really amazing and creative people. I get almost too much time to learn new stuff and I got up to speed with the latest tech in a few weeks. I'm happy.
Advice? I don't really have any, but I guess never lose faith in yourself.3 -
So my client is (was) paying 3500$~ a month to that service that has also an API and we have been now fighting atleast 2 months for them to raise the rate limit higher. (because the new features pull in a lot more records, to basically make their shitty old dashboard obsolete at some point)
He's even willing to pay more, but the ticket and calls just get thrown around from one level to another, when he threatened to quit, all they changed was to send him to another level that was suggesting 3 months 10% off and when he declined it just got thrown into the pool again lol
So what we end up doing is register his wife on same service (there's not really any alternatives that actually have all that weird shit he needs and his wife was co-owner anyway, so it was just a name change basically), but just tick the higher API rate limit and it worked, he's now quitting the old one.
What's funny though, the new contracts for the same thing he was paying cost just ~2450$ (would have been even less, but hes too clingy on that one page I can't recreate without having the data) so they just lost that revenue, just because they didn't want to raise the API rate limit and the client also decided to give me the difference of one month on top of my contract, once the new contract kicks in and the old one expires in 6ish days (at best) or 12ish days at worst
well done support and assigned engineers, not only did you just lose a client with an old contract paying you 12000$/year more, but you also gave me a great free bost in money lol
btw: I hope I put everything in again, I this time decided to be brave (read as "stupid") and wrote it in the devrant webapp, then accidentally clicked twice outside the borders, making everything disappear.. -
I finally fucking made it!
Or well, I had a thorough kick in my behind and things kinda fell into place in the end :-D
I dropped out of my non-tech education way too late and almost a decade ago. While I was busy nagging myself about shit, a friend of mine got me an interview for a tech support position and I nailed it, I've been messing with computers since '95 so it comes easy.
For a while I just went with it, started feeling better about myself, moved up from part time to semi to full time, started getting responsibilities. During my time I have had responsibility for every piece of hardware or software we had to deal with. I brushed up documentation, streamlined processes, handled big projects and then passed it on to 'juniors' - people pass through support departments fast I guess.
Anyway, I picked up rexx, PowerShell and brushed up on bash and windows shell scripting so when it felt like there wasn't much left I wanted to optimize that I could easily do with scripting I asked my boss for a programming course and free hands to use it to optimize workflows.
So after talking to programmer friends, you guys and doing some research I settled on C# for it's broad application spectrum and ease of entry.
Some years have passed since. A colleague and I built an application to act as portal for optimizations and went on to automate AD management, varius ssh/ftp jobs and backend jobs with high manual failure rate, hell, towards the end I turned in a hobby project that earned myself in 10 times in saved hours across the organization. I felt pretty good about my skills and decided I'd start looking for something with some more challenge.
A year passed with not much action, in part because I got comfy and didn't send out many applications. Then budget cuts happened half a year ago and our Branch's IT got cut bad - myself included.
I got an outplacement thing with some consultant firm as part of the goodbye package and that was just hold - got control of my CV, hit LinkedIn and got absolutely swarmed by recruiters and companies looking for developers!
So here I am today, working on an AspX webapp with C# backend, living the hell of a codebase left behind by someone with no wish to document or follow any kind of coding standards and you know what? I absolutely fucking love it!
So if you're out there and in doubt, do some competence mapping, find a nice CV template, update your LinkedIn - lots of sources for that available and go search, the truth is out there! -
Have you encountered projects that were beyond saving?
Been freelancing for a client via agency for the past year. In the beginning the deal was to maintain identity verification sdk for android maybe 10-15 hours a month or so. Their flow consisted of around 25-30 screens, so I took it thinking it was easy. Boy I was wrong.
Codebase was and still is a complete spaghetti, backend weird and overcomplicated and impossible to talk with someone in backend. Had to reverse engineer their complicated flows many times just to make a small change on the app. There also are lots of issues with capturing/sending camera recordings especially on older devices. The fact that Im the only dev maintaining this doesnt help either.
First few months it was just maintenance, later some small features and soon it become a 40 hour a month gig. I was able to deal with it but then management changed, they started micromanaging me heavily and now they want me to do 60-70 hours a month. Also they asked to implement some unnecessarily complicated features and to be honest without refactoring most of the codebase I cant even begin to think of how to implement them.
Also workload in my main job increased. Started sacrificing my evenings, weekends and basically my wellbeing to work on their product. Tried to relax but then I realized Im just spending my freetime thinking about their project all of the time. Best part is that last few updates fucked up the whole flow and I dont even understand where the problem is anymore: backend, 3rd party integration issues or something else that I did.
Last friday told them that my availability changed and Im quitting. Told them that Im gonna provide support till the end of the month but no big features. Just spent a full shift in my main job and another full shift working on their product, trying to untagle their spaghetti.. Im totally lost and burned out. Meanwhile stupid manager is asking why "simple" stuff according to him is taking too long.
I should receive my last payment from agency this week, also asked them to send it to me earlier but no answer so far. At this point Im so burned out that I dont care anymore about the last payment, even if client complains that everything is broken and doesnt want to pay me. Project is beyond fucked and that SDK as well as their backend is a ticking time bomb. Im done.14 -
I've never used Windows in my day-to-day life. No kidding.
When I got my father's first computer, I used an old distribution called BBC Linux. I didn't have any computer knowledge, it was my first contact with a computer, so I went to a friend's house and asked for a CD to install on my computer. I don't know if this friend ended up making a "gotcha" and thought I'd give up, but I just read the manuals and fell in love. That was year 2000.
Then I used Conectiva Linux, then I went to Red Hat 9, then Slackware, then in 2007 I started using Solaris. And I stayed on Solaris (Solaris 10, Solaris Nevada and OpenSolaris) until 2011.
In 2011 I bought a Mac. I stayed at Apple until 2020, when I couldn't stand Apple forcing me to buy new computers (I still don't understand how a 2011 iMac, i5 (4 Hyper Thread cores) with 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD only runs up to High Sierra).
Then I bought a Dell. It came with Windows 10, the first thing I did was install WSL2. I could not stand it, the system is bad, sorry. I installed OpenSuse and have been using it for two years.
It's just that every day someone tells me "how can you use this"? "There is no alternative to Windows, do you want to be different?"
I know that my story was the reverse of the "mainstream", so I'm going to talk about my vision of Windows, that in my brain it is actually the "alternative".
- Having a file explorer without "tabs" in 2022 is unthinkable for me.
- I love terminal. And the Windows terminal is very limited. "ps ... | awk ... | xargs ..." is a must for me. "find ./ -name '...' -exec ..."... these things on Windows are totally "different" and have the "powershell way" while all other operating systems keep the same form. And cygwin is not an option. As Wine for serious work is also not.
- Dragging a file into the terminal, and having it write its path, is so natural, that when Windows didn't do it, I was dismayed.
- I've always used StarOffice, OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. All the people in my story received my documents and reports as a PDF and no one complained. Until a coworker saw me editing in LibreOffice and said "oh I want it in word format". As long as he didn't know, everything was fine, right?
- Windows is paid. And is there advertising? I don't understand. And I refuse. If you want to display advertising, then excuse me. I have no problem paying, I'm not an opensource shiite. It's just that paying and not working bothers me much more than an opensource that I can fix or expect a fix knowing the good will of the people involved.
- Hyper-V is a joke. QEMU/KVM is better, and Bhyve on FreeBSD which is a very young project, is already a million times better than Hyper-V.
- Developing in C/C++ for Windows is only possible in two ways: Either you've always lived in Windows and your brain is conditioned, or you compile with MSYS2 (CLang or GCC).
- There is no significant evolution of the windows desktop since 95.
- Multiple workspace support with multiple monitors, not ready. It's another joke.
- REGEDIT does not need any comment.
- The system loses performance over time. I still don't know how Windows achieves this.
- I've seen people complain about desktop fragmentation on Unix and Linux. Many DEs end up leaving applications with different themes (like running a Qt application in Gnome and GTK in KDE), but to be quite honest, the lack of Windows standard bothered me much more. Even Microsoft's own software is completely different: Control Panel, Calculator, Paint and Office, To-Do, and Settings, have horrible style differences and look-and-feel fragmentation.
- Dark mode has not been implemented. It's another joke. Many applications are white while everything else is dark. Sorry, even on Linux which is a mess, this has been resolved. And well resolved.
- NTFS? Serious?
- C:, D:.. It doesn't convince me since DOS.
- Bloatware.
- News "biased" in the search bar is a lack of respect for those who use the computer to work.
And that. For me, Windows is the alternative operating system. I can't take Windows seriously, for me it's an experimental one like Haiku or ReactOS. It's good to play.
About market share, it doesn't convince me to use it. But convinces me to sell. I've always developed applications to run on Windows. And when I need it, I turn on a VM to compile the project. But in everyday life? Impractical.15 -
A friend of mine who works in tech support at a college gets this call. The guy on the other end (a college professor) asks how to open an application on his computer.
Tech Support: "There should be an icon on your desktop."
He then hears this strange rustling noise over the phone.....
Tech Support: "What are you doing?"
Professor: "You said to look on my desktop."
Tech Support: "Ummm, hang on. I'll be there in a few minutes." -
Diary of an insane lead dev: day 447
pdf thumbnails that the app generates are now in S3 instead of saved on disk.
when they were on disk, we would read them from disk into a stream and then create a stream response to the client that would then render the stream in the UI (hey, I didn't write it, I just had to support it)
one of my lazy ass junior devs jumps on modifying it before I can; his solution is to retrieve the file from the cloud now, convert the stream into a base64 encoded string, and then shove that string into an already bloated viewmodel coming from the server to be rendered in the UI.
i'm like "why on earth are you doing that? did you even test the result of this and notice that rendering those thumbnails now takes 3 times as long???"
jr: "I mean, it works doesn't it?"
seriously, if the image file is already hosted on the cloud, and you can programmatically determine its URL, why wouldn't you just throw that in the src attribute in your html tag and call it a day? why would you possibly think that the extra overhead of retrieving and converting the file before passing it off to the UI in an even larger payload than before would result in a good user experience for the client???
it took me all of 30 seconds to google and find out that AWS SDK has a method to GetPreSignedURL on a private file uploaded to s3 and you can set when it expires, and the application is dead at the end of the year.
JFC. I hate trying to reason with these fuckheads by saying "you are paid for you brain, fucking USE IT" because, clearly these code monkeys do not have brains.3 -
My company has two offices in separate cities but they treat each the devs of each location very very differently.
In one office the devs get full power to experiment with whatever tech they want, they just stomp their feet and management gives em whatever they ask for, freedom of choice regarding anything they are working on, to be allowed to do greenfield work or experimental stuff
But in my office we are forced to do ONLY. Bug fixing and refactoring shitty code from over a decade a go, our tech is ancient and we are not allowed to to
Shit , anything we ask for is denied
And improvements to our process is shut down with the reasoning that whatever we got works so why meddle ??
For us , management is solely focussed on making sure we respond to support calls , deployments , configurations and little bug fixing. Basically they only care that we manage to finish for out next delivery.
No new work whatsoever!
If there is any hint of something new to to
Implemented the golden boys from the other office just stopm their feet tillmthey get it or just go off and start working on it then seek permission afterwards, with their much larger team they obviously get further than we do by the time management hears about it so they end up taking over the work since they already have more done already
My manager decided to push us to attend a company devCon to share ideas with our devs from our other location. This rapidly turned into a sour experience
Basically we do all shitty boring work which puts money on the table which goes straight to those idiots to play with...
They have the guts to laugh when we mentioned that we never get anything interesting to work on
Never seen so many of our devs looking up job sites on the bus back...
This is gonna blow up in management's face...2 -
So I wrote an application that loads data from a 3rd party API. It allows the user to enter a record locator number and pull it up. By design, the value can be a partial match and it will pull up the record still.
The first API call I make only took 2-3 seconds, so I didn't see an issue as it's loading most of the data the app needs. I keep the filters/fields as they are and move on.
Fast forward 6 months. The user is complaining that the records are taking 30-45 seconds to load. Sure enough, load times are terrible. I've made lots of changes to what fields I'm loading through the API, and I'm calling several additional APIs, so I start pulling pieces of code out to see if anything improves. They all barely make any difference--still 30+ second load times. I end up removing everything except the first API call I developed that was taking 2-3 seconds before. Still taking 30+ seconds.
The 3rd party API allows you to filter using "starts with" or "contains". I used "contains" initially and had no issue, but I decided to try "starts with" since it should fit most use cases.
Load time is less than one second. I add back everything else. Load time is just over a second.
It seems that the 3rd party updated the API and multiplied load times by 10 when using that particular filter. I spent almost an hour on this since the platform doesn't support performance or debugging tools very well, and it all came down to a one line fix.4 -
"It works on our end", the sentence that made me lose my shit.
I've been working on a project were we're supposed to integrate an API into our system.
When trying to get some user id's (UUID) from said API, we got a type-error in the response (???), so I called their integration support and asked what the fuck they were doing (not really, i was kinda calm at this point).
The answer I got was following:
Integration guy: "Uh, bro, like, I don't even know, it's probably on your end"
Me: "We literally used this endpoint with the same parameters yesterday, and got a result we expected. I noticed you updated your API this morning, did you make any major changes?"
Integration guy: "Yeah we changed the type of user id from string to number"
Me: "So, you changed the type of a UUID (uuid4) from string to number? How did you not think that would be an issue? I can see in your forums that everyone else is having the same issue."
Integration guy: "Nah, it's probably a bug in your code, it works on our end"
Me in my mind: *IT WORKS ON YOUR END?!? IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER IF IT WORKS ON YOUR END, FUCKTARD.*
What I actually said: "Uhm, I'm not sure if works on your end either, I'm not even sure how this change made it to production. But hey, thanks I guess, bye."
WHY AM I NOT ABLE TO YELL AT PEOPLE WHEN THEY ARE BEING RETARDED???
But really though, when you're maintaining an API, you shouldn't fucking care if things work on your end in your dev environment. What matters is how it works in production, for the end user/users.
And I know that 99% of cases it's the users fault by entering the wrong parameters or trying to request with wrongly setup auth and what not, but still.
Don't ASSUME nothing's wrong on your end. It's your fucking job to fix the issues.
And guess what? The problem was on their side.
I'm going fucking bald.2 -
The worst mistake I made was using json files as a simple database.
The project was to be delivered the day before it was even ordered, so I had to take shortcuts.
I totally underestimated the popularity of the project, so all that file reading and writing made the server slow and sluggish. It also being submitted on a shared host, made it even worse.
In the end the host shut it down. I don't recall, but I guess I had to add that database support after all, the project being that popular...4 -
Really getting tired of these web design ads. I would turn on Adblock but I want to support YouTubers that are actually interesting to watch. I saw this ad today, Divi. A plugin of some sort for WordPress and the lady in the video is talking about how building a website is like painting a master piece but not really. And then goes on about "creating" a website with their tool on the page itself. (Like a Wix or Weebly but on the actual page and live). I watch the video to the end and decide to check the comments and someone said "or you know, learn HTML and stop being lazy" *liked* then one smart ass replied, "or use Wix, or use Weebly, or use any other thing online that lets you design a website without typing code". It annoys me how ignorant people can be about designing, but I don't blame them. People are lazy in general and would want to do things the easy way even though it's not the best way. You know the saying, give a man a CMS or WYSIWYG builder and he'll make a website, but teach a man to code and he'll make more, improved websites.4
-
Most useless feature:
Once we had to create a Learning Manager System to a small university. One of the (useful) features was a "file system" to people upload, organize and share documents (like a Google Drive prototype). This was the "student portfolio".
However, we had to create a page to act as a "cover" to it, that should allow the student to change the background, add exactly 2 images, and up to 9 "post-its". The image shows the notebook of our client while he was thanking us praising it as the greatest innovation of the decade.
The post-its was kinda nice, but what's the point of those images??
Anyway... On the same meeting of that picture the client asked us to include a "canvas" on that same page, so people could draw whatever they want. The words used was "just like [MS] Paint".
We postponed it, hoping he would forget about it, but on the end of the project he was still asking about it.
I found a lib that did the job and integrated with the project, but I also included a long comment for the next devs saying that I'm sorry they would have to support such thing 😅
The client loved but we never knew anyone that really used that Paint
3 -
My first job. Hired as a designer. It was me and a backend dev (PHP). Company wanted us to build their e-commerce website, but the backend dev had no eye for design or front end chops, fell onto me, so I learned it on the spot.
I also did the mistake of trying to prove myself too hard and ended up doing IT, network and user support, user training, phone sales and helping the print team on designs, on top of my already taxing responsibilities, for 18k/year.
In the end, the company moved offices and I was tasked with finding and installing a new server, IP phone system, and organising the desks following a carefully crafted and approved plan. Spent the weekend doing that (had some friends that didn't even work for the company join as they knew of my struggle) only for the bosses to arrive on Monday, decide they didn't like it, and just said "change it", ignoring the plan entirely. I then left without having another job lined up and never looked back.1 -
Our new IT support college (I've been the support for like almost 2 years into the company and then I moved onto another project) asked me about how to configure a printer over LAN. I explained him the whole procedure and after he asked me what does the gateway IP means, I explained him that it's a router, switch or another device that know how to forward packets on to other networks and gave him an example like 192.168.100.1 and told him that usually is the router's/switch IP address and is the same IP address as the static IP of the printer but with .1 at the end instead of the last number set. After that he asked me: "Like this? 192.168.100.25.1?"3
-
CTO: We'll use epochs for any time related fields in our services.
After service integration...
Dev from producer team: Hey the time field is showing up as 1970 and not null in your table. That seems to be a bug.
Me: Code looks fine. We are converting epochs to timestamps here. Null is taken care by the library function itself.
The same dev: Actually we are sending zero instead of null values in that time field. But we'd want the end table to treat that as null.
Me: Why can't you send null then?
The dev: Actually avro doesn't support nulls. Hence the zero.
Me: WTF??????
Manager to me: Actually you need to convert them as null. Anyways, this is not a blocker and we can live with it for now.
END OF RANT
Why can't they fucking send it as null? And when I asked about the details, that particular event type doesn't require that field. Still the manager insists on sending that field for it.23 -
Well, everytime I build a pc for a friend I'll always end up telling myself "this is the last time". Not bc I have a problem with building pc's, I love it, but its the "free of charge" 24/7 IT-support my non techy (techii?) friends expects from me after the build is done I hate.
So here's the deal.
A week ago I built a brand new pc for a friend, as usual (bc he's a good friend) I told him that my "fee" would be a couple of beers and the train ticket up. So I got there, built the pc and we hooked it up to his monitor. About 5sec in to windows the screen went black. My friend started to panic, and I started to check if all the components and cables were hooked up right (tho I've done this a couple of times, shit can happen) but found nothing was wrong.
I had to take the train home, cause it got late AF and I live in another city, but I told him to try another cable. Felt bad AF for not being able to help him.
Flash forward 2 days, my friend started messaging me late in the evening, complaining about how he had tried everything and ultimately had to leave the pc at an (as he called it) "proffesional" who charged him 100$.
I felt even guiltier about that one, asked him if he tried to change the hdmi, but he said that's in The hands of this guy now.
Two days later this PC God gave him an answer.
Guess What he told him?
CHANGE THE ***** HDMI CABLE.
Well, shit..
Afterwards he wanted help installing drivers over fb-messenger.
I love my friends, but man why do I do this to myself.3 -
I wanna make you feel what you have brought into my house!!
I was working with security cameras once in a home automation project. One of those camera particularly stand out by offering a cgi without password request to view and change the current passwort and username.
Seriously wtf is wrong with you? I mean this thing automatically connects to an internet service offering everyone to connect to it with that passwort and username. And I know some of you might say "hey chill the cgi is only available on the wifi" - dammit no. Security is a lifestyle do it complete or get the fuck out. God knows what other mistakes there might be hidden in that thing screaming out to everyone to watch me taking a shit.
But that's not the end of it. My company arranged a call to the technical support of that camera so that I can explain the problem and a patch gets released. Those guys didn't give a shit about it and were even laughing at me. Fuck you!
So whoever is responsible - I will find you - and you will never see me coming.4 -
Yesterday while we finished having breakfast, the receptionist from the office approached us and said: "Guys, the company mail does not work! We lost the domain! They forgot to pay the bill!" and we all see each other's faces confused.
I don't like to link the work email on my personal phone, so I open the company's page on the phone and for some reason a DNS error appears. oh boy!
We all go crazy ass to the computers to see the mail and we can use it normally, my computer opens the company page normal, we send emails between us and everything works well…
I ask the receptionist if the test emails arrive and she says "No, I cannot even open the mail". (hmmm) I go to see what happens and she says "Look!" I see a label on the login page: "your password was changed 16 hours ago" (facepalm) I ask her if she have changed the password and she say NO. So I ask the support guy if he can reset her password and that's it. Magic, magic!
In the end we remember that not all of us have the same "computer knowledge" and discovered that the company's website only works if you enter “www”, very good custom software company! Very good!3 -
A fight story (separation of concern) : work vs life
IT Director (IT'D) forwarded a client message (false detection) to my whatsapp (personal number). I am sitting next to his cabin.
After an hour,
ITD : what was the issue with the client x?
Me : (proved false detection),
ITD : did you emailed client?
Me : no, don't send me these in WhatsApp, if any issues, email me since I won't check whatsapp and there is no guarantee that I will reply you back.
ITD : why, don't be negative. Either you have to or me have to do it.
Me : Tell them to email.
ITD : That is not right.
Me : I don't care if you provide support via WhatsApp. But I don't. Unless you provide a separate mobile and connection.
End of story.3 -
This day I have received the most glorious news in e-pistolary form. For some years, I was suffering in support of a client who was, well, insufferable. My presence there paralleled the divine comedy in both essence and fact.
I opened the missive, expecting another plea to bail them out of whatever clusterfuck they found themselves in. Instead, what I found was something truly magical.
"Hey Human,
I hope this finds you well. I'm not sure if you remember a few years back, we were trying to decide between IBM Cloud and AWS. Well, after years of battling FF*, we're finally moving ahead with AWS. He failed one too many times to deliver anything visibly. After you left, there was no one left he could use to steal credit, ideas, and work.
FF is still pushing to have them use IBM cloud as a "warm backup" in the event "AWS fails." We will see where that goes.
I figured you'd like to know; you were the void in the wilderness for a long time. I don't want to think about how much time we could have saved if we had just listened.
PeeEm**"
This event represents a personal victory, albeit belated, over a few peoples' absurd amount of privilege. Towards the end, I was vicious about my contestation to the insanity of adopting a desperate hedge attempt-as-cloud offering from a failing company. Some examples:
// cloud 'strategy meeting'
Moi: What cloud platform are we looking at using?
FF: We're looking at IBM cloud and AWS as a second.
Moi: Why is that? I understand you're obligated to rep your offering first, but that decision doesn't seem to have the customer's best interest at heart.
FF: IBM cloud is a market leader; AWS isn't as good.
Moi: I see. I mean, that's the tech equivalent of the company's fleet management considering monkeys on tricycles as a strong competitor to service trucks, but I get what you mean.
// steering meeting
Director: Who can we look to as an example? Who is currently using the IBM cloud?
Moi: No one; they account for a single-digit portion of the actual cloud market. Their long game to sell you a "Hybrid Cloud," which means put some front end payload in a CDN, and buy n-frame units of IBM z servers for the DC with IBM gateway appliances acting as connective tissue. So it's not the cloud at all, really.
Director: How does it compare in cost?
Moi: It's generally 40% more expensive than other clouds, and it only goes higher as you option their software.
Director: What about Watson? I hear Watson is good?
Moi: It's a brand name. Most of the "Watson" product is just a facade on top of FOSS products like Spark, Hadoop, Elasticsearch, etc.
Director: Those were words. They sounded good. FF say it's good tho so we'll believe him because we're from the same city.
Moi: *deletes Director from LinkedIn*
Moral of the story: Never trust a vendor that only recommends their products.
*FF = FatFuck - an embarrassingly rotund individual whose girth is roughly equivalent to his height. He shit his way into an IBM architect position in his mid-20s purely due to winning the visa lottery. He had fake hair glued to his head for his wedding to hide his male pattern baldness; his arrange-married wife undoubtedly cries herself to sleep after sex.
**PeeEm - the then project manager, now portfolio manager of some satellite projects. An overall decent human being, capable.9 -
The company I work at sends their developers out to other companies to help them work on projects and help them in other ways (advice when communicating to customers of on demand software for example).
While not on a project you are working in house training trainees and interns. Part of that is teaching them to show initiative and treating them as full developers. The 30 interns all discussed a git flow and code format.
During the third sprint (two weeks sprints) a team messaged me if I wanted to check their merge request for the sprint.
It took me a glance at the first file to know they didnt do any review themselves. I used my flywheel to check all their changes and without being able to read the code I saw indentation was all over the place, inconsistent bracket placements etc. I let them know I wouldnt check their code until it was according to their own standards.
Two days later I got the message to check it again. At first glance the indentation was fine so I started reading the code. Every single thing was hardcoded, not made to support mobile (or any resolution other than 1920×1080).
A week later they improved it and still not good. Gave them a few pointers like I would for any colleague and off they went to fix things. The code became worse and indentation was all over the place.
I told them the next time it shouldnt be a quick glance to be able to reject it again. By this time other teams came to me asking why it wasnt merged yet and I explained it to them. One of the teams couldnt do anything u til this was merged so I told them to implement it themselves. I was surprised that 4 teams came to me asking about a merge request, that was every team except the team whose pull request it was.
4 weeks after the intitial sprint the other team made a merge request and I had three small comments and then an hour later it was merged.
The other team messaged me why their merge request did went through (still havent seen any of their team in person, Im sitting 10 meters away from them behind a wall)
They also said that it was easier for them because they started from scratch. Thats when I called them in to discuss it all and if they were not interns but full time developers they would have been fired. I told them communication is key and that if you dont understand something you come in person to ask about it. They all knew I like teaching and have the patience to explain a single thing ten times, but the initiative should be theirs.
One of the team members is my current coworker and he learned his lesson by that. The others stopped with their study and started doing something completely else.
TL;DR
Merge request is open for 4 weeks, in the end another team started from scratch and finished it within a week. The original team didnt ask me questions or come to me in person, where other teams did.
DISCLAIMER: some of you might find it harsh, but in our experience it works the best for teaching and we know when people don't dare to ask questions and we help them in that too. It's all about the soft skills at our company.4 -
This was not exactly the worst work culture because the employees, it was because the upper level of the organization chart on the IT department.
I'm not quite sure how to translate the exact positions of that chart, but lets say that there is a General Manager, a couple of Area Managers (Infrastructure, Development), some Area Supervisors (2 or 3, by each area), and the grunts (that were us). Anyway, anything on the "Manager" was the source of all the toxicity on the department.
First and foremost, there was a lack of training for almost any employee. We were expected to know everything since day-1. Yes, the new employees had a (very) brief explanation about the technologies/languages were used, but they were expected to perform as a senior employee almost since the moment they cross the door. And forget about having some KT (Knowledge Transfer) sessions, they were none existent and if they existed, were only to solve a very immediate issue (now imagine what happened when someone quit*).
The general culture that they have to always say "yes" to the client/customer to almost anything without consulting to the development teams if that what was being asked to do was doable, or even feasible. And forget about doing a proper documentation about that change/development, as "that was needed yesterday and it needs to be done to be implemented tomorrow" (you know what I mean). This contributes to the previous point, as we didn't have enough time to train someone new because we had this absurd deadlines.
And because they cannot/wanted to say "NO", there were days when they came with an amount of new requirements that needed to be done and it didn't matter that we had other things to do. And the worst was that, until a couple of years (more or less), there was almost impossible to gather the correct requirements from the client/user, as they (managers) "had already" that requirement, and as they "know better" what the user wants, it was their vision what was being described on the requirements, not the users'...
And all that caused that, in a common basis, didn't have enough time to do all this stuff (mainly because the User Support) causing that we needed to do overtime, which almost always went unpaid (because a very ambiguous clause of the contract, and that we were "non-union workers"**). And this is my favorite point of this list, because, almost any overtime went unpaid, so basically we were expected to be working for free after the end of the work day (lets say, after the 17:00). Leaving "early" was almost a sin for the managers, as they always expected that we give more time to work that the indicated on the contract, and if not, they could raise a report to HR because the ambiguous clause allowed them to do it (among other childish things that they do).
Finally, the jewel of the crown, is that they never, but never acknowledge that they made a mistake. Never. That was impossible! If something failed on the things/systems/applications that they had assigned*** it was always our fault.
- "A report for the Finance Department is giving wrong information? It's the DBA's fault**** because although he manages that report, he couldn't imagine that I have an undocumented service (that runs before the creation the report) crashed because I modified a hidden and undocumented temporal table and forgot to update that service."
But, well, at least that's on the past. And although those aren't all the things that made that workplace so toxic, for me those were the most prominent ones.
-
* Well, here we I live it's very common to don't say anything about leaving the company until the very last day. Yes, I know that there are people that leave their "2-days notice", but it's not common (IMHO, of course). And yes, there are some of us that give a 1 or 2-weeks notice, but still it's not a common practice.
** I don't know how to translate this... We have a concept called "trusted employee", which is mainly used to describe any administrative employee, and that commonly is expected to give the 110% of what the contract says (unpaid overtimes, extra stuff to do, etc) and sadly it's an accepted condition (for whatever reasons). I chose "non-union workers" because in comparison with an union worker, we have less protections (besides the legal ways) regarding what I've described before. Curiously, there are also "operative workers", that doesn't belong to an union, but they have (sometimes) better protections that the administrative ones.
*** Yes, they were in charge of several systems, because they didn't trust us to handle/maintain them. And I'm sure that they still don't trust in their developers.
**** One of the managers, and the DBA are the only ones that handle some stuff (specially the one that involves "money"). The thing that allows to use the DBA as scapegoat is that such manager have more privileges and permissions than the DBA, as he was the previous DBA2 -
Apparently Chrome will no longer support installing add-ons outside of the official store by the end of this year. Not even in dev mode...8
-
Not as much of a rant as a share of my exasperation you might breathe a bit more heavily out your nose at.
My work has dealt out new laptops to devs. Such shiny, very wow. They're also famously easy to use.
.
.
.
My arse.
.
.
.
I got the laptop, transferred the necessary files and settings over, then got to work. Delivered ticket i, delivered ticket j, delivered the tests (tests first *cough*) then delivered Mr Bullet to Mr Foot.
Day 4 of using the temporary passwords support gave me I thought it was time to get with department policy and change my myriad passwords to a single one. Maybe it's not as secure but oh hell, would having a single sign-on have saved me from this.
I went for my new machine's password first because why not? It's the one I'll use the most, and I definitely won't forget it. I didn't. (I didn't.) I plopped in my memorable password, including special characters, caps, and numbers, again (carefully typed) in the second password field, then nearly confirmed. Curiosity, you bastard.
There's a key icon by the password field and I still had milk teeth left to chew any and all new features with.
Naturally I click on it. I'm greeted by a window showing me a password generating tool. So many features, options for choosing length, character types, and tons of others but thinking back on it, I only remember those two. I had a cheeky peek at the different passwords generated by it, including playing with the length slider. My curiosity sated, I closed that window and confirmed that my password was in.
You probably know where this is going. I say probably to give room for those of you like me who certifiably. did. not.
Time to test my new password.
*Smacks the power button to log off*
Time to put it in (ooer)
*Smacks in the password*
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.
Whoops, typo probably.
Do it again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.
No u.
Try again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.
Try my previous password.
Well, SUCCESS... but actually, no.
Tried the previous previous password.
T O O M A N Y A T T E M P T S
Ahh fuck, I can't believe I've done this, but going to support is for pussies. I'll put this by the rest of the fire, I can work on my old laptop.
Day starts getting late, gotta go swimming soonish. Should probably solve the problem. Cue a whole 40 minutes trying my 15 or so different passwords and their permutations because oh heck I hope it's one of them.
I talk to a colleague because by now the "days since last incident" counter has been reset.
"Hello there Ryan, would you kindly go on a voyage with me that I may retrace my steps and perhaps discover the source of this mystery?"
"A man chooses, a slave obeys. I choose... lmao ye sure m8, but I'm driving"
We went straight for the password generator, then the length slider, because who doesn't love sliding a slidey boi. Soon as we moved it my upside down frown turned back around. Down in the 'new password' and the 'confirm new password' IT WAS FUCKING AUTOCOMPLETING. The slidey boi was changing the number of asterisks in both bars as we moved it. Mystery solved, password generator arrested, shit's still fucked.
Bite the bullet, call support.
"Hi, I need my password resetting. I dun goofed"
*details tech support needs*
*It can be sorted but the tech is ages away*
Gotta be punctual for swimming, got two whole lengths to do and a sauna to sit in.
"I'm off soon, can it happen tomorrow?"
"Yeah no problem someone will be down in the morning."
Next day. Friday. 3 hours later, still no contact. Go to support room myself.
The guy really tries, goes through everything he can, gets informed that he needs a code from Derek. Where's Derek? Ah shet. He's on holiday.
There goes my weekend (looong weekend, bank holiday plus day flexi-time) where I could have shown off to my girlfriend the quality at which this laptop can play all our favourite animé, and probably get remind by her that my personal laptop has an i2350u with integrated graphics.
TODAY. (Part is unrelated, but still, ugh.)
Go to work. Ten minutes away realise I forgot my door pass.
Bollocks.
Go get a temporary pass (of shame).
Go to clock in. My fob was with my REAL pass.
What the wank.
Get to my desk, nobody notices my shame. I'm thirsty. I'll have the bottle from my drawer. But wait, what's this? No key that usually lives with my pass? Can't even unlock it?
No thanks.
Support might be able to cheer me up. Support is now for manly men too.
*Knock knock*
"Me again"
"Yeah give it here, I've got the code"
He fixes it, I reset my pass, sensibly change my other passwords.
Or I would, if the internet would work.
It connects, but no traffic? Ryan from earlier helps, we solve it after a while.
My passwords are now sorted, machine is okay, crisis resolved.
*THE END*
If you skipped the whole thing and were expecting a tl;dr, you just lost the game.
Otherwise, I absolve you of having lost the game.
Exactly at the char limit9 -
rant!
As a web dev i really hate half assed solutions
Especially when I'm forced to spend time making them because some stupid sales person sold certain features that our current product doesn't support.
At the end of the day that sales guy gets a commission and I build something that will inevitably break somewhere in the future.1 -
So it's been a while since I've posted as my first few months at the new job have been amazing. But now I'm running into issues with a team member that I need to get off my chest.
So my new job is front end development in React. I'm brand new to it but I was promised time to learn on the job. On my first day the team member I'm now having a conflict with offered me help. He's the most experienced so I gladly took it.
But now several months in I've noticed his teaching style doesn't work for me. He'll go into long theoretical explanations whenever I ask a question and I get overwhelmed with info. And he gets frustrated with my inability to process all that, because he feels I waste his time. So frustrated that at one time he just walked out of work and drove home, which was really upsetting to everyone.
My direct manager and my mentor in the company (our software architect), as well as our scrum master (a consultant) are all aware of the conflict. I've been assigned another colleague to help me out. Things were going ok but he got sick so I had to turn back to the team member with the conflict for assistance. Of course frustrations arose again.
Now yesterday during our sprint planning meeting we had to say what we liked and didn't like about the past sprint. And I brought up I feel I need time for learning and that I don't know where to put that, since we don't have a task for it. I said I also felt past approaches weren't working out and that I'd like to take up the offer to go on training. I was trying to word it very neutral to not upset my colleagues, as they tried their best. But the colleague who I had previous conflicts with took it personal and accused me of not listening and that is why my code is awful. While all I've been doing is rely on his code to learn. Long story short it got very heated and direct manager and scrum master who were present had to shut it down.
I'm thinking of talking to my manager and mentor today. It really hurts when you're accused of maliciousness when all you did was try. I know my code isn't perfect. But I get no help in improving it beyond long winded explanations about theory. If I ask for practical help he says he won't write my code for me. Which isn't what I expect. When I say I followed his example he says I shouldn't copy. But two sentences later he says if I don't know what I am doing I should listen to him. It's really very confused and demotivating as a beginner, but he makes it about how I waste his time and ruin his job for him. I understand he tries his best and that it has to be hard when someone seemingly is as dumb as a bag of bricks. But my manager and mentor told me they support me as long as I continue to show improvement. So I asked for alternatives (training, time to study, or whatever I haven't thought of) and now I feel like the bad person. I'm already someone with crippling low self esteem, and I'm thrown into the deep end. It kinda sucks when someone then tells you from the sideline you can't swim and how swimming works. How about tossing me one of those floaty things and then maybe accept I need to hold on to that for a bit and my technique will need work until I can make it on my own? :(2 -
Me: We have a new research project for you. We need you to test these 2 new services, see how they will fit into the new application, look at alternatives if necessary etc. At the end we need you to write a report with your findings, showing how you would integrate them to achieve X, Y and Z, and how much it would cost each month.
Dev: sounds good, I'll come back to you when I have it.
*2 and a half weeks later*
Document paragraph 1: The new language translation service doesn't support the languages we need.
Document paragraph 2: Here's my proposal for integrating the new language translation service.
*review*
Me: So I had a look at the doc and it says it doesn't support the languages.
Dev: yeah unfortunately not.
Me: Ok, so when you discovered that, why didn't you look for an alternative? Or come back to me and say it's not going to work.
Dev: I dunno, I thought you'd want to see the rest of the research first.
Me: ... not if we know for 100% undeniable fact that it will never function.
Dev: Ah ok, I didn't think of that. I'll do that next time, don't worry.
... aw how sweet, he thinks there will be a next time. Poor guy.2 -
First company:
- being sat at an office that didn't have chairs with proper back support. It would kill my back every day. Like sitting on a bar stool coding.
- not having access to basic resources (cafeteria, salary bonuses)
- being seriously underpaid ($200 under)
- not having an IT process pipeline (yeah, this is a huge one): no JIRA, no git, no VCS, no continuous integration, etc. I fucking spend 45% of the time fixing coding-unrelated shit.
Second company (very aggravating):
- dumb frontend bitch and privileged colleague who both kept telling me months on end to shut up and who wouldn't listen to my advice on anything, while my advice would actually help the company advance in productive ways. The key here is being told to shut up while stagnating. i.e. dead end job.
- people advancing in the company based on nepotism and favoritism, based on having tits and ass, rather than skills and independence.
- pointlessssssssss meetings where decisions are made solely based on the opinion of Mr. favorite senior dev. The rest just sits there like a bunch of sad saps and yay-nodders. Incompetent PO's who "would like to hear your input" but then when you give it, they completely dismiss you.
- pointlessssssssss monthly meetings with stakeholders, where the dev teams do nothing but clash and act like pussies in front of the PM just to get in his favor, but behind scenes continue to make the same mistakes and telling the CEO everything is fine. Goodness, how can it get more unproductive.
- completely antisocial and nepotistic 'colleagues' who won't even talk to you, let alone smile at you or be friendly. You saying good morning and them pretending you're vapor that doesn't exist. Go go company atmosphere! Especially during lunch, those are the worst times. Imagine sitting at lunch where everyone looks like you killed their dog and the rest is huddled up in little high school groups.
What else? The incessant and pointless smalltalk that makes me want to bang my head against the wall. Talking about dogs, kids, what show was on tv last night. The fuck man, do you have a brain?!
Third company:
- HR bitches who think they are the shit and developers are antisocial, helpless misfits, but they work with computers and they don't even fucking know what a status bar is! The irony!
- forced socializing and stigmatization for the opposite. Imagine coming into a company and you don't say good morning. Should that be a problem? No. Instead, everyone starts dogging on you and hating you just because you didn't smile in their faces and said: hiiiiiiiiiiii how did you sleep? Did you feed your dog? Fuck you.
Elliot (Mr. Robot): "Wouldn't it be awesome if there was a mute button for life?" -boop, boop, boop, boop...- Ahh.. there.. that's much better."
- CEO's sucking up to you but when it comes to salary increase, they say shit like: "Ahhh ya know, it's kinda difficult." Yet another dead end job.2 -
Forms with autofocus. What are your opinions on that?
My boss keeps asking us to always give autofocus to the first input of a form, without any UX study to support it, just his opinion ("I think it makes sense"). I fucking hate it. He says it's nice for keyboard users, but I'm a keyboard user myself and I say that's what the tab key is for. To fucking focus stuff.
It really annoys me to no end when things like this are requested, but it's ok to have buttons, checkboxes, etc without fucking :focus and :active styles. Just :hover is not enough ffs.
And "links" that work with "onclick". Damn how I want to kill anyone that does that.5 -
Ever had a day that felt like you're shoveling snow from the driveway? In a blizzard? With thunderstorms & falling unicorns? Like you shovel away one m² & turn around and no footprints visible anymore? And snow built up to your neck?
Today my work day was like that.. xcept shit..shit instead of pretty & puffy snow!!
Working on things a & b, trying to not mess either one up, then comes shit x, coworker was updating production.. ofc something went wrong.. again not testing after the update..then me 'to da rescue'.. :/ hardly patch things up, so it works..in a way.. feature c still missing due to needed workarounds.. going back to a and b.. got disrupted by the same coworker who is nver listening, but always asking too much..
And when I think I finally have the b thing figured out a f-ing blocker from one of our biggest clients.. The whole system is unresponsive.. Needles to say, same guy in support for two companies (their end), so they filed the jira blocker with the wrong customer that doesn't have a SLA so no urgent emails..and then the phone calls.. and then the hell broke loose.. checking what is happening.. After frantic calls from our dba to anyone who even knows that our customer exists if they were doing sth on the db.. noup, not a single one was fucking with the prod db.. The hell! Materialised view created 10 mins ago that blocked everything..set to recreate every 10 minutes..with a query that I am guessing couldn't even select all that data in under 15.. dafaaaq?! Then we kill it..and again it is there.. We found out that customers dbas were testing something on live environment, oblivious that they mamaged to block the entire db..
FML, I'm going pokemon hunting.. :/ codename for ingress n beer..3 -
So about 3 weeks ago I was laid off from my dream job due to corporate bullshit. From the feedback received since then it is clear that the company made a mistake hiring a brand new React dev while they really needed an experienced one. Because the consultants who were supposed to be weren't. And the other in-house front end dev was an elitist asshole. And I never received proper feedback until it was too late. Actually I still don't have proper feedback save for some vague stuff which really sounds like the kind of feedback you'd give someone in the middle of their learning process. They even said eventually given more time I could have made it. But alas they felt they had to make a call in the best interest of the company.
Things moved fast since then, I took a week to recover and then I spent time updating my resume before getting back in touch with the recruiter who got me my last job. Great guy and he was happy to help me again. Applied to some positions, got some replies, first in person interview I go to they are immediately willing to take me on.
So now I'm supposed to start tomorrow but somehow I'm having my doubts. The company isn't an IT company but rather a fashion company. They believe in developing in house tools because past attempts with external companies resulted in them trying to push their vision through. Knowing who they worked with I agree, they tried to oversell all the time. But after talking with their developers I noticed they are behind on their knowledge. But so am I. So there was no tech interview which means I am getting an easy way in. And if they honour their word I'll be signing tomorrow for around my old wages.
So you'd think that sounds good right? And yet I'm worried it's going to be another shit show working on software without proper analysis or best practices. I mean the devs aren't total idiots, they are mediors like me and I think their heart is in the right place. They want to develop a good project but it will be just us 3 making a modern .net wpf application with the same functionality of the old Access based system currently in use. I was urged by the boss to draw on my experience and I think he wants me to help teach them too. But I'm painfully aware for my decade since graduating I'm a less than average .net dev who struggles with theory and never worked a job where I had someone more experienced to teach me. I coasted most of the time in underpaid jobs due to various reasons. But I'd always get mad over shitty code and practices. Which I realize is hypocritical for someone who couldn't explain what a singleton class is or who still fails at separation of concerns.
So yeah my question for the hivemind is what advice would you give a dev like me? I honestly dislike how poor I perform but it often feels like an insurmountable climb, and being over 30 makes it even more depressing. On the other hand I know I should feel blessed to find a workplace who seems to genuinely believe that people grow and develop and wishes to support me in this. Part of me thinks I should just go in, relax, but also learn till I'm there where I want to be and see if these people are open to improving with me. But part of me also feels I'm rushing into this, picking the first best offer, and it sure feels like a step backwards somehow. And that then makes me feel like an ugly ungrateful person who deserves her bad luck because she expects of others what she can't even do herself :(4 -
[See image]
This guy is wrong in so many ways.
"Windows/macOS is the best choice for the average user. Prove me wrong."
There are actually many Gnu/Linux based operating systems that's really easy to install and use. For example Debian/any Debian based OS.
There are avarage users that use a Gnu/Linux based operating system because guess what. They think its better and it is.
Lets do a little comparision shall we.
- - - - - Windows 10 - - Debian
Cost $139 Free
Spyware Yes. No
Freedom Limited. A lot
"[Windows] It's easy to set up, easy to use and has all the software you could possibly want. And it gets the job done. What more do you need? I don't see any reason for the average joe to use it. [Linux]"
Well as I said earlier, there are Gnu/Linux based operating systems thats easy to set up too.
And by "[Windows] has all the software you could possibly want." I guess you mean that you can download all software you could possibly want because having every single piece of software (even the ones you dont need or use) on your computer is extremely space inefficient.
"Linux is far from being mainstream, I doubt it's ever gonna happen, in fact"
Yes, Linux isn't mainstream but by the increasing number of people getting to know about Linux it eventually will be mainstream.
"[Linux is] Unusable for non-developers, non-geeks.
Depends heavily on what Gnu/Linux based operating system youre on. If youre on Ubuntu, no. If youre on Arch, yes. Just dont blame Linux for it.
"Lots of usability problems, lots of elitism, lots of deniers ("works for me", "you just don't use it right", "Just git-pull the -latest branch, recompile, mess with 12 conf files and it should work")"
That depends totally on what you're trying to. As the many in the Linux community is open source contributors, the support around open source software is huge and if you have a problem then you can get a genuine answer from someone.
"Linux is a hobby OS because you literally need to make it your 'hobby' to just to figure out how the damn thing works."
First of all, Linux isnt a OS, its a kernel. Second, no you dont. You dont have to know how it works. If you do, yes it can take a while but you dont have to.
"Linux sucks and will never break into the computer market because Linux still struggles with very basic tasks."
Ever heard of System76? What basic tasks does Linux struggle with? I call bullshit.
"It should be possible to configure pretty much everything via GUI (in the end Windows and macOS allow this) which is still not a case for some situations and operations."
Most things is possible to configure via a GUI and if it isnt, use the terminal. Its not so hard
https://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/...
21 -
2017 has ended and I want to throw this fucking rock of anger with it out of the Window.
I will tell you how my last 3 to 4 years as private IT Guy (IT Dumpster) for everything was.
My Gaming Community:
It was so fucking retarded that I would like to punch everyone there in the face over a thousand times.
Seriously there are over 60 People in that Community and they take every shit for granted and only cry about everything.
I'm Paying since 4 Years over 60 € for our Server every month. Some people donated some small bucks over the time and in the end it was around 150 € Donations over 4 years.
Im thankful for the Donations, but these people really think that they can demand for this Donations private Gameservers for over years for free or think that they now own the Servers. WTF?? FUCK YOU!!
Im managing 2 Linux Server with Web, MySQL, Voice and Gameserver. What did 1 guy donate? 10 € for 4 years, thats around 15% for just a month. You would get our Teamspeak for 7 Days for that price idiots!!
I did all the damn Webdev and am now writing a App in Kotlin for Android man!!
Since last everybody in the Community gets on my nerves, because they are so ignorant and dont appreciate the work of others 😡.
My Association where I support the hole IT with a friend:
We decided in the commitee that we would take on major changes in our infrastructure.
We need to finish the barebone concept in the end of January 18.
Early December 17 I wrote my friend, that we need to have a meeting and plan everything.
Well, now I mostly designed the roadmap by myself and didnt receive any reply from my friend 💀.
I really dont understand why the shit always sticks at me and I need to finish it.
I really love to code something, install or repair PC's with joy or manage Server but the people around me are in my free time like poison and they take out my fun for it.
The only fun and enjoyable IT Part for me is at my fulltime job. Thats the only good place left for me as Safe Heaven and the people there really appreciate my knowledge and work I do.7 -
So, some years ago, my old firm was bought by a much larger company.
A couple years later, my CTO resigned, as he needed a week deserved break. I acted as interim CTO for half a year, with the full support of the CEO.
But then higher management removed my CEO for a politician 🤡. His first move is to ask my ex-CEO who to consider for CTO.
He adamantly vouches for me, but in the end, I'm not "political" enough. (Sure I admit I'm not the most organized person, and do not sweeten arguments to suits, but I had won the full trust of my previous superiors *and* fellow devs, and had people to cover for organizational stuff, and have successfully navigated situations with the world's biggest tech orgs).
So I'm again a dev, and they hire this new CTO at twice my salary. But as you can probably guess, who ends up still doing all the CTO work on top of his dev work? Yeah.
That drove me to quit, not because of the demotion, but for a denied minor raise when I was doing the work of someone with twice my paycheck.
As could be expected, once I quit, the CTO barely lasted 6 months.
Fun part is, I've been freelancing (successfully) from them on, and I've been contacted by this CTO, trying to hire me to do some work in his new company...
I'm torn whether to tell him to bite me, charge him a shitton of money or any other funny ideas.
Mind you, I don't dislike the guy, and he's not particularly annoying to work with, so I guess this doubles as a rant against corporate clowns, and a bit of advice seeking.7 -
It's fucking never worth it, to be decent to colleagues. I got prove of that just this evening. Sorry, this rant will be a bit longer.
A colleague of mine inherited some legacy project that I worked on in the past. He clearly hates working on it. And tbh. I can't blame him for it. It's not very fun. He also makes virtually no effort to become more proficient in it.
This usually leads to him calling for my aid, whenever any problem arises, that would require any kind of effort to solve. I would normally cave in and help him. Mostly due to the fact, that without any intervention from me, it would end on my desk sooner or later.
That changed in the last few months, as I simply couldn't make free time to help him. anymore. I was working overtime and the associated project barely got done on time. During that time I would, as politely as possible, deny him. He knows fully how stressful the project was getting.
Today he asked for help again. I denied again, as a task was due very soon. He didn't reply to my message afterwards. After a few hours suddenly I got a bunch of his jira issues assigned to me.
The motherfucker simply shoved _all_ of his support issues to me. Not only that, he also assigned the issue he was asking for help for earlier as well. All without consulting me or anything. Then he pissed of into his vacation.
Some of his support issues have been created last year! And they are still not solved. He simply isn't replying to questions in those issues or just assigns them to others colleagues without any instructions.
Fuck him. Other colleagues don't even respond to him anymore. He fully fucking knows that I have a tight deathline on my current task. And still he chose to dump all his work on me, so that I have to waste time to reassign it and report it to our superior.
Fuck him for creating more stress in this already stressful situation. Enjoy your vacation you fucking leech. I will have quite a "nice suprise" waiting for you, when you return.15 -
story time:
I use onedrive for sharing some files and shit. So one day one of my folders, which I got from a downloaded zip, caused an error "files couldn't be synced because of unallowed character in the title".
Turns out there was a space at the end of the folder title. I change the name, I get some error.
"Okay, no problem, I don't need that folder anymore anyway" So I delete it, doesn't work, the error message reads "Can't delete folder because it no longer exists.". "What the hell" try deleting it some more. Emptying it before deleting. Deleting the parent folder. I try formatting it before deleting. Nothing works.
Deleting from the online onedrive client causes it to briefly disappears but refreshing places it back right where it came from.
So I resort to my last hope, customer support.
I explain the whole thing.
I get a reply. Oh boy.
I get explained that if the recycle bin is full, the file will be placed back.
After that, I get an explanation on how to remove a file xD
Thanks OneDrive Team, really helpful.6 -
(long post is long)
This one is for the .net folks. After evaluating the technology top to bottom and even reimplementing several examples I commonly use for smoke testing new technology, I'm just going to call it:
Blazor is the next Silverlight.
It's just beyond the pale in terms of being architecturally flawed, and yet they're rushing it out as hard as possible to coincide with the .Net 5 rebranding silo extravaganza. We are officially entering round 3 of "sacrifice .Net on the altar of enterprise comfort." Get excited.
Since we've arrived here, I can only assume the Asp.net Ajax fiasco is far enough in the past that a new generation of devs doesn't recall its inherent catastrophic weaknesses. The architecture was this:
1. Create a component as a "WebUserControl"
2. Any time a bound DOM operation occurs from user interaction, send a payload back to the server
3. The server runs the code to process the event; it spits back more HTML
Some client-side js then dutifully updates the UI by unceremoniously stuffing the markup into an element's innerHTML property like so much sausage.
If you understand that, you've adequately understood how Blazor works. There's some optimization like signalR WebSockets for update streaming (the first and only time most blazor devs will ever use WebSockets, I even see developers claiming that they're "using SignalR, Idserver4, gRPC, etc." because the template seeds it for them. The hubris.), but that's the gist. The astute viewer will have noticed a few things here, including the disconnect between repaints, inability to blend update operations and transitions, and the potential for absolutely obliterative, connection-volatile, abusive transactional logic flying back and forth to the server. It's the bring out your dead approach to seeing how much of your IT budget is dedicated to paying for bandwidth and CPU time.
Blazor goes a step further in the server-side render scenario and sends every DOM event it binds to the server for processing. These include millisecond-scale events like scroll, which, at least according to GitHub issues, devs are quickly realizing requires debouncing, though they aren't quite sure how to accomplish that. Since this immediately becomes an issue with tickets saying things like, "scroll event crater server, Ugg need help! You said Blazorclub good. Ugg believe, Ugg wants reparations!" the team chooses a great answer to many problems for the wrong reasons:
gRPC
For those who aren't familiar, gRPC has a substantial amount of compression primarily courtesy of a rather excellent binary format developed by Google. Who needs the Quickie Mart, or indeed a sound markup delivery and view strategy when you can compress the shit out of the payload and ignore the problem. (Shhh, I hear you back there, no spoilers. What will happen when even that compression ceases to cut it, indeed). One might look at all this inductive-reasoning-as-development and ask themselves, "butwai?!" The reason is that the server-side story is just a way to buy time to flesh out the even more fundamentally broken browser-side story. To explain that, we need a little perspective.
The relationship between Microsoft and it's enterprise customers is your typical mutually abusive co-dependent relationship. Microsoft goes through phases of tacit disinterest, where it virtually ignores them. And rightly so, the enterprise customers tend to be weaksauce, mono-platform, mono-language types who come to work, collect a paycheck, and go home. They want to suckle on the teat of the vendor that enables them to get a plug and play experience for delivering their internal systems.
And that's fine. But it's also dull; it's the spouse that lets themselves go, it's the girlfriend in the distracted boyfriend meme. Those aren't the people who keep your platform relevant and competitive. For Microsoft, that crowd has always been the exploratory end of the developer community: alt.net, and more recently, the dotnet core community (StackOverflow 2020's most loved platform, for the haters). Alt.net seeded every competitive advantage the dotnet ecosystem has, and dotnet core capitalized on. Like DI? You're welcome. Are you enjoying MVC? Your gratitude is understood. Cool serializers, gRPC/protobuff, 1st class APIs, metadata-driven clients, code generation, micro ORMs, etc., etc., et al. Dear enterpriseur, you are fucking welcome.
Anyways, b2blazor. So, the front end (Blazor WebAssembly) story begins with the average enterprise FOMO. When enterprises get FOMO, they start to Karen/Kevin super hard, slinging around money, privilege, premiere support tickets, etc. until Microsoft, the distracted boyfriend, eventually turns back and says, "sorry babe, wut was that?" You know, shit like managers unironically looking at cloud reps and demanding to know if "you can handle our load!" Meanwhile, any actual engineer hides under the table facepalming and trying not to die from embarrassment.36 -
I'm pissed off as fuck. By far these were the worst fucking 2 weeks in a very long time.
My grandma died. At work I had to do shitty tasks and IT support for stupid end users, like an overpayed PC technician. I couldn't find any time to write a single line of code on any of my personal projects.
And I still can't find a fucking developer job. I feel like I'm stuck in this IT hell forever.
Kill me3 -
can we all take a moment to appreciate the developers of flutter. they're smart, and they took the time to make flutter the *right* way.
they used an easy to learn language that's ideal for mobile development, which means hot reload/restart is possible (because dart supports aot and jit compilation)
the way it's designed is beautiful. everything is a widget, and it's easy to customize them via named parameters.
the community is great. it's not large, but it's supportive, with two active subreddits. yesterday i asked a question on r/flutterdev, and a member of the flutter team at google answered the question with a comprehensive answer.
flutter is very consistent across platforms. if it works on android or ios, you can bet it'll work on the other just as well, with the exception of platform-specific code.
it is VERY performant. unless you write a major bottleneck, 60fps is easy to achieve.
animations are EASY. define a tween and animation controller and then write a callback function. not to mention it's straightforward, and complex/combined animations are easy, too.
you can get almost direct access to the canvas, should you need it, with custompainter.
oh my god, this is revolutionary in the programming world. development is quicker than it is with native android alone, and for people who have no access to a mac, like me, i can develop for ios and compile via code magic. if you haven't checked it out and you develop for mobile, check it out.
oh yeah, did i mention it's not just mobile. hummingbird - flutter compiled to web - is already in experimental public betas, and will likely be released by the end of the year. there's also experimental desktop support, which is amazing, and much better than electron. not to mention flutter is the future, as it will be the primary way to make apps on fuchsia os.13 -
Antergos is going out of the play. And i saw a very click baity article which poised the following statement at the end:
"Is the death of Antergos a major loss? No, not on its own. Despite the developers bragging about over 900,000 downloads (over the last five years) it’s hardly a popular operating system. Still, its demise is a part of an emerging trend where developers don’t have the resources to continue a project. And both the Linux and Open Source communities should be very worried about that. Developing for love or as a hobby simply isn’t sustainable."
Now, this is, at least to me, bullshitty in the sense that the open source community does not really have anything big to worry about. Large pools of companies would make yeary investments in open source codebases due to the ammount of usefulness they present to their companies. More and more great open sourced projects come out every year OUTSIDE the all eating scope of just web development(which to an extend is fine since it brings communities together)
Saying that a hobby isn't sustainable is funny in itself really.
If people don't have the time to support a hobby project because they are moving on to bigger and better things in shit that actually pays then I am glad for them. It tomorrow Arch, Debian, pop os, ubuntu and fucking freebsd goea out then I would have something to bitch about.
Till then, stating that the community haa something to worry about is just bullshit.3 -
The company I work for used to be hosted on 3dcart. One day the site went down and their support couldn't tell us why. After over 24 hours of downtime they restored service but left 5 days of all records and customizations across the entire store, from the DB to the damn templates. Their support apologized for the outage blaming the disaster on a combination of hard disk failure and a bad update to their backup script. They were not willing to assist us in any way. We were forced to manually enter 5 days of orders (which gave them new order numbers and caused more problems), products and template changes, with order data coming from an internal email which was luckily CC'd on the order confirmation email. Thank God for whoever setup that CC, it saved our asses. In the end it cost our company thousands of dollars and 3dcart never composited us in any way.2
-
*Clears throat*
To everyone who say's they won't release X for Y because Y isn't good at Z (For example, people who don't support games on Linux because Linux isn't as good at gaming compared to windows), go fuck yourself with the wide end of a rake...
Fuck me people piss me off with stupidity sometimes .-.
Thing's aren't going to evolve and get better if everyone just abandon's shit at the first fucking hurdle, remember when windows wasn't good at gaming compared to mac, well that fucking changed pretty quick didn't it...
(If anyone is curious how this came about, I'm am still holding hope for Gamemaker studio 2 to come to Linux but in the mean time though about running it's compiler through mono and building a front end to see if I can even do it but was talking to someone about it and they said I'm wasting my time because Linux is shit for games)5 -
Let's talk about the cargo cult of N-factor authentication. It's not some magic security dust you can just sprinkle onto your app "for security purposes".
I once had a client who had a client who I did server maintenance for. Every month I was scheduled to go to the site, stick my fingerprint in their scanner, which would then display my recorded face prominently on their screens, have my name and purpose verified by the contact person, and only then would the guards let me in.
HAHA no of course not. On top of all of that, they ask for a company ID and will not let me in without one.
Because after all, I can easily forge my face, fingerprints, on-site client contact, appointment, and approval. But printing out and laminating a company ID is impossible.
---
With apologies to my "first best friend" in High School, I've forgotten which of the dozens of canonicalisations of which of your nicknames I've put in as my answer to your security question. I've also forgotten if I actually listed you as my first best friend, or my dog - which would actually be more accurate - and actually which dog, as there are times in my High School life that there were more tails than humans in the house.
I have not forgotten these out of spite, but simply because I have also forgotten which of the dozen services of this prominent bullshit computer company I actually signed up for way back in college, which itself has been more than a decade ago. That I actually apparently already signed up for the service before actually eludes me, because in fact, I have no love for their myriad products.
What I have NOT forgotten is my "end of the universe"-grade password, or email, or full legal name and the ability to demonstrate a clear line of continuity of my identity from wherever that was to now.
Because of previous security screwups in the past, this prominent bullshit company has forced its users to activate its second, third, and Nth factors. A possibly decade-old security question; a phone number long lost; whatever - before you can use your account.
Note: not "view sensitive data" about the account, like full name, billing address, and contact info. Not "change settings" of the account, such as changing account info, email, etc. Apparently all those are the lowest tier of security meant to be protected by mere "end of the universe"-grade passwords and a second factor such as email, which itself is likely to be sold by a company that also cargo cults N-factor auth. For REAL hard info, let's ask the guy who we just showed the address to "What street he lived in" and a couple others.
Explaining this to the company's support hotline is an exercise in...
"It's for your security."
"It's not. You're just locking me out of my account. I can show you a government ID corroborating all the other account info."
"But we can't, for security."
"It's not security. Get me your boss."
...
"It's for security."8 -
Our team talking with a Mr. KnowItAll...
Mr. KIA: What concerns me about this huge system transference is that the devs won't give us the JS scripts files decompiled.
Mr. KIA again: I'm also concerned about Win XP end of support...
Us seeing each other: WTF is going on?!? Where are the hidden funny cameras...
A tip:
If you wanna pretend you know it all...you'll fail...
A humble dev never get humilliated1 -
Storytime!
(I just posted this in a shorter form as a comment but wanted to write it as a post too)
TL;DR, smarts are important, but so is how you work.
My first 'real' job was a lucky break in the .com era working tech support. This was pretty high end / professional / well respected and really well paid work.
I've never been a super fast learner, I was HORRIBLE in school. I was not a good student until I was ~40 (and then I loved it, but no longer have the time :( )
At work I really felt like so many folks around me did a better job / knew more than me. And straight up I know that was true. I was competent, but I was not the best by far.
However .... when things got ugly, I got assigned to the big cases. Particularly when I transferred to a group that dealt with some fancy smancy networking equipment.
The reason I was assigned? Engineering (another department) asked I be assigned. Even when it would take me a while to pickup the case and catch up on what was going on, they wanted the super smart tech support guys off the case, and me on it.
At first this was a bit perplexing as this engineering team were some ultra smart guys, custom chip designers, great education, and guys you could almost see were running a mental simulation of the chip as you described what you observed on the network...
What was also amusing was how ego-less these guys seemed to be (I don't pretend to know if they really were). I knew for a fact that recruiting teams tried to recruit some of these guys for years from other companies before they'd jump ship from one company to the next ... and yet when I met them in person it was like some random meeting on the street (there's a whole other story there that I wish I understood more about Indian Americans (many of them) and American engineers treat status / behave).
I eventually figured out that the reason I was assigned / requested was simple:
1. Support management couldn't refuse, in fact several valley managers very much didn't like me / did not want to give me those cases .... but nobody could refuse the almighty ASIC engineers. No joke, ASIC engineers requests were all but handed down on stone tablets and smote any idols you might have.
2. The engineers trusted me. It was that simple.
They liked to read my notes before going into a meeting / high pressure conference call. I could tell from talking to them on the phone (I was remote) if their mental model was seizing up, or if they just wanted more data, and we could have quick and effective conversations before meetings ;)
I always qualified my answers. If I didn't know I said so (this was HUGE) and I would go find out. In fact my notes often included a list of unknowns (I knew they'd ask), and a list of questions I had sent to / pending for the customer.
The super smart tech support guys, they had egos, didn't want to say they didn't know, and they'd send eng down the rabbit hole. Truth be told most of what the smarter than me tech support guy's knew was memorization. I don't want to sound like I'm knocking that because for the most part memorization would quickly solve a good chunk of tech support calls for sure... no question those guys solved problems. I wish I was able to memorize like those guys.
But memorization did NOT help anyone solve off the wall bugs, sort of emergent behavior, recognize patterns (network traffic and bugs all have patterns / smells). Memorization also wouldn't lead you to the right path to finding ANYTHING new / new methods to find things that you don't anticipate.
In fact relying on memorization like some support folks did meant that they often assumed that if bit 1 was on... they couldn't imagine what would happen if that didn't work, even if they saw a problem where ... bro obviously bit 1 is on but that thing ain't happening, that means A, B, C.
Being careful, asking questions, making lists of what you know / don't know, iterating LOGICALLY (for the love of god change one thing at a time). That's how you solved big problems I found.
Sometimes your skills aren't super smarts, super flashy code, sometimes, knowing every method off the top of your head, sometimes you can excel just being more careful, thinking different.4 -
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... -
This is a long post and if someone comments without reading carefully I don't care about that person's opinion.
I have 3 accounts here, and that is a must have for me. Let me explain:
Let's think of people and who they are in layers.
The innermost layers are made of private and intimate things: fears, dreams, shames, basically things that are mostly shared with very close people, like family, best friends, and specially significant others.
On the other hand, outermost layers are the public persona, who you are as a citizen, who you are in your profesion, and so on.
So, you wouldn't normally tell your boss about your favorite sex positions.
Let's also say there can be layers in the middle, and all the layers sometimes overlap, but let's not get too deep into this as I think I got the point across.
Here on I explain the original thesis.
I am a developer, and as such I want to fulfill my needs on dev communities, one of them being devrant.
I wish to learn from other devs, I expose my (sometimes controversial) points of view. I rant about annoying shit in the workplace.
But also, at some level, I wish to be taken seriously as a developer, I wish to build a reputation, and I wish to be accepted, even in a shallow social level. There is a social factor to what we do and it's totally normal.
Now, the problem is that I also would want to express my inner self.
So what I do is I don't use my main account for that, I use another, in fact 2 other accounts.
There are several reasons for that:
* I want to hide intimate shit from trolls.
Imagine I griefpost about a loved one that died, then later found myself in a heated discussion about some language, and then some troll comments something like "I'm glad your x died". i wouldn't react very well.
* I want to keep my posts consistent.
If people become interested in what I post as a dev, then they are going to expect dev related stuff from me. If I start posting like controversial points of view, that's not very cool because I'd be doing like a bait n switch on them.
* I want to maintain a reputation, and I want to not get banned on the main account
Reputation as a profesional is a real thing, and it shouldn't be affected by your personal shit.
Also sometimes you argue, and things get heated, and sometimes you get suspended or banned.
You try your hardest to be respectful, but in some communities, some mods are trigger happy.
By restricting this on your alt account, you're in a way promising that you'll have the upmost behaviour on your dev account because that means being professional.
Now, I said I had 2 other accounts.
The reason for having 2 is because I separate two layers:
In the 2nd account I am open and direct regarding my points of view, and more argumentative, but still trying to be relatively civil. I would also post things that might be controversial or not popular. I try to be real basically.
You can conclude that the 2nd account is the one posting this, since this post could trigger some people.
In the 3rd account, I talk about intimate shit like traumas, fears, emotional pain, things I know I'll get support for (the same support I give others when in need) and are not controversial in any way.
This way I can vent painful things and avoid trolls.
Cool people appreciate it when you're transparent about your shortcoming and dark thoughts.
But it takes one asshole in a high horse to judge you. And sometimes you need to give that asshole the middle finger without being afraid of ruining your reputation
or getting banned,
or being scared of that asshole laughing about your intimate shit (again, I use this account for that)
I know it sounds like I have multiple personalities but I swear I'm ok, and hopefully what I said makes sense. People might say "don't use alt accounts, go to another site", but I find that devrant has some interesting people.
The obvious downside is that you end up knowing people more than what they assume, because you interact with them through different accounts.
This is kinda shady, but I'm not interested in taking advantage of others anyway so...27 -
Ok people. I got a contract last year with a company, and I was their support for one year, which ended back in February. They still email me for all their problems. I don't know why. They emailed me today, for Christ's sake, on the Saturday of Easter, to tell me that their 3rd party software can't send them emails because the mailserver has that IP on greylist asking me to look into it and find a solution. AS IF I CARE! I'm with my family, taking a break for two days damn it. Panic attack came, my heartbeat rate problem kicked in and now I can't calm down. I'm trying to get into the "I don't give a fuck" mood but I can't, I'm too responsible for that, in the worst dramatic way (the world is gonna end etc).
Piece of advice:
Be very clear next time you come to terms with another company, be precise and don't let them have it their way.9 -
One of our projects migrated their file-repository to another one during a major release.
Instead of giving this task to an experienced programmer, they gave it to the head of the respective dev department due to the usual release panic.
Soo.... He wrote the migration tool. It was executed during the release. Everything seemed fine so far.
A few days later. Someone from the above project came to my team due to some "strange behaviour on the production database".
They reported that they couldn't download some of the user's documents due to unknown reasons.
After quickly analyzing the current state of the new file-repository, we concluded that the affected documents did not exist in the new repository.
Then we took a look at the so called migration tool...
Well.. After nearly 30 min. we knew the root cause for that.
They only migrated the first 4 levels of the folder structure. Due to the assumption that "we don't use deeper nesting". (Facepalm)
As the head of their department wrote it, no one seems to questioned it either. Nor did they made a code review and ended up with a tool with hard coded urls to the production db, no version control, no build tool, no ci, nothing. Breaking nearly every possible company standard.
However.. That's not it. When analyzing their migration tool we noticed another even more dangerous thing.
They mixed up the id generation of the migrated documents resulting in a random assignment between customers and documents. Which is quite bad as this contains sensitive information. E.g. passports
They offered us quite a nice amount of money to fix this until EOB. We declinded as it was simply not possible in that time, but agreed to support them with the new tool.
After some time I heard that they migrated production again. And they fucked it up again. They never talked to us after we offered them support...
The third and final migration was written by us. Not only migrated it correctly. It was also way faster. By factor 20.
In the end we haven't gained anything from this rushed project as the penalties were piling up due to this fucked up migration.
After all this time I'm not sure who is to blame. In my opinion, partly all of them.
Head of department who can't and shouldn't code.
Seniors who didn't review the code and didn't ask for help.
Release mgmt who put way too much pressure on the devs. -
Be me, wanting to try out PyOpenGL.
Lets start by drawing a rectangle.
Nice.
And now add some text?!
NOPE CANT RENDER FROM TTF OR SOME OTHER STUPID SHIT! YOU NEED TO CREATE A BITMAP FONT. WHICH IS THE MOST INEFFECTIVE BS IVE EVER SEEN.
K but there is surely a library for Python which enables the usage of text in OpenGL? Yes but its last support was 12 years ago.
FFS WHAT IS THIS GARBAGE?
At the end i found out cpp uses freetype to convert each character of a font to a bitmap with the according spacing.
THIS SHOULD BE WAY SIMPLER!5 -
FML I am an idiot.. might end up in a rant here (well deserved!!) //if you are here reading this I'm so sorry again!!
I wrote to our support I need DP/HDMI cable.. they asked me to take a pic of the cable I'm currently using.. WTF?! Don't you know how connectors look?! Just get me the damn cable.. :/
Ok.. Took a picture.. sent it back.. At that time I still didn't see the problem with what I wrote/demanded..
Got back reply this is not HDMI connector... FML, I was so convinced computer had HDMI ports so even when I took the pic I wasn't paying attention.. Fuck.
And before when I was switching cables behind the computer below desk I was just blindly feeling around, it didn't even occurr to me to actually check what connectors are used..just knew both monitors had the same connector (and not aure why I thought HDMI :/)...so yeah, I'm the idiot who is not paying attention to stuff.. Fuck.. Was on a scavanger hunt for a wrong type of cable the whole time.. Sorry again!! And please don't kill me next time you see me.. o.O1 -
Stories like the one I'm about to tell you are just another reason why people hate Windows. I know I usually preach 'Don't hate everything' and shit, but this is a real big fucking deal when it hits your desktop for no reason.
Now, onto the actual story...
Background: Playing with my Oculus, fixing issues like forgetting to use USB3 and stuff. I learned about an issue with Nvidia GPUs, where in Windows, they can only support 4 simultaneous displays per GPU. I only have the one GPU in my system, Nova, so I have to unplug a monitor to get Oculus and its virtual window thingy working. Alright, friend gave me idea of using my old GPU to drive one of my lesser used monitors, my right one. Great idea I thought, I'll install it a bit later.
A bit later...
I plug the GPU in (after 3 tries of missing the PCI-E slot, fuckers) and for some reason I'm getting boot issues. It's booting to the wrong drive, sometimes it'll not even bother TRYING to boot, suddenly one of my hard drives isn't even being recognized in BIOS, fuck. Alright, is the GPU at least being recognized? Shit, it isn't. FUCKFUCKFUCK.
Oh wait. I just forgot the power cable Duh. Plug that in, same issues. Alright, now I have no idea. Try desperately to boot, but it just won't I start getting boot error 0xc000000f. Critical device not found. Alrighty then. Fuck my life, eh?
Remove the GPU, look around a bit while frantically trying to boot the system, and I notice an oddly bent SATA cable. I look at it and the bastard is FRAYED AT THE END! Fuck, that's my main SSD! I finally replace the SATA cable and boot, still the same error... Boot into a recovery environment, and guess what?
Windows has decided to change my boot partition, ya know, the FUCKING C: DRIVE, from NTFS to RAW format, stripping it of formatting! What the actual fuck Microsoft? You just took a shit on yourself while having a seizure on the fucking MOON! Fine, fuck you, I have recovery USB! Oh, shit, that won't boot... I have an old installation! Boot ITS recovery, try desperately to find a fix online... CHKDSK C: /F... alright, repairing, awesome! Repaired, I can see data, but not boot. So now I'm at the point where I'm waiting for a USB installer to be created over USB 2.0. Wheeeeeeeeee. FML.
THESE are the times I usually hate Windows a lot. And I do. But it gets MOST of my work done. Except when it does this.
I'm already pissed, so don't go into the comments and just hate on Windows completely. Just a little. The main post is for the main hate. Deal with it. And I know that someone is going to come at me "Ohhhhh, you need FUCKIN LIIIIIIINUUUUUUUXXXXXXXX!' Want to know my response to that?
No.3 -
This week we had a live production issue that our staff were catching/fixing on the fly. We're a relatively small software team without any direct external customers, so this is not too unusual.
Unfortunately, the person in charge of dealing with these issues didn't resolve it during the work week, so we were stuck with it over the weekend. Said responsible employee left at 2:30 on Friday without figuring out how we'd deal with the problem without any staff in the office to intercept problem cases. Better yet, he drove all the way back, and was there from 3:30 to 4 and promptly left again without telling the rest of the team what was going on with the production issue. We asked how it happened, what it was, etc, but didn't focus on his fix (in hindsight, a mistake).
Since it's his job, I assumed that he would let us know what was up before he left on Friday. It turns out that he never addressed the production issue at all and just decided to leave.
A junior developer and I spent two hours contacting management (who, at this time are already at home with their families) to get clearance to either shut the system off or fix it. No one wants to give it and no one that's high enough up to approve the decision is available.
In the end, we asked the weekend mechanical support team (some friends of mine) to monitor the issue and they kindly accepted.
All of this could have been avoided if my coworker had either told us his plan earlier (so we could ask about the lack of coverage), gotten approval to shut it down for the weekend, or covered his own ass before he left for the day.
Ugggh. I get that we all make mistakes, but I really hope this guy shapes up soon. -
After deleting an AskUbuntu question due to peer pressure pointing out that it is "off-topic because parts are off-topic, and parts are written as a rant in disguise", I decided that DevRant is where to repost this instead:
As a user, how can I make sure to keep my applications as a user without keeping obsolete software packages?
Upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellifish) using the Software Updater GUI removes a working installation of the zoom video meeting application, without installing any upgrade, during the "cleanup" step.
Unfortunately, we can only choose either to remove or keep all suggested removals. While every other removal seemed fine and had a good explanation (either an outdated version number or the move to update Firefox via snap packages in the future), only zoom, at the end of the list, was scheduled for removal without any replacement.
After proceeding with the removals and restarting my computer, as expected, zoom is gone.
I am posting this to inform others before the upgrade, but also trying to help solve the problem, so that either there should be an option to select which packages to keep or remove (maybe there is when using the command line instead of the GUI?) or not to suggest to remove zoom at all. If it had been removed as an outdated third-party source without official 22.04 support, it would have been helpful to communicate that more explicitly.
As the latest zoom version, 5.12.2 (4816) deb (for Ubuntu 16.04+), obviously supports everything from 16.04, there should be no reason at all to remove zoom when upgrading an Ubuntu distribution.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/...4 -
My biggest regret was leaving school for the workforce. I had aspirations of climbing the corporate ladder and maybe even being a leader or CEO someday myself.
It unfortunately took me too many years to realize it’s all a complete scam. You end up wasting away working on the most soul crushing of stuff, all to support someone else’s dream, and the people on top are not those who deserve to be there, but those who schemed and manipulated their way to the top. They often have zero idea what they’re doing and you end up having to do their job for them, while they take the credit and the big bonuses.
I had (and still have) many brilliant ideas for creations, but not one of my employers has cared about anything other than their bottom line. You are nothing but livestock to them, and they will treat you as such.
I wish now I’d just stayed in school and worked on my ideas and theories in an academic environment. If you think for a second companies will give a shit about you, think again.1 -
I was tasked to evaluate wherever a customer could use an implementation of OTRS ( https://otrs.com/ )
Is it just me or is there no information on this site apart from <OTRS> will make your life better! <OTRS> will cure AIDS! <OTRS> will end world hunger!
This site is trying to use its fucking product name in every god damn sentence. <OTRS>. Everytime <OTRS> is mentioned it is fucking bold printed! My eyes are bleeding within 2 minutes of visiting this site.
I can't get any information about what excatly it is apart from their catchphrase: OTRS (again, bold. I'll refrain from putting it in <> from now, i think you got the point) is a customizable support desk software that manages workflows and structures communication so there are no limits to what your service team can achieve.
So, it's a support desk software you can customize. Great. What does it do?
"Whether you deal with thousands of inquiries and incidents daily [...] you’ll need digital structures that integrate standardized processes
and make communication transparent between teams and departments,
as well as for external customers."
Great, but what does it do?
"Reduce costs and improve satisfaction by structuring customer service communication with OTRS."
Great, BUT WHAT DOES IT DO?
"Manage incidents simply and uncover the data needed to make forward-thinking strategy decisions. OTRS is an ITSM solution that scales and adapts to your changing business needs."
W H A T D O E S I T D O ?!
Okay fuck that, maybe the product page has something to say.
Hm... A link on the bottom of the page says it is a feature list ( https://otrs.com/product-otrs/... )
Ah great, so i got a rough idea about what it is. Our customer wants a blackboard solution with a window you can pin to your desktop and also has a basic level of access control.
So it seems to be way to overloaded on features to recommend it to them. Well, let's see if can at least do everything they want. So i need screenshots of the application. Does the site show any of them? I dare you to find out.
Spoiler: It does not. FFS. The only pictures they show you are fucking mock ups and the rest is stock photos.
Alright, onwards to Google Images then.
Ah, so it's a ticket system then. Great, the site did not really communicate that at all.
Awesome, that's not what i wanted at all. That's not even what the customer wanted at all! Who fucking thought that OTRS was a good idea for them!
Fuck!5 -
(pseudorant)
Any ideas on how to end with computer scams (fake Microsoft support calls, money flips and the other gazillion)?
I'm really tired of this. A$$#les abusing unsuspecting people, abusing our elders, shielded behind a remote control session.
I know that this is very I.T. I'm just appealing to the extremely powerful distributed knowledge of all SUPERB people in devRant.
Thanks and hope that this was not tl;dr2 -
Bought myself a standing desk (one that rests on top of an existing desk), a new chair with good lumbar support and a few other office bits and pieces before the end of the tax year in the UK. I didn't think I'd be able to put them through my Ltd Co next year because of IR35 changes, but they have been delayed now.
The only thing I don't have yet at home is dual monitors. Otherwise the setup feels great. 30 Mins sitting followed by 30 Mins standing is doing wonders for my old back
3 -
I'll post a rant (will be long) soon-ish on the root of the asinine problem...
TL;DR
Anyone got a better suggestion of killing a WLAN router signal than a Faraday Cage?
-----------------------
As to the point as I can manage atm...
My ISP forces a proprietary router/modem for them to script my static IPv4 block (/28, aka 13 usable). Modifying this equipment in any way or using the vast majority of tactics to modify its behaviour = Federal Felony... with my history, it couldn't be construed as mistake/ignorance of this fact, so I'd likely end up working for some branch of the gov to mitigate the costs of standard prison (on both ends... handicapped af = expensive af to comply with base human rights laws... plus I'd be a dangerous prisoner from what I've been told).
I NEED the ipv6 functionality TOTALLY off... I've written this into every kernel and every container config at kernel level.
The issue is, I don't trust their shit device (which "should" also be set to no ipv6 via gui... non-GUI = fed felony).
This horrid device, they apparently made them for home use initially (to be fair it has decent specs and tolerable RAM), so included WiFi... that comes on by itself.
Disable the WiFi!... except I cant (at least not without 'tampering').
Why? Well acc to the GUI it's not enabled in the first place. Acc to the 'tech support' it's apparently a paid feature (yes, nonsense) that I have not paid for (nor would I), meaning on their end's GUI and DBs I also don't have WiFi ability from that dev.
So... Not trusting the other settings and the dev, being something im not allowed to directly config outside of their GUI that doesn't realise it's putting out a usable signal despite registering DHCP on behalf of that non-existent signal. I NEED to kill those signals.
I realise it likely sounds extreme to make and use a Faraday Cage for a router/modem (secondary modem, it parses the initial modem's output, via script, to allow the static block to be accessed). I really dont know any other way that's legal to restrict it.
Oh, in case unclear, I have tried so many ways to get them to just allow me to use any device (pref. mine, but even their's) that i can simply script myself... it's a no-go.20 -
So at work, there is this class/model thing that's for storing translated strings. It also supports n-level nested macros, cascading lookup (e->d->c->b->a->blank), and I've added transforms too. The code is a bloody mess and very inefficient (legendary dev's code), but it's useful.
You call methods with a symbol representing one of the strings, and it does... whatever you ask, like return text, booleans, expand macros and submacros, pass in data to interpolate, etc.
But I just learned something today.
Its `.html` method... doesn't support html. In fact, calling it strips out all html, takes whatever is left, and attempts to convert that back into html. Because that makes so much sense. So, if you have an html string? Don't call html on it.
Also, macros use the same <angle brackets> as html tags, and macro expansion eats unknown macros, so... you can't mix html and macros, meaning you cannot inject values into your markup. That's a freaking joy to work around. (You end up writing a parser every time.)
So no, if you have an html string, you need to get the raw data out and handle it yourself. Don't reach for that shiny .html method; it'll just ruin your day.
It's the little things that make my day so terribly long.8 -
My previous employer, which I've described on here many years ago as "the best job I've ever had", pivoted a couple of times during my time with them.
I felt obligated to help them, next thing you know I'm no longer developing, the company focus changes and I end up in a general IT support position.
I knew I needed to get out, but the skills I'd picked up were mostly forgotten because they weren't being utilised. When I looked for other positions nowhere was taking on someone at my barely-existent skill level, despite being well liked in terms of company and team fit.
I was tired all the time, stressed out, miserable. I couldn't grow in the company and was starting to worry about finances due to company issues. I thought COVID and lockdowns would help me get myself back in the game, but I burnt out with everything I was trying to take on at once and didn't make much progress.
When I was made redundant I'd thankfully picked up enough to finally find a much better position. The old company was in a lot of trouble and it's a case of when, not if, it will fold.
Now I really am doing the best job I've ever had, feel much better about myself and my relationships have improved. -
TL;DR: intel stripped the hosted network function from the drivers for my wifi chip. Older versions can still so it
Every month I travel by bandbus to neighbouring countries for a show.
This usually takes 7+ hours.
So i have my laptop with me and if my brother is along as well, we game in the bus.
Using a cable for internet connection isnt handy, since we sit on opposite sides of the bus. So i looked up if I can use a hosted wifi network for this.
We both checked out our drivers and both said no hosted network support.
And some posts on the internet said that customer support told them that the chip can't do it
But thats weird. My laptop is high end. So I searched a little only to find out that I can do a hosted wifi network if I DOWNGRADE my drivers.....
Fuck you intel. Fuck you hard for stripping that function from the drivers1 -
One of the big ISP/entertainment companies dug up the roads a few months back and laid fibre optic cables (cutting through a power cable in the process but that's another story).
Recently had someone turn up at my door to chat about their services. All sounded very good, I took a card and gave it some thought and did some research.
So, it'd be a little cheaper than my current provider (FTTC setup). It'd be faster for downloads, slightly slower for uploads (I want fast upload). IPv6 is only on their business packages. I use IPv6 a lot. I also have several static IPv4 addresses.
It would involve getting a cable in to where my equipment rack is, and one to where the TV is (which I spent ages building a TV unit with power, network etc.)
To record/watch TV in another room with their service, I'd need to pay extra. The service just provides HD channels that I can already get, unless I pay more. At the moment I have MythTV handling all the recording of TV shows I want, and Kodi to play them back on different TVs, via CAT6 I spent ages installing into the walls.
Then there's the uncertainty of how nicely their equipment will play with my relatively complicated setup.
I decided, it isn't worth it really for me. I would have to change a load of stuff just to end up with what I already have... But with more limitations.
Anyway, the guy turned up again a few days later, I told him of my decision and away he went.
Since then I have been visited by 2 other employees of this company to try to sell me the service.
It is probably great and convenient if you are not like me and DIY all your home network and media distribution setup...
Also the ISP I'm with is quite small. They are very knowledgeable and friendly and I can get through to someone quickly if i phone. What I use meets my needs, so I prefer to support the smaller company in this case. -
Today I dont feel that good.
I have only 1 month of my holiday temporary job left. After that Im going to university, the place that i have been dreaming about, the place where finaly i would finish my projects, where i would meet people like me that could support, help me with my passions.
I have no idea where i got that wave of saddnes. Normaly i dont feel that way. Job is unconfortable and sometimes stressing a bit but it is not the end of the world.
I just want to stay in confy bed for the whole day but i cant, i need that money for uni.
I tried to code yesterday but i just couldnt focus! Always when i try to finish the project, no matter what it is i just lose my motivation, its just gone.
Sometimes I wonder if that university is going to be as good as i was imaginig it, after numerous rants on devrant about their uni im not so sure... That dosent help me with my mood.
Is my terrible mood caused by loneiness? bad diet? or lazyness?
I just dont know... I just want to feel better. I just want to survive that month somehow, without that crushing feeling and constant depression.3 -
I haven't said anything yet, but an AltRant notification server exists. Support for it will arrive very very soon on the AltRant app. It will run locally on the end user's personal computer, and it does not require a constant connection to the phone. Both devices need to be connected to the same local network on first connection, but after that you can wander out of your house or disconnect from the local network and still receive notifications.
DISCLAIMER: ALL SENSITIVE USER CREDENTIALS ARE NOT STORED *ANYWHERE* EXCEPT ON THE LOCAL USER'S MACHINE. NO DATA IS SENT TO ME. THE SERVER IS OPEN-SOURCE, HAS NO RELEASE BINARIES AND RUNS ON PYTHON.
Note to @dfox: if you want this to not exist or not be supported inside AltRant, please tell me or send me an email about it.2 -
A little background on project fubar:
Project fubar was started a couple of years ago, by an entirely different set of devs, against an entirely different set of requirements which were never made transparent to this day, on a new platform and framework.
That means it had APIs either outdated or deprecated, front-end logic that did things it wasn't supposed to be doing and lots of scope creep and technical debt.
I had to support and fix fubar for the last few months to prime it for UAT. It was the equivalent of plugging leaks which created more leaks.
Finally, I couldn't take it and asked for a week off. I timed it so it would be right after what would have been the final UAT deployment and I'd be back after they completed their test rounds, so I could fix any new or returning defects.
Today I just found out that fubar got put on hold, that UAT was a failure and all fubar-related work had to stop. I have some mixed feelings on this: I worked hard to get fubar working as business wanted, and I was proud of that. But I also didn't like that fubar was constantly changing in scope and function.
I wonder if anyone else has ever felt the same thing?2 -
A dev life in Queen songs:
„A Kind of Magic“ - Build successful
„A Winter’s Tale“ - Key Account Manager visits customer
„Action This Day“ - Release day
„All Dead, All Dead“ - System down
„Another One Bites the Dust“ - kill -9 4711
„Breakthru“ - 10 hour debuging session
„Chinese Torture“ - Microsft Office
„Coming Soon“ - Client asks for delivery date
„Dead on Time“ - shutdown -t 10
„Doing All Right“ - How's the progress on the new feature?
„Don’t Lose Your Head“ - git push -f
„Don’t Stop Me Now“ - In the zone
„Escape from the Swamp“ - Hand in resignation letter
„Forever“ - while(1)
„Friends Will Be Friends“ - friend class Vector;
„Get Down, Make Love“ - No rule to make target "Love"
„Hammer to Fall“ - Release day
„Hang on in There“ - 2 weeks until release
„I Can’t Live With You“- Microsoft
„I Go Crazy“ - Microsoft
„I Want It All“ - Google
„I Want to Break Free“ - free( (void*) 0xDEADBEEF );
„I’m Going Slightly Mad“ - Impossible feature requested
„If You Can’t Beat Them“ - Impossible feature promised by sales
„In Only Seven Days“ - Impossible feature ordered
„Is This the World We Created...?“ - Philosphic moments
„It’s a Beautiful Day“ - Weekend
„It’s a Hard Life“ - Weekday
„It’s Late“ - Deadline was last week
„Jesus“ - WTF?
„Keep Passing the Open Windows“ - Interprocess communication
„Keep Yourself Alive“ - Daily struggle
„Leaving Home Ain’t Easy“ - Time to get up and go to work
„Let Me Entertain You“ - Sales meets customer
„Liar“ - Sales
„Long Away“ - Project start
„Loser in the End“ - Dev
„Lost Opportunity“ - Job ad
„Love of My Life“ - emacs/vim
„Machines“ - Computer
„Made in Heaven“ - git
„Misfire“ - Unhandled exception at Memory location 0xDEADBEEF
„My Life Has Been Saved“ - Google drive/Facebook
„New York, New York“ - Meeting at customer
„No-One But You“ - Bus factor = 1
„Now I’m Here“ - Morning rush hour
„One Vision“ - Management goals
„Pain Is So Close to Pleasure“ - NullPointerExcption
„Party“ - Delivery completed
„Play the Game“ - Customer meeting inhous -
„Put Out the Fire“ - Support hotline
„Radio Ga Ga“ - GSM/GPRS/UMTS/LTE/5G
„Ride the Wild Wind“ - Arch Linux
„Rock It“ - Linux
„Save Me“ - CTRL-S/CTRL-Z
„See What a Fool I’ve Been“ - git blame
„Sheer Heart Attack“ - rm -rf /
„Staying Power“- UPS
„Stealin’“ - Stack Overflow
„The Miracle“ - It works
„The Night Comes Down“ - It doesn't work
„The Show Must Go On“ - Project cancelled
„There Must Be More to Life Than This“ - Philosophic moments
„These Are the Days of Our Lives“ - Daily routine
„Under Pressure“ - 1 day until release
„Was It All Worth It“ - Controlling
„We Are the Champions“ - Release finished
„We Will Rock You“ - Sales at customer
„Who Needs You“ - HR
„You Don’t Fool Me“ - Debugging session
„You Take My Breath Away“ - rm -rf /
„You’re My Best Friend“ - emacs/vim4 -
I think I've reached some kind of job nirvana. My coworkers and I all complain about our work. We're overworked, underappreciated, underpaid, and and have to deal with all sorts of bullshit all the time. Pretty much everyone who has been on the team longer than a year is talking about quitting.
But I started at this company as a level 1 tech support phone technician before I transferred into the DevOps side of things, and that tech support job was SO much worse. Way more stressful, way less pay, mandatory overtime, horrible scheduling, being forced to remain calm while people hurl insults at you over the phone, and it was a dead-end job with a high turnover rate and almost no opportunities for advancement of any kind.
And every time I think back on that job, I realize that what I have now is actually pretty great. I'm paid well (still underpaid for the job I do, but catching up really fast due to my current boss giving me several big raises to keep me from quitting lol). I deal only with other tech people like developers and data scientists so no more listening to salesmen insult me on the phone. I'm not in any sort of customer service role so I can call people on their bullshit as long as I'm professional about it. I'm salaried so they can't make me work horrible shifts. 99% of my days are a normal 9-5 workday. I actually have a reliable schedule to plan around.
People treat me like the adult that I am.
I'd get a similar experience at other, better-paying companies, for sure, but what I have now is still pretty great.
I'm sure I'll be back in a few days to rant about more nonsensical bullshit and stress, but for now I'm feeling the zen. -
Can't wait until I'm done at my current workplace (about a month left). I've had enough of this fucking shitty ass ancient ASP.Net ERP-system and employer.
For the system:
1. The build times are horrendous and eats up all CPU power.
2. The "classic" UI and UX is absolute garbage. If I was an accountant, I would go nuts trying to invoice someone. Companies pay millions to use this garbage.
3. Besides the "classic UI", there is a mishmash of different JS frameworks plastered on top.
4. Absolute no fucking technical documentation whatsoever
5. The in-house relational database is a mess, no relations, entirely denormalized, no documentation.
6. The frontend is structured in HTML tables with iframes inside <td>
The company:
1. If you're a implementation consultant and you quit your job, you get stripped off all your projects, you won't get to join anything social and you're placed on 1st line support for three months. They might as well force them out.
2. Anyone can work from home anytime they feel like it without any valid reasons, and believe me they do.
3. The senior devs are overworked as all hell. By the end of the year, some of them have hundreds of flextime hours and won't get anything in return.
4. The CEO seems like a jolly guy, but when you quit, he doesn't like you at all. He also acts like a bigshot, always getting driven around meetings when there is literally a very good metro network in this city.9 -
I work in tech support right now... 80% of my job is waiting around for presenters to show up to events and end up not wanting any tech.
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soo after finishing 1 year of my 2 yr CS program, i moved back to my hometown so my partner wouldn't have to keep commuting for her career. couldnt get a cs job here with no experience and only 1 yr of school and like basically no portfolio to show for myself, i took a customer service job in a tech company with a lot of support for career pathing.
end goals are to end up working for their software dev team, mid goal is to switch into their web dev team from customer service since the career pathing is WAY easier from customer service to web dev, then web dev to sw dev rather than customer service straight to sw dev
so in the meantime i need to be practicing and building my portfolio but FUCK i have NO motivation and with coronavirus fucking up my life and everybody elses all i wanna do at the end of the workday and on weekends is melt into my bed in a semi-comatose state
i woke up early today to get some work done on my portfolio but all im doing is watching grey's anatomy and playing mobile games
i used to feel so motivated and excited to code but the excitement is gone and now even doing stuff for myself is a lot more like work than play
just need to rant it out rn4 -
<rant>
I was once a pure server side developer. Then came full stack development. So in order to keep up with the competition, I had to brave through front-end development.
But goddamn javascript, make up your mind between functions, and “Objects”.
Also variable visibility. Goddamnit. I thought ES6 was widely supported. I was happy doing const and let bbut goddamn testing frameworks, grunt and shit. Can’t make up it’s mind to support it unitedly.
And lastly, IE. Goddamn it, why the fuck are you not supporting Promise by default. We’re fucking 2017. [insert slowpoke meme]
</rant>
One good thing though, I like the library vuejs.
Bad thing is, this is just the beginning of a much more upcoming headache.4 -
The Zen Of Ripping Off Airtable:
(patterned after The Zen Of Python. For all those shamelessly copying airtables basic functionality)
*Columns can be *reordered* for visual priority and ease of use.
* Rows are purely presentational, and mostly for grouping and formatting.
* Data cells are objects in their own right, so they can control their own rendering, and formatting.
* Columns (as objects) are where linkages and other column specific data are stored.
* Rows (as objects) are where row specific data (full-row formatting) are stored.
* Rows are views or references *into* columns which hold references to the actual data cells
* Tables are meant for managing and structuring *small* amounts of data (less than 10k rows) per table.
* Just as you might do "=A1:A5" to reference a cell range in google or excel, you might do "opt(table1:columnN)" in a column header to create a 'type' for the cells in that column.
* An enumeration is a table with a single column, useful for doing the equivalent of airtables options and tags. You will never be able to decide if it should be stored on a specific column, on a specific table for ease of reuse, or separately where it and its brothers will visually clutter your list of tables. Take a shot if you are here.
* Typing or linking a column should be accomplishable first through a command-driven type language, held in column headers and cells as text.
* Take a shot if you somehow ended up creating any of the following: an FSM, a custom regex parser, a new programming language.
* A good structuring system gives us options or tags (multiple select), selections (single select), and many other datatypes and should be first, programmatically available through a simple command-driven language like how commands are done in datacells in excel or google sheets.
* Columns are a means to organize data cells, and set constraints and formatting on an entire range.
* Row height, can be overridden by the settings of a cell. If a cell overrides the row and column render/graphics settings, then it must be drawn last--drawing over the default grid.
* The header of a column is itself a datacell.
* Columns have no order among themselves. Order is purely presentational, and stored on the table itself.
* The last statement is because this allows us to pluck individual columns out of tables for specialized views.
*Very* fast scrolling on large datasets, with row and cell height variability is complicated. Thinking about it makes me want to drink. You should drink too before you embark on implementing it.
* Wherever possible, don't use a database.
If you're thinking about using a database, see the previous koan.
* If you use a database, expect to pick and choose among column-oriented stores, and json, while factoring for platform support, api support, whether you want your front-end users to be forced to install and setup a full database,
and if not, what file-based .so or .dll database engine is out there that also supports video, audio, images, and custom types.
* For each time you ignore one of these nuggets of wisdom, take a shot, question your sanity, quit halfway, and then write another koan about what you learned.
* If you do not have liquor on hand, for each time you would take a shot, spank yourself on the ass. For those who think this is a reward, for each time you would spank yourself on the ass, instead *don't* spank yourself on the ass.
* Take a sip if you *definitely* wildly misused terms from OOP, MVP, and spreadsheets.5 -
Well here it goes,
I started out in customer support (A lot of stuff to tell here).
1.
One of my colleagues would come to work drunk, like every day he would smell of boze (the hard stuff 80%+). When a customer got on his nerves he endet the call and threw his Keyboard across the room. He worked in the company 3+ Years after I left.
2. Another colleague would connect to his Personal Computer at his home and play WoW while at work ( Allthough the man was a genius with a lot of free time, until a new task was assigned to him)
3. My Boss at the time did some really shitty things. I worked 17 hour days (while I was 18) for a week, and at the end of the week he shredded the accrued overtime with some Bullshit Explanation. (I did not stay long after this shitshow happened).
4. A dispatcher who sent our technicians out scheduled their tasks so that they were on the road for weeks and did not see their families. This led to a very strong turnover among technicians.
And yes, this company still operates today.1 -
My family absolutely did not support me. Throughout my life my parents wanted me to become an accountant (like my sibling) and encouraged me to pursue that. In 8th grade I initially broke the news that I wanted to get into software development and was told "computers won't be around for another 10 years (this was probably around 2010), don't go into something so stupid". For reference, we had 1 family computer up til 2008 which we had limited amounts of time with.
Every year after, up until the end of 12th grade I told them I planned on going into software dev, and they got angrier each time, before finally they stopped speaking to me for a short time over that summer after I told them I had been accepted into university for computer science.
Now, in my final year, they still think i'm throwing my life away. Their disapproval is what has been motivating me the most, to prove to myself that I can support myself and create good things.1 -
Windows, the operating system which is so much more user-friendly than Linux, or so they say, cannot be operated by my family members without constant support helping them to find files they downloaded and want to send in an email for example. So I have to stretch my mind between my family's non-tech end-user perspective and Microsoft's Windows 11 UI, both of which deviate from my developer's perspective, each in its own surprising way.5
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Didn't think I had material for a rant but... Oh boy (at least at the level I'm at, I'm sure worse is to come)
I'm a Java programmer, lets get that out of the way. I like Java, it feels warm and fuzzy, and I'm still a n00b so I'm allowed to not code everything in assembly or whatever.
So I saw this video about compilers and how they optimize and move and do stuff with the machine code while generating the executable files. And the guy was using this cool terminal that had color, autocomplete past commands and just looked cool. So I was like "I'll make that for my next project!"
In Java.
So I Google around and find a code snipped that gives me "raw" input (vs "cooked" input) and returns codes and I'm like 😎. Pressing "a" returns 97 (I think that's the ASCII value) and I think this is all golden now.
No point in ranting if everything goes as planned so here is the *but*
Tabs, backspaces and other codes like that returned appropriate ASCII codes in Unix. But in windows, no such thing. And since I though I'd go multiplatform (WORA amarite) now I had to do extra work so that it worked cross platform.
Then I saw arrow keys have no ASCII codes... So I pressed a arrow key and THREE SEPARATE VALUES WERE REGISTERED. Let me reiterate. Unix was pretending I had pressed three keys instead of one, for arrow keys. So on Unix, I had to work some magic to get accurate readings on what the user was actually doing (not too bad but still...). Windows actually behaved better, just spit out some high values and all was good. So two more systems I had to set up for dealing with arrow keys.
Now I got to ANSI codes (to display color, move around the terminal window and do other stuff). Unix supports them and Windows did but doesn't but does with some Win 10 patch...? But when tested it doesn't (at least from what I've seen). So now, all that work I put into making one Unix key and arrow key reader, and same for Windows, flies out the window. Windows needs a UI (I will force Win users, screw compatibility).
So after all the fiddling and messing, trying to make the bloody thing work on all systems, I now have to toss half the input system and rework it to support UI. And make a UI, which I absolutely despise (why I want to do back end work and thought this would be good, since terminal is not too front end).2 -
Doing the deployment to production, and towards the end one of the support guys looks over at me;
"So, the website in prod is throwing some errors"
Followed by another guy:
"Yeah I'm getting the same, SQL exceptions on the page"
I stare at them panicked for a moment, when one of them goes "just kidding!". Like dude, my heart just skipped several beats!
Any one here ever had something cruel happen to them during a deployment?3 -
So today i had to visit this banks site to do updation on a document but for some reason the modal dialogue that was supposed to open was not working and i couldn't continue to next step.
On an attempt to contact customer support, i browsed the site for relevant details. As i do that, i observed this site is so shitty that it can't even properly render on Google Chrome! It was an horrific experience finding info in that site.
Finally found the customer support form and as I clicked the "submit" it didn't give any feedback whether it was processing or not. After like over a minute of uncertainty, it got redirected to a 404 page.
Frustrated, I went on to their twitter and I almost tweeted calling out their terrible web developer team.
But, my instinct told me to calm my titties and i tweeted a regular confused user tweet.
Got their attention and few hrs later i got a phone call from someone working there. He didn't sound like a customer service representative from the way he spoke. He told it was an issue with their website and had fixed it. I tried again as he was on the line but it was not working for me. And then i shared screenshot of the issue. He tested it again and said it was working for them. Still not working for me. ( Probably cache issue on my end ). Thought he would suggest to clear cache and try. But he asked me to try on another computer since it was working for him.
As i searched for a another system, i got a call from customer support guy and he said he will do the update on their end and told me to tell details. Since the info was not that sensitive in nature, I went with it.
Pretty sure the other guy i talked to was a developer.
This made me think - had i tweeted out a mean tweet calling out their shitty website it would have been probably awkward talking to him - I'd have to be mean again. It could've ruined his day, maybe he was under pressure from his pm that he had to make the phone call. He probably hates his job already managing that shitty legacy code..
I don't know - either way, I'm glad i was able to keep myself calm and not be a source of negative energy. -
longer rant, with curious question at the end;
my sister asked me lately how she can change the way her phone creates the name of pictures she takes (the naming scheme), as she didn't want the name to be composed of date and time (and so on) the picture was taken, cause she had to send it to her boss
after i replied that i don't know how this could be changed and that the naming scheme would have a purpose, she got angry at me because i wouldn't help her and that i should fuckin tell where it can be changed!😡
after i repeated my answer she said "what are you studying cs for?? YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS!!!😡😤"
i got furious, you guys can probably imagine as IT guy/dev 😠😠😠, given stereotypes/prejudices etc., unfortunately i'm not the guy who is good at freaking out and yelling at people, but GODDAMN IF I COULD TELL HER WHAT STUDYING THE DEGREE IS REALLY ABOUT! I'M SO FED UP WITH THIS!😤😤😤
i'm not supposed to know how her FUCKIN HONOR PHONE WORKS
WHICH I DON'T EVEN USE and never even thought about changing the naming scheme.
JUST RENAME IT AFTERWARDS!
of course her phone is so complicated that she doesn't even know how to rename the file, as she only knows how to use the google photos app (which doesn't support that?🤔) and never even considered to use the file manager ... well can't blame her for that, android isn't as simple as windows when it comes to this🤷
... in the end she just sent it, as is😪.
oh and by the way, is it actually possible?🤔14 -
The year was 2006. During the first half of my career, I use to work in the NOC. This was before I made my transition to software engineer. I worked on the third shift for a bank services company. The company was on a down turn. Just years earlier they just went public, and secured a deal with a huge well known bank. Eventually they entered a really bad contract with the bank and was put into a deal they couldn't deliver on. The partnership collapse and their stock plummeted. The CEO was dismissed, and a new CEO came in who wanted to "clean things up".
Anyway I entered the company about a year after this whole thing went down. The NOC was a good stepping stone for my career. They let me work as many hours as I liked. And I took advantage of it, clocking in 80 hours a week on average. They gave me the nick name "Iron Man".
Things started to turn around for the company when we were able to secure a support contract with a huge bank in the Alabama area. As the NOC we were told to handle the migration and facilitate the onboarding.
The onboarding was a mess with terrible instructions that didn't work. A bunch of software packages that crashed. And the network engineers were tips off, as they tunnel between our network and the banks was too narrow, creating an unstable connection between us and them. Oh, and there were all sorts of database corruption issues.
There was also another bank that was using an old version of our software. The sells team had been trying to get them off our old software for over a year. They refuse to move. This bank was the last one using this version, and our organization wanted to completely cut support.
One of the issue we would have is that they had an overnight batch job that had an ETA to be done by 7 AM. The job would often get stuck because this version of the software didn't know how to fail when it was caught in an undesired state. So the job hung, and since the job didn't have logging, no one could tell if it failed unless the logs stopped moving for an hour. It was a heavily manually process that was annoying to deal with. So we would kill the JVM to "speed" the job up. One day I killed the JVM but the job was still late. They told me that they appreciated the effort, but that my job was only to report the problem and not fix it.
This got me caught up in a major scandal. Basically they wanted the job to always have issues everyday. Since this was critical for them, all we needed to do was keep reporting it, and then eventually this would cause the client to have to upgrade to our new software. It was our sales team trying to play dirty. It immediately made me a menace in the company.
For the next 6 months I was constantly harassed and bullied by management. My work was nitpicked. They asked me to come into work nearly everyday, and there was a point I worked 7 days with no off days. They were trying to run me so dry that I would quit. But I never did.
On my last day at the company, I was on a critical call with a customer, and my supervisor was also on the line. My supervisor made a request that made no sense, and was impossible. I told her it wasn't possible. She then scalded me on the call in front of customers. She said "I'm your supervisor, you're just a NOC technician, you do what I say and don't talk back". It was embarrassing to be reprimanded on a call with customers. I never quite recovered from that. I could fill myself steaming with anger. It was one of the first times in my adult life that I felt I really wanted to be violent towards someone. It was such a negative feeling I quit that day at the end of my shift with no job lined up.
I walked away from the job feeling very uncertain about my future, but VERY relieved. I paid the price, basically unable to find a job until a year and a half later. And even was forced to move back in with my mother. After I left, the company still gave my a severance. Probably because of the supervisor's unprofessional conduct in front of customers, and the company probably needed to save face. The 2008 crash kept me out of work until 2009. It did give me time to work on myself, and I swore to never let a job stress me out to that degree. That job was also my last NOC job and the last job where did shift work. My next few jobs was Application Support and I eventually moved into development full time, which is what I always wanted to do.
Anyway sorry if it's a bit long, but that's my burnout story. -
Excel literally has internal support for treating other excel workbooks as SQL databases, encouraging end-users to do that instead of using MS Access properly, and *it doesn't even work*.6
-
Headsup: if you're making a game, or want to, a good starting point is to ask a single question.
How do I want this game to feel?
A lot of people who make games get into it because they play and they say I wish this or that feature were different. Or they imagine new mechanics, or new story, or new aesthetics. These are all interesting approaches to explore.
If you're familiar with a lot of games, and why and how their designs work, starting with game
feel is great. It gives you a palette of ideas to riff on, without knowing exactly why it works, using your gut as you go. In fact a lot of designers who made great games used this approach, creating the basic form, and basically flew-blind, using the testing process to 'find the fun'.
But what if, instead of focusing on what emotions a game or mechanic evokes, we ask:
How does this system or mechanic alter the
*players behaviors*? What behaviors
*invoke* a given emotion?
And from there you can start to see the thread that connects emotion, and behavior.
In *Alien: Isolation*, the alien 'hunts' for the player, and is invulnerable. Besides its menacing look, and the dense atmosphere, its invincibility
has a powerful effect on the player. The player is prone to fear and running.
By looking at behavior first, w/ just this one game, and listing the emotions and behaviors
in pairs "Fear: Running", for example, you can start to work backwards to the systems and *conditions* that created that emotion.
In fact, by breaking designs down in this manner, it becomes easy to find parallels, and create
these emotions in games that are typically outside the given genre.
For example, if you wanted to make a game about vietnam (hold the overuse of 'fortunate son') how might we approach this?
One description might be: Play as a soldier or an insurgent during the harsh jungle warfare of vietnam. Set ambushes, scout through dense and snake infested underbrush. Identify enemy armaments to outfit your raids, and take the fight to them.
Mechanics might include
1. crawl through underbrush paths, with events to stab poisonous snacks, brush away spiders or centipedes, like the spiders in metro, hold your breathe as armed enemy units march by, etc.
2. learn to use enfilade and time your attacks.
3. run and gun chases. An ambush happens catching you off guard, you are immediately tossed behind cover, and an NPC says "we can stay and fight but we're out numbered, we should run." and the system plots out how the NPCs hem you in to direct you toward a series of
retreats and nearest cover (because its not supposed to be a battle, but a chase, so we want the player to run). Maybe it uses these NPC ambushes to occasionally push the player to interesting map objectives/locations, who knows.
4. The scouting system from State of Decay. you get a certain amount of time before you risk being 'spotted', and have to climb to the top of say, a building, or a tower, and prioritize which objects in the enemy camp to identity: trucks, anti-air, heavy guns, rockets, troop formations, carriers, comms stations, etc. And that determines what is available to 'call in' as support on the mission.
And all of this, b/c you're focusing on the player behaviors that you want, leads to the *emotions* or feelings you want the player to experience.
Point is, when you focus on the activities you want the player to *do* its a more reliable way of determining what the player will *feel*, the 'role' they'll take on, which is exactly what any good designer should want.
If we return back to Alien: Isolation, even though its a survival horror game, can we find parallels outside that genre? Well The Last of Us for one.
How so? Well TLOU is a survival third-person shooter, not a horror game, and it shows. Theres
not the omnipresent feeling of being overpowered. The player does use stealth, but mostly it's because it serves the player's main role: a hardened survivor whos a capable killer, struggling through a crapsack world. The similarity though comes in with the boss battles against the infected.
The enemy in these fights is almost unstoppable, they're a tank, and the devs have the player running from them just to survive. Many players cant help but feel a little panic as they run for their lives, especially with the superbly designed custom death scenes for joel. The point is, mechanics are more of a means to an end, and if games are paintings, and mechanics are the brushes, player behavior is the individual strokes and player emotion is the color. And by examining TLOU in this way, it becomes obvious that while its a third person survival shooter, the boss fights are *overtones* of Alien: Isolation.
And we can draw that comparison because like bach, who was deaf, and focused on the keys and not the sound, we're focused on player behavior and not strictly emotions.1 -
Bootcamps get you up and running in coding quickly. If you are a programmer, companies are only interested on how quickly, error free and cheaply you produce marketable output. Bootcamps enable this.
More or less you are not more than a former assembly line worker putting parts on a car platform. Your value is not very high as you may be exchanged at any time at their will.
Nevertheless, you can earn money quickly. You trade in your youth and time which might be a dead end in the long-term. Trends go to machine learning, artificial intelligence. They will not need Bootcamp people and code workers.
It is better you set up Bootcamps and sell them versus absolving this. Like selling shovels during the gold rush, but not working in the mud of Alaska by yourself.
Your choice is: Making quick money, which fades anyway; or striving for the long-term future proof career.
C/S degrees from Technical Universities of reputation give to you the right direction under a strategic consideration. Companies which pay well, or freelancing with a solid acknowledged background, will always look for top graduates. People from Bootcamps are just OK for hammering assembly line coding. Even worse with SCRUM in one noisy room under enormous team server pressure controls, counting your lines of code per minute, with pale people all around. And groups of controllers never acknowledging nor trusting your work.
To acquire a serious degree, a Bachelor is nothing. Here, in INDIA, Bachelor now is what a former high school grade was. You must carry a diploma or Masters degree combined with internships at big companies with high brand recognition. This will require 4–6 years of your lifetime. You can support this financially by working part-time freelancing as making some projects front- or back-end web, data analysis and else.
Bootcamp people will lose in the long-term. They are the modern cannon fudder of software production.
It is your choice. Personally, I would never do Bootcamps. Quality and sustainability require time, deep studies and devotion. -
I wrote a blogging platform around 3.5yrs back in PHP. My friend uses that, and apparently wants me to update the code. To which I refused saying that I am too busy. But the real reason is that it is one of the purest form of cancerous shit I ever wrote. I can't even look at that code now. Its like abandoning your own child, because it is too ugly... Here's a snapshot of the code, I don't even know what this does anymore..
Moral: Don't give your code to your friend no matter how shitty it is, you will end up providing lifetime support for it.
1 -
I got assigned to work on a new project a couple of weeks ago. We got the POC code handed off from senior management, since he came up with the idea over the weekend. The project concept is hella exciting, but the dev manager and PO I have to deal with make life unbearable to say the least.
We have only 2 devs (including me) and 1 QA on this supposedly very important project. Of course, management announced the project to the clients already, so now we have to deliver ASAP cause it adds “sizzle”.
The MVP deadline is... no one knows when, either July 30th or September 1st. The MVP requirements are... unknown. I swear if someone saw the list of tasks and issues attached to “MVP” Epic, they would call us nuts trying to fit it all in.
To make things better, each PR requires 2 reviewers, so we end up adding manager as a reviewer just cause we need him to hit that “approve” button. So in attempt to make life easier, we requested to have a third developer. We are getting another developer, but that guy doesn’t know how to unit test a pure function...
Current priorities are... unit testing with coverage of 95% and if we want to refactor code, we have to add area to the list in a Google Doc. As a result, we are not tackling big things like risk of SQL injections not to mention big features like i18n (5-6 languages to support by the way and yes, it’s part of MVP as well as SSR no one knows why). Currently, I spend 2-3 hours a week in calls with the team just to figure out what the hell MVP is, what we have to do and why we have to do it. Last time we spent an hour refining 1 spike and breaking down one story into 3.
Oh, we also don’t have a deployment plan, not even to test environments since DevOps team was not aware of this project at all. Thus, QA cannot create any test suites and have to test everything manually which eats a lot of their time.
This whole project is a big hot mess and I’m considering leaving it all together especially since I’m working on two squads at the same time. I love the project, I love the idea, but management makes it unbearable, so I’m not even motivated to work on that.3 -
WARNING - a lot of text.
I am open for questions and discussions :)
I am not an education program specialist and I can't decide what's best for everyone. It is hard process of managing the prigram which is going through a lot of instances.
Computer Science.
Speaking about schools: regular schools does not prepare computer scientists. I have a lot of thoughts abouth whether we need or do NOT need such amount of knowledge in some subjects, but that's completely different story. Back to cs.
The main problem is that IT sphere evolves exceedingly fast (compared to others) and education system adaptation is honestly too slow.
SC studies in schools needs to be reformed almost every year to accept updates and corrections, but education system in most countries does not support that, thats the main problem. In basic course, which is for everyone I'd suggest to tell about brief computer usage, like office, OS basics, etc. But not only MS stuff... Linux is no more that nerdy stuff from 90', it's evolved and ready to use OS for everyone. So basic OS tour, like wtf is MAC, Linux (you can show Ubuntu/Mint, etc - the easy stuff) would be great... Also, show students cloud technologies. Like, you have an option to do *that* in your browser! And, yeah, classy stuff like what's USB and what's MB/GB and other basic stuff.. not digging into it for 6 months, but just brief overview wuth some useful info... Everyone had seen a PC by the time they are studying cs anyway.. and somewhere at the end we can introduce programming, what you can do with it and maybe hello world in whatever language, but no more.. 'cause it's still class for everyone, no need to explain stars there.
For last years, where shit's getting serious, like where you can choose: study cs or not - there we can teach programming. In my country it's 2 years. It's possible to cover OOP principles of +/- modern language (Java or C++ is not bad too, maybe even GO, whatever, that's not me who will decide it. Point that it's not from 70') + VCS + sime real world app like simplified, but still functional bookstore managing app.
That's about schools.
Speaking about universities - logic isbthe same. It needs to be modern and accept corrections and updates every year. And now it depends on what you're studying there. Are you going to have software engineering diploma or business system analyst...
Generally speaking, for developers - we need more real world scenarios and I guess, some technologies and frameworks. Ofc, theory too, but not that stuff from 1980. Come-on, nowadays nobody specifies 1 functional requirement in several pages and, generally, nobody is writing that specification for 2 years. Product becomes obsolete and it's haven't even started yet.
Everything changes, whether it is how we write specification documents, or literally anything else in IT.
Once more, morale: update CS program yearly, goddammit
How to do it - it's the whole another topic.
Thank you for reading.3 -
Good code is a lie imho.
When you see a project as code, there are 3 variables in most cases:
- time
- people / human resources
- rules
Every variable plays a certain role in how the code (project) evolves.
Time - two different forms: when certain parts of code are either changed in a high frequency or a very low frequency, it's a bad omen.
Too high - somehow this area seems to be relentless. Be it features, regressions or bugs - it takes usually in larger code bases 3 - 4 weeks till all code pathes were triggered.
Too low - it can be a good sign. But it should be on the radar imho. Code that never changes should be reviewed at an - depending on size of codebase - max. yearly audit. Git / VCS is very helpful here.
Why? Mostly because the chances are very high that the code was once written for a completely different requirement set. Hence the audit - check if this code still is doing the right job or if you have a ticking time bomb that needs to be defused.
People
If a project has only person working on it, it most certainly isn't verified by another person. Meaning that only one person worked on it - I'd say it's pretty bad to bad, as no discussion / review / verification was done. The author did the best he / she could do, but maybe another person would have had an better idea?
Too many people working on one thing is only bad when there are no rules ;)
Rules. There are two different kind of rules.
Styling / Organisation / Dokumentation - everything that has not much to do with coding itself. These should be enforced at a certain point, otherwise the code will become a hot glued mess noone wants to work on.
Coding itself. This is a very critical thing.
Do: Forbid things that are known to be problematic in the programming language itself. Eg. usage of variables in variables, reflection, deprecated features.
Do: Define a feature set for each language. Feature set not meaning every feature you want to use! Rather a fixed minimum version every developer must use and - in case of library / module / plugin support - which additional extras are supported.
Every extra costs. Most developers don't want to realize this... And a code base that evolves over time should have minimal dependencies. Every new version of an extra can have bugs, breakages, incompabilties and so on.
Don't: don't specify a way of coding. Most coding guidelines are horrific copy pastures from some books some smart people wrote who have no fucking clue what you're doing and why.
If you don't know how to operate on people, standing in an OR and doing what a book told you to do would end in dead person pretty sure. Same for code.
Learn from mistakes and experience, respect knowledge from other persons, but always reflect on wether this makes sense at this specific area of code.
There are very few things which are applicable to a large codebase on a global level. Even DRY / SOLID and what ever you can come up with can be at a certain point completely wrong.
Good code is a lie - because it can only exist at a certain point of time.
A codebase should be a living thing - when certain parts rot, other parts will be affected too.
The reason for the length of the comment was to give some hints on what my principles are that code stays in an "okayish" state, but good is a very rare state -
When you read an article that WhatsApp's end of support is the last nail in the coffin of Windows Phone and you are like: "But I don't care about WhatsApp at all..." 😅
P.S. W10M user here.4 -
Every tool in the JS ecosystem goes out of its way to support faulty or outdated variants of every interface, yet nothing is actually forgiving or fault tolerant. Publishing packages is exactly as agonizing as consuming them, even though both sides have tens of switches and probably hundreds of automatic heuristics to align themselves to any hypothetical setup on the opposite end.2
-
For a back-end, Java engineer, It's really sad when you are so bored at work that you get excited at the thought of designing SQL views/procs to make prod support easier.
-
One of my insurance companies made me sign a legal disclosure that they no longer support Internet Explorer for paperless options. The end is in sight!1
-
Motherfucking windows 10 upgrades. Fucking hell no! They added that piece of shit that they sell as a browser again. Edge? More fucking end me. And why the fuck that shit have all permissions my default. Even those I don't want the OS to have.
But what's even worse...
THE FUCKING MOUSEPAD DRIVER DOESN'T SUPPORT MULTITOUCH AGAIN
I wish I had the time to finally configure get away Form these micro$uckers.
3 -
F*ck software updates..
So while working today, one of the IT support guy came and asked to update my windows machine due to some stupid company 'security policy' they were following .. That update took more than 3hrs.. The reason it took so long because I somehow managed to avoid any updates for 6-8 months.
But that is not the end of the story... Windows update was followed by a bios update, some softwares, and at this point I just gave up and went for a cup of coffee, and left my machine locked in a drawer still updating and it will stay in this condition until tomorrow.. We'll see if something breaks after updating.
F*ck why are there so many updates and why each of them requires a f*cking reboot...
Productivity today was less than the number of side projects I completed. 😪6 -
A dedicated team has built an "infrastructure" for creating UI for c++ developers in the company. What looks like a poor attempt at recreating what Microsoft did with XAML at first glance, it actually is a horrible exercise in force feeding people the stinking pile of shit that their code is.
The idea is to make it easy to create UI for developers who aren't used to front end development. They should just need to declare the layout. Very noble.
But.
If you want to do anything more than show a checkbox or a radio button, if you dare to define relationships between the UI controls or worse, if you get ambitious with creating a simple UI that uses a lot of similar controls and similar relationships with dynamic content... be prepared to eat your own barf from eating too much of their shit.
Not only do you now need to write front end code (including JS among others), you need to do it with limited or poor support and you have to make sure that it sits well with the house of moist, crumbly cards the team proudly created. Or resort to some very stupid and performance costing "bypasses" that further cripple your application code. Usually you have to do both of these things.
To think that scores of other teams have welcomed this amazing enhancement with full support without any resistance. It's sickening.
I waste too much of energy (and good jokes!) with these people.4 -
Step 1:
Promise customer something non-existent
Step 2:
Complain big time that engineering is not co-operating in getting the order out in time. (without which you won't get your end of year sales performance bonus)
Step 3:
Comment about the product being sub standard. Rant about how engineering "great" products must be the philosophy. Blah blah blah...
Offer to provide your fucking support to make the product better despite not being responsible for it.Be the greater person.
Step 4:
Deliver the product. Pocket your bonus. Make jokes about how bad the product is and how you won't sell it again to protect the company brand reputation.
Step 5:
Rinse and repeat.
Fucking assholes. -
I hate this feeling.
Changing stuff with a greamripers scythe around my neck called doubt because the available data isn't too convincing.
Then having to go big or nothing as it is an ecosystem change (e.g. changing the cipher suites of TLS, changing protocol - e.g. HTTP 1.1 to 2) so it needs to be consistent as otherwise fun stuff could happen (fun as in the grim reaper cuts off my neck except a few centimeters and plays "now your head is off, now your head is on" ).
To top it off - just few seconds after the change has happened people coming up in the support channel.
My hands are - mysteriously - not sweaty then. Rather cold.
Lil prayer to the heavens and getting the whiskey bottle...
Opening an ongoing discussion in support channel....
And they're discussing whether the page needs to have an additional arrow for going back to the last page or if the default page navigation is enough.
Constantly using @all so everyone gets pissed off due to being pinged every few seconds in a channel that was meant for emergency support.
Now my hands go from a dark red to a bright red, my nostrils flare out, my adrenaline goes through the roof and I literally wanna murder people....
Those days.
I hate those days.
And I hate the timing of some people...
Like they're deliberately fucking with me without knowing it, like the universe told them explicitly to do so just to fuck with me.
*gooozfraba*
And of course, everything else is fine and running smooth like butter, except that said discussion now goes on in a total flamewar so I get even more pings.
Sucks to be in management.
You have way to many rooms where people can annoy you.
To top it off - after being grumpy and pissed and angry for people just annoying the fuck out of me, I have to mediate.
Yeah. Cause the usual person is on vacancy.
*slowly strangling the whiskey bottle like homer does with bart*
Turns out after 15 mins listening to enraged UX designer vs Frontend Team Lead that UX designer meant a completely different thing - uploaded wrong screenshot, whole discussion was unnecessary.
*Nah. Fuck it. Drinking whiskey*
Reminding everyone what the fucking frigging support channel is meant for and that penis fights aka who got the longest schlong don't belong there....
"Yeah it was a mistake, but it wasn't so bad"
...
You pinged fucking 32 people like it was the end of the world, you ignorant fucktwads.
For over 5 mins.
For fucking frigging nothing except your tiny dicks and shitty egos.
*Second round of whiskey*
Back to work after a wasted half hour.
What says monitoring?
Ah. Everything's working.
At least luck hasn't failed me.
Good server. Brave server.
Then I hear this lil voice in my head: no.
The servers know your personality.
They're afraid. Terrified.
Somehow that thought makes me giggle always...
Childish? Maybe. But it helps on those days.... Funnily enough, remaining 3 hours noone said anything in any chat channel.
"I wonder why, I wonder how...."... *hum* -
Hey just brainstorming a business/ startup idea I may try out sometime down the line. I wanted to put it in writing available to my peers for review. If that sounds boring, sorry.
So I've had an idea and I know it's a million dollar idea because it's absolutely boring as fuck.
Recently I have been learning about NoSQL and it has gotten me pretty excited about unstructured data.
Now the first thing you should know about me is I like to make business software. I don't like games or social networks or blah blah blah, I like business stuff. One dream I have always had is to make THE business solution. I've noticed so many specific business solutions for very specific areas of work. Specific software for car washes, which is separate from the software for car maintenance, which is separate from the point-of-sales software, which is separate from the [...]
One of the problems with this is the inconsistency. Modular is good, but only if the modules are compatible. They aren't. Training needs to be provided for each individual system since they are all vastly different. And worst of all, since all of these different applications reach their own niche market, they charge out the butt for things that are usually very simple "POST a form over http(s)" machines.
I mean let's not get too dreamy here. My solution is an over-complicated form-builder. But it would be a game-changer for small and medium-sized businesses. Allowing users to build their own front-end and back-end disguised as a drag-and-drop form builder would be THE alternative, because they could bring all of their solutions into a single solution (one bill!) and since THEY are the ones that build what they need, they can have custom business software for the price of a spreadsheet program.
The price difference we could offer would be IMMENSE. Not only would we be able to offer "cookie-cutter" pricing as opposed to "custom" pricing, but since this generic solution could be used for essentially all of their systems, we aren't just decreasing one bill. We're decreasing one bill, and eliminating the rest entirely. We could devastate competition.
"BUT ALGO", you scream in despair, "USERS AREN'T SMART ENOUGH TO DRAG AND DROP FORM PARTS TO MAKE A FORM"
I mean ya true. But you say that like it's a bad thing. For one, we can just offer a huge library of templates. And for another, which is part of the business plan, we can charge people support dollars to help them drag and drop their stupid fucking forms!! Think of the MONEEYYYY YOU COULD MAKEE BY EXPLAINING HOW TO COLLECT FIRST AND LAST NAMEEE. Fuck.
The controls library would be extensible of course. You would be able to download different, more specialized controls if you need them. But the goal would be to satsify those needs with the standard collection of controls (Including interesting ones line barcode scanner and signature input and all that). But if all else fails, maybe someone made an open source control for you to implement and ignore that stupid donation button. We all do.
This could PURGE the world of overpriced and junky specialized business software, and best of all, it's aimed at smaller businesses. With smaller businesses making more profit, they will stay afloat better and may start to compete with their larger foes. Greater for the entire economy.
Anyways, I'm sure it's full of holes. Everything always is. But I still think it's something I'll try before I die.24 -
#include <advice>
using namespace plz;
So I have a soft cozy internship for a large retail corporation, the workplace is fantastic and the people are nice. We run into problems where this company outsources to India for almost all of its programming leaving their "software engineers" to answer emails and support 15 year old applications. This is obviously not the work I want to be doing. I want to create. This company also pays slightly less than average for an entry level programmer. I have one year of college left as well. At the end of this internship it is almost guaranteed that I get a full time offer but I only get 2 months to accept or decline. I feel like I'll say no.
So I guess what I'm asking is, should I turn down the safe first job and go for work that will make me excited in the morning or take the easy soft underpaid email answering job?
Thanks guys3 -
We received legacy project for support and fixing.. it had few issues:
1. There was a controller called MainController. This guy was the soul of the project 10k+ lines, heavily dependent on the data from the database.
2. We didnt get the data. Just the database structure (we couldnt run the app at all)
3. At the very end of that controller there was a "simple" eval($_SESSION['somevariable'])
4. We had no documentation and had to guess how it works...
Someone really had fun screwing up this project. Needless to say we got rid of it quickly. :) -
Anyone know how to go about unit testing an application that is made up of:
- Electron
- Node
- React
- Typescript
(React using Typescript of course).
Electron has its own framework (Spectron), people seem to use Mocha with Node, React has its own tools like React testing library (and testing UI components will probably end me) and Typescript seems to play best with Jest - but a special Typescript flavour of Jest called ts-jest is preferable because the only other option is having Babel and its Typescript support that doesn't type check.
I want to beg for the sweet release of death.4 -
I'm tired of our daily support meeting. That's almost one hour i lost everyday in which i could ne productive in my project🙄
Everyday the god damn same stories about our dumb customers and at the end nothing change...
Maybe i'll start draw all my colleagues, while i sit there😄 -
The end of today was extremely fun.
Imagine the surprise. I was importing a simple 8 GB big virtual machine into the Proxmox hypervizor.
First issue: It was in the Open Virtualization Format (.ova) for easy import into... most hypervizors... Not Proxmox, however.
But really, not that bad, there are ways around it. Create a blank virtual machine through the UI, scrap the disk you create, then extract the two disk QCOW2 files from the .ova file, which by itself is just a POSIX TAR archive. Then import them through the commandline.
...So I did just that. The larger of the two was about 8 GBs, the other just like... 50 MBs.
The larger imported fine. The smaller?
Color me surprised, when it created a FUCKING. 1. TB. LOGICAL. VOLUME.
...
That it then proceeded to try and fill full of zeros...
Oh yes, it was one of the fancy dynamic storage files that expand as space is needed.
...
Tomorrow, I'll have to try if I can export just the filesystem data into an individual, shrunken down, normal, plain, old disk. None of this fancy black magic shit.
...Also... I don't get why Proxmox doesn't support that... The filesystem was only a few megs big... Ugh.1 -
The taboo of not finishing.
(As I prefaced to many posts I made, don't take this too seriously)
It is very normal in the programming world to get recommended to finish projects.
But I was wondering "what if you don't?".
Of course, we can agree that having little patience or persistence is not good for any endeavor.
But what if this recurrent focus on finishing is also bad?
Granted, I have started dozens of things and only finished one or two of them and none have become popular.
So there's not a lot of support to back my take.
But I definitely learned a lot from these projects. And I definitely had a lot of fun at some points.
In fact, I think if I had switched more often early on I would have been less miserable, and maybe I would have learned more by the virtue of not getting stuck with some project.
Of course this applies as long as you stay within the same field; it doesn't help learning gardening one day but karate the following.
But even then, there are so many hobbies in life that the chance of finding the one that you love and are the best at are very slim. So switching out of the least pleasant ones might bring you to a favorite one.
But, let's go back to programming.
Here, people recommend finishing things as means to become profitable. If you want to live as a gamedev, then you need to sell games, and to do that, you need to finish games.
That is understandable.
But if gamedev isn't your main profit, why is finishing games a requirement?
What's the point of publishing a game that you know looks like shit?
Why? Why should you put time and energy, pain and stress, all the way through the end only to finish or even publish a game that you can feel ashamed of how awful it looks? (because most 1st games look awful).
Why would you ever want to finish something that looks horrible?
First tries are always terrible, and that's fine, nothing wrong with that.
What's wrong is this sheepthought that you should publish to the public every turd that you can produce in your early learning stages.
I've been a programmer for almost 8 years now. I'm not the best out there, but I consider myself ok.
And considering I had some pretty deep depression pits thanks to this mentality, here's my advice to folk having stress with unfinished projects: don't give a single fuck.
If a side project has become stressful, shelf that shit, maybe tell someone about your issues with it. But don't care much about it.
In fact, if you manage to finish a project but it has costed you a great deal of stress, maybe that should be the shameful thing.
Life is too short to waste it considering suicide because you're not a prolific programmer.
And i would argue that iterating 100 times on different things is far more productive (and fun) than fetting stuck or spending shitloads of time on the first one, even if you don't finish any of them.2 -
TLDR;
Side project update.
Made simple nlp library in python and published it’s first version to open source.
Now I can feed it with parsed pdf text.
See rant https://devrant.com/rants/2192388/...
Why ?
Cause during reading book about nltk I couldn’t find simple extendible way to provide support for polish language and I wanted to abstract stemming, word normalization, tokenizer etc. so I can provide ex. different conditions for separate text files and don’t write much code what is an asset when you work solo.
It’s about 12GB of pdf public accessible law data I am trying to handle ( at first ) which is about 35000 files from last 90 years.
So far I automated downloading web pages and pdf documents from them. Extracting data from web pages and saving it to database. Extracting text from pdf files. I have about 5-6 projects to do all of it above maybe at the end I will put it to some workflow manager like Luigi or just run it by cronjob.
First thing for website version 1.0 part is find correlation between all documents inside law text using nlp library by building custom conditions. Then just generate directory structure and html files with links between documents.
Website version 2.0 is already in my mind but it will be creepy to make it and will take at least 1-2 months and I want to publish fast.
I have some pdfs with only images instead of text and tesseract worked quite good with them so maybe I will try to process them when everything go live.
Learned a lot about pdf as now I know that font in pdf is not always providing unicode characters ( stupid form of obfuscation) so when you extract text you need to build glyph vector to text map for every font.
Pdf is full vector representation - just like svg - what is logic if you think a bit and know that some printers are running using postscript.
Let’s hope next update will be about flutter mobile app which started all of shit above. It’s almost ready ( except getting data from api I am trying to do and logo for release version ). It’s last piece of puzzle.3 -
Low-end smartphones sold to Americans with low-income via a government-subsidized program contain unremovable malware, security firm Malware bytes said in a report.
According to the report of ZdNet: The smartphone model is Unimax (UMX) U686CL, a low-end Android-based smartphone made in China and sold by Assurance Wireless. The telco sells cell phones part of a government program that subsidizes phone service for low-income Americans. "In late 2019, we saw several complaints in our support system from users with a government-issued phone reporting that some of its pre-installed apps were malicious," Malwarebytes said in a report. The company said it purchased a UMX U686CL smartphone and analyzed it to confirm the reports it was receiving.7 -
This is a part rant-part question.
So a little backstory first:
I work in a small company (5 including me) which is mostly into consultation (we have many tech partners where we either resell their products or if there is a requirement from one of our clients, we get our partners to develop it for them and fulfill the client requirements) so as you can see there is a lot of external dependencies. I act as a one-hat-fits-all tech guy, handling the company websites, social media channels, technical documentation, tech support, quicks POCs (so anything to do with anything technical, I handle them). I am a bit fed up now, since the CEO expects me to do some absurd shit (and sometimes micro manages me, like WTF I am the only one who works there with 100% commitment) and expects me to deliver them by yesterday.
So anyway long story short, our CEO finally had the brains to understand that we should start having our own product (which i had been subtly suggesting him to do for a while now!).
Now he came up with a fairly workable concept that would have good market reach (i atleast give him credits for that) and he wanted me to suggest the best way to move forward (from a both business and technical point of view). The concept is to have an auction-based platform for users to buy everyday products.
I suggested we build a web app as opposed to a mobile one (which is obvious, since i didnt want to develop a seperate website and a mobile app, and anyway just because we can doesnt mean we have to make a mobile app for everything), and recommended the Node/react based JS tech stack to build it.
At first he wanted me to single handedly build the whole platform within a month, I almost flipped (but me being me) then somehow calmed down and finally was able to explain him how complicated it was to single-handedly build a platform of such complexity (especially given my limited experience; did I mention that this is my first job and I am still in college, yeah!!) and convinced him to get an experienced back-end dev and another dev to help me with it.
Now comes the problem, I was to prepare a scope document outlining all the business and technical requirements of the project along with a tentative cost, which was fairly straightforward. I am currently stuck at deciding the server requirements and the system architecture for the proposed solution (I am thinking of either going with AWS - which looks a bit complicated to setup - or go with either Digital Ocean or Heroku):
I have assumed that at peak times we would have around 500-1000 users concurrently
And a daily userbase of 1000 users (atleast for the first few months of the platform running)
What would be the best way forward guys?
I did some extensive (i mean i read through some medium blogs! and aws documentation) research and put together the following specs (if we are going through AWS):
One AWS t3.medium ec2 instance for the node server (two if we want High Availability by coupling with the AWS load balancer and Elastic Beanstalk)
The db.t3.small postgres database
The S3 Storage bucket (100gb) for the React Front end hosting
AWS SNS for email/sms OTP and notification
And AWS CloudMonitor for logging amd monitoring.
Am I speculating the requirements properly, where have I missed??
Can u guys suggest what is the best specification for such a requirement (how do you guys decide what plan to go with)?
Any suggestions, corrections, advices are welcome3 -
<long post>
To start of I'm a student in the Netherlands, I have just finished finished a support management study and I'm currently starting with a IT Management study on MBO 4 lvl.
At the moment I'm in conflict scout doing the IT Management study or doing a application development study as I just don't know what to do. I kind of want do development as I do it in my free time and I like it but I also want to do data center engineering as I also like to work with the hardware.
Should I take a month break of my study and try to get in contact with company's to work there to finalize my decision or should I just drop in the towel and do this study without knowing if I'm going to like it in the end.
And if you work at a company in the Netherlands do you think i can do some orientation internship at your company or do you guys know some places to look at.
</Long post>6 -
A shitty platform that, although open source, there is no clearly documented way of setting a development environment for it. This pile of crap states clearly that it does NOT support RTL languages. One of the core business requirements is Arabic support. What to do? Look for other platforms? WRONG!
Base the fucking business on it and ask ME to see why the SQL database is not encoding the Arabic characters correctly and to look into the logs that back-end puked. My expertise is mobile development anyways damnit. Sure the backend code is Java code (Java jokers and haters, not the appropriate place) and I know it but there is no fucking way to test that motherfucker or to build it! No fucking testing server can be made! Only instructions to get a Docker image pulled and set up.
FML.
"This company is a fucking م."
I cannot believe I am so frustrated that I am ending this rant with a fun puzzle.
Hints to help you decipher the quoted sentence:
Hint 1: That Arabic letter is the perfect letter.
Hint 2: You don't need to be an Arab to understand what it means.6 -
The adventurous world of javascript and typescript never ceases to amaze me.
I'm investigating some paths to take for migrating this legacy project which has incurred some technical debt. Because of... reasons... even the frontend Vue project needs to be built on a Windows system. No, you can take your hands down, even wsl or docker aren't alternatives here. It's a long story and ties in with said debt.
I'm keen on rebooting the entire frontend using a newer Vue cli and scaffold up all the essentials like eslint and typescript which is currently not used. This is gonna be sweet.
Except, typescript (BY Microsoft) doesn't play well on a Windows (BY Microsoft) filesystem because of a recent change to support - get this - wsl. I can't decide if it's hilariously ironic or genius.
This response about sums up my current mood. https://github.com/Microsoft/...
Of course, further digging in other repos like node only turns up issues closed due to it being on Windows' end.
So now my readme has a troubleshooting section describing how to make changes to your filesystem if you run into issues in Windows and I want to go home.6 -
Long time nothing from Mr. Gitmaster, somehow made my peace with him as the project moved out of my focus and he actually seemed to be contributing.
But now some pull request exchanges burst into flames as if they were on LKLM before Linus got castrated. Actually it's with the guy who is jamming out most of the front end code trying to make a really shiny UI with lots of animations that turn our macs into heaters.
Well, debate was over JS code styles or lack thereof and how commented out code should be removed (would actually support Mr gitmaster here). They have me a bit lost there, as I expect the freestyle JS code we produce without any agreed Coding Style Guideline to be an even greater clusterfuck than our C++ code base.
Anyway, hope they come to terms again, like at the start of the project when they jokingly attributed one another as assholes. Their opposing characters could actually benefit from each other. -
WooCommerce sucks, Block editor sucks, Elementor is no better, but if you want a real mess, just add more plugins. Bonus: if you use any "third party WordPress plugin", WooCommerce support can always say, oh yeah, I see that you are using a third party plugin, so we cannot support you, sorry.
Fuck, that's not the kind of front-end development that I was hoping to do in 2023.4 -
When you end up running support queries and QA as a developer because the client's on site support team blame the provider instead of their half-assed user configuration job. #IHopeYouGetFiredAssholes
-
"Hi, I was wondering if we have a way to <do a standard thing that we have support for, and has already been done in their project>"
Also, of course, let's CC every team lead and manager we can find so they all think it's something dire and we can end up in tons of meetings about it. Great. -
Electronic companies nowadays are no different than ranchers that force their slaves to earn money to buy new stuff cause people can’t repair old electronics or fix software bugs cause it’s not theirs or it’s not maintained and source code is not existent.
Damn you software and hardware corporations.
You tell everyone that you care about environment, yet you don’t fucking support your software and hardware as long as people use it. When you stop support you don’t make everything open source but keep it on your private repositories as intellectual property and fuck your clients.
Literally all electronics and software should be mandatory made open source to the people who purchased product so they can use it as long as they want not as long as corporate assholes want. This is insane law that is splitting our world and making it burn. If I could fix my laptop in nearby shop I wouldn’t have to purchase new one.
If it won’t change we will end up with <10 corporations that would rule world economy, everyone who will work for those corporations will be rich and happy and everyone else will be poor and unhappy . Mind me if this is not already happening and this planet slowly becomes Elysium movie nightmare.
Stop buying new stuff you stupid people cause this make things worse.
If it won’t change in 10 or so years there will be connected to cloud robots all over the world guarding us and some dick shit rich John Conor kid will hack them to exterminate humans by executing order 66. After that there will be big power outage that will put us into the role of battery and we would be closed in the barrel full of pink shit connected to matrix.
Get me out of here you asshole.1 -
Ok so another short rant about project I ranted before. We are developing Android and iOS social app for around 6 months, apps should have been in store during September . Turns out sometimes during August Apple decided that all apps of appstore that communicate with server have to implement ipv6 also Amazon had support ipv6 on its old ec-classic instances but not on new ec-vpc instances. I have worked until middle of the night trying to find work around for this but at the end we need to find another host that supports ipv65
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First rant! I'm currently on my first actual dev job and I've been learning a ton, doing extra studying/side projects in my free time and office environment is decent with good colleagues!
BUT
1) I'm getting paid about half as much as someone on my level (education and experience considered) - partly my fault, but thought experience would outweight the shit pay, now I'm really starting to question this bullshit
2) I'm away from all my friends, and by the end of my contract, 90% of them would have graduated... Have no friends outside of work where I live, and any social life I had, died when I moved
3) My work project is fucking tedious and could be flipped upside down to be of actual use, but no, company can't change how they've done things for the past 1000 years. But who gives a flying fuck about junior's suggestions, I haven't got decades of experience to back my ideas, plain logic and industry feedback isn't enough
4) Programming 24/7 for months is doing no favours to my hobbies, as I'm either too tired to do anything, or I don't have the time
5) The piece of shit library that I HAVE to use (because alternative has no support, lacks basic documention, the usual...) is built so that any automation that my project is meant to provide, is next to impossible to achieve, so day-to-day I'm just spitting in the wind as I'm slowly falling behind schedule
Quitting isn't really an option, as I'd have to find a job with significantly higher pay, really quickly to benefit from leaving... which is next to impossible
So here I am, stuck between frustration with aspects of my life and being contempt with other half (the learning and programming as a career)...
Is this something that will stay with me throughout my career/life? Or is it simply a shitty-entry-level situation out of which I'll grow out of?5 -
Holy shit. I've been working on a project for the last few months. It's been going fairly well all things considered. We're currently at the tail-end of the project and are set to be dev complete next Friday.
We're on a headless CMS + Gatsby and decided to use a front-end framework (This is important to the story) to "speed development time."
PM comes to me yesterday and inquires about functional/visual QA on IE11. IE-What?! This framework I was told I had to use doesn't support IE11.. like.. at all, and now we need to support IE11, at the ass-end of this project, cause 60% of the traffic on their current site uses IE11? Oh come on!
So its looking like we get to re-write a few components from scratch. Then we get to try and fix the display issues for the other ones... FML, I was looking forward to being done with this so I could take a week off and go recharge before Thanksgiving garbage.1 -
my phone is dying. Very slowly, i see the first signs of decay, i probably have months or even more than a year, but it will die on me. I knew it will happen.
I currently have an asus phone (ZE552KL), it is technically DualSim or SD-Card, has a camera that is..badish and sometimes the bluetooth wont start and then it reboots. Also the camera has a pure software bug where it isnt able to ever focus properly, but with tricks you can get it to work again. The asus forums constantly refer to sending it to a repair station (wherever one is in germoney). That annoys me.
Back to dying. For now its definetly the battery.
I remember when you could change the battery on a whim. Great times. My last phone died duo battery aswell (well, the gps module broke aswell so it wasnt all flowers besides the battery).
My current asus phone was something around 300 € and according to reviews 2 years ago it has a good bang for the buck ratio.
I havent looked into the market, just a cursory glance. But apparently if you want a phone that has a decent battery life, is not basically a tablet, has an sd card slot and a camera that is not total rubbish it gets hard. Its hard to balance those things, and if you want a swappeable battery all hope is lost.
Further i have started to misstrust chinese phones, the asus software support is wacky and some stuff is weird. I suspect its as bad with huwai and all the others. Also its apparently kinda hard to get any resemblance of quality in accessoires for non-mainstream brands (i mean cases and display protection)
So i dread the future, the future in which i need a new phone that is somewhere in the mid price segments and fits my needs. In the end i will take something suboptimal and be unhappy with it till it dies.
I despise the phone market.5 -
Lend me your wisdom o wise ones!
I'm tired of windows updates and im tired of it eating my background resources on my low end convertible(atom, 2gigs ram).
The only reason i'm still on windows is the touch support. Haven't yet found a distro where everything just works. Anyone here using a touch screen with linux?
Edit: I've tried hacking away with drivers and shit but feeble touch support just doesn't help as i primarily use it as a tablet14 -
I hate meteor. I hate that I have to have everything I do revolve around meteor and it's packages. I hate that I cant implement HMR without support from meteor or tearing my hair out for hours on end. I hate the special implementation of unit tests that have to accommodate for the fact that meteor sucks so much. I hate the encapsulated bubble of "meteor" packages that install themselves outside of my development directory. I hate that I can't use most of the code I find while researching problems because it doesn't work inside of the meteor bubble.
I did not start this project. I did not select meteor as a starting point because I didn't want to implement my own full stack solution, of which there are many that are far better in almost every way, and watch everyone else that touched my code suffer from day one.
If it is the last thing I do, I WILL purge meteor and all of it's nonsense from every line of code in this application even if that means rewriting every line of code in this application.
I will have no mercy. There will be screams of agony, gnashing of teeth and blood will flow down the streets like the rivers of hate that flow in my heart for meteor and all things it stands for.
I will have my vengeance, and it will be terrible.1 -
For all those years of using github, did you ever notice the right end?
After how long? Our support dept has been using, Engineering dept we're so surprised.
2 -
AWS.
It’s taken off like a rocket in the .net world where I live even though c# support doesn’t seem marvellous and with Azure .net is the 1st class citizen and seems far easier to use.
But the really odd thing is I’m talking to the devs about how they use it and what they use, and it’s like a damn cult. They’re absolutely fanatical about it.
I don’t get it, it’s just a load of APIs, I just can’t get excited about APIs.
At my company the rest of the stuff, well that’s gone to shit and seems 10 years out of date. But it doesn’t matter because we use AWS and it’s the be-all-and-end-all.
FFS.5 -
Being a front end develop of mostly PHP projects and also designer of everything for the company, probably best that I use OS X most of the time.
My place doesn't agree. They realise that I can't use Windows because it's support of PHP is laughable at best. However, they don't understand how difficult it is find a good quality piece of Ubuntu software for designing responsive websites. It just doesn't exist as far as I'm aware.23 -
Fuck. I just realized that because I picked Firebase for an SPA I was making for a client a year ago, I will need to keep updating the damn backend forever. Node 8 has reached EOL in the end of 2019, so Firebase has deprecated it and will *remove support* for it in 2021. Ok, I updated the app to work with node 10. But what happens when node 10 gets deprecated and loses support? Am I going to be forced to update the project once again so that it can keep running? Have the people at Firebase heard of backwards compatibility?
The reason I chose Firebase in the first place was because I wouldn't have to deal with servers (stuff like that scared me back then) and because it was free (client likes free stuff, of course). Had I picked a simple Express + MongoDB combo I would be able to deploy the thing when I was done and just leave it there forever, at the cost of ~$5/mo on DigitalOcean. But no, I was scared of the unknown so now I have to live with the shitfest that Firebase is. Fucking hell.
Disclaimer: I would not use Express and MongoDB in a project today, I have outgrown JS backend (thank god) and I prefer the safety of a relational DB.6 -
I have an app I have developed that uses concurrency. My dev env allows me to select different targets. One of those targets is WebAssembly. So I got it configured and decided to test my app. It immediately failed on compile due to the concurrency module missing. I later found that for my dev env concurrency for webassembly is experimental.
So concurrency is a thing for webassembly, but the support on my dev env end is not there yet.
Is threading difficult in webassembly?2 -
!Rant
I'm helping a customer who calls in all the time for support. At the end of a call this exchange happens.
Customer: So I have this game...
*Points at a solitaire icon on his desktop*
Customer: If we open that up, there's this little thing here...
*Game opens and there's an ad in the bottom right corner*
Customer: Can you get rid of that?
Me: I can't, not in applications like this. This is the free version of the software and add are how they make their money. If you did want to play without ads, Microsoft has the Solitaire Collection for free
*Makes shortcut to Solitaire Collection on desktop*
Me: There you go -
@dfox Now, I'm not a web dev (or really a dev of any kind quite yet) but I noticed that your web app doesn't show emoticons properly, making it confusing at times. Is this something you can set up support for on your side, or something I can or should do on my end? (This is on Chrome btw.)4
-
Microsoft ends support for Windows 7
Support for Windows 7 ended this week which means that security or software updates will no longer be provided by Microsoft.
Windows 7 will continue to run however it will be more vulnerable to viruses and malware. The best way to remain secure is to use the latest operating system available.
Microsoft have a dedicated webpage for user questions, next steps and detailed advice. 👇
https://microsoft.com/en-gb/...1 -
Short : I'm in a situation where I fucking hate to go to office everyday because the business team thinks I'm their bitch
Long : Exactly one year ago I joined this small company, few months ago all the senior devs started working on revamping the old shitty ERP they have into new one.They put me in charge of taking care the support for a project we work before.Now fucking asshole from the BA team sit on my shoulder every day and forcing me to do anything he thinks he want.Right now I'm doing a data migration from massive excel files from client. It's in a shitty format I asked help from senior devs they said it's impossible to import this shit.But my asshole team lead also support that BA fucker.
I can't sleep everyday normally because of stress.My notice period (relieving period) is 3 months.I just feel like every end of day I wanna kill all those motherfuckers11 -
Starting to wonder why I tend to like our QA people so much: they often seem so much saner. Yes, sometimes they quibble as with the complaints about a page that is hidden from the user anyway, but they would usually not creep to deep into the hole creating most unintuitive workflows and abysmal logic.
Disclaimer: We're more like backend devs, but we had to do a UI which was beautifully slaughtered by the CEO messing with it - guess what's happening with the new one - and because of that... thing I already nearly smashed my Mac because stupid entered credentials for updating software would only be applied if you defocused once out of the password entry box. Fucked up stuff like this, which devs meddle with, give up, just shrug it off and dump it on the (l)user.
Or a more recent example: So PM wanted a stupid "Apply to all" buttons on a list that can be filtered. Guess to which items the actions should be applied if you filtered it and you currently only see a small selection in your window! Yes, of course it still applies to all items in the universe. QA guy who's just trying the buttons comes to me: "Hey, you sure this "apply all"-stuff supposed to work like that?"
Third example to end this long QA-praise: So there is this virtual appliance we build and we should support another stupid hypervisor.. and he found the kernel modules I have to activate additionally so we can just convert the existing image without having to create a new build system.3 -
This is a repost of an original rant posted on a request for "Community Feedback" from Atlassian. You know, Atlassian? Those beloved people behind such products as :
• Thing I Love™
• Other Thing You Used One Time™
• Platform Often Mentioned in Suicide Notes, Probably™*
Now this rant was written in early 2022 while I was working in an Azure Cloud Engineer role that transformed into me being the company's main Sysadmin/Project Manager/Hiring Manager/Network Admin/Graphic Designer.
While trying to simultaneously put out over 9000 fires with one hand, and jangling keys in the face of the Owner/Arsonist with the other, I was also desperately implementing Jira Service Desk. Normally this wouldn't have been as much of a priority as it was, but the software our support team was using had gone past 15 years old, then past extended support, then the lone developer died, then it didn't work on Windows 10, then only functioned thanks to a dev cohort long past creating a keygen....which was now broken. So we needed a solution *now*.
The previous solution was shit of a different tier. The sight of it would make a walking talking anthropomorphised sentient puddle of dogshit (who both eats and produces further dookie derivatives) blush with embarrassment. The CD-ROM/Cereal Box this software came in probably listed features like "Stores Your Customer's First AND (or) Last Name!" or "Windows ME Downgrade Disk Included!" and "NEW: Less(-ish) Genocide(s)"!
Despite this, our brain/fearless leader decided this would be a great time to have me test, implement, deploy, and train everyone up on a new solution that would suck your toes, sound your shaft, and that he hadn't reminded me that I was a lazy sack enough lately.
One day, during preliminary user testing I received an email letting me know that the support team was having issues with a Customer's profile on our new support desk. Thanks to our Owner/Firestarter/Real World Micheal Scott being deep in his latest project (fixing our "All 5 devs quit in the last 12 months and I can't seem to hire any new ones" issue (by buying a ping pong table)), I had a bit of fortuitous time on my hands to investigate this issue. I had spent many hours of overtime working on this project, writing custom integrations and automations, so what I found out was crushing.
Below is the (digitally) physical manifestation of my rage after realising I would have to create / find / deal with a whole new method for support to manage customer contacts.
I'm linking to the original forum thread because you kind of need to have the pictures embedded in said reply to get really inhale the "Jira-Rant" ambiance. The part where I use several consecutive words as anchor links to tickets with other people screaming into the void gets a bit sweet n' savoury too - having those hyperlinks does improve the je ne say what of it all.
bit.ly/JIRANT (Case Sensitive)
--------------------------
There is some good news at the end of this brown n' squirty rainbow though!
Nice try silly little Jira button, you can't ruin *my* 2022!
• I was able to forget all about Jira a month later when I received a surprise vacation home! (To be there while my Mom passed away).
• Eventually work stress did catch up to me - but my boss thoughtfully gave me a nice long vacation! (By assaulting *while* firing me (for emailing in a vacation request while he was a having a bad (see:normal) day))
5 -
I starting developing my skills to a pro level from 1 year and half from now. My skillset is focused on Backend Development + Data Science(Specially Deep Learning), some sort of Machine Learning Engineer. I fill my github with personal projects the last 5 months, and im currently working on a very exciting project that involves all of my skills, its about Developing and deploy a Deep Learning Model for Image Deblurring.
I started to look for work two months to now. I applied to dozens of jobs at startups, no response. I changed my strategy a bit, focusing on early stage startups that dont have infinite money for pay all that senior devs, nothing, not even that startups wish to have me in their teams. I even applied to 2 or 3 and claim to do the job for little payment, arguing im not going for money but experience, nothing. I never got a reply back, not an interview, the few that reach back(like 3, from 3 or 4 dozen of startups), was just for say their are not interested on me.
This is frustrating, what i do on my days is just push forward my personal projects without rest. I will be broke in a few months from now if i dont get a job, im still young, i have 21 years, but i dont have economic support from parents anymore(they are already broke). Truly dont know what to do. Currently my brother is helping me with the money, but he will broke in few months as i say.
The worst of all this case is that i feel capable of get things done, i have skills and i trust in myself. This is not about me having doubts about my skills, but about startups that dont care, they are not interested in me, and the other worst thing is that my profile is in high demand, at least on startups, they always seek for backend devs with Machine Learning knowledge. Im nothing for them, i only want to land that first job, but seems to be impossible.
For add to this situation, im from south america, Venezuela, and im only able to get a remote job, because in my country basically has no Tech Industry, just Agencies everywhere underpaying devs, that as extent, dont care about my profile too!!! this is ridiculous, not even that almost dead Agencies that contract devs for very little payment in my country are interested in me! As extra, my economic situation dont allows me to reallocate, i simple cant afford that. planning to do it, but after land some job for a few months. Anyways coronavirus seems to finally set remote work as the default, maybe this is not a huge factor right now.
I try to find job as freelancer, i check the freelancer sites(Freelancer, Guru and so on) every week more or less, but at least from what i see, there is no Backend-Only gigs for Python Devs, They always ask for Fullstack developers, and Machine Learning gigs i dont even mention them.
Maybe im missing something obvious, but feel incredible that someone that has skills is not capable of land even a freelancer job. Maybe im blind, or maybe im asking too much(I feel the latter is not the case). Or maybe im overestimating my self? i think around that time to time, but is not possible, i have knowledge of Rest/GraphQL APIs Development using frameworks like Flask or DJango(But i like Flask more than DJango, i feel awesome with its microframework approach). Familiarized with containerization and Docker. I can mention knowledge about SQL and DBs(PostgreSQL), ORMs(SQLAlchemy), Open Auth, CI/CD, Unit Testing, Git, Soft DevOps Skills, Design Patterns like MVC or MTV, Serverless Environments, Deep Learning Solutions, end to end: Data Gathering, Preprocessing, Data Analysis, Model Architecture Design, Training and Finetunning. Im familiarized with SotA techniques widely used now days, GANs, Transformers, Residual Networks, U-Nets, Sequence Data, Image Data or high Dimensional Data, Data Augmentation, Regularization, Dropout, All kind of loss functions and Non Linear functions. My toolset is based around Python, with Tensorflow as the main framework, supported by other libraries like pandas, numpy and other Data Science oriented utils.
I know lot of stuff, is not that enough for get a Junior Level underpaid job? truly dont get it, what is required for get a job? not even enough for get an interview?
I have some dev friends and everyone seems to be able to land jobs, why im not landing even an interview?
I will keep pushing my Dev career, is that or starve to death. But i will love to read your suggestions! how i can approach this?
i will leave here my relevant social presence:
https://linkedin.com/in/...
https://github.com/ElPapi42
Thanks in advance!9 -
I don't like BizTalk.
It's very powerful and all but the resource needed to develop, support and maintain far outweigh the benefits.
Everything seems half finished, for example the way to deploy, update and the admin console GUI are all a massive core to work with.
A small part of me dies every time I end up with a BizTalk project.1 -
Me in a Nutshell 😅
An Xubuntu user...
Wants to hop out of debian zone..
Does not like rolling release cycle..
Out of box support for proprietary s/w..
Argues with self and tries Manjaro..
Falls back to Xubuntu
End of distro hop 😇 -
What we will miss, if he really softens:
In fact, if the reason is stated as "it makes debugging easier", then I fart in your general
direction and call your mother a hamster.
In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people.
Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F*CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they not die as babies, considering
that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?
Gnome seems to be developed by interface nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not "it's too complicated to do", but "it would confuse users".
I think the stupidity of your post just snuffed out everything
I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the
point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them.
That is either genius, or a seriously diseased mind. - I can't quite tell which.
Christ, people. Learn C, instead of just stringing random characters together until it compiles (with warnings).
"and anybody who thinks that the above is
(a) legible
(b) efficient (even with the magical compiler support)
(c) particularly safe
is just incompetent and out to lunch.
The above code is sh*t, and it generates shit code. It looks bad, and
there's no reason for it." -
Fucking Quarkus. Fucking Panache. Fucking ORM.
I wanted to do a fucking simple projection. First this piece of fuck, the Panache, won't let me do a Projection because of a fucking bug, that haven't implemented it properly until 2.12 (fuck and you call this v2?). Ok, upgraded, to the latest 2.16, cuz why the fuck, i'm upgrading already. But now the whole fucking quarkus app won't start! Noice! Ok, fuck it, let's go down exactly to 2.12. Quarkus started, perfect. But now, this pice of fuck Hibernate says 'collection was evicted' whenever i tried to read a collection in the setter (Access.PROPERTY), which worked just fucking fine before. But okay, fuck you. I'll write a @PostLoad method, fine, just fuck off.
But that's not the end! Now it says I cannot write `select parent.someColl is not null and parent.collection is empty as canProcess` because "is empty" only supported in where clauses. What fucking wonderful system! Well, fuck you. I'll write a union query. But guess what! JPA standard does not support union queries, nor HQL (Eclipse Link does, btw). Ok, fuck this shit, let's write a native query. But hey, fucking Panache does not support that. There is no fucking place in their fucking docs stating anything about how to use native queries.
So, fuck you quarkus, fuck you panache, fuck you hibernate, fuck you overcomplicated limiting bullshit called full-fledged ORMs. I'm moving to a fucking mybatis and fuck it. It's simple as fuck, does not fucking restrict me in writing whatever shit query I want to write and let's me map the shit just fine.1 -
Suddenly, I find myself in a crossroad situation. I have been offered a position which would align perfectly with my career path aspirations (cloud solutions architect) with double the pay to my current salary. If only those were the only variables in this equation, taking the offer would be a no-brainer. Alas, it is never that simple (unless all you care about are pay and career path, of course)…
So, let’s break it down to pros and cons of jumping ship, shall we?
Pros:
- double pay compared to current salary
- aligns with my career aspiration
- part of a team of cloud solutions architects (mentorship opportunities)
- varying projects (position is at a consultancy firm)
- shares of the company come with the position ($$$ if it grows)
- possibility to influence strategic decisions
- no more 2h+ commutes
Cons:
- it’s a consultancy startup (emphasis on both consultancy and startup)
- 100% wfh
- would mean losing my current team where we are well and truly glued together and have such great vibes (and I value this, very very highly - this really is the main con)
- would mean losing my current work environment, where we have a gym and sauna at the office etc all kinds of stuff that support my athletic lifestyle
- would mean I don’t have as many opportunities to visit my parents anymore (since they live close to my current office but not close to me)
- at my current position I have super interesting projects both ongoing and in the horizon for a long time to come
- would mean eating my words (see previous point, and the fact I’ve said to my TM ”I can see myself staying as long as this job offers me opportunities to keep learning skills that are meaningful to me”), and I value my integrity
- would mean leaving my colleagues in quite a hairy spot, effectively betraying them in my mind (when our lead dev jumped ship a few years ago, he left us in quite a limbo and hands full of shit we didn’t know what to do about… I don’t wish that situation for anyone)
So, to sum it up, my reasons to stay are more those of moral integrity and convenience, well as the will to see the wheels I got rolling to the end, whereas my reasons to go are more personal finances and career oriented. A difficult decision. What to do?14 -
for christ sake.. I ended up receiving all problems at a startup, I am alone every lvl of support from software exceptions to plc. Even for machines I have never received any training or explanation. How can a company afford mass holydays and rely for all level support on a single person who is still under training? I cant dug deeper in any issue because then I got overfilled with questions. I really want this week to end...1
-
!dev
I've finally been so agitated at G+ I need somewhere to just vent.
So for context. What I'm talking about is Google+, or more specifically, the Android app. The website is bad in its own way, but that's not here nor there. No opinions on the iOS version, as I simply REFUSE to touch iOS.
So anyways. The platform itself honestly is not bad. With competent developers behind it, and them actually listening to their dwindling fucking userbase, they could easily turn it into something successful, but the issue is that they just aren't
You see, it's almost like they change dev staff every 6 or so months. Why do I believe this? Because the GUI changes about that fucking often. They also have a history of forcing updates, but allowing you to use an older version, just horrifically slapping on a new and unwelcome skin. This isn't an isolated practice by any means, but it's by far the most prevalent here.
So, now a list of some of the issues the current version has:
-After about a week, the app becomes unstably slow, to the point of it taking about a minute to refresh your home feed, or an individual page.
-Searching is never good, always being slow and rarely giving you who you asked for.
-Transparency is non fucking existent. There isn't a development roadmap to speak of, and when something happens we get it second hand from staff in a "G+ help" community.
There is a solution for the first one, going and clearing the data/cache, but really, the end user shouldn't have to regularly do that. Not to mention the storage space Google apps IN GENERAL fucking take up. Why does Google Play Services regularly use 250MB? (For most people, this really isn't much. But when you only get to fucking use 4 GB of internal storage it's a giant fuck you.)
Bah, back to the topic at hand.
There isn't a good solution to searching, or for transparency at the moment.
The spam filter is awful as well. REGULARLY letting obvious spam pass, regularly blocking and filtering genuine users. It's real annoying that the Android app itself doesn't have support for seeing these flags outside of rooting through the settings a bit, but still. The web and iOS versions have this already.
Oh, it also completely lacks a dark mode like most Google apps for some fuckin reason.
That concludes my random 1:30 AM rant about something I have no ability to change, except hope in vain that someone who has the ability to change this forwards this to the developers of G+.
I need a better sleep schedule.3 -
In my first job another junior dev and I (junior at the time) were assigned the task of designing and implementing a user management and propagation system for a biometric access control system. None of the seniors at the time wanted to be involved because hardware interfacing in the main software was seen as a general shit show because of legacy reasons. We spent weeks designing the system, arguing, walking out in anger, then coming back and going through it again.
After all that, we thought we would end up using each other, but we actually became really good friends for the rest of my time there. The final system was so robust that support never heard back from the client about it until around 2 years later when a power outage took down the server and blew the PSU.
Good times. -
How do all you other devs deal with sleep? Because I am losing my fucking mind I work for myself so I don't go to work at 9am leave at 6pm.
I normally work until 6am and then sleep till 12 drink 3 strong coffee to start functioning again try and do something productive which at the moment involves catching up on the NBA playoffs and then starting work at 6pm.
Due to resent baby I thought shit my life is fucked I haven't left the house in 3 days I need structure routine I need to work 9am to 6pm become human again but I just can't FUCKING sleep it's now 1:30am and I'm trying to sleep.
I know what your thinking why are you on devRant but I've been trying to sleep for the past 3 hours but all I can think about is work code, refactoring, new languages, security, support shit that can wait but I can't get it out my head, keep thinking "ah your not tired you could work", and YES I have a list which get bigger every day wish I had a drug dealer or was still in contact with my old mates so I could get some Valium but it's hot milk and sleeping tablets for me, life is so much easier when you can just fuck of home at the end of the day and forget about work, not having your laptop next to you trying to trick you into opening it. How do other people who work for theirselves deal with the life work balance?4 -
Having some issues with my laptop seizing up in graphical linux desktop environments, probably due to some peripheral power management. I saw there was a bios setting for "make linux work" but I couldn't find mention of it in the manual (why is this usually so hard to find, anyway?), so I googled a bit before I messed with it.
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/...
Worst case I guess I'd just reset the bios, but it always blows my mind seeing issues like these go seemingly unaddressed. That's a 12 page discussion from 2018 where you brick your laptop - a fairly high end one at that - by flipping a bool and the latest response is "Same issue here".
Is it just PR practice to not acknowledge these things or is it likely that they are legitimately unaware? Does it not get escalated properly or do they reckon there's not enough benefit to address it?
Whatever the case, my faith in Lenovo is certainly starting to show cracks. I used to see it as the "correct" laptop brand, but nowadays I'm equally iffy about all of them.3 -
App idea: Platform for ongoing entrepreneurs
I just come from a start-up weekend. I really enjoyed the support we got from 17 different mentors (most of them founded in the past on their own).
Back home start-up funders don't have the access to that mentoring. My idea is to create a platform specialized for founders, where you can share your idea, believes and ask question all around your business.
I think especially in the early founding stages entrepreneurs are full of questions. Helping and discussing with other selfminded people is probably very enjoyable for us founder folks. A difference to the f.e. reddit concept: Users can create "diaries", a place where all storys, questions and posts about your project are stored. Reading a diary from beginning to end shall be a fun experience, reviewing your or others history of their "babys" and following the entrepreneurs thoughts through all stages of founding. Users of course can create multiple diaries.
Functionality will be suited for the listed usecase, for example a "Post as Anonymous" function will be added, if you have to deal with company sensitive data and more stuff like that.
What do you think about the idea? Do you like it? Would you use it? If not, tell me why?
Cheers -
Hey there! So, I'm kind of stuck in my own thoughts right now. I've got this goal of becoming really good at DSA, Maths, and computer networks in just one year, while also finding time to do some web development and open-source projects. But here's the problem - I'm just an average person when it comes to those first three things. I don't even know where to start or what to do, and whenever I try to focus on one thing, I end up questioning myself and feeling frustrated. So, I was wondering if anyone could lend a hand and offer me some advice or support to help me reach my goal.13
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#Suphle Rant 7: transphporm failure
In this issue, I'll be sharing observations about 3 topics.
First and most significant is that the brilliant SSR templating library I've eyed for so many years, even integrated as Suphle's presentation layer adapter, is virtually not functional. It only works for the trivial use case of outputting the value of a property in the dataset. For instance, when validation fails, preventing execution from reaching the controller, parsing fails without signifying what ordinance was being violated. I trim the stylesheet and it only works when outputting one of the values added by the validation handler. Meaning the missing keys it can't find from controller result is the culprit.
Even when I trimmed everything else for it to pass, the closing `</li>` tag seems to have been abducted.
I mail project owner explaining what I need his library for, no response. Chat one of the maintainers on Twitter, nothing. Since they have no forum, I find their Gitter chatroom, tag them and post my questions. Nothing. The only semblance of a documentation they have is the Github wiki. So, support is practically dead. Project last commit: 2020. It's disappointing that this is how my journey with them ends. There isn't even an alternative that shares the same philosophy. It's so sad to see how everybody is comfortable with PHP templating syntax and back end logic entagled within their markup.
Among all other templating libraries, Blade (which influenced my strong distaste for interspersing markup and PHP), seems to be the most popular. First admission: We're headed back to the Blade trenches, sadly.
2nd Topic: While writing tests yesterday, I had this weird feeling about something being off. I guess that's what code smell is. I was uncomfortable with the excessive amount of mocking wrappers I had to layer upon SUT before I can observe whether the HTML adapter receives expected markup file, when I can simply put a `var_dump` there. There's a black-box test for verifying the output but since the Transphporm headaches were causing it to fail, I tried going white-box. The mocking fixture was such a monstrosity, I imagined Sebastian Bergmann's ghost looking down in abhorrence over how much this Degenerate is perverting and butchering his creation.
I ultimately deleted the test travesty but it gave rise to the question of how properly designed system really is. Or, are certain things beyond testing white box? Are there still gaps in the testing knowledge of a supposed testing connoisseur? 2nd admission.
Lastly, randomly wanted to tweet an idea at Tomas Votruba. Visited his profile, only to see this https://twitter.com/PovilasKorop/.... Apparently, Laravel have implemented yet another feature previously only existing in Suphle (or at the libraries Arkitekt and Deptrac). I laughed mirthlessly as I watch them gain feature-parity under my nose, when Suphle is yet to be launched. I refuse to believe they're actually stalking Suphle
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