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Sales employee Bob wants a clickable blue button.
Bob tells product owner Karen about his unstoppable desire for clickable blue buttons.
Karen assigns points for potential and impact (how much does a blue button improve Bob's life, how many people like Bob desire blue buttons)
Karen asks the button team how hard it is to build a button. The button team compares the request to a reference button they've built before, and gives an ease score, with higher score being easier (inverse of scrum points).
These three scores are combined to give a priority score. The global buttonbacklog is sorted by priority.
Once every two weeks (a "sprint") the button team convenes, uses the ease scores to assign scrum points. Difficult tasks are broken up into smaller tasks, because there is a scrum point upper limit. They use the average of the last 5 sprints to calculate each developer's "velocity".
The sprint is filled with tasks, from the top of the global button backlog, up to the team's capacity as determined by velocity. Approximate due dates are assigned, Bob is a happy Bob.
What if boss Peter runs into the office screaming "OUR IMPORTANT CLIENT WANTS A FUCKING PINK BUTTON WHICH MAKES HEARTS APPEAR"?
Devs tell boss to shut the fuck up and talk to Karen. Karen has a carefully curated list of button building tasks sorted by priority, can sedate boss with valium so he calms the fuck down until he can make a case for the impact and potential of his pink button.
Karen might agree that Peter's pink button gets a higher priority than Bob's blue button.
But devs are nocturnal creatures, easily disturbed when approached by humans, their natural rhythms thrown out of balance.
So the sprint is "locked", and Peter's pink button appears at the top of the global backlog, from where it flows into the next sprint.
On rare occasions a sprint is broken open, for example when Karen realizes that all of the end users will commit suicide if they don't have a pink heart-spawning button.
In such an event, Peter must make Bob happy (because Bob is crying that his blue button is delayed). And Peter must make the button team of devs happy.
This usually leads to a ritual involving chocolate or even hardware gift certificates to restore balance to the dev ecosystem.23 -
First world problems...
I've been working at this startup as a tech lead for a little over a year, and we've grown from 3 to over 150 employees, and a bit over a million end users.
I've spent tens of thousands on high end displays and chairs for your lazy butts, on external consultants to help and train you, even those fucking dirty recruiters have leeched their shares of the pie. I built an amazing luxury kitchen with a fridge, beer cooler, induction plates and a blender for all your crossfitting bodybuilder meals, but forgot to think of my own needs.
NOW I JUST WANT TO BUY A GOOD COFFEEMAKER AND ALL THESE FUCKING TEASLURPING FAKE DEV-BROS SUDDENLY START SCREAMING ABOUT BUDGETS AND HOW COFFEE IS NOT NECESSARY IF YOU MEDITATE. FUCK YOU, WE'RE LIKE THE ONLY STARTUP IN THE COUNTRY RUNNING A FAT PROFIT. I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR STUPID MINDFULNESS IOS APP. GIVE ME MY FUCKING ESPRESSO OR I'LL BLEND YOUR BALLS INTO A PROTEIN SHAKE.25 -
I wanted to post a note on devRant community etiquette and rule-breaking behavior we’ve been seeing lately to make clear it will not be tolerated. This is pretty much a rehash of this rant, https://devrant.com/rants/609739/... and also our official rules which I highly encourage people to read: https://devrant.com/rules
I’ve noticed an influx of a select group of members, mostly older users, expressing a distain towards other users or declaring content they dislike “shouldn’t be posted”, “please stop”, etc. If you find yourself about to post that, as per our rules, please don’t. It blatantly violates our rules and we are going to start cracking down on it much more. Whether you have 30k+ points or 10, we will apply the rules fairly to everyone and not give breaks to specific people, which admittedly I’ve done in the past.
If we see this behavior in rants/comments first we will give a warning (and the rant/comment will be deleted) and the next offense is a ban.
A valid question (even though I’ve answered it before) might be why does this need to be a rule? Simply put, it’s a rule for a number of reasons: posts like described try to inflict one’s will upon the entire community (even though we have a Democrat voting process...), they create confusion (almost every time they try to sound official, ex. “Stop doing this”), and beyond those two main reasons, they literally accomplish nothing because they offer no constructive methods of achieving what’s being requested, and only a fraction of the community will actually see it.
Here’s an example of what’s not allowed and what is allowed:
- Allowed: posting an issue on our GitHub issue tracker saying “I really dislike seeing this type of rant in my algo feed, here’s some ideas I have to improve the algo and add more personalization so I can see what I want.”
- Allowed: posting on GitHub issue tracker: “I found this awesome image similarly algo that I think can improve the ‘repost check feature’ - you guys should check it out and see if it might be good”
- Not allowed: “Omg stop shitposting windows update rants and Linux rants I hate them. Go post this type of rant because that’s what everyone really wants to see.”
One is constructive an the other is merely an opinion expressed as an enforcement of a self-made rule on the community and tries to tell other people how they should use devRant.
I cringe when people tell others how to use devRant because without fail when I see those posts, I go through that person’s rant/comment history and I nearly always see them using devRant in some kind of way I disagree with or isn’t exactly what I like to see. But that’s OK. I understand I’m not going to enjoy everything posted and I’m also not going to agree with everything posted. But I think it’s fair for those same people to then lecture on what isn’t appropriate to post on devRant, and it’s even more silly when their posts are sometimes irrelevant to development and the posts they are complaining about are relevant.
In the end, based on the large majority of feedback we get, we want to make devRant a place where everyone feels comfortable expressing themselves and doesn’t have to think about possibly getting ridiculed every time they post and that don’t have people trying to dictate what kind of ideas they are allowed to post. We also realize there’s types of content people don’t enjoy, but telling others not to post it is not the solution. We will soon be launching post type filters that will make filtering rants by post type possible.
Please let me know if you have any questions and thanks for reading.64 -
BETA USER: Is this feature working? When I add a link I get an error that says "URL cannot be more than 255 characters."
ME (biting my tongue): Hi ****, Yes it works. The link you're trying to add is too long. Please try a shorter URL.
BETA USER: Oh, it should tell you that!
😳🤪🤬11 -
The way 90% of the population wears their face masks really explains a lot about their approach to using software, apps & websites as well.
I feel like giving up.
I am not a developer for the salary, or just to solve analytical puzzles. Those are motivators, but my main drive is to make the world more comfortable and enjoyable, better optimized, build ethical services which bring happiness into people's lives. I want to improve society, even if it's just a tiny bit.
But if users invest absolutely zero percent of their limited brain capacity into understanding a product that already has a super-clean design and responds with helpful validation messages...
...why the fuck bother.
I used to think of the gap between technology and tech-incompetent people as an optimization problem.
As something which could be fixed by spending a fortune on UX research. Write tests, hire QA employees, decrease tech debt, create a bold but unified & simple design.
But the technologically incompetent just get more entitled with every small thing you simplify.
It's never fucking fool-proof enough.
Why can't I upload a 220MB PDF as profile picture? Why doesn't the app install on my 9 year old Android Froyo phone? Why can't I sign up if my phone number contains a  U+FFFC? Why does this page load so slowly from my rural concrete bunker in East Ukraine? WHY DO I HAVE PNEUMONIA, HOW DID I GET INFECTED EVEN THOUGH I WAS WEARING A MOUTH MASK ON MY FOREHEAD?
This is why I ran away from Frontend, to Backend, to DBA.
If I could remove myself further from the end user, I would.
At least I still have a full glass of tawny port and a huge database which needs to be normalized & migrated.
Fuck humans, I'm going to hug a server.
25 -
!rant
This was over a year ago now, but my first PR at my current job was +6,249/-1,545,334 loc. Here is how that happened... When I joined the company and saw the code I was supposed to work on I kind of freaked out. The project was set up in the most ass-backward way with some sort of bootstrap boilerplate sample app thing with its own build process inside a subfolder of the main angular project. The angular app used all the CSS, fonts, icons, etc. from the boilerplate app and referenced the assets directly. If you needed to make changes to the CSS, fonts, icons, etc you would need to cd into the boilerplate app directory, make the changes, run a Gulp build that compiled things there, then cd back to the main directory and run Grunt build (thats right, both grunt and gulp) that then built the angular app and referenced the compiled assets inside the boilerplate directory. One simple CSS change would take 2 minutes to test at minimum.
I told them I needed at least a week to overhaul the app before I felt like I could do any real work. Here were the horrors I found along the way.
- All compiled (unminified) assets (both CSS and JS) were committed to git, including vendor code such as jQuery and Bootstrap.
- All bower components were committed to git (ALL their source code, documentation, etc, not just the one dist/minified JS file we referenced).
- The Grunt build was set up by someone who had no idea what they were doing. Every SINGLE file or dependency that needed to be copied to the build folder was listed one by one in a HUGE config.json file instead of using pattern matching like `assets/images/*`.
- All the example code from the boilerplate and multiple jQuery spaghetti sample apps from the boilerplate were committed to git, as well as ALL the documentation too. There was literally a `git clone` of the boilerplate repo inside a folder in the app.
- There were two separate copies of Bootstrap 3 being compiled from source. One inside the boilerplate folder and one at the angular app level. They were both included on the page, so literally every single CSS rule was overridden by the second copy of bootstrap. Oh, and because bootstrap source was included and commited and built from source, the actual bootstrap source files had been edited by developers to change styles (instead of overriding them) so there was no replacing it with an OOTB minified version.
- It is an angular app but there were multiple jQuery libraries included and relied upon and used for actual in-app functionality behavior. And, beyond that, even though angular includes many native ways to do XHR requests (using $resource or $http), there were numerous places in the app where there were `XMLHttpRequest`s intermixed with angular code.
- There was no live reloading for local development, meaning if I wanted to make one CSS change I had to stop my server, run a build, start again (about 2 minutes total). They seemed to think this was fine.
- All this monstrosity was handled by a single massive Gruntfile that was over 2000loc. When all my hacking and slashing was done, I reduced this to ~140loc.
- There were developer's (I use that term loosely) *PERSONAL AWS ACCESS KEYS* hardcoded into the source code (remember, this is a web end app, so this was in every user's browser) in order to do file uploads. Of course when I checked in AWS, those keys had full admin access to absolutely everything in AWS.
- The entire unminified AWS Javascript SDK was included on the page and not used or referenced (~1.5mb)
- There was no error handling or reporting. An API error would just result in nothing happening on the front end, so the user would usually just click and click again, re-triggering the same error. There was also no error reporting software installed (NewRelic, Rollbar, etc) so we had no idea when our users encountered errors on the front end. The previous developers would literally guide users who were experiencing issues through opening their console in dev tools and have them screenshot the error and send it to them.
- I could go on and on...
This is why you hire a real front-end engineer to build your web app instead of the cheapest contractors you can find from Ukraine.
19 -
string excuses[]={
"it's not a bug it's a feature",
"it worked on my machine",
"i tested it and it worked",
"its production ready",
"your browser must be caching the old content",
"that error means it was successful",
"the client fucked it up",
"the systems crashed and the code got lost" ,
"this code wont go into the final version",
"It's a compiler issue",
"it's only a minor issue",
"this will take two weeks max",
"my code is flawless must be someone else's mistake",
"it worked a minute ago",
"that was not in the original specification",
"i will fix this",
"I was told to stop working on that when something important came up",
"You must have the wrong version",
"that's way beyond my pay grade",
"that's just an unlucky coincidence",
"i saw the new guy screw around with the systems",
"our servers must've been hacked",
"i wasn't given enough time",
"its the designers fault",
"it probably won't happen again",
"your expectations were unrealistic",
"everything's great on my end",
"that's not my code",
"it's a hardware problem",
"it's a firewall issue",
"it's a character encoding issue",
"a third party API isn't responding",
"that was only supposed to be a placeholder",
"The third party documentation is wrong",
"that was just a temporary fix.",
"We outsourced that months ago.","
"that value is only wrong half of the time.",
"the person responsible for that does not work here anymore",
"That was literally a one in a million error",
"our servers couldn't handle the traffic the app was receiving",
"your machines processors must be too slow",
"your pc is too outdated",
"that is a known issue with the programming language",
"it would take too much time and resources to rebuild from scratch",
"this is historically grown",
"users will hardly notice that",
"i will fix it" };11 -
Dev: Ok issue fixed, you just need to log out and back in again on your end to receive the fix
User: It’s still not working
Dev: Did you log out and in again?
User: No why would I want to do that?
Dev: It’ll reset your locally saved login information which is causing the issue
User: I thought you said the issue was fixed?
Dev: On our end yes, we just need you to reset your end in order to receive the fixed version
User: Look I have been dealing with this issue for 6 months. Fixing bugs are your responsibility. I have too much to do, you have to get this fixed. *click*.
Dev: Yeah you submitted the bug ticket yesterday night though
Email from users manager later that day: <User> is saying you are refusing to fix this bug. This is unacceptable. Fix it or else I will escalate this. Also there are other bugs we noticed today too, fixing them is absolutely critical!
Dev: …
Dev: What other bugs did you notice?
*no response for 2 weeks and then:
User: Hey you can close this ticket, the issue seems to have resolved itself.
Dev: ….muppet.17 -
"could you please just use the standard messaging/social networking thingies? That way it'll be way easier to communicate!!"
Oh I don't mind using standard tools/services which everyone uses at all.
Just a few requirement: they don't save information that doesn't need to be saved, leave the users in control of their data (through end to end encryption for example) and aren't integrated in mass surveillance networks.
Aaaaaand all the standard options which everyone uses are gone 😩30 -
Be more passive
I always get involved in everything, at every company. Not to further my career through ass-kissing and overperforming.
I regularly piss off people. When C-level has a discussion about strategy, I'm usually ahead of them, ask too many questions, criticize every detail they've missed, cause frustration by making them look incompetent.
Can't help it, when I see retards destroy a great product I have to intervene.
Some people appreciate it. I often defend both devs and end users, when others don't dare speak up.
But fuck it, I'm getting older. I'm gonna coast a bit more. Sit back, relax.
If a product manager doesn't prepare enough tasks — that's cool, I still have a Factorio savegame to work on.
If another team designs an incredibly stupid feature — they'll discover the issues eventually by themselves. Maybe I'll warn once, just to be nice.
*Pours another chocolate milk*
Also gonna spend at least 4h/d with my daughter. She's a better human than most of my coworkers, and the work we do using her Legos is honestly more important for humanity than the Jira backlog.20 -
--- GitHub 24-hour outage post mortem ---
As many of you will remember; Github fell over earlier this month and cracked its head on the counter top on the way down. For more or less a full 24 hours the repo-wrangling behemoth had inconsistent data being presented to users, slow response times and failing requests during common user actions such as reporting issues and questioning your career choice in code reviews.
It's been revealed in a post-mortem of the incident (link at the end of the article) that DB replication was the root cause of the chaos after a failing 100G network link was being replaced during routine maintenance. I don't pretend to be a rockstar-ninja-wizard DBA but after speaking with colleagues who went a shade whiter when the term "replication" was used - It's hard to predict where a design decision will bite back and leave you untanging the web of lies and misinformation reported by the databases for weeks if not months after everything's gone a tad sideways.
When the link was yanked out of the east coast DC undergoing maintenance - Github's "Orchestrator" software did exactly what it was meant to do; It hit the "ohshi" button and failed over to another DC that wasn't reporting any issues. The hitch in the master plan was that when connectivity came back up at the east coast DC, Orchestrator was unable to (un)fail-over back to the east coast DC due to each cluster containing data the other didn't have.
At this point it's reasonable to assume that pants were turning funny colours - Monitoring systems across the board started squealing, firing off messages to engineers demanding they rouse from the land of nod and snap back to reality, that was a bit more "on-fire" than usual. A quick call to Orchestrator's API returned a result set that only contained database servers from the west coast - none of the east coast servers had responded.
Come 11pm UTC (about 10 minutes after the initial pant re-colouring) engineers realised they were well and truly backed into a corner, the site was flipped into "Yellow" status and internal mechanisms for deployments were locked out. 5 minutes later an Incident Co-ordinator was dragged from their lair by the status change and almost immediately flipped the site into "Red" status, a move i can only hope was accompanied by all the lights going red and klaxons sounding.
Even more engineers were roused from their slumber to help with the recovery effort, By this point hair was turning grey in real time - The fail-over DB cluster had been processing user data for nearly 40 minutes, every second that passed made the inevitable untangling process exponentially more difficult. Not long after this Github made the call to pause webhooks and Github Pages builds in an attempt to prevent further data loss, causing disruption to those of us using Github as a way of kicking off our deployment processes (myself included, I had to SSH in and run a git pull myself like some kind of savage).
Glossing over several more "And then things were still broken" sections of the post mortem; Clever engineers with their heads screwed on the right way successfully executed what i can only imagine was a large, complex and risky plan to untangle the mess and restore functionality. Github was picked up off the kitchen floor and promptly placed in a comfy chair with a sweet tea to recover. The enormous backlog of webhooks and Pages builds was caught up with and everything was more or less back to normal.
It goes to show that even the best laid plan rarely survives first contact with the enemy, In this case a failing 100G network link somewhere inside an east coast data center.
Link to the post mortem: https://blog.github.com/2018-10-30-...6 -
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 -
Worst of 2020:
Seeing company get stuck in an organizational swamp. Devs tend to be reasonably good at working from home...
Management isn't. Meeting quality has gone down the drain, half of management thinks "if the boss can't see me why work at all?", the other half has constant calls with tiny working groups where nothing is final and everyone is left confused.
I'm convinced: Everything management is afraid of about allowing devs to work from home is based on projection of their own weaknesses.
They're not passionate enough to work without oversight. They might not be introverts, but extroverts are perfectly able to communicate poorly, especially when a few digital hurdles get in the way.
The average developer might actually be more attuned to the intricacies of emotionless text chats, and preventing disruptive elements in video calls.
Also, unless someone physically helps a manager to remove their head from their own ass once in a while, their "gut feelings" about the market and products are actually just amplified bias caused by their endless self-absorbed yelling into the echo chamber that is their stretched out rectum.
Holy motherfucking hell, have I seen some weird projects float by in 2020, pooped out by isolated product managers whose brain clearly has melted when they had to survive without office fruitbaskets and organizational post-it walls.
Yeah let's promote our international character, by giving away travels and hotel bookings, using pictures of happy hugging people in foreign countries... Great promo during a pandemic.
Or let's get "woke" and promote the "colored users" on our platforms, by training ML to categorize people by skin pigment (Apart from how illegal and ethically insane that is on multiple levels, about 85% of our users pick shit like anime characters and memes for their avatar).
Or how about we make a Microsoft Store app, even though the vast majority of our end users are students using cheap Android phones, older iPhones, Macbooks and Chromebooks.
😡
Anyway, now that I have dressed up my Christmas tree with some manager intestines...
Best of 2020:
I got to play through my Steam backlog, work on hobby projects, and watch a lot of YouTube.
All this pandemic insanity has convinced me all the more that I want to work way more in Rust, and publish way more on open source projects.
I became maintainer/collaborator on a bunch of semi-prominent libraries & frameworks, and while no community is perfect, I enjoy my laid-back coffee-fueled debugging on those packages much more than listening to another crack addicted cocksucker in a suit explain their half-assed A/B test idea to me at 9AM.
So, 2021 will be me half-assing through the spaghetti at my official fuckfest of a job so I can keep filling my bank account — and investing way more time and effort into stuff I find truly engaging, into projects with a heart and a soul.3 -
Our website once had it’s config file (“old” .cgi app) open and available if you knew the file name. It was ‘obfuscated’ with the file name “Name of the cgi executable”.txt. So browsing, browsing.cgi, config file was browsing.txt.
After discovering the sql server admin password in plain text and reporting it to the VP, he called a meeting.
VP: “I have a report that you are storing the server admin password in plain text.”
WebMgr: “No, that is not correct.”
Me: “Um, yes it is, or we wouldn’t be here.”
WebMgr: “It’s not a network server administrator, it’s SQL Server’s SA account. Completely secure since that login has no access to the network.”
<VP looks over at me>
VP: “Oh..I was not told *that* detail.”
Me: “Um, that doesn’t matter, we shouldn’t have any login password in plain text, anywhere. Besides, the SA account has full access to the entire database. Someone could drop tables, get customer data, even access credit card data.”
WebMgr: “You are blowing all this out of proportion. There is no way anyone could do that.”
Me: “Uh, two weeks ago I discovered the catalog page was sending raw SQL from javascript. All anyone had to do was inject a semicolon and add whatever they wanted.”
WebMgr: “Who would do that? They would have to know a lot about our systems in order to do any real damage.”
VP: “Yes, it would have to be someone in our department looking to do some damage.”
<both the VP and WebMgr look at me>
Me: “Open your browser and search on SQL Injection.”
<VP searches on SQL Injection..few seconds pass>
VP: “Oh my, this is disturbing. I did not know SQL injection was such a problem. I want all SQL removed from javascript and passwords removed from the text files.”
WebMgr: “Our team is already removing the SQL, but our apps need to read the SQL server login and password from a config file. I don’t know why this is such a big deal. The file is read-only and protected by IIS. You can’t even read it from a browser.”
VP: “Well, if it’s secured, I suppose it is OK.”
Me: “Open your browser and navigate to … browse.txt”
VP: “Oh my, there it is.”
WebMgr: “You can only see it because your laptop had administrative privileges. Anyone outside our network cannot access the file.”
VP: “OK, that makes sense. As long as IIS is securing the file …”
Me: “No..no..no.. I can’t believe this. The screen shot I sent yesterday was from my home laptop showing the file is publicly available.”
WebMgr: “But you are probably an admin on the laptop.”
<couple of awkward seconds of silence…then the light comes on>
VP: “OK, I’m stopping this meeting. I want all admin users and passwords removed from the site by the end of the day.”
Took a little longer than a day, but after reviewing what the web team changed:
- They did remove the SQL Server SA account, but replaced it with another account with full admin privileges.
- Replaced the “App Name”.txt with centrally located config file at C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\config.txt (hard-coded in the app)
When I brought this up again with my manager..
Mgr: “Yea, I know, it sucks. WebMgr showed the VP the config file was not accessible by the web site and it wasn’t using the SA password. He was satisfied by that. Web site is looking to beat projections again by 15%, so WebMgr told the other VPs that another disruption from a developer could jeopardize the quarterly numbers. I’d keep my head down for a while.”8 -
It's funny to see how a coworker of mine and me are very similar minded on some privacy stuff. He's a very cool/open guy and just a regular consumer (used the default services etc) but he shares quite some of my views. This is a convo we had today:
*got to the WhatsApp subject somehow*
Him: oh right, you didn't use that haha
Me: yeah 😅
Him: why was that again, privacy reasons or something, right? xD
Me: uhm yes *help*
Him: Well fair enough.
Me: so you'd think I'm right? I mean it uses end to end crypto... (I'm entirely with him in the next few lines but I always approach it carefully)
Him: they veeeery probably have some kinda fucking masterkey.
Me: why'd you think that?
Him: it has over a billion users, the owner is facebook, fb is directly integrated with several mass surveillance programs, they are known to work closely with one particular one, the intelligence interests are way too high for letting such an opportunity pass and after all, THE FUCKER IS CLOSED SOURCE AKA NO ONE CAN FUCKING VERIFY THE CRYPTO NOR THE APP ITSELF.
Me: I agree haha 😅
Him: it's not rocket science, it's modern day mass tracking/surveillance logic :)
I like that guy.5 -
Privacy & security violations piss me off. Not to the point that I'll write on devRant about it, but to the point that coworkers get afraid from the bloodthirsty look in my eyes.
I know all startups proclaim this, but the one I work at is kind of industry-disrupting. Think Uber vs taxi drivers... so we have real, malicious enemies.
Yet there's still this mindset of "it won't happen to us" when it comes to data leaks or corporate spying.
Me: "I noticed we are tracking our end users without their consent, and store not just the color of their balls, but also their favorite soup flavor and how often they've cheated on their partner, as plain text in the system for every employee to read"
Various C-randomletter-Os: "Oh wow indubitably most serious indeed! Let's put 2 scrumbag masters on the issue, we will tackle this in a most agile manner! We shall use AI blockchains in the elastic cloud to encrypt those ball-colors!"
NO WHAT I MEANT WAS WHY THE FUCK DO WE EVEN STORE THAT INFORMATION. IT DOES IN NO WAY RELATE TO OUR BUSINESS!
"No reason, just future requirements for our data scientists"
I'M GRABBING A HARDDRIVE SHREDDER, THE DB SERVER GOES FIRST AND YOUR PENIS RIGHT AFTER THAT!
(if it's unclear, ball color was an optimistic euphemism for what boiled down to an analytics value which might as well have been "nigger: yes/no")12 -
1. I wish that people start taking back their device ownership. Right to repair is an extremely important thing. Like that Nexus 6P that I've recently repaired by jamming another battery into it, now it's at 110-ish% health according to AccuBattery. And it cost me.. €10 or so? All the while if I wasn't able to get in there, it would've been a €120 paperweight (and that's not even considering the €300-ish (? Someone please fill me in on that) price it retailed at back in 2015 when it was a flagship).
(edit the so many'th: according to https://express.co.uk/life-style/... the base model was apparently £449 at release, haven't been able to verify it though.. point is, a paperweight at such prices would've been quite a bummer, I mean for me it was even one given that it failed a mere few months after purchase for €120.. €40/m for a phone ain't nothing :/)
Right to repair is an extremely important thing, and the ability to do so shouldn't ever be impeded. Users should become able again to service the devices that they own.
2. I wish that people start caring about their privacy again. Google and Facebook and the likes are large companies, but at the end of the day, that's all they are. Large companies. And they're hungry for your data, not because they're selling it, rather because they're collecting it to an extent which they shouldn't. Over at DDG (https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckg...) they explain a very much viable alternative revenue model pretty well. Additionally, there's several tools which you can use to limit the amount of data that's being collected about you. These include but are not limited to Firefox, NoScript, ad blockers (I personally use uBlock), a trustworthy VPN (ideally one of your own), and Tor.
3. I wish that software would become less inefficient. It really pains me to see that applications with functionality that could be implemented in a couple of MB at most come at a size of several hundreds of MB. 1% efficiency, even the inefficient as fuck tungsten light bulbs weren't that awful!!! Imagine what could be done with all the hardware we have available nowadays, if every piece of software would be around 80% efficient as is a common norm in electronics. Just looking at Linux which is still in many ways convoluted, modern desktops with a couple hundred MB of RAM usage? You've got it! So why can't OS's like Windows (although I have to say, huge improvements have been made there over the last few years) and browsers like Firefox and Chrome be more like that? I really don't understand.
There's several more wishes I have of course, but those are the most important ones.. hopefully I'll be able to see at least one of them come true during my life.10 -
Buckle up kids, this one gets saucy.
At work, we have a stress test machine that trests tensile, puncture and breaking strength for different materials used (wood construction). It had a controller software update that was supposed to be installed. I was called into the office because the folks there were unable to install it, they told me the executable just crashed, and wanted me to take a look as I am the most tech-savvy person there.
I go to the computer and open up the firmware download folder. I see a couple folders, some random VBScript file, and Installation.txt. I open the TXT, and find the first round of bullshit.
"Do not run the installer executable directly as it will not work. Run install.vbs instead."
Now, excuse me for a moment, but what kind of dick-cheese-sniffing cockmonger has end users run VBScript files to install something in 2018?! Shame I didn't think of opening it up and examining it for myself to find out what that piece of boiled dogshit did.
I suspend my cringe and run it, and lo and behold, it installs. I open the program and am faced with entering a license key. I'm given the key by the folks at the office, but quickly conclude no ways of entering it work. I reboot the program and there is an autofilled key I didn't notice previously. Whatever, I think, and hit OK.
The program starts fine, and I try with the login they had previously used. Now it doesn't work for some reason. I try it several times to no avail. Then I check the network inspector and notice that when I hit login, no network activity happens in the program, so I conclude the check must be local against some database.
I browse to the program installation directory for clues. Then I see a folder called "Databases".
"This can't be this easy", I think to myself, expecting to find some kind of JSON or something inside that I can crawl for clues. I open the folder and find something much worse. Oh, so much worse.
I find <SOFTWARE NAME>.accdb in the folder. At this point cold sweat is already running down my back at the sheer thought of using Microsoft Access for any program, but curiosity takes over and I open it anyway.
I find the database for the entire program inside. I also notice at this point that I have read/write access to the database, another thing that sent my alarm bells ringing like St. Pauls cathedral. Then I notice a table called "tUser" in the left panel.
Fearing the worst, I click over and find... And you knew it was coming...
Usernames and passwords in plain text.
Not only that, they're all in the format "admin - admin", "user - user", "tester - tester".
I suspend my will to die, login to the program and re-add the account they used previously. I leave the office and inform the peeps that the program works as intended again.
I wish I was making this shit up, but I really am not. What is the fucking point of having a login system at all when your users can just open the database with a program that nowadays comes bundled with every Windows install and easily read the logins? It's not even like the data structure is confusing like minified JSON or something, it's literally a spreadsheet in a program that a trained monkey could read.
God bless them and Satan condemn the developers of this fuckawful program.8 -
Data scientist: we need to whitelist a pod to connect to a database
Me: Whitelist? We don't use whitelists on private databases
DS: It's the new data warehouse database
Me: is it on <X> VPC?
DS: I'm not sure what that means but its ip is <real world ipv4>
Me: Are you hosting a publicly accessible database with all our end users information?!
DS: ...
Me: There goes our SOC2 audit controls...
DS: how long until you can white list it?
Me: I won't be whitelisting it. You need to put it on a private VPC and peer with the cluster, you'll have to rebuild all the Terraform and redeploy
DS: We didn't use Terraform because it takes too long, just white list the pods IP.
Me: No. I'm contacting the CISO and CTO...21 -
Wow... this is the perfect week for this topic.
Thursday, is the most fucked off I’ve ever been at work.
I’ll preface this story by saying that I won’t name names in the public domain to avoid anyone having something to use against me in court. But, I’m all for the freedom of information so please DM if you want to know who I’m talking about.
Yesterday I handed in my resignation, to the company that looked after me for my first 5 years out of university.
Thursday was my breaking point but to understand why I resigned you need a little back story.
I’m a developer for a corporate in a team of 10 or so.
The company that I work for is systemically incompetent and have shown me this without fail over the last 6 months.
For the last year we’ve had a brilliant contracted, AWS Certified developer who writes clean as hell hybrid mobile apps in Ion3, node, couch and a tonne of other up to the minute technologies. Shout out to Morpheus you legend, I know you’re here.
At its core my job as a developer is to develop and get a product into the end users hands.
Morpheus was taking some shit, and coming back to his desk angry as fuck over the last few months... as one of the more experienced devs and someone who gives a fuck I asked him what was up.
He told me, company want their mobile app that he’s developed on internal infrastructure... and that that wasn’t going to work.
Que a week of me validating his opinion, looking through his work and bringing myself up to speed.
I came to the conclusion that he’d done exactly what he was asked to, brilliant Work, clean code, great consideration to performance and UX in his design. He did really well. Crucially, the infrastructure proposed was self-contradicting, it wouldn’t work and if they tried to fudge it in it would barely fucking run.
So I told everyone I had the same opinion as him.
4 months of fucking arguing with internal PMs, managers and the project team go by... me and morpheus are told we’re not on the project.
The breaking point for me came last Wednesday, given no knowledge of the tech, some project fannies said Morpheus should be removed and his contract terminated.
I was up in fucking arms. He’d done everything really well, to see a fellow developer take shit for doing his job better than anyone else in [company] could was soul destroying.
That was the straw on the camels back. We don’t come to work to take shit for doing a good job. We don’t allow our superiors to give people shit in our team when they’re doing nothing but a good job. And you know what: the opinion of the person that knows what they’re talking about is worth 10 times that of the fools who don’t.
My manager told me to hold off, the person supposed to be supporting us told me to stand down. I told him I was going to get the app to the business lead because he fucking loves it and can tell us if there’s anything to change whilst architecture sorts out their outdated fucking ideas.
Stand down James. Do nothing. Don’t do your job. Don’t back Morpheus with his skills and abilities well beyond any of ours. Do nothing.
That was the deciding point for me, I said if Morpheus goes... I go... but then they continued their nonsense, so I’m going anyway.
I made the decision Thursday, and Friday had recruiters chomping at the bit to put the proper “senior” back in my title, and pay me what I’m worth.
The other issues that caused me to see this company in it’s true form:
- I raised a key security issue, documented it, and passed it over to the security team.
- they understood, and told the business users “we cannot use ArcGIS’ mobile apps, they don’t even pretend to be secure”
- the business users are still using the apps going into the GDPR because they don’t understand the ramifications of the decisions they’re making.
I noticed recently that [company] is completely unable to finish a project to time or budget... and that it’s always the developers put to blame.
I also noticed that middle management is in a constant state of flux with reorganisations because in truth the upper managers know they need to sack them.
For me though, it was that developers in [company], the people that know what they’re talking about; are never listened to.
Fuck being resigned to doing a shit job.
Fuck this company. On to one that can do it right.
Morpheus you beautiful bastard I know you’ll be off soon too but I also feel I’ve made a friend for life. “Private cloud” my arse.
Since making the decision Thursday I feel a lot more free, I have open job offers at places that do this well. I have a position of power in the company to demand what I need and get it. And I have the CEO and CTO’s ears perking up because their department is absolutely shocking.
Freedom is a wonderful feeling.13 -
!!privacy
!!political
I had a discussion with a coworker earlier.
I owed him for lunch the other day, and he suggested I pay him back either with cash (which I didn't have), Venmo, or just by him lunch the next time (which I ended up doing).
I asked about Venmo, and he said it was like paypal, but always free. that sounded a bit off -- because how are they in business if it's always free? -- so I looked it up, and paid special attention to their privacy policy.
The short of it: they make money by selling your information. That's worth far more than charging users a small fee when sending $5 every few weeks. Sort of what I expected when I heard "always free," but what surprised me is just how much they collect. (In retrospect, I really shouldn't have been surprised at all...)
Here's an incomplete list:
* full name, physical address, email, DoB, SSN (or other government IDs, depending on country)
* Complete contact list (phone numbers, names, photos)
* Browser/device fingerprint
* (optional) Your entire Facebook feed and history
* (optional) all of your Facebook friends' contact info
* Your Twitter feed
* Your FourSquare activity
(The above four ostensibly for "fraud prevention")
* GPS data
* Usage info about the actual service
* Other users' usage info (e.g. mentioning you)
* Financial info (the only thing not shared with third parties)
Like, scary?
And, of course, they share all of this with their parent company, PayPal. (The privacy policy does not specify what PayPal does with it, nor does it provide any links that might describe it, e.g. PayPal's "info-shared-by-third-parties" privacy policy)
So I won't be using Venmo. ever.
I mentioned all of this to my coworker, and he just doesn't understand. at all. He even asks "So what are they going do with that, send me ads? like they already do?"
I told him why I think it's scary. Everything from them freely selling all of your info, to someone being able to look through your entire online life's history, to being able to masquerade around as you, to even reproducing your voice (e.g. voice clips collected by google assistant), to grouping people by political affiliations.
He didn't have much to say about any of them, and actually thought the voice thing was really cool. (All I could think of was would happen if the "news" had that ability....) All of his other responses were "that doesn't bother me at all" and/or "using all of these services is so convenient."
but what really got me was his reaction to the last one.
I said, "If you're part of the NRA, for example, you'd be grouped with Republicans. If they sell all of this information, which they do, and they don't really care who buys it or what they do with it... someone could look through the data and very very easily target those political groups."
His response? "I don't have to worry about that. I'm a Democrat, and have always voted Democrat. I'll tell anyone that."
Like.
That's basically saying every non-democrat is someone you should be wary of and keep an eye on. That's saying Democrats are the norm and everyone else is deviant and/or wrong.
and I couldn't say anything after this because... no matter what I said, it would start a political conflict, and would likely end with me being fired (since the owner is also a democrat, and they're very buddy-buddy). "What if they target democrats?" -> "They already do!" or "What if democrats use it against others?" -> "They deserve it for being violent and racist, but we never would" (except, you know, that IRS/tea-party incident for example...)
But like, this is coming from someone who firmly believes conservatives are responsible for all of the violence and looting and rioting and mass shootings in the country. ... even when every single instance has been by committed by democrats. every. single. one.
Just...
jfl;askjfasflkj.
He doesn't understand the need for privacy, and his world view is just... he actually thinks everyone with different beliefs is wrong and dangerous.
I don't even know how to deal with people like this. and with how prevalent this mindset is... coupled with the aforementioned privacy concerns... it's honestly *terrifying.*65 -
Lately, Namecheap has been forcing their users to change passwords once every six months. Otherwise, they bombard you with annoying popups. When I finally changed mine, this is how they did it on their end. I just can't deal with the irony of this whole situation...
11 -
So, some time ago, I was working for a complete puckered anus of a cosmetics company on their ecommerce product. Won't name names, but they're shitty and known for MLM. If you're clever, go you ;)
Anyways, over the course of years they brought in a competent firm to implement their service layer. I'd even worked with them in the past and it was designed to handle a frankly ridiculous-scale load. After they got the 1.0 released, the manager was replaced with some absolutely talentless, chauvinist cuntrag from a phone company that is well known for having 99% indian devs and not being able to heard now. He of course brought in his number two, worked on making life miserable and running everyone on the team off; inside of a year the entire team was ex-said-phone-company.
Watching the decay of this product was a sheer joy. They cratered the database numerous times during peak-load periods, caused $20M in redis-cluster cost overrun, ended up submitting hundreds of erroneous and duplicate orders, and mailed almost $40K worth of product to a random guy in outer mongolia who is , we can only hope, now enjoying his new life as an instagram influencer. They even terminally broke the automatic metadata, and hired THIRTY PEOPLE to sit there and do nothing but edit swagger. And it was still both wrong and unusable.
Over the course of two years, I ended up rewriting large portions of their infra surrounding the centralized service cancer to do things like, "implement security," as well as cut memory usage and runtimes down by quite literally 100x in the worst cases.
It was during this time I discovered a rather critical flaw. This is the story of what, how and how can you fucking even be that stupid. The issue relates to users and their reports and their ability to order.
I first found this issue looking at some erroneous data for a low value order and went, "There's no fucking way, they're fucking stupid, but this is borderline criminal." It was easy to miss, but someone in a top down reporting chain had submitted an order for someone else in a different org. Shouldn't be possible, but here was that order staring me in the face.
So I set to work seeing if we'd pwned ourselves as an org. I spend a few hours poring over logs from the log service and dynatrace trying to recreate what happened. I first tested to see if I could get a user, not something that was usually done because auth identity was pervasive. I discover the users are INCREMENTAL int values they used for ids in the database when requesting from the API, so naturally I have a full list of users and their title and relative position, as well as reports and descendants in about 10 minutes.
I try the happy path of setting values for random, known payment methods and org structures similar to the impossible order, and submitting as a normal user, no dice. Several more tries and I'm confident this isn't the vector.
Exhausting that option, I look at the protocol for a type of order in the system that allowed higher level people to impersonate people below them and use their own payment info for descendant report orders. I see that all of the data for this transaction is stored in a cookie. Few tests later, I discover the UI has no forgery checks, hashing, etc, and just fucking trusts whatever is present in that cookie.
An hour of tweaking later, I'm impersonating a director as a bottom rung employee. Score. So I fill a cart with a bunch of test items and proceed to checkout. There, in all its glory are the director's payment options. I select one and am presented with:
"please reenter card number to validate."
Bupkiss. Dead end.
OR SO YOU WOULD THINK.
One unimportant detail I noticed during my log investigations that the shit slinging GUI monkeys who butchered the system didn't was, on a failed attempt to submit payment in the DB, the logs were filled with messages like:
"Failed to submit order for [userid] with credit card id [id], number [FULL CREDIT CARD NUMBER]"
One submit click later and the user's credit card number drops into lnav like a gatcha prize. I dutifully rerun the checkout and got an email send notification in the logs for successful transfer to fulfillment. Order placed. Some continued experimentation later and the truth is evident:
With an authenticated user or any privilege, you could place any order, as anyone, using anyon's payment methods and have it sent anywhere.
So naturally, I pack the crucifixion-worthy body of evidence up and walk it into the IT director's office. I show him the defect, and he turns sheet fucking white. He knows there's no recovering from it, and there's no way his shitstick service team can handle fixing it. Somewhere in his tiny little grinchly manager's heart he knew they'd caused it, and he was to blame for being a shit captain to the SS Failboat. He replies quietly, "You will never speak of this to anyone, fix this discretely." Straight up hitler's bunker meme rage.13 -
Oh boy, the startup managers are writing a roadmap today. Can't wait.
5 mIlLiOn DaIlY aCtIvE uSeRs By EnD oF Q1! (2022!!!)
1 MiLlIoN dAiLy ReVeNuE bY tOmOrRoW!
zErO bUgS aNd KnOwN iSsUeS iN sYsTeM bY 5Pm ToDaY!
tHoUsAnDs Of NeW cUsToMeRs WiThIn ThE nExT hOuR!6 -
1. Try to stay sane in startup chaos
2. Use more vacation days
3. Separate work and free time a bit more
4. Get out into nature more
5. Hire 50+ good developers & get company to 15M active end users while doing all of the above5 -
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 -
Well, it all started off with hardware-level programming involving jumpers and stuff like that... Then came Assembly, which was good.. B, C compilers. Finally came the interpreted languages, and that's where in my opinion the abstraction should've ended. But no, we needed more frameworks, more libraries, even more abstraction! Where does it end? As it seems to be going, I guess that users will have kid toys - no iToys! - for electronics and we'll be programming on with bloated Scratch GUI's. Nothing against Scratch, but that shit ain't proper programming anymore. God I can't wait for the future.
ABSTRACT ALL THE THINGS!!!
Oh and not to mention that all software will be governed in political correctness by some Alex SJW AI shit that became sentient. Not a single programming term will be non-offensive anymore, no matter how hard you try to not offend anyone, or God forbid - don't care about it because you just want to make something that's readable, usable and working!! Terms, UI names for buttons, heck even icons! REMOVE IT BECAUSE IT OFFENDS SOMEONE THAT I DON'T EVEN KNOW JACK SHIT ABOUT!!!18 -
//
// devRant unofficial UWP update (v1.5.6)
//
Hi!
A new update for Windows 10 users is in certification right now (will be available in a few hours/days), with the new feature you could see a few days ago on the official client.
But the main reason of this post is that I've seen the success of the official Issue Tracker created in August by @dfox and @trogus on GitHub.
For this reason I decided to do the same for the unofficial client.
Feel free to post bugs reports (I prefer this method instead of emails) and requests of features (even if not available in the official client) you would like to see.
https://github.com/JakubSteplowski/...
Complete changelog of v1.5.6:
- Added new 'post type' selector for easier classification of rant types in the future;
- Added Official devRant unofficial Issue Tracker on GitHub;
- Added Feedback page with link to GitHub Issue Tracker repo;
- Added black theme... no, wait... already there.
- Minor UI improvements;
- Minor back-end improvements;
I hope to see a lot of interesting feature requests I will enjoy to implement to make the UWP client always the best for you, Windows community. 😁
18 -
The list would be quite long.
I think Google is still making good tools, but just like Apple the integrations get all so tight and constricting... And with their data, if it goes wrong, it will go wrong hard.
I feel like YouTube is gliding into a state where cheap clickbait floats to the top and finding quality gets more difficult as well, their algorithm is more and more tuned to choose recent popular stuff over good older gems.
Microsoft is all pretend lovey dovey cuddling open source, but I'm still suspicious it's all a hug of death. I was never a big fan, but they're seriously dropping balls when it comes to windows-as-a-service, taking away so much personal control from end users even though they can't be trusted to babysit either.
Amazon is creeping it's way through the internet, charging $10/m to join the vip club infesting houses with spytubes to sell more plastic crap. Bezos' only right to keep wasting oxygen is BlueOrigin, but he'll probably fuck that up as well turning spaceflight into a decadent prime consumer orgy instead of something inspiring.
Facebook... Well, that's self explanatory. Fuck it, everything it pretends to be, and everyone who still has an account with a rusty spike.
Uber and AirBnB, with their fake ass mission of a green shared economy, but they trample over employees, customers and neighbors to build their ivory towers of progressive illusions.
Then there's a million declining brands.
I liked Skype for example when it was first released, Just like how I started out liking (and then hating) Discord, Slack, etc... They're all tools which seem fast and easy, but then they get us further away from solid protocols, get us entrenched into limiting, bloated and sometimes even dangerous tools. As my dad used to say: "Companies are like women, if you go for cheap, fast and easy you'll end up with a burning dick and half your savings gone"
You know what, fuck all tech companies.
OK, devrant is still pretty nice... For now.8 -
What I'm posting here is my 'manifesto'/the things I stand for. You may like it, you may hate it, you may comment but this is what I stand for.
What are the basic principles of life? one of them is sharing, so why stop at software/computers?
I think we should share our software, make it better together and don't put restrictions onto it. Everyone should be able to contribute their part and we should make it better together. Of course, we have to make money but I think that there is a very good way in making money through OSS.
Next to that, since the Snowden releases from 2013, it has come clear that the NSA (and other intelligence agencies) will try everything to get into anyone's messages, devices, systems and so on. That's simply NOT okay.
Our devices should be OUR devices. No agency should be allowed to warrantless bypass our systems/messages security/encryptions for the sake of whatever 'national security' bullshit. Even a former NSA semi-director traveled to the UK to oppose mass surveillance/mass govt. hacking because he, himself, said that it doesn't work.
We should be able to communicate freely without spying. Without the feeling that we are being watched. Too badly, the intelligence agencies of today do not want us to do this and this is why mass surveillance/gag orders (companies having to reveal their users' information without being allowed to alert their users about this) are in place but I think that this is absolutely wrong. When we use end to end encrypted communications, we simply defend ourselves against this non-ethical form of spying.
I'm a heavy Signal (and since a few days also Riot.IM (matrix protocol) (Riot.IM with end to end crypto enabled)), Tutanota (encrypted email) and Linux user because I believe that only those measures (open source, reliable crypto) will protect against all the mass spying we face today.
The applications/services I strongly oppose are stuff like WhatsApp (yes, encryted messages but the metadata is readily available and it's closed source), skype, gmail, outlook and so on and on and on.
I think that we should OWN our OWN data, communications, browsing stuffs, operating systems, softwares and so on.
This was my rant.17 -
So yesterday our team got a new toy. A big ass 4k screen to display some graphs on. Took a while to assemble the stand, hang the TV on that stand, but we got there.
So our site admin gets us a new HDMI cable. Coleague told us his lappy supports huge screens as he used to plug his home TV in his work lappy while WFHing. He grabs that HDMI, plugs one end into the screen, another - into his lappy and
.. nothing...
Windows does not recognize any new devices connected. The screen does not show any signs of any changes. Oh well..
Site IT admin installs all the updates, all the new drivers, upgrades BIOS and gives another try.
Nothing.
So naturally the cable is to blame. The port is working for him at home, so it's sure not port's fault. Also he uses his 2-monitor setup at work, so the port is 100% working!
I'm curious. What if..... While they are busy looking for another cable, I take that first one, plug it into my Linux (pretty much stock LinuxMint installation w/ X) lappy,
3.. 2.. 1..
and my desktop is now on the big ass 4k fat screen.
Folks. Enough bitching about Linux being picky about the hardware and Windows being more user friendly, having PnP and so. I'm not talking about esoteric devices. I'm talking about BAU devices that most of home users are using. A monitor, a printer, a TV screen, a scanner, wireless/usb speaker/mouse/keyboard/etc...
Linux just works. Face it
P.S. today they are still trying to make his lappy work with that TV screen. No luck yet.
17 -
I'm sure this has probably been posted before, but it never fails to drive me nuts, and customers never stop doing it, so:
Why do end users think "it's broken" is all they have to put into the support ticket?
It's a web app, not a goddamn pretzel.
If the turn signal on your car stops working, do you drop your car off at the mechanic, hand them the keys, and say "its broken, fix it!"?
While I'm on the topic, "I tried to do {x} and it gave an error" is better than "its broken", but still: why do you think what the actual error says would be completely irrelevant, especially when we put in the effort to give you relatively meaningful error messages?
I mean, is "there was a problem sending the email" so utterly gibberish to you that it is indistinguishable from "error: 0x000351e6"?
If so, I'm sorry, but you're too stupid to use a goddamn computer!5 -
I did it: I built up another PC identical to my machine (https://devrant.com/rants/2923002/...) for my SO and installed Linux Mint for her, too. That had been my primary motive for an easy and stable distro in the first place.
Now that didn't come out of the blue. We were discussing the end of Win 7 already two years ago where I brought up my concerns with Win 10 - mainly the forced, lousy updates and the integrated spyware, and that I was considering Linux as way out.
I had expected quite some pushback because she had been exclusively on Windows since the 90s. However, I didn't sell Linux as upgrade. It's just that Win 7 is over, progress under Windows as well, and we're in damage control mode. Went down pretty well.
Fast forward three weeks - remember, first time Linux user and no IT-geek:
- it just works, including web, videos, and music.
- she likes Cinnamon.
- nice desktop themes.
- Redshift is as good as f.lux.
- software installation is just like an app store.
- updates work via an easy tray icon.
- quote: "Linux is great!"
- given this alternative, she doesn't understand why people willingly put up with Win 10.
- no drive letters: already forgotten.
- popcorn for upcoming Win 10 disaster stories.
- why do Windows updates take that long?
- why does Windows need to reboot for every update?
- why does Windows hang in that update boot screen for so long?
I'm impressed that Linux has come so far that it's suitable for end users. Next in line is her father who wants to try Linux, but that will be a story for tomorrow.22 -
Continuation of the story with Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon on the old Core2 Duo with 2 GB RAM and HDD. The guy has had that PC under Linux for 1.5 months now, had never had Linux before, has no IT background, and is over 70.
Upon visit, I checked how the machine was doing. OK, he had forgotten to apply the updates, so I highlighted paying attention to the red icon in the tray. Launched the updates, all ran through.
Otherwise, he had managed to install Skype all by himself (network effect because of his family...) and had bought a webcam plus a microphone. Linux had just recognised everything without any fuzz. Even his Skype buddies were impressed, he said.
On top of that, he likes how much faster that PC is compared to his much more current Win 10 laptop and actually uses the old Linux PC more than the laptop.
He also enjoys that Linux doesn't do weird things all by itself all the time. That's not his experience with Win 10.12 -
>> this === rant
<< true
At beginning of this year, I only knew HTML, JS, and CSS so I just applied for offers like "Jr Apprentice Dev in Front-End"
In a interview call, the woman told me that they will send me a test asking about my JS and HTML5 knowledge.
When I look in my inbox, the mail subject says "Back-end Test".
Then I call the woman:
Me: "Hello, I have received the test mail, but maybe it's wrong. I applied for a Front-End position and the test is about backend! "
She: "Do you have skills in JS and HTML5?"
Me: "Yes!, and CSS3"
She: "Well, the test is about that. JS, jQuery, and HTML5"
Me: "..."
Me: "Sorry, that languages are Front-End. In the subject say 'Back-End' and Back-End is PHP, SQL, MySQL, Java, .Net... I don't know nothing about that. I only know HTML, JS, CSS."
She: "It's the same"
Me: "I sorry but it's not the same. Fron-End is client-side, what users sees. Animation, colors, FXs, buttons, forms... And Back-End is server-side, what users doesn't see."
She: "Well, JS, HTML, and CSS is backend for us. We call it that way too"
Me: "Sorry but that is wrong. I invite you to read some basic info. Now I am confused"
Of course that I am not confused. That idi0t was wrong.
Perhaps recruiters should take some info about areas where they are recruiting... (:T)3 -
Let me tell you a story:
One upon a time poor lil PonySlaystation received a call. It was a nice guy who cried about his WordPress website had been hacked. So the clusterfuck began...
He gave me the login credentials for the hosting back-end, DB, FTP and CMS.
A hacked WP site was not new for me. It was probably the 6th of maybe 10 I had to do with.
What I didn't expect was the hosting back-end.
Imagine yourself back in 1999 when you tried to learn PHP and MySQL and all was so interesting and cool and you had infinite possibilities! Now forget all these great feelings and just take that ancient technology to 2018 and apply it to a PAID FUCKING HOSTING PROVIDER!
HOLY FUCKING ASSRAPE!
Wanna know what PHP version?
5.3.11, released the day before gomorrah was wiped.
The passwords? Stored in fucking plaintext. Shown right next to the table name and DB user name in the back-end. Same with FTP users.
EXCUSE ME, WHAT THE FUCK?!
I have to call Elon Musk and order some Boring Company Flame Throwers to get rid of this.
Long story long, I set up a new WP, changed all passwords and told the nice guy to get a decent hoster.4 -
So today was the worst day of my whole (just started) career.
We have a huge client like 700k users. Two weeks ago we migrated all their services to our aws infrastructure. I basically did most of the work because I'm the most skilled in it (not sure anymore).
Today I discovered:
- Mail cron was configured the wrong way so 3000 emails where waiting to be sent.
- The elastic search service wasn't yet whitelisted so didn't work for two weeks.
- The cron which syncs data between production db en testing db only partly worked.
Just fucking end me. Makes me wonder what other things are broken. I still have a lot to learn... And I might have fucked their trust in me for a bit.13 -
This rant is particularly directed at web designers, front-end developers. If you match that, please do take a few minutes to read it, and read it once again.
Web 2.0. It's something that I hate. Particularly because the directive amongst webdesigners seems to be "client has plenty of resources anyway, and if they don't, they'll buy more anyway". I'd like to debunk that with an analogy that I've been thinking about for a while.
I've got one server in my home, with 8GB of RAM, 4 cores and ~4TB of storage. On it I'm running Proxmox, which is currently using about 4GB of RAM for about a dozen VM's and LXC containers. The VM's take the most RAM by far, while the LXC's are just glorified chroots (which nonetheless I find very intriguing due to their ability to run unprivileged). Average LXC takes just 60MB RAM, the amount for an init, the shell and the service(s) running in this LXC. Just like a chroot, but better.
On that host I expect to be able to run about 20-30 guests at this rate. On 4 cores and 8GB RAM. More extensive migration to LXC will improve this number over time. However, I'd like to go further. Once I've been able to build a Linux which was just a kernel and busybox, backed by the musl C library. The thing consumed only 13MB of RAM, which was a VM with its whole 13MB of RAM consumption being dedicated entirely to the kernel. I could probably optimize it further with modularization, but at the time I didn't due to its experimental nature. On a chroot, the kernel of the host is used, meaning that said setup in a chroot would border near the kB's of RAM consumption. The busybox shell would be its most important RAM consumer, which is negligible.
I don't want to settle with 20-30 VM's. I want to settle with hundreds or even thousands of LXC's on 8GB of RAM, as I've seen first-hand with my own builds that it's possible. That's something that's very important in webdesign. Browsers aren't all that different. More often than not, your website will share its resources with about 50-100 other tabs, because users forget to close their old tabs, are power users, looking things up on Stack Overflow, or whatever. Therefore that 8GB of RAM now reduces itself to about 80MB only. And then you've got modern web browsers which allocate their own process for each tab (at a certain amount, it seems to be limited at about 20-30 processes, but still).. and all of its memory required to render yours is duplicated into your designated 80MB. Let's say that 10MB is available for the website at most. This is a very liberal amount for a webserver to deal with per request, so let's stick with that, although in reality it'd probably be less.
10MB, the available RAM for the website you're trying to show. Of course, the total RAM of the user is comparatively huge, but your own chunk is much smaller than that. Optimization is key. Does your website really need that amount? In third-world countries where the internet bandwidth is still in the order of kB/s, 10MB is *very* liberal. Back in 2014 when I got into technology and webdesign, there was this rule of thumb that 7 seconds is usually when visitors click away. That'd translate into.. let's say, 10kB/s for third-world countries? 7 seconds makes that 70kB of available network bandwidth.
Web 2.0, taking 30+ seconds to load a web page, even on a broadband connection? Totally ridiculous. Make your website as fast as it can be, after all you're playing along with 50-100 other tabs. The faster, the better. The more lightweight, the better. If at all possible, please pursue this goal and make the Web a better place. Efficiency matters.9 -
Long rant!!!
Let me give you a little back story first
So I was building a mobile app for a client who is to say the least a big PAIN IN THE ASS!
And once I completed the final edits he requests and sent him the app for approval, he calls me and starts asking about some features in the app if it has does or not (which the app does). The main reason for this rant is the feature about the app being able to open the links of the website inside the app without going to the browser first.
But what was happening when the client clicked on the link, since it’s a newspaper type of app, he got asked in which browser he wanted to open the link and after the browser was opened it returned him to the app and asked if he wants that link be opened in the app or browser again. So I can understand his confusion and anger with this problem so I started to debug to see what is happening since I now this featured worked before and had it on video to show it does. After a few minutes I noticed that the links were being added as google.com/url?q={CLIENT_URL}/something_else instead of just www.client_url.com/article
Obviously not my fault as I don’t do content for the website but some other person. But once I called him back and explained the situation to him, he started yelling at me for not being able to create the feature and not notifying him of the mistake his author was making. After about 10mins of him yelling I snapped and just angrily told him “I don’t hear any problems with the app, as far as I’m concerned it can be published as is, as there is not problem on my side”. Then he got even more angry and started talking more shit about how this is all my fault and how I’m a bad programmer and how his users are gonna just delete the app once they see this and I should find a way to fix those links.
And to clarify some more, if there was like 5-10 articles I would do it, just so that I don’t have to listen to him, but there are more than 1 or 2k articles with about 2-5 links per article that were added like that.
After his call I called my boss and told him what happened, and he said he will talk to the client and explain to him how he will be able to communicate with me from now on and in what tone. As I’m not allowed to tell clients anymore to go fuck themselves, since I did it once. But I can call my boss and he does it for me :D
//END RANT !!!4 -
“Don’t learn multiple languages at the same time”
Ignored that. Suddently I understood why he said that. Mixed both languages. In holiday rechecked it and it was ok.
Sometimes mistakes can lead to good things. After relearning I understood it much better.
“Don’t learn things by head” was another one. Because that’s useless. If you want to learn a language, try to understand it.
I fully agree with that. I started that way too learning what x did what y did, ... But after a few I found out this was inutile. Since then, I only have problems with Git
Another one. At release of Swift, my code was written in Obj-C. But I would like to adopt Swift. This was in my first year of iOS development, if I can even call it development. I used these things called “Converters”. But 3/4 was wrong and caused bugs. But the Issues in swift could handle that for me. After some time one told me “Stop doing that. Try to write it yourself.”
One of the last ones: “Try to contribute to open source software, instead of creating your own version of it. You won’t reinvent the wheel right? This could also be usefull for other users.”
Next: “If something doesn’t work the first time, don’t give up. Create Backups” As I did that multiple times and simply deleted the source files. By once I had a problem no iOS project worked. Didn’t found why. I was about to delete my Mac. Because of Apple’s WWDR certificate. Since then I started Git. Git is a new way of living.
Reaching the end: “We are developers. Not designers. We can’t do both. If a client asks for another design because they don’t like the current one tell them to hire one” - Remebers me one of my previous rants about the PDF “design”
Last one: “Clients suck. They will always complain. They need a new function. They don’t need that... And after that they wont bill ya for that. Because they think it’s no work.”
Sorry, forgot this one: “Always add backdoors. Many times clients wont pay and resell it or reuse it. With backdoors you can prohibit that.”
I think these are all things I loved they said to me. Probably forgot some. -
//
// 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 -
Rant.
So I work in the service desk and the moment and one of our clients use Mac's.
One of the end users called up saying that it was being slow and sluggish.
End user: hi my Mac is being slow.
Me: when did you last reboot it?
End user: last night
*Remotely connects*
*Runs uptime in terminal*
Me: are you sure you rebooted it last night?
End user: yes I close the lid every night...
The up time was 68 days...9 -
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 -
--- iOS-Jailbreak-AppStore "Cydia" shuts down ---
This Friday, Jay Freeman, the maintainer of the iOS-Jailbreak-AppStore "Cydia", announced that he will shut-down his services.
"Cydia" is a app store for people that jailbreaked their iPhones and allows them to buy and download apps. Apple's AppStore doesn't allow jailbreaked apps, that's the reason it was created in 2009.
Jay Freeman, also known as "Saurik", explained that he wanted to shut down the service at the end of 2018 anyways.
Now, a recent security issue, threatening the data of all users, caused that the store no longer existed with immediate effect.
In addition to the security issue, "Cydia" was said to be no more profitable.
To calm you breakers down: Previous purchases can still be downloaded!
The software itself will continue to exist, but without a back-end for payments and stuff like that. Users are still able to do payments through third-party repositories, which already happened anyway, so that lowers the impact of the shut-down.
Just like "Cydia", other services are shutting down too.
One of the three big Cydia-repositories, ModMyi, said they wont allow any new apps and archived all existing ones.
ZodTTD and MacCiti will also be discontinued.
"Bigboss" is the only repository remaining.
Jailbreaks just lost their popularity over the last years. There's still no jailbreak for iOS 11! This shows that Apple is getting better and better at preventing jailbreaks.
On the other hand, it shows that the need for jailbreaks is not quite as high anymore and therefore the developers don't spend too much energy for breaking up iOS anymore.
Did you use Cydia, or any of the other services? Write us in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
12 -
God damn fucking Windows bullshit.
Why is the fuck does Microsoft HATE its users?
Latest updates, and no fuck Windows 11, completely BREAKS all of my WSL environments.
Home directories are gone, or the environments are corrupt and won't even run.
99% of the issues these dense shit-fucks cause are because they RaNdOmLy reboot for their dumbass updates instead of scheduling them with the end user. During these rebots, do you thing they wait for everything to shut down?
HELL NO!
They just shut that shit down like they fucking own it. Editors? Gone. Browsers? Gone. WSL Consoles? Gone. Docker containers? Gone. IEdge? Hey, we have great news, we made IE your default browser again! BTW, your upgrade to Windows 11 is free until we force you to upgrade!
I'm so fed up with it.....so fucking tired of it...
The only reason why I even use WSL these days is to ssh into my Linux devices or run some quick dev tests in containers. Why not use PuTTY for SSH? Because it fucking SUCKS that's why.
I'm feeling so many emotions right now over bullshit that shouldn't even be happening. I'm literally at the point that I'm just going to install Linux on this device and just create a Windows VM on one of my hosts so I can still do "work" things that involve leadership.19 -
Fuck Apple and its review system
So, this started in december. We wanted to publsih an app, after years of development.
Submit to review, and passes on the first try. Well, what do you know. We are on manual release option, so we can release together with the android counterpart. Well yes, but someone notices that the app name is not what was aggreed (App Name instead of AppName). Okay, should be easy, submit the same app, just the name changed. If it passed once, it will pass again, right? HAH
Rejected, because the description, why we use the device’s camera is too general. Well... its the purpose of the app... but whatever, i read the guidelines, okay, its actually documented with exapmles. BUT THEN WHY THE FUCK COULDNT YOU SAY THAT ON THE FIRST UPLOAD?
Whatever, fix it, new version, accepted, ready to release just in time.
It doesindeed roll out,but of course, we notice that the app has a giant issue, but only on specific phones. None of our test phones had this problem, but those who have, essentially cannot use our program. Nasty as it is, the fix is really easy, done in 5 minutes. Upload it asap, literally nothing changed from user point of view, except now it doesnt crash on said devices. Meanwhile 1 star reviews are arriving from these users - of course with all the right. Apple should allow this patch quickly, right? HAH
THE REAL BULLSHIT COMES NOW
With only config files changed, the same binary uploaded we get rejected? What now? Lets read it. “Metadata rejected, no need to upload new binary”.... oh fine only the store page is wrong? Easy. Read the message, what went wrong. “Referencing third party content is nit permitted on the app store” meaning that no android test device should be shown. Fine, your rules. They even send a picutre of the offending element. BUT ITS NOT EVEN ON THE STORE. THATS A SCREENSHOT OF THE APP. HOW IS THAT METADATA? I ask about this, and i get a reply, from either a bot, or a person who cant speak or read english, and only pasted a sample answer, repeating the previous message. WTF. Fine, i guess you are dumb, but since they stop replying to our queries, do the only sensible thing, re-record the offending tutorial video that actually contained an android device. This is about 2 weeks, after the first try to apply a simple patch to a broken app. And still, how did it pass the review 2 times?
Whatever, reupload again, play the waiting game for a week, when the promised average wait time is 2 days, they hit us with a message, that they want to know what patent we use in our apps core functionality. WTF WHY NOW? It didnt bother you for a month, let it release ti production and now you delay a simple patch for this? We send them what they know. Aaaaand they reply: sorry we need more time to review your app. FUUUUUUCKKK YOUUU. You are reviewing a PATCH with close to zero functional change!!! Then, this shit goes on, every week we ask about an ETA, always asking for patience... at the end it took another 3 weeks... so december 15 to jan 21 in total...
FOR. A. SINGLE. FUCKING. PATCH
Bottom line is what is infurating, apple cares that there is an android device in the tutorial video, but they dont care that a significant percentage of our users simply cannot use the app.
Im done7 -
Story of a penguin fledgling, one of my end users whom I migrated from Win 7 to Linux Mint. She had been on Windows since Win 98 and still uses Windows at work.
Three months before. Me, Linux might not be as good, but Win 10 is even worse. User, mh.
Migration. User, looks different, but not bad.
One month later. User, it's nice, I like it.
Three months later. User, why does Windows reboot doing lengthy stuff?
Six months later. User, I hate Windows. Why is everyone using this crap?
One year later. Malware issues at work. User to IT staff, that wouldn't have happened with Linux. Me, that's the spirit!31 -
Just finished our BIG update including a big change in the backend (PHP => NODEJS). So I hope our users will enjoy this one because we are not yet public and our competitor get a lot of clients each day but if we compare our product to their product: Ours is responsive as fucked and have much more stability but less fonctionnalities so we have to add more fonctionnalities before releasing our product to the public. I hope we will be able in a few weeks! With only me and my back-end dev (My employee and friend at the same time) to work on it and they have 2 more devs to their team to use Bubble.. (They are now 6 or 8 devs (wannabes and using a drag and drop website) in total vs 2 (us) real programmers).
A well deserved night of sleep :P3 -
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*32 -
OK< been a long time user of Unity.
Tried the latest update as I and others were enthusiastic about creating a joint project of gamers and developers.
As I was building up a started website and we were getting things with Unity ready...BOOM,. They Fuck up the installs.
Not just a minor thing here or there but not finding its own Fucking file locations where it installs shit. You try and say, Hey Unity you fucking twat, install here in this folder.
Boom again, it installs part of it there, and then continues installing shit everywhere else it wants to. Then the assholes at Unity give this Bullshit claim "the bug has been fixed."
Just reinstall.
Fuck you, its never that simple, You have to delete all sorts of fucking files to make sure conflicts from a previous corruption isn't just loaded on top of so it does not fuck up later.
So we did all that from programs, program data, program(x86), AppData Local, Local Low, and Roaming.
For added measure we manually removed all the crap from the registry folders (that was a pain but necessary), and then ran a cleaner to make sure all the left over shit was gone.
Thinking, OK you shit tech MoFo's we are clean and here we go.
HOLY SHIT BALLS, Its fucking worse with the LTS version it recommends and Slow as Fuck with their most recent version which is like 2020 itself, and insane piece of fucking bloated garbage and slower than a brick hard shit without fruit.
So we were going to all go post on the forums, and complain the fix section isn't fixed for shit.
Fuck us running backwards naked through a field of razor grass. Its so overloaded with complaints that they shut down further posts.
What makes this shit worse is we cannot even get the previous fucking versions of the editor before all this to work where our only option is without using the fucking Hub demand is just install 2018.
great if we started coding and testing in that. We cannot get shit where we were at back on track because you cannot fucking backward load an exported saved asset file.
Unity's suggestion? Start over.
Our Suggestion? Stop fucking smoking or using whatever fucking drug you assholes are on, you fucking disabled the gear options so we can resolve shit ourselves, and admit you did that shit and other sneaky piece of shit back stabby, security vulnerable data leak bullshit things to your end users.
Listen to your fucking experienced and long time users and get rid of the Fucking backward stepped hub piece of shit everyone with more brains than whatever piss ant pieces of shit praised that the rest of us have hated from day fucking one!
And while fixing this shit like it should be fucking fixed if you shit head bastards want to continue to exist as a fucking company, overhaul the fucking website or get the fuck out of business with now completely worthless SHIT.
Phew:
Suffice it to say....
We are now considering dealing with the learning curve and post pone our project going with unreal just because of these all around complete fuck ups that herald back to shit games of versions 3.0 and earlier.
8 -
Having pets is a good way to prepare yourself for working in a brown-field environment.
When your cat or dog shits on the floor, you get the same feeling as when you need to dive into a legacy code base.
You know you can't just leave it there, and yet you still want to find anything else to do except for touch the pile of shit in the middle of the room.
Meanwhile you know your users are going to end up trampling over it and mashing it into your carpet.
4 -
I'm starting to get sick of people calling out js for being what it is, a terrible pile of shit, without taking any effort learning the language. just because you wrote an app in java or python doesn't mean you're entitled to a free certificate in any language with a name that makes it sound easier.
in fact, I'd claim that for an experienced programmer, Java is much easier to pick up than JavaScript.
but, if all you want to do is sit here and complain, and you can find no joy in reading pages on end of documentation... well then, the only thing you're missing out on is the biggest fucking platform of the world. so don't worry I guess. it'll be fine. right? eventually the users will see that the web is just a nuisance for developers and they'll all start using native apps...6 -
iPhones are ridiculously picky when it comes to finding a mate- um charger. And knowing why doesn't really make it any easier to understand why. If anything it baffles me more.
So, let's start with appliances that are not phones. Think Bluetooth headsets, keyboards, earbuds, whatever. Those are simple devices. They see 5V on the VCC line and 0V on ground, and they will charge at whatever current they are meant to. Usually it will not exceed 200mA, and the USB 2.0 spec allows for up to 500mA from any USB outlet. So that's perfectly reasonable to be done without any fuss whatsoever.
Phones on the other hand are smarter.. some might say too smart for their own good. In this case I will only cover Android phones, because while they are smarter than they perhaps should be, they are still reasonable.
So if you connect an Android phone to the same 5V VCC and 0V ground, while leaving the data lines floating, the phone will charge at 500mA. This is exactly to be within USB 2.0 spec, as mentioned earlier. Without the data lines, the phone has no way to tell whether it *can* pull more, without *actually* trying to pull more (potentially frying a charger that's not rated for it). Now in an Android phone you can tell it to pull more, in a fairly straightforward way. You just short the data lines together, and the phone will recognize this as a simple charger that it can pull 1A from. Note that shorting data lines is not a bad thing, we do it all the time. It is just another term for making a connection between 2 points. Android does this right. Also note that shorted data lines cannot be used to send data. They are inherently pulled to the same voltage level, probably 0V but not sure.
And then the iPhones come in, Thinking Different. The iPhones require you to pull the data lines to some very specific voltage levels. And of course it's terribly documented because iSheep just trying to use their Apple original white nugget charger overseas and shit like that. I do not know which voltage levels they are (please let me know!), but it is certainly not a regular short. Now you connect the iPhone to, say, a laptop or something to charge. An Android phone would just charge while keeping data transmission disabled (because they can be left floating or shorted). This is for security reasons mostly, preventing e.g. a malicious computer from messing with it. An iPhone needs to be unlocked to just charge the damn thing. I'm fairly sure that that's because the data lines need to be pulled up, which could in theory enable a malicious computer to still get some information in or out of it. USB data transmission works at at least 200mV difference between the data lines. It could be more than that. So you need to unlock it.
Apple, how about you just short your goddamn data lines too like everyone else? And while you're at it, get rid of this Lightning connector. I get it, micro USB was too hard for your users. I guess they are blind pigs after all. But USB-C solved all of that and more. The only difference I can think of is that the Lightning connector can be a single board with pads on either side on the connector, while in USB-C that could be at the socket end (socket being less common to be replaced). And at the end of the day, that really doesn't matter with all the other things that will break first.
Think Different. Think Retarded. Such tiny batteries and you can't even fucking charge them properly.6 -
Let me tell you the story of how a feature request no one asked for got put in an early grave:
PM walks into weekly meeting with a single use case that one user called in about, despite never having this issue during the past year and a half that our app has been in production. PM's boss (genuinely one of the best people i have ever worked with) happens to sit in this particular meeting for no reason other than he felt like he should once in a while.
PM brings up use case and wants to devote 3 weeks' development time and another 3 weeks to test RIGHT NOW while other projects are already in motion. PM's boss speaks up with this: "Listen if this guy is really this upset, we can just tell him to build his own service. All the other end users have no problems with this, so it's not worth spending the resources on, i don't think."
And that is how i went from "this is bullshit" to "i love you" in the span of 20 minutes.2 -
NEW 6 Programming Language 2k16
1. Go
Golang Programming Language from Google
Let's start a list of six best new programming language and with Go or also known by the name of Golang, Go is an open source programming language and developed by three employees of Google and the launch in 2009, very cool just 3 people.
Go originated and developed from the popular programming languages such as C and Java, which offers the advantages of compact notation and aims to keep the code simple and easy to read / understand. Go language designers, Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, revealed that the complexity of C ++ into their main motivation.
This simple programming language that we successfully completed the most tasks simply by librariesstandar luggage. Combining the speed of pemrogramandinamis languages such as Python and to handalan of C / C ++, Go be the best tools for building 'High Volume of distributed systems'.
You need to know also know, as expressed by the CTO Tokopedia namely Mas Leon, Tokopedia will switch to GO-lang as the main foundation of his system. Horrified not?
eh not watch? try deh see in the video below:
[Embedyt] http://youtube.com/watch/...]
2. Swift
Swift Programming Language from Apple
Apple launched a programming language Swift ago at WWDC 2014 as a successor to the Objective-C. Designed to be simple as it is, Swift focus on speed and security.
Furthermore, in December 2015, Swift Apple became open source under the Apache license. Since its launch, Swift won eye and the community is growing well and has become one of the programming languages 'hottest' in the world.
Learning Swift make sure you get a brighter future and provide the ability to develop applications for the iOS ecosystem Apple is so vast.
Also Read: What to do to become a full-stack Developer?
3. Rust
Rust Programming Language from Mozilla
Developed by Mozilla in 2014 and then, and in StackOverflow's 2016 survey to the developer, Rust was selected as the most preferred programming language.
Rust was developed as an alternative to C ++ for Mozilla itself, which is referred to as a programming language that focus on "performance, parallelisation, and memory safety".
Rust was created from scratch and implement a modern programming language design. Its own programming language supported very well by many developers out there and libraries.
4. Julia
Julia Programming Language
Julia programming language designed to help mathematicians and data scientist. Called "a complete high-level and dynamic programming solution for technical computing".
Julia is slowly but surely increasing in terms of users and the average growth doubles every nine months. In the future, she will be seen as one of the "most expensive skill" in the finance industry.
5. Hack
Hack Programming Language from Facebook
Hack is another programming language developed by Facebook in 2014.
Social networking giant Facebook Hack develop and gaungkan as the best of their success. Facebook even migrate the entire system developed with PHP to Hack
Facebook also released an open source version of the programming language as part of HHVM runtime platform.
6. Scala
Scala Programming Language
Scala programming termasukbahasa actually relatively long compared to other languages in our list now. While one view of this programming language is relatively difficult to learn, but from the time you invest to learn Scala will not end up sad and disappointing.
The features are so complex gives you the ability to perform better code structure and oriented performance. Based programming language OOP (Object oriented programming) and functional providing the ability to write code that is capable of evolving. Created with the goal to design a "better Java", Scala became one behasa programming that is so needed in large enterprises.3 -
It's my second rant about Windows here in two days, but here we go:
Windows used to be a cool OS (and in part it still is). Yes, it's made for the end user, not power users, yes it has many flaws. But it was my gateway to computers and programming. I have fond memories of my first PC, playing around with the old win98 themes (my favorite was the baseball one!).
However, I am very disappointed now. I just had to basically force Windows 10 to stop hogging my bandwidth. It was an actual battle, with the OS simply (I kid you not) running update and other services EVEN AFTER I SPECIFICALLY DISABLED THEM. I just saw the Windows update service running, while its status was disabled. It's absurd.
Sorry Windows, but that's not what I want. I want to choose what happens on my own OS. Linux gives me exactly that, why can't you?11 -
In my previous rant about IPv6 (https://devrant.com/rants/2184688 if you're interested) I got a lot of very valuable insights in the comments and I figured that I might as well summarize what I've learned from them.
So, there's 128 bits of IP space to go around in IPv6, where 64 bits are assigned to the internet, and 64 bits to the private network of end users. Private as in, behind a router of some kind, equivalent to the bogon address spaces in IPv4. Which is nice, it ensures that everyone has the same address space to play with.. but it should've been (in my opinion) differently assigned. The internet is orders of magnitude larger than private networks. Most SOHO networks only have a handful of devices in them that need addressing. The internet on the other hand has, well, billions of devices in it. As mentioned before I doubt that this total number will be more than a multiple of the total world population. Not many people or companies use more than a few public IP addresses (again, what's inside the SOHO networks is separate from that). Consider this the equivalent of the amount of public IP's you currently control. In my case that would be 4, one for my home network and 3 for the internet-facing servers I own.
There's various ways in which overall network complexity is reduced in IPv6. This includes IPSec which is now part of the protocol suite and thus no longer an extension. Standardizing this is a good thing, and honestly I'm surprised that this wasn't the case before.
Many people seem to oppose the way IPv6 is presented, hexadecimal is not something many people use every day. Personally I've grown quite fond of the decimal representation of IPv4. Then again, there is a binary conversion involved in classless IPv4. Hexadecimal makes this conversion easier.
There seems to be opposition to memorizing IPv6 addresses, for which DNS can be used. I agree, I use this for my IPv4 network already. Makes life easier when you can just address devices by a domain name. For any developers out there with no experience with administration that think that this is bullshit - imagine having to remember the IP address of Facebook, Google, Stack Overflow and every other website you visit. Add to the list however many devices you want to be present in the imaginary network. For me right now that's between 20 and 30 hosts, and gradually increasing. Scalability can be a bitch.
Any other things.. Oh yeah. The average amount of devices in a SOHO network is not quite 1 anymore - there are currently about half a dozen devices in a home network that need to be addressed. This number increases as more devices become smart devices. That said of course, it's nowhere close to needing 64 bits and will likely never need it. Again, for any devs that think that this is bullshit - prove me wrong. I happen to know in one particular instance that they have centralized all their resources into a single PC. This seems to be common with developers and I think it's normal. But it also reduces the chances to see what networks with many devices in it are like. Again, scalability can be a bitch.
Thanks a lot everyone for your comments on the matter, I've learned a lot and really appreciate it. Do check out the previous rant and particularly the comments on it if you're interested. See ya!25 -
Worst collaboration experience story?
I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.
The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.
Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"
Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).
Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".
Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.
In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.
With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).
Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.
By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.5 -
This rings true even if the customer is internal. Built a feature and provided documentation on how to use it and one of the end users still used it wrong.
It was a simple validation process too. Input the member ID then click validate, the app then checks if the person is in the system and fills in some other fields and does some other backend stuff. How could you get that wrong?! 🤔
7 -
Flash has made Java programs look desirable. And anyone keeping up with me knows I despise Java and C#, despite having written C# and currently working on deciphering a Java server to create documentation.
Before I begin, I want to make this clear: IT IS TWO THOUSAND AND FUCKING EIGHTEEN. 2018. WE HAVE BETTER TECH. JAVASCRIPT HAS TAKEN OVER THIS BITCH. So, firstly, FUCK FLASH. Seriously, that shit's a security liability. If you work for a company that uses it, find a new job and then fucking quit, or go mutany and get several devs to begin a JS-based implementation that has the same functionality. There is no excuse. "I'm fired?" That's not an excuse - if there is a way to stop the madness, then fucking hit the brakes on that shit or begin job hunting. Oh, and all you PMs who are reading this and have mandated or helped someone else to mandate work on an enterprise flash program, FUCK YOU. You are part of the problem.
The reason for this outburst seems unreasonable until you realize the hell I went through today. At my University, there is a basic entry-level psychology course I'm taking. Pearson, a company I already fucking hate for some of the ethically sketchy shit they pulled with PARCC as well as overreach in publishing to the point they produce state tests here in the US - has a product called "My PsychLab" and from here on out, I'm referring to it as MPL. MPL has an issue - it is entirely fucking Flash. Homework assignments, the textbook, FUCKING EVERYTHING. So, because of that, you need to waste time finding a browser that works. Now let me remind all of you that just because something SHOULD WORK does NOT mean that it actually does.
I'm sitting on my Antergos box a few days ago: Chromium and Firefox won't load Flash. I don't know why, and don't care to find out. NPAPI and whatnot are deprecated but should still run in a limited mode or some shit. No go on Antergos.
So, today I went to the lab in the desolated basement of an old building which is where it's usually empty except a student hired by the university to make sure nobody fucks things up. I decided - because y'all know I fuckin' hate this - to try Windows. No go in Chrome still - it loaded Flash but couldn't download the content. So I tried Firefox - which worked. My hopes were up, but not too long - because there was no way to input. The window had buttons and shit - but they were COMPLETELY UNRESPONSIVE.
So the homework is also Flash-based. It's all due by 1/31/18 - FOUR CHAPTERS AND THE ACCOMPANYING HOMEWORK - which I believe is Tuesday, and the University bookstore is closed both Saturday and Sunday. No way to get a physical copy of the book. And I have other classes - this isn't the only one.
Also, the copyright on the program was 2017 - so whoever modded or maintained that Flash code - FUCK YOU AND THE IRRESPONSIBLE SHIT YOUR TEAM PULLED. FUCK THE SUPERIORS MAKING DECISIONS AS WELL. Yeah, you guys have deadlines? So do the end users, and when you have to jump through hoops only to realize you're fucked? That's a failure of management and a failure of a product.
How many people are gonna hate me for this? Haters gonna hate, and I'm past the point of caring.7 -
Users and Bosses.
I honestly don't know who is worse, the end user or the boss.
The boss thinks all you do is click a button and everything just works, so everything should take 30 minutes to complete, why on earth would it take a week to do something?
The user seems to think every tiny idea is the most important thing ever to add, so they tell said boss it must be added, and boss normally agrees.
I get it, Marge (Fake name), adding in a copy button because you're too dumb to press ctrl + c is way more important than updating the security after a Ransomware attack.
No boss, I can't add in 30 new things and make sure the security protocols are updated all before the meeting in 15 minutes.
If you think it's all so easy and just pressing buttons, why did you hire me? Anyone who can read and press a button should be able to do it....
4 -
Consumers ruined software development and we the developers have little to no chance of changing it.
Recently I read a great blog post by someone called Nikita, the blog post talks mostly about the lack of efficiency and waste of resources modern software has and even tho I agree with the sentiment I don't agree with some things.
First of all the way the author compares software engineering to mechanical, civil and aeroespacial engineering is flawed, why? Because they all directly impact the average consumer more than laggy chrome.
Do you know why car engines have reached such high efficiency numbers? Gas prices keep increasing, why is building a skyscraper better, cheaper and safer than before? Consumers want cheaper and safer buildings, why are airplanes so carefully engineered? Consumers want safer and cheaper flights.
Wanna know what the average software consumer wants? Shiny "beautiful" software that is either dirt ship or free and does what it needs to. The difference between our end product is that average consumers DON'T see the end product, they just experience the light, intuitive experience we are demanded to provide! It's not for nothing that the stereotype of "wizard" still exists, for the average folk magic and electricity makes their devices function and we are to blame, we did our jobs TOO well!
Don't get me wrong, I am about to become a software engineer and efficient, elegant, quality code is the second best eye candy next to a 21yo LA model. BUT dirt cheap software doesn't mean quality software, software developed in a hurry is not quality software and that's what douchebag bosses and consumers demand! They want it cheap, they want it shiny and they wanted it yesterday!
Just look at where the actual effort is going, devs focus on delivering half baked solutions on time just to "harden" the software later and I don't blame them, complete, quality, efficient solutions take time and effort and that costs money, money companies and users don't want to invest most of the time. Who gets to worry about efficiency and ms speed gains? Big ass companies where every second counts because it directly affects their bottom line.
People don't give a shit and it sucks but they forfeit the right to complain the moment they start screaming about the buttons not glaring when hovered upon rather than the 60sec bootup, actual efforts to make quality software are made on people's own time or time critical projects.
You put up a nice example with the python tweet snippet, you have a python script that runs everyday and takes 1.6 seconds, what if I told you I'll pay you 50 cents for you to translate it to Rust and it takes you 6 hours or better what if you do it for free?
The answer to that sort of questions is given every day when "enganeers" across the lake claim to make you an Uber app for 100 bucks in 5 days, people just don't care, we do and that's why developers often end up with the fancy stuff and creating startups from the ground up, they put in the effort and they are compensated for it.
I agree things will get better, things are getting better and we are working to make programs and systems more efficient (specially in the Open Source community or high end Tech companies) but unless consumers and university teachers change their mindset not much can be done about the regular folk.
For now my mother doesn't care if her Android phone takes too much time to turn on as long as it runs Candy Crush just fine. On my part I'll keep programming the best I can, optimizing the best I can for my own projects and others because that's just how I roll, but if I'm hungry I won't hesitate to give you the performance you pay for.
Source:
http://tonsky.me/blog/...
13 -
My ideal job:
Getting payed to develop for awesome open source projects from home, at any time I like.
My current job:
Full time 9 to 6, outsourced security sysadmin, dealing with bullshit systems and stupid end users.
Getting home with barely enough strength to self learn and develop my own projects.
Just kill me3 -
I love it when people make a mistake and break something on their website then act as tho the are losing millions of pounds every second like they are going to have to remortgage their house "life is over", if it's not fixed in 30 seconds the world will end!
Then you look at their website and you think they probably have about two users every week, and the website looks like it has been built by a one armed monkey. Delusional2 -
End User: The program isn't working
Me: What were you trying to do?
End User: blah blah blah
Me: Are you using IE?
End User: Yes, I always use IE everything should work with it.
Me: Didn't you see the email to the listserv explicitly saying not to use IE?
End User: I did, but I only like to use IE.
Me: (bangs head against desk & loses all hope)3 -
"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 -
When your manager who claims to be a Wordpress "developer" says to you oh my God, why are you using notepad to write the page when there is an editor?
My response, because I am a developer. I write code and I can write better HTML than any editor can. I then said I do add editors for my projects where required, not for me, but for the end users that cannot write HTML. He walked away 😂15 -
Today was a manic-depressive kind of day. Spent the morning helping some developers with getting their code to run a stored procedure to drop old partitions, but it wasn't working on their end. It was a fairly simple proc. But working with partitions is a little like working with an array. I figured out that they were passing the wrong timestamp, and needed to add +1 to delete the right partition. Got that sorted out, and things were good. Lunch time.
After lunch I did some busy work, and then the PO comes up at about 2PM and says he's assigned some requests to me. The first was just attaching some scripts. Easy. The second, the user wants a couple of schemas exported ... at 6PM. I've been in the office since 6:45AM.
While I'm setting up some commands to run for the data export, a BA walks up and asks if I'm filling in for another DBA who is out for a few weeks. Yep. There's a change request that hasn't been assigned, and he normally does the work. I ask when it's due. Well, the pre-implementation was supposed to be done in the morning, but it wasn't, and we're in the implementation window ... half way through. I bring up the change task, and look at. Create new schema and users. That's all it says. The BA laughs. I tell I need more to go on. 10 minutes later he sends an email with the information. There's only two hours left in the window, and I can only use half of it, because the production guys have to their stuff, and we're in their window. Now I'm irritated, because I'm new to Oracle, and it's an unforgiving mistress. Fortunately, another DBA says he'll do it, so that we can get it done in time. But can't work it either, because Dev DBAs don't have access to QA, and the process required access for this task. Gets shelved until the access issue is resolved. It's now after 4:15PM. I'm going to in traffic with that 6PM deadline.
I manage to get home and to the computer by 5:45PM. Log in. Start VPN. Box pops on screen. Java needs to update. I chose skip update. Box pops up again. It won't let me log in until Java is current. Passed.
I finally get logged in, and it's 6:10PM. I'm late getting the job started. I pull up Putty and log into the first box, and paste my pre-prepared command in the command line and hit error. Command not found. I'm tired, so it's a moment to sink in. I don't have time for this.
I log into DBArtisan and pull up the first data base, use the wizard to set the job, and off it goes. Yay. Bring up the second database, and have enter the connect info. Host not found. Wut? Examine host name. Yep, it's correct. Try a different method. Host not found. Go back to Putty. Log in. Past string. Launch. Command not found. Now my brain is quitting on me. Why now? It's after 6:30PM. Fiddle with some settings, reset $Oracle home. Try again. Yay. It works. I'm done. It's after 7PM.
There is nothing like technology to snatch the euphoria of a success away from you. It's a love-hate thing, but I wouldn't trade it for anything else. I'm done. Good night.3 -
Dear customer, disregarding the bullshit your agency has dumped into Figma, I hereby deliver a clean, minimalist, and usable website without carousel sliders, chatbots, call-to-action teasers for newsletter signup, and muted auto-play videos consuming your end users' bandwidth.
One day you will understand and be grateful, too!3 -
While I work on my devRant client, I always end up thinking, "how would dfox do it for the backend".
Some of the functions I have include:
-fetching new rants, 250 at a time
-remembering the ones I've read and filtering those out (kinda similar to Algo)
-checking for updates from followed users and new notifications
My implementions are kinda spammy though part of it is because I need to use the existing API.
But even so, how would/does he implement these so all the users' requests don't end up bringing down the server, and efficiently store and retrieve everyone's view history?
My problems are small compared to his... How do you think and deal with problems at that scale though? -
End user when criticizing a developer for 'taking long' to create something of value from scratch:
(4 hours later): "What's taking you so damn long? Are you retarded?"
Oh I don't know, maybe I have to make sure that tests in my code run well, maybe I have to evaluate everything to meet the custom satisfactions of the user for his ever-so-custom requirements and I also have to make sure I discard what they don't like? And maybe it takes time to deliver a quality product, and so on?
Or would you prefer I deliver an untested product that I didn't bother to think about and I haven't bothered to make sure it matches with their requirements?
What end users don't understand is the involvement in a quality product.2 -
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 -
more of my favorite "about" sections from various users:
Jilano
"nothing."
Humble like a monk.
kindawonderful
"This user likes to keep secrets about himself."
Aw, hes shy!
molaram
"Part time evil corporation hater & armed infidel trying to blow off some steam."
Is that you Elliot?
dmonkey
"Computer Science student and Math lover."
Your love of math is suspect. I have not seen you participate in any of my math shitposting.
And under his skills
"I was ending up becoming a front-end developer, now I'm thinking to become a farmer after uni."
The total state of frontend in 2021. "Fuck it, I'd rather shovel horse shit than learn another
framework!"
Have you tried Horseshit.JS for that?
What about shove.js?2 -
Our CEO had a virtual town hall using Zoom and now have a sign language interpreter box as a regular feature... To go along with all the Inclusion stuff...
The most immediate problem though is they didn't turn on auto-captions...
I don't know sign but am deaf so needed the captions which it turns out you can get using the Google Recorder app on Pixels. (This is literally like a fuck you to non-Pixel users and Zoom which disables Live Captions in conferences and recording full transcripts).
Anyway I left it own and near the end, a speaker was like "we're getting a lot of likes and positive feedback about the interpreter box! See how small changes make such a big difference?!"
And well of course in my mind I'm going "uh.... No."
I'll just go back to not caring about anything that isn't related to how much I make.2 -
This was a while back. I was hosting a site at a hosting company's 'vps'. I had 1gig for the mysql databases. Problem is, for some reason the server didnt let me have more than 300mbs including everything (there were some videos on the site). I contacted them and they only replied that its ok on their end. Okay, makes sense. So i opened ssh and started looking for the problem. After a bit, i figured out that my site is hosted on a 1tb drive and i could see all the other partitions. Meaning they just slapped a bunch of users data on the same drive. So i wrote an assembly program to offset the mysql files by ~500 mbs. Turns out that put me in an unoccupied 100gb partition and the site was still working properly. So i offset everything to there and i had a 100gb vps for like $5.2
-
you wanna know what the most hilarious shit is? hackernews users AKA the 6 figure startup bros that "rule the world" in terms of code and software...
trying to argue the best way to build a website 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
here's some select quotes:
"I believe the most minimalistic and productive way is to just use php"
^ this guy must not know its 2023 now
"Unless you are a web developer I don't see the point of a CSS framework, it's much easier to roll your own."
^ this guy must not know the pain and suffering that is 'rolling your own' in CSS
"Sadly, I just don't have the time to generate the content I wanted to do, so the site sits."
^ this guy just... wait, what?
but you know what? these guys clearly know WAY more than me in terms of software, it's good they get infinite salad bar and prime rib every day at silicon valley's best and brightest!
please fucking kill me i want it to end16 -
made a Facebook app once that allowed users to submit their stories for a competition to win a tablet. The HTML form had no limit on length but ORM defaulted to 1000 characters in database, imagine the sourprise when we exported the data for the client at the end...1
-
I'm hal laughting, half facepaling.
Use multiple servers they said
It's gonna balance automaticlly your load they said.
Well, they didn';t accoubnt for a MEGA badly writen API whic can block a whole server for a minute.
Or, but it's not the end !!!
So you see ? 1 at 100%, 1 at 0% ? Quick maths : Average 50%.
Autoscaling kicks in at average 40% for 2 minutes.
So it kicks in... Created a 3d server... Which is still booting !!
And some trafic redirected there.
Sooo. Users on a 100% server : Bad bad bad for them
Users on 0% server : No problems
users on a new 3d server : Wait 15 seconds, then it's like 0%.
Fun fun fun. At least I know now which fucking API does that.
7 -
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 -
So first of all I'm not a dev.
I'm a software tester and my test manager is a douche, but this is not it.
Today I went to the end user place along with him to teach them how to test properly and how to manage the software test cycle in JIRA.
I did a demo and showed the users the software the dev team developed and of course there were a lot of rants about it.
Users noted down a list of things to be changed and we kept going.
By the end of the demo, my test manager started discussing the fact that I told these guys to open Bugs without test objects on Jira.
I mean, we don't have a test cycle or test cased yet but these guys found issues already, what's the point?
So here's the funny part.
He then starts telling users (which ignore testing fundaments) to create a test cycle called 'meeting of today dd/mm/yyyy" and create tests below it which were named with the names of who created them.
All of that without a logic and ignoring the fact that these tests were not tests.
I was laughing my ass off while assisting this total mess and I almost lost control.
And this is my manager.
Luckily, tomorrow is Saturday.4 -
Back when I used be a junior fresh out of school, my senior used to say, when releasing a first version or a major version of any software, app or website always implement easy to fix bugs.
End users or clients, especially the ones that tasked you with the creation of it, will look for a bug until they find one, if it isn't one you will spent hours trying to figure it out, instead give them one.
You know how to fix it and the client is satisfied they found one.
To this day, i still do that, although mostly not even aware of it. Eg: I know that's a bug but i'll fix that when (not if, when) they complain about it.
I even find myself telling the juniors, i develop with, giving them similar if not the same advice.
And that is what experience means, skill is something they teach you in school.
Experience is what makes you a senior or a junior, not your level of skill or the amount of keywords on your Linked In profile.2 -
[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 -
Alright, who is rigging the "Top Tags" results? Where is Arch?
Arch users: we should aim to get `arch` into the devRant top tags by the end of the year
2 -
🪙 The golden age of tech is coming to an end. We currently live in a world of tech built by engineers and great minds; both Windows and Linux are great in their own ways. PCs are the peak of engineering, both desktops and laptops because of how versatile, powerful and universal they are. They serve engineers, designers and end users. You can do anything you can imagine; because the great people who built it, did it in such way that they themselves could use and enjoy it.
📱 The tech of the future will become ever more limited. The next generation of humans will use Chrome OS gladly and not even feel limited because they never experienced the freedom provided by a true personal computer device. Android OS is already getting ever closer to restricting 3rd party APK installers. Big tech will do everything they can to limit freedoms and make everyone use cloud, where they can charge $ for every damn click.
☎️The consumer-facing tech will become increasingly dumbed-down over time. The programmers and engineers will be still able to use "true" tech, but only for work. In everyday life, they will have to be content with the dumb limited tech.
And there is nothing we can do to stop it.9 -
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 -
I think the reason why git beginners have a hard time with it is because the api is a bit untuitive.
For example: if you want to "unstage" staged changes, you run git reset, and if you want to "delete" those changes from your working copy, you git checkout those files.
But then, you find out that you can do all of that if you git add . and git reset --hard.
So you're like "huh..."
And then you discover that if you end the resethard with a branch name/commit id then you also make current branch point to the commit or that branch/commit (respectively).
So you're like "huh..."
And also if you add a commit id or branch name to git checkout, you change the current branch to specified/enter detached state with HEAD pointing to that commit (respectively).
Oh and you don't use git branch to create branches, you use git checkout -b because it's a lot shorter.
So here's a rundown: git reset mutates things related to files, but also mutates things related to branches.
git checkout also mutates things related to files and mutates things related to branches too (in a diff way). Also, creates new branches.
I don't think this is intuitive. We users use the same commands for different purposes with just a different flag.
Commands shouldn't mutate different types of things. But don't composite commands (as in, "smart" commands that mutate different things) shoudln't be a flag in an existing command, it should be a single new command of its own.
Maybe if I reread the internals of git now, I'll be able to disgest the dozens of technical terms they throw at you (they are many). And in my mind, the api will cognitively fit to the explanations.
Here's another one that feels weird too.
If you want to make your changes start on top of someone else's commit, you do git rebase.
But git rebase -i can be used for that, and also to delete, modify changes or message of, reorder or combine previous commits of the current branch.
Maybe the reason why several things we do overlap with the same commands is because they internally do similar things, and while not separating those commands might make it less intuitive, it makes them more sensible? i dunno...
disclaimer: I'm not setting this opinion in stone though, and am aware that git was created by one of the most infuential programmers.6 -
Patience is not slapping a non-technical end user when they explain how easy it is going to be to make a change to an application.1
-
Saw this sent into a Discord chat today:
"Warning, look out for a Discord user by the name of "shaian" with the tag #2974. He is going around sending friend requests to random Discord users, and those who accept his friend requests will have their accounts DDoSed and their groups exposed with the members inside it becoming a victim as well. Spread the word and send this to as many discord servers as you can. If you see this user, DO NOT accept his friend request and immediately block him. Discord is currently working on it. SEND THIS TO ALL THE SERVERS YOU ARE IN. This is IMPORTANT: Do not accept a friend request from shaian#2974. He is a hacker.
Tell everyone on your friends list because if somebody on your list adds one of them, they'll be on your list too. They will figure out your personal computer's IP and address, so copy & paste this message where ever you can. He is going around sending friend requests to random discord users, and those who accept his requests will have their accounts and their IP Addresses revealed to him. Spread the word and send this to as many discord servers as you can. If you see this user, DO NOT accept his friend request and immediately block him. Saw this somewhere"
I was so angry I typed up an entire feature-length rant about it (just wanted to share my anger):
"1. Unless they have access to Discord data centres or third-party data centres storing Discord user information I doubt they can obtain the IP just by sending friend requests.
2. Judging by the wording, for example, 'copy & paste this message where ever you can' and 'Spread the word and send this to as many discord servers as you can. If you see this user, DO NOT accept his friend request and immediately block him.' this is most likely BS, prob just someone pissed off at that user and is trying to ruin their reputation etc.. Sentences equivalent to 'spread the word' are literally everywhere in this wall of text.
3. So what if you block the user? You don't even have their user ID, they can change their username and discrim if they want. Also, are you assuming they won't create any alts?
4. Accounts DDoSed? Does the creator of this wall of text even understand what that means? Wouldn't it be more likely that 'shaian' will be DDoSing your computer rather than your Discord account? How would the account even be DDoSed? Does that mean DDoSing Discord's servers themselves?
5. If 'shaian' really had access to Discord's information, they wouldn't need to send friend requests in order to 'DDoS accounts'. Why whould they need to friend you? It doesn't make sense. If they already had access to Discord user IP addresses, they won't even have to interact with the users themselves. Although you could argue that they are trolling and want to get to know the victim first or smth, that would just be inefficient and pointless. If they were DDoSing lots of users it would be a waste of time and resources.
6. The phrase 'Saw this somewhere' at the end just makes it worse. There is absolutely no proof/evidence of any kind provided, let along witnesses.
How do you expect me to believe this copypasta BS scam? This is like that 'Discord will be shutting down' scam a while back.
Why do people even believe this? Do you just blindly follow what others are doing and without thinking, copy and paste random walls of text?
Spreading this false information is pointless and harmful. It only provides benefits to whoever started this whole thing, trying to bring down whoever 'shaian' is.
I don't think people who copy & paste this sort of stuff are ready to use the internet yet.
Would you really believe everything people on the internet tell you?
You would probably say 'no'.
Then why copy & paste this? Do you have a reason?
Or is it 'just because of 'spread the word''?
I'm just sick of seeing people reposting this sort of stuff
People who send this are probably like the people who click 'Yes' to allow an app to make changes in the User Account Control window without reading the information about the publisher's certificate, or the people who click 'Agree' without actually reading the terms and conditions."8 -
Stackoverflow started 8 years ago.
Is there no hope for us "noobs" to ever see the 'k' at the end of our points?
All these 100K + users and i'm over here rejoicing in the 48 points that I was able to muster up with some effort T-T
7 -
Started off with a prototype with about 20 backend data points per hour and 10 concurrent front-end users. Total dataset in the 10,000s.
Now about 5 backend data points per second and 500 concurrent front-end users. Total dataset in excess of 20,000,000. -
So I've created this account specifically for this rant. I usually just browse anonymously.
I've recently been hired in a big company that is one of the biggest Microsoft users in the world and my essentially revolves on making it easier for our collaborators to work with SharePoint (and other ms software)
Never in my life have I hit that much of a roadblock. So for the past week I've been trying to integrate what Ms calls webparts. And to modify the default webparts Ms provides you need to their properties (or Metadata). Except here's the big problem these are NOT documented anywhere (unless I failed to find it, if you do know where it is documented please HMU), so I've found myself trying to reverse engineer the js scripts that are served with SharePoint to figure out what the webpart properties are called and what type of data they are! I've been going through endless github repos using the CSOM nuget package (it's the library everyone uses to interact with SharePoint) and I finally found out about this other library called PnP which is a wrapper around CSOM that makes it easier to use. That wrapper has a way for me to load existing page and look at the properties of existing webparts. So here I thought it was the end of my suffering and I could finally get an idea of what it should be. Turns out this method doesn't work because one of the dependencies it has has had breaking changes and they still updated it even though it breaks their code! So for the past two days I've been trying random combinations of key values with different data types and json serialization methods.
Oh and yeah I've also looked at all the http calls via the chrome network tab, the metadata is not served as an individual file but is computed by Ms servers when they're serving you their html files.
So uh yeah run from CSOM if you can..3 -
Why is it that you guys are not seeing the big picture and reading between the fucken lines... why is it that people always have to run to legislation to fix their problems .... THIS IS WHY.. the other generation accomplished so much more because when there’s a problem they came up with a solution many times better than the status quo.
Those people are few and far between now.. those folks are the innovators. You know whom I’m referring to... those people didn’t whine to create laws to fix or protect their industry from competitors.
We need to stop looking toward our government to fix our issues... especially regarding this issue.. WHY because the people in government ARE NOT TECH PEOPLE!!! THEY DONT EVEN KNOW HOW COMPUTERS WORK! for Pete’s sake folks we had a lady in there who thought the term whip the server ment to literally clean it with a rag... come-on guys, do what they did years ago you don’t like something FIX IT.. by creating something new!
There’s a reason our grandparents generation made it to the fucken moon with less technology than a calculator, BECAUSE THEY PROBLEM SOLVED!
What have we achieved in the last 5 years that is really “big”... fucken apps
Unite together build the next internet learning from the issues we’ve seen with the internet over the last 30 years.. No it won’t be quick no it won’t be easy but nothing revolutionary is easy.
It took 6 years to land a man on the moon, I think we can rebuild the network infrastructure in that time OR FAR LESS if we unite together! Without the government interference we can eliminate the ISPs from the equation and screw them over for screwing us for so long
My group is has the solution, the vision and need, to get this done be we can’t do it alone I will make the official public statement within 24 hours of the vote results...
explaining everything, the plan, the work, EVERYTHING.
We need more people.
For reference the plan can be summarized like this.. nonprofit CoOp Tier 1 ISP.. members being the end users from both sides of the equation ...
TILL THEN
Contact me here,
Or SnapChat: theqsolution
Until I release all the contact info.4 -
A couple of years ago, we decide to migrate our customer's data from one data center to another, this is the story of how it goes well.
The product was a Facebook canvas and mobile game with 200M users, that represent approximately 500Gibi of data to move stored in MySQL and Redis. The source was stored in Dallas, and the target was New York.
Because downtime is responsible for preventing users to spend their money on our "free" game, we decide to avoid it as much as possible.
In our MySQL main table (manually sharded 100 tables) , we had a modification TIMESTAMP column. We decide to use it to check if a user needs to be copied on the new database. The rest of the data consist of a savegame stored as gzipped JSON in a LONGBLOB column.
A program in Go has been developed to continuously track if a user's data needs to be copied again everytime progress has been made on its savegame. The process goes like this: First the JSON was unzipped to detect bot users with no progress that we simply drop, then data was exported in a custom binary file with fast compressed data to reduce the size of the file. Next, the exported file was copied using rsync to the new servers, and a second Go program do the import on the new MySQL instances.
The 1st loop takes 1 week to copy; the 2nd takes 1 day; a couple of hours for the 3rd, and so on. At the end, copying the latest versions of all the savegame takes roughly a couple of minutes.
On the Redis side, some data were cache that we knew can be dropped without impacting the user's experience. Others were big bunch of data and we simply SCAN each Redis instances and produces the same kind of custom binary files. The process was fast enough to launch it once during migration. It takes 15 minutes because we were able to parallelise across the 22 instances.
It takes 6 months of meticulous preparation. The D day, the process goes smoothly, but we shutdowns our service for one long hour because of a typo on a domain name.1 -
Error mesage on my 4GB ram "smart" phone, running a "smart" application.
'Oh no ! Something went wrong. Re-try'
Whatttttttt!!!
WHY DOES A "SMART" APPLICATION GIVE SUCH A STUPID ERROR MESSAGE.
IT IS MY PHONE, PLEASE PROVIDE A HELPFUL ERROR MESSAGE, WHY IS IT SO HARD.
I JUST HATE SOFTWARE THAT TREATS THE END USERS AS STUPID ANIMALS.9 -
Since my first post was a success, here's another shameless hack-- in this case, ripping a "closed" database I don't usually have access to and making a copy in MySQL for productivity purposes. That was at a former job as an IT guy at a hardware store, think Lowes/Rona.
We had an old SCO Unix server hosting Informix SQL (curious, anyone here touched iSQL?), which has terminal only forms for the users to handle data, and has keybindings that are strangely vi based (ESC does commit changes. Mindfsck for the users!). To add new price changes to our products, this results to a lengthy procedure inside a terminal form (with ascii borders!) with a few required fields, which makes this rather long. Sadly, only I and a colleague had access to price changes.
Introducing a manager who asks a price change for a brand- not a single product, but the whole product line of a brand we sell. Oh and, those price changes ends later after the weekend (twice the work, back at regular price!)
The usual process is that they send me a price change request Excel document with all the item codes along with the new prices. However, being non technical, those managers write EVERYTHING at hand, cell by cell (code, product name, cost, new price, etc), sometimes just copy pasted from a terminal window
So when the manager asked me to change all those prices, I thought "That's the last time I manually enter all of this sh!t- and so does he". Since I already have a MySQL copy of the items & actual (live) price tables, I wrote a PHP backend to provide a basic API to be consumed to a now VBA enhanced Excel sheet.
This VBA Excel sheet had additional options like calculating a new price based on user provided choices ("Lower price by x $ or x %, but stay above cost by x $ or x %"), so the user could simply write back to back every item codes and the VBA Excel sheet will fetch & display automatically all relevant infos, and calculate a new price if it's a 20% price cut for example.
So when the managers started using that VBA sheet, I had also hidden a button which simply generate all SQL inserts for the prices written in the form, including a "back to regular price" if the user specified an end date, etc.
No more manual form entry for me, no more keyboard pecking for the managers with new prices calculated for them. It was a win/win :)1 -
These ignorant comments about arch are starting to get on my nerves.
You ranted or asked help about something exclusive to windows and someone pointed out they don't have that problem in arch and now you're annoyed?
Well maybe it's for good.
Next comes a very rough analogy, but imagine if someone posts "hey guys, I did a kg of coke and feeling bad, how do I detox?"
It takes one honest asshole to be like "well what if you didn't do coke?".
Replace the coke with windows.
Windows is a (mostly) closed source operating system owned by a for profit company with a very shady legal and ethical history.
What on earth could possibly go wrong?
Oh you get bsod's?
The system takes hours to update whenever the hell it wants, forces reboot and you can't stop it?
oh you got hacked because it has thousands of vulnerabilities?
wannacry on outdated windows versions paralyzed the uk health system?
oh no one can truly scrutinize it because it's closed source?
yet you wonder why people are assholes when you mention it? This thing is fucking cancer, it's hundreds of steps backwards in terms of human progress.
and one of the causes for its widespread usage are the savage marketing tactics they practiced early on. just google that shit up.
but no, linux users are assholes out to get you.
and how do people react to these honest comments? "let's make a meme out of it. let's deligitimize linux, linux users and devs are a bunch of neckbeards, end of story, watch this video of rms eating skin off his foot on a live conference"
short minded idiots.
I'm not gonna deny the challenges or limitations linux represents for the end user.
It does take time to learn how to use it properly.
Nvidia sometimes works like shit.
Tweaking is almost universally required.
A huge amount of games, or Adobe/Office/X products are not compatible.
The docs can be very obscure sometimes (I for one hate a couple of manpages)
But you get a system that:
* Boots way faster
* Is way more stable
* Is way way way more secure.
* Is accountable, as in, no chance to being forced to get exploited by some evil marketing shit.
In other words, you're fucking free.
You can even create your own version of the system, with total control of it, even profit with it.
I'm not sure the average end user cares about this, but this is a developer forum, so I think in all honesty every developer owes open source OS' (linux, freebsd, etc) major respect for being free and not being corporate horseshit.
Doctors have a hippocratic oath? Well maybe devs should have some form of oath too, some sworn commitment that they will try to improve society.
I do have some sympathy for the people that are forced to use windows, even though they know ideally isn't the ideal moral choice.
As in, their job forces it, or they don't have time or energy to learn an alternative.
At the very least, if you don't know what you're talking about, just stfu and read.
But I don't have one bit of sympathy for the rest.
I didn't even talk about arch itself.
Holy fucking shit, these people that think arch is too complicated.
What in the actual fuck.
I know what the problem is, the arch install instructions aren't copy paste commands.
Or they medium tutorial they found is outdated.
So yeah, the majority of the dev community is either too dumb or has very strong ADD to CAREFULLY and PATIENTLY read through the instructions.
I'll be honest, I wouldn't expect a freshman to follow the arch install guide and not get confused several times.
But this is an intermediate level (not megaexpert like some retards out there imply).
Yet arch is just too much. That's like saying "omg building a small airplane is sooooo complicated". Yeah well it's a fucking aerial vehicle. It's going to be a bit tough. But it's nowhere near as difficult as building a 747.
So because some devs are too dumb and talk shit, they just set the bar too low.
Or "if you try to learn how to build a plane you'll grow an aviator neckbeard". I'll grow a fucking beard if I want too.
I'm so thankful for arch because it has a great compromise between control and ease of install and use.
When I have a fresh install I only get *just* what I fucking need, no extra bullshit, no extra programs I know nothing about or need running on boot time, and that's how I boot way faster that ubuntu (which is way faster than windows already).
Configuring nvidia optimus was a major pain in the ass? Sure was, but I got it work the way I wanted to after some time.
Upgrading is also easy as pie, so really scratching my brain here trying to understand the real difficult of using arch.22 -
- A girl asks on FB how to deal with a problem in her Windows computer: the system is asking her to introduce the serial key.
- I comment her the possibility of using Linux in case her use cases are simple enough (web, music, videos).
- First reactions are even enthusiastic, some people who had good experiences join the thread to express their delight with Linux.
- Then a guy arrives to tell us how irresponsible we are, telling a poor girl who does not even know how to introduce the serial key... to use Linux (a super complex system!)
- So I tell the guy that Windows is not simple at all, and that most of the times, people just rely o knowing someone else with higher expertise than them, who always end up paying the price of solving the problems caused by Windows, so the users don't really feel how painful is Windows compared to other systems.
- The girl, who was enthusiastic at first, and seems to be not very bright, to say the least, completely misunderstands my answer. She interprets that I'm insulting the poor guys that act as IT service for free, and calls me a "know-all/smartass" (those words are not even close to their Spanish counterpart on pushing down people who know stuff, we are experts on that there, we didn't loose an empire in the 17th century by respecting the wise ones).
This is, in part, why I stopped helping those dumbasses 18 years ago. I forbid myself to learn anything new about Windows (at user level) so I couldn't help these ungrateful and ignorant people who don't make any effort to learn anything by themselves.19 -
Me during a presentation of a website for university project. It's a simple project for our university where there is internships offer for our field, stack : php, js, css (bootstrap), and the presentation was on my computer, so on localhost.
In that projet i have implemented a back office to manage all the offers, basic CRUD functionality, and as lazy as I am, for delete confirmation i used a simple javascript alert for that.
Me during the presentation :"so here is the back-office to manage users and internships offer, and for deleting one offer you just have to click on this trash icon *click*".
Ze professor : "hold on hold on, why it's showing 'localhost' "
Me : "it's javascript alert"
Prof : "but why 'localhost' "
Me : "oh, because i'm running the website on my computer as a server"
Prof : "but why localhost, it's not professional"
Me : *god please "it's javascript alert rendered by the browser, we can't do anything about it, and for a simple application it's sufficient"
Prof : "but why it's bigger than the message, and if we host that, do we steal have that localhost"
Me to end that : "I'm sorry i made a mistake on that".
Fortunately i had a good mark on that project.
It's my first story here, and sorry for ze bad English ^^
1 -
A long long time ago ( 2007 I think ) I worked for a company that made landing sites, so basically an email campaign would go out, users would be sent to a 1 page website with a form to capture their data, ready to be spammed even more. You know how it was back then.
So I worked with a guy who we had just hired, I didn't do the hiring but his CV checked out, so I gave him one of my tasks. Now most pages were made with js and html, with a PHP backend ( called with Ajax). Now this guy didn't know PHP so I was like all good, ASP works too at the end of the day we don't judge, we do like 2 or 3 of these a day and never look at them again. So he goes of and does is thing.
3 weeks later, the customer calls up to me they still haven't received their landing page. Ok so he probably forgot to email the customer np, I tell him to double check he has emailed the customer. Another week goes by end the customer calls back, same problem. At this point I'm getting worried, because we're days away from the deadline and it was originally my task.
So I go back to the guy and I tell him I want that landing page so I can send it myself, half thinking to myself that we had a freeloader, that guy that comes in to companies for 3 weeks, doesn't work, but still cashes his pay. But no, this was much worse.
So he tells me he has finished yet. I ask him why, what's the blocker ? You had 4 weeks to tell me you were blocked and couldn't progress. And his answer was simply, because I wasn't blocked I have been working on it this whole time. So I tell him to zip his project up and email it to me. We didn't do SVN or git back then, simply wasn't worth it. So he comes back to me and says the email server is telling him attachments can't be bigger then 50mb. At this point I'm thinking he didn't properly sized the art or something, so I give him a flash drive to put it on.
When I then open the flash drive, the archive is 300mb, thinking to myself, the images weren't even that big to begin with.
So I open it up, and I don't even find any images, just a single asp page. About 500mb. When I opened that up and it finally loaded, I saw the most horrendous things ever.
The first 500 lines was just initializing empty vars. Then there was some code that created an empty form with an onChange event that submits the form. After that.. it was just non stop nested if's. No loops, no while, for, foreach, NO elseif's, just nested if's, for every possible combination of the state the form could be in. Abou 5000 of them, in a single file. To make matters worse, all the form ( and page ) layout was hardcoded in the if's. Includes inline css, base64 encoded images, nothing but as dynamic, based on the length of the form he changes the layout, added more background etc. He cut the images up for every possible size of the page and included them in the code.
I showed it to my boss, he fired the guy on the spot. I redid the work from scratch, in under 4 hours. Send it to the client. they had no ammends to make, happy as Larry. Whish I kept the code somewhere.
Morale of the story, allways do a coding test on interviews, even if small things just to sanity check.3 -
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 -
1. It's gonna be more and more specialized - to the point where we'll equal or even outdo the medical profession. Even today, you can put 100 techs/devs into a room and not find two doing the same job - that number will rise with the advent of even more new fields, languages and frameworks.
2. As most end users enjoy ignoring all security instructions, software and hardware will be locked down. This will be the disadvantage of developers, makers and hackers equally. The importance of social engineering means the platform development will focus on protecting the users from themselves, locking out legitimate tinkerers in the process.
3. With the EU getting into the backdoor game with eTLS (only 20 years after everyone else realized it's shit), informational security will reach an all-time low as criminals exploit the vulnerabilities that the standard will certainly have.
4. While good old-fashioned police work still applies to the internet, people will accept more and more mass surveillance as the voices of reason will be silenced. Devs will probably hear more and more about implementing these or joining the resistance.
5. We'll see major leaks, both as a consequence of mass-surveillance (done incompetently and thus, insecurely) and as activist retaliation.
6. As the political correctness morons continue invading our communities and projects, productivity will drop. A small group of more assertive devs will form - not pretty or presentable, but they - we - get shit done for the rest.
7. With IT becoming more and more public, pseudo-knowledge, FUD and sales bullshit will take over and, much like we're already seeing it in the financial sector, drown out any attempt of useful education. There will be a new silver-bullet, it will be useless. Like the rest. Stick to brass (as in IDS/IPS, Firewall, AV, Education), less expensive and more effective.
8. With the internet becoming a part of the real life without most people realizing it and/or acting accordingly, security issues will have more financial damages and potentially lethal consequences. We've already seen insulin pumps being hacked remotely and pacemakers' firmware being replaced without proper authentication. This will reach other areas.
9. After marijuana is legalized, dev productivity will either plummet or skyrocket. Or be entirely unaffected. Who cares, I'll roll the next one.
10. There will be new JS frameworks. The world will turn, it will rain.1 -
Backend devs (and yes, even full-stack folks) who naively dismiss the nuance of a frontend dev role have clearly never tried to do a really good job at it. Or, don't realize the fullness of the responsibilities, more like.
Frontend devs have to reconcile all the requirements (and sometimes whims) of the following people:
- End Users, obviously
- Desires of Business stakeholders
- Visual Designers
- UX (Yes, it's a different discipline from vis design)
- Fellow frontend devs
- Performance budgets
- Accessibility specialists
- Content Authors (if using a CMS)
And rarely are they ever ALL aligned. Some days, it feels less like development and more like brokering deals and compromises.5 -
I don't work for Walmart, but they almost put my job in jeopardy today. I have a console app in production that pushes Walmart orders from their marketplace into our system for fulfillment. For half a year, I have handled thousands of orders, but overnight, all customers were getting massive price cuts on products in the Walmart feed! I looked at the data and initially thought it was my error due to using a quotient instead of a product in the code. But upon closer inspection, some fool at Walmart had changed code on their end without telling my team! Broke all the things. Lucky we were able to pull a full stop before we lost disgusting amounts of money, but you would think that a big player like Wally would at least announce a breaking code change to their users. 😲😡1
-
I'm writing a devrant like site, so a kind of forum that supports live chat under every article. Login will be just username and password to stay anonymous. Email is optional for password reset. Also it won't have password requirements. Who cares if user uses insecure password. I do like the devrant avatar thing. I will use the ducky generator instead. So everyone on the site is a custom duck. K-SASS prolly never expected his generator to be used anywhere. The requirement of this site is that it scales very well. I have db calls of 0.006s, this is for persistent data only and will be used by all site instances. I expect that it can handle many clients concurrent as long I do not return more than 30 rows or so. Events get handled by a self written pubsub server.
All sounds great and development goes fine. But why is this a rant? Because the same thing as always is biting me, I can't design a site at all. I know how but I don't have any feeling for design at all making me almost incapable of building an attractive site. The only thing I can 'design' is an application in bootstrap or smth. I spend so much time one design while I don't like to do it ironically. But looks of site is almost as important as an good working site. Good working site doesn't get used if looks bad in many casee. This is since the start of my career an issue and it sucks that I appearantly can't deliver a whole site on my own meeting my standards.
My backend work is top notch tho. Btw, this application is not to be an alternative for devrant. I do not think I can attract more users than it already has and I've seen two communities disappearing once because someone decided to make a new one, took half of community with him and both communities died after short while.
End product of this project is a working project, not a live site hosted somewhere. It's pure about mixing mostly self written tech to get the best performance. Reinventing wheel on many levels. I wanted maybe to do the site in C but decided that it's way to much work for the value. I change the site so rapid since I don't have decent plan that python aiohttp is the best choice in amount of writing it yourself and fast. It's very lightweight.
More a story than a rant, sorry29 -
A message to designers and developers:
please please please stop being so touchy about your designs/software. The final work is meant to be used/enjoyed by end users, customers, clients, young people, old people, disabled people, short attention span people, irrational people, patient people etc. So if they say it's not good enough accept it go back and make it simpler (not necessarily better but simpler) and move on!!
Stop going into defence mode and start throwing your toys out the pram or giving people the silent treatment.
Sorry just been on the receiving end and boy is childish.1 -
A time I (almost) screamed at co-worker?
Too many times to keep up with.
Majority of time its code like ..
try
{
using (var connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString))
{
// data access code that does stuff
}
catch (Exception e)
{
// Various ways of dealing with the error such as ..
Console.WriteLine("Here");
ShowMessage("An error occured.");
return false;
// or do nothing.
}
}
Range of excuses
- Users can't do anything about the error, so why do or show them anything?
- I'll fix the errors later
- Handling the errors were not in the end-user specification. If you want it, you'll have to perform a cost/benefit analysis, get the changes approved by the board in writing, placed in the project priority queue ...etc..etc
- I don't know.
- Users were tired of seeing database timeout errors, deadlocks, primary key violations, etc, so I fixed the problem.
On my tip of my tongue are rages of ..
"I'm going to trade you for a donkey, and shoot the donkey!"
or
"You are about as useful as a sack full of possum heads."
I haven't cast those stones (yet). I'll eventually run across my code that looks exactly like that.1 -
Rant about IT teacher
(This happened a few months ago)
I go to highschool and in ninth grade you learn about Excel and databases in general. In the first half of the year we learned how to use excel and in the second part of the year we learned about SQL databases.
So we learned SQL and how to set up a database using LibreOffice Base. At the end of the year we had to do one final project which was setting up a database and writing some queries.
We had to do it in groups of two and we had to choose for what we wanted to make a database.
We had like 5 minutes time to discuss it in the groups and me and my friend decided to do something like GitHub, so a database with tables for all the users, repositories, etc.
Then we had to tell our teacher what we wanted to do. Others made databases for hospitals, shops, netflix, app stores. The teacher asked the other groups, they told him what they wanted to do and he wrote it down. Here is how it went down with my group:
Teacher: So what do you want to do?
Me: A database for something like GitHub
Teacher: For what?
Me: GitHub
Teacher: what?
Me (very slowly): G I T H U B
Teacher: what is github?
Me: ...
(I was very surprised that he didn't know GitHub)
Me: well, you can upload files and work on them together with other people. There are also things like branches...
Teacher: Ah ok, so a cloud service
(I was done and wanted to end the conversation)
Me: Yes... it's a cloud service...
(Me in my mind: why do i have to be here)
We named our project 'GitGud', a little bit passiv aggresive.
Yeah so apparently my IT teacher doesn't know GitHub, however he installed Ubuntu on some of the school computers so I guess that's nice
We got an A so that's good.14 -
I've just noticed something when reading the EU copyright reform. It actually all sounds pretty reasonable. Now, hear me out, I swear that this will make sense in the end.
Article 17p4 states the following:
If no authorisation [by rightholders] is granted, online content-sharing service providers shall be liable for unauthorised acts of communication to the public, including making available to the public, of copyright-protected works and other subject matter, unless the service providers demonstrate that they have:
(a) made best efforts to obtain an authorisation, and
(b) made, in accordance with high industry standards of professional diligence, best efforts to ensure the unavailability of specific works and other subject matter for which the rightholders have provided the service providers with the relevant and necessary information; and in any event
(c) acted expeditiously, upon receiving a sufficiently substantiated notice from the rightholders, to disable access to, or to remove from, their websites the
notified works or other subject matter, and made best efforts to prevent their future uploads in accordance with point (b).
Article 17p5 states the following:
In determining whether the service provider has complied with its obligations under paragraph 4, and in light of the principle of proportionality, the following elements, among others, shall be taken into account:
(a) the type, the audience and the size of the service and the type of works or other subject matter uploaded by the users of the service; and
(b) the availability of suitable and effective means and their cost for service providers.
That actually does leave a lot of room for interpretation, and not on the lawmakers' part.. rather, on the implementer's part. Say for example devRant, there's no way in hell that dfox and trogus are going to want to be tasked with upload filters. But they don't have to.
See, the law takes into account due diligence (i.e. they must give a damn), industry standards (so.. don't half-ass it), and cost considerations (so no need to spend a fortune on it). Additionally, asking for permission doesn't need to be much more than coming to an agreement with the rightsholder when they make a claim to their content. It's pretty common on YouTube mixes already, often in the description there's a disclaimer stating something like "I don't own this content. If you want part of it to be removed, get in touch at $email." Which actually seems to work really well.
So say for example, I've had this issue with someone here on devRant who copypasted a work of mine into the cancer pit called joke/meme. I mentioned it to dfox, didn't get removed. So what this law essentially states is that when I made a notice of "this here is my content, I'd like you to remove this", they're obligated to remove it. And due diligence to keep it unavailable.. maybe make a hash of it or whatever to compare against.
It also mentions that there needs to be a source to compare against, which invalidates e.g. GitHub's iBoot argument (there's no source to compare against!). If there's no source to compare against, there's no issue. That includes my work as freebooted by that devRant user. I can't prove my ownership due to me removing the original I posted on Facebook as part of a yearly cleanup.
But yeah.. content providers are responsible as they should be, it's been a huge issue on the likes of Facebook, and really needs to be fixed. Is this a doomsday scenario? After reading the law paper, honestly I don't think it is.
Have a read, I highly recommend it.
http://europarl.europa.eu/doceo/...13 -
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... -
ZNC shenanigans yesterday...
So, yesterday in the midst a massive heat wave I went ahead, booze in hand, to install myself an IRC bouncer called ZNC. All goes well, it gets its own little container, VPN connection, own user, yada yada yada.. a nice configuration system-wise.
But then comes ZNC. Installed it a few times actually, and failed a fair few times too. Apparently Chrome and Firefox block port 6697 for ZNC's web interface outright. Firefox allows you to override it manually, Chrome flat out refuses to do anything with it. Thank you for this amazing level of protection Google. I didn't notice a thing. Thank you so much for treating me like a goddamn user. You know Google, it felt a lot like those plastic nightmares in electronics, ultrasonic welding, gluing shit in (oh that reminds me of the Nexus 6P, but let's not go there).. Google, you are amazing. Best billion dollar company I've ever seen. Anyway.
So I installed ZNC, moved the client to bouncer connection to port 8080 eventually, and it somewhat worked. Though apparently ZNC in its infinite wisdom does both web interface and IRC itself on the same port. How they do it, no idea. But somehow they do.
And now comes the good part.. configuration of this complete and utter piece of shit, ZNC. So I added my Freenode username, password, yada yada yada.. turns out that ZNC in its infinite wisdom puts the password on the stdout. Reminded me a lot about my ISP sending me my password via postal mail. You know, it's one thing that your application knows the plaintext password, but it's something else entirely to openly share that you do. If anything it tells them that something is seriously wrong but fuck! You don't put passwords on the goddamn stdout!
But it doesn't end there. The default configuration it did for Freenode was a server password. Now, you can usually use 3 ways to authenticate, each with their advantages and disadvantages. These are server password, SASL and NickServ. SASL is widely regarded to be the best option and if it's supported by the IRC server, that's what everyone should use. Server password and NickServ are pretty much fallback.
So, plaintext password, default server password instead of SASL, what else.. oh, yeah. ZNC would be a server, right. Something that runs pretty much forever, 24/7. So you'd probably expect there to be a systemd unit for it... Except, nope, there isn't. The ZNC project recommends that you launch it from the crontab. Let that sink in for a moment.. the fucking crontab. For initializing services. My whole life as a sysadmin was a lie. Cron is now an init system.
Fortunately that's about all I recall to be wrong with this thing. But there's a few things that I really want to tell any greenhorn developers out there... Always look at best practices. Never take shortcuts. The right way is going to be the best way 99% of the time. That way you don't have to go back and fix it. Do your app modularly so that a fix can be done quickly and easily. Store passwords securely and if you can't, let the user know and offer alternatives. Don't put it on the stdout. Always assume that your users will go with default options when in doubt. I love tweaking but defaults should always be sane ones.
One more thing that's mostly a jab. The ZNC software is hosted on a .in domain, which would.. quite honestly.. explain a lot. Is India becoming the next Chinese manufacturers for software? Except that in India the internet access is not restricted despite their civilization perhaps not being fully ready for it yet. India, develop and develop properly. It will take a while but you'll get there. But please don't put atrocities like this into the world. Lastly, I know it's hard and I've been there with my own distribution project too. Accept feedback. It's rough, but it is valuable. Listen to the people that criticize your project.9 -
I'm writing a book that teaches everything I have learned in the past 20 years about writing small niche software and selling it.
Need some help from my fellow DevRanters.
Anyone who comments here with something constructive gets a free copy when it's done.
When I say:
"Why don't you just write your own software and sell it to end users"
What is the first thing that pops into your head?
Is it "I don't know how to advertise"
or
"that's a pipe dream"
or
"I tried starting my own business, but _______"
or
"I am doing that, i have this side project "
(how long have you spent on that side project?)
I need to know all your concerns questions fears, skepticism etc around the idea of writing your OWN software.
After 20 years I have like, so much knowledge, but it's sometimes hard to get it all out, UNLESS someone has a question or concern, then, out it comes.
So, I'm going to (hopefully) collect all the questions here ... and answer them, and it'll help me out a lot to extract this knowledge.
A lot of stuff I do without even thinking and realizing all the years it took to even know that.
What would you like to know the most?
You have the skills, you have the know how, you can probably see it in your head, so what's stopping you from making the leap?32 -
Today I answered 3 not trivial SO questions spending about 30 minutes at each of them, caring about formatting, explanation, sources, documentation, links and tests, and also paying attention at catching questions immediately after they were posted and without other answers by faster users.
End of the day: 0 points1 -
Let me begin by giving props to the KDE team for being proactive, and working to improve the ecosystem in which they exist.
https://fossbytes.com/kde-slimbook-...
With that said, I'm sitting here wondering why bigger organizations - companies with significantly more clout - can't manage to do the same thing. Canonical is so busy, fapping at the notion of competing in the mobile space (they won't though) that they've lost sight of their core audience - computer users. While they insist on trying to piss in Google's Cheerios, smaller teams are 1) pushing out better firmware and software, and 2) are now creating (seemingly) good hardware as well.
As the public face of Linux (unfortunately), Canonical and the Ubuntu team have an obligation to lead from the front. In neglecting to do so, they do a disservice to the entire Linux community. KDE, Manjaro, Arch, Mate, Debian, etc are all doing more with less, and they're offering better end products than Canonical has in the last decade.
/rant
16 -
I told you fucking moron clients doing that "little" change would be complicated and in the worst case it would end fucking up your whole spaghetti crap. A really HUGE spaghetti monster of that you aren't aware because you guys don't know a shit about coding conventions.
*Clients call me complaining about their software is broken*
-Hey, we're in serious trouble. Our users aren't being able to see the proper calculated values. Why that little change had so much side effects?
- I already told you why.
- Can you fix it asap? Our clients are complaining.
- No. Deploy an old copy of the affected modules while you give me a prudent time to refactorize that crap.
- Refactorize?
- ...
I used to work in their place, 3 years later I quit that crappy job and decided to make them my clients. I escaped from the micromanaging thing but I didn't from their ugly practices.
Anyways, I have to fix this shit asap. Money talks, at least until I can find a better client. -
A software had been developed over a decade ago. With critical design problems, it grew slower and buggier over time.
As a simple change in any area could create new bugs in other parts, gradually the developers team decided not to change the software any more, instead for fixing bugs or adding features, every time a new software should be developed which monitors the main software, and tries to change its output from outside! For example, look into the outputs and inputs, and whenever there's this number in the output considering this sequence of inputs, change the output to this instead.
As all the patchwork is done from outside, auxiliary software are very huge. They have to have parts to save and monitor inputs and outputs and algorithms to communicate with the main software and its clients.
As this architecture becomes more and more complex, company negotiates with users to convince them to change their habits a bit. Like instead of receiving an email with latest notifications, download a csv every day from a url which gives them their notifications! Because it is then easier for developers to build.
As the project grows, company hires more and more developers to work on this gigantic project. Suddenly, some day, there comes a young talented developer who realizes if the company develops the software from scratch, it could become 100 times smaller as there will be no patchwork, no monitoring of the outputs and inputs and no reverse engineering to figure out why the system behaves like this to change its behavior and finally, no arrangement with users to download weird csv files as there will be a fresh new code base using latest design patterns and a modern UI.
Managers but, are unaware of technical jargon and have no time to listen to a curious kid! They look into the list of payrolls and say, replacing something we spent millions of man hours to build, is IMPOSSIBLE! Get back to your work or find another job!
Most people decide to remain silence and therefore the madness continues with no resistance. That's why when you buy a ticket from a public transport system you see long delays and various unexpected behavior. That's why when you are waiting to receive an SMS from your bank you might end up requesting a letter by post instead!
Yet there are some rebel developers who stand and fight! They finally get expelled from the famous powerful system down to the streets. They are free to open their startups and develop their dream system. They do. But government (as the only client most of the time), would look into the budget spending and says: How can we replace an annually billion dollar project without a toy built by a bunch of kids? And the madness continues.... Boeings crash, space programs stagnate and banks take forever to process risks and react. This is our world.3 -
I'm still studying computer science/programming, I still have one year to do in order to graduate (Master). I am in a work study program so I'm working for a company half of the time, and I'm studying the other half. It is important to mention that I am the only web developer of the company
When I arrived in the company 9 months ago, I was given a Vue project which had been developed by a trainee a few weeks before my arrival and I was asked to correct a few things, it was mostly about css. Then, I was ask to add a few functionalities, nothing really hard to code, and we were supposed to test the solution in a staging environment, and if everything was ok, deploy it to prod.
However, the more I did what I was asked, the more functionalities I had to implement, until I reached a point where I had to modify the API, create new routes, etc. I'm not complaining about that, that's my job and I like it. But the solution was supposed to be ready when I arrived, it was also supposed to be tested and deployed.
The problem is, the person emitting these demands (let's call him guy X) is not from the IT service, it's a future user of the website in the admin side. The demands kept going and going and going because, according to him, the solution was not in a good enough state to be deployed, it missed too many (un)necessary features. It kept going for a few months.
The best is yet to come though : guy X was obviously a superior, and HIS superior started putting pressure on me through mails, saying the app was already supposed to be in production and he was implying that I wasn't working fast enough. Luckily, my IT supervisor was aware of what was going on and knew I obviously wasn't to blame.
In the end, the solution was eagerly deployed in production, didn't go through the staging environment and was opened to the users. Now, guy X receives complaints because none of what I did was tested (it was by me, but I wasn't going to test every single little thing because I didn't have time). Some users couldn't connect or use this or that feature and I am literally drowning in mails, all from guy X, asking me to correct things because users are blocked and it's time consuming for him to do some of the things the website was doing manually.
We are here now just because things have been done in a rush, I'm still working on it and trying to fix prod problems and it's pissing me off because we HAVE a staging environment that was supposed to prevent me from working against the clock.
On a final note, what's funny is that the code I'm modifying, the pre-existing one needs to be refactored because bits and pieces are repeated sometimes 5 times where it should have been externalized and imported from another file. But I don't know when and if I will ever be able to do that.
I could have given more context but it's 4am and I'm kinda tired, sorry if I'm not clear or anything. That's my first rant -
Time for a rant about shitstaind, suspend/hibernate, and if there's room for it at the end probably swappiness, and Windows' way of dealing with this.
So yesterday I wanted to suspend my laptop like usual, to get those goddamn fans to shut up when I'm sleeping. Shitstaind.. pinnacle of init systems.. nope, couldn't do it. Hibernation on the other hand, no problem mate! So I hibernated the laptop and resumed it just now. I'm baffled by this.
I'll oversimplify a bit here (but feel free to comment how there's more to it regardless) but basically with suspend you keep your memory active as well as some blinkenlights, and everything else goes down. Simple enough.. except ACPI and I will not get into that here, curse those foul lands of ACPI.
With hibernation you do exactly the same, but on top of that, you also resume the system after suspending it, and freeze it. While frozen, you send all the memory contents to the designated swap file/partition. Regarding the size of the swap file, it only needs to be big enough to fit the memory that's currently in use. So in a 16GB RAM system with 8GB swap, as long as your used memory is under 8GB, no problem! It will fit. After you've moved all the memory into swap, you can shut down the entire system.
Now here's the problem with how shitstaind handled this... It's blatantly obvious that hibernation is an extension of suspend (sometimes called S3, see e.g. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/...) and that therefore the hibernation shouldn't have been possible either. The pinnacle of init systems.. can't even suspend a system, yet it can hibernate it. Shitstaind sure works in mysterious ways!
On Windows people would say it's a hardware issue though, so let's talk a bit about that clusterfuck too. And I'll even give you a life hack that saves 30GB of storage on your Windows system!
Now I use Windows 7 only, next to my Linux systems. Reason for it is it's the least fucked up version of Windows in my opinion, and while it's falling apart in terms of web browsing (not that you should on an EOL system), it's good enough for le games. With that out of the way... So when you install Windows, you'll find that out of the box it uses around 40GB of storage. Fairly substantial, and only ~12GB of it is actually system data. The other 30-ish GB are used by a hibernation file (size of your RAM, in C:\hiberfil.sys) and the page file (C:\pagefile.sys, and a little less than your total RAM.. don't ask me why). Disable both of those and on a 16GB RAM system, you'll save around 30GB storage. You can thank me later.
What I find strange though is that aside from this obscene amount of consumed storage, is that the pagefile and hibernation file are handled differently. In Linux both of those are handled by the swap, and it's easy to see why. Both are enabled by the concept of virtual memory. When hibernating, the "real" memory locations are simply being changed to those within swap. And what is the pagefile? Yep.. virtual memory. It's one thing to take an obscene amount of storage, but only Windows would go the extra mile and do it twice. Must be a hardware issue as well.
Oh, and swappiness. This is a concept that many Linux users seem to misunderstand. Intuitively you'd think that the swappiness determines what percentage of memory it takes for the kernel to start swapping, but this is not true. Instead, it's a ratio of sorts that the kernel uses when determining how important the memory and swap are. Each bit of memory has a chance to be put into either depending on the likelihood of it being used soon after, and with the swappiness you're tuning this likelihood to be either in favor of memory or swap. This is why a swappiness of 60 is default most of the time, because both are roughly equally important, and swap being on disk is already taken into account. When your system is swapping only and exactly the memory that's unlikely to be used again, you know you've succeeded. And even on large memory systems, having some swap is usually not a bad idea. Although I'd definitely recommend putting it on SSD in a partition, so that there's no filesystem overhead and so that it's still sufficiently fast, even when several GB of memory are being dumped in.6 -
I begin with the optimism and the joy that I am creating something new that will improve people's lives.
I listen to the user and analyze the current process in depth.
I try to suggest additional value to the system for the users consideration. Sometimes they do not realize we can improve 10x rather than 2x.
I learn what the users goals are and what they want out of the system. We think about reports and downstream value. Sort of working from the end to the beginning (data ingests and upstream processes that will feed the system).
After the user signs off on the requirements and deliverables and I have a realistic project plan I begin to code.
It works and has worked for me every time for a long long time. -
I don't consider myself a guru in JavaScript (hell I studied theoretical chemistry), but I do hate much of the rationalization behind building a Jenga stack of libraries, frameworks, dependencies... for building everything web related.
Many of the problems I see people solving with these giant stacks could be easily solved understanding how websites work (html, css, js and how interact with each other) with no dependencies giving smaller (for end users at least) and more maintainable code (in the sense it would not require updating dependencies that may be discontinued...)
I do imagine situations where these are ideal... Since there are not absolutes and developing is very context sensitive, but man if I have js article fatigue for ridiculous scenarios.2 -
MySQL 5.5 end of life’d in 2010. In 2021 my company started an upgrade to 5.6. The outdated dependencies meant we needed 25 engineers for 2 months full-time to make the upgrade as invisible to users as possible. We still took about 90 minutes of downtime on cutover day. Not upgrading MySQL on time meant we paid way more in terms of engineering hours. The reason we call it debt, is because you pay interest when you don’t tKe care of it right away.4
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There has been a post today about the existence of too many js frameworks. Which reminds me of this awesome post https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels...
At first I thought someone was corpseposting, as it is my understanding that the js ecosystem is calming down a bit. But then I noticed that post got almost 20 upvotes. So here's my thoughts:
(I'm not sure what I'm ranting about here, as it feels kinda broad after writing it. I think it's kinda valid anyhow.)
I'm ok with someone expressing frustration with js. But complaining about progress is definitely off to me.
How is too many frameworks a bad thing?
How does the variety and creation of more modern frameworks affect negatively developers?
Does it make it hard to understand each of these new frameworks?
Well, there's no need to. Just because it has a logo and some nice badges and says it will make you happy doesn't mean you should use it.
You just stick to the big boys in the ecosystem and you'll be fine for a while.
Does it make you feel compelled to migrate the stack of every project you did?
Well, don't. If you don't like being on the bleeding edge of js, then just stick to whatever you're using, as long as it's good code.
But if a lot of companies decided to migrate to react (among others frameworks), it's because they like the upsides: the code is faster to write, easier to test and more performant.
In general, I'm more understanding/empathic with beginner js programmers.
But I have for real heard experienced devs in real life complain about having to learn new frameworks, like they hate it.
"I just want to learn a single framework and just master it throughout my life" and I think they're lowering the bar.
There's people that for real expect occupying positions for life, make money, but never learn a new framework.
We hold other practitioners to high standards (like pilots or doctors), but for some reason, some programmers feel like they're ok with what they know for life.
As if they couldn't translate all they learned with one framework to another.
Meanwhile our lives are becoming more and more intertwined with technology and demand some pretty high standards. Standards that historically have not been met, according to thousands of people screaming to their devices screens.
Even though I think the "js can be frustrating" sentiment is valid, the statement 'too many js frameworks is bad' is not.
I think a statement like 'js frameworks can go obsolete very quickly' is more appropriate.
By saying too many js frameworks is a bad thing you're
1) Making a conspiracy theory as if js devs were working in tandem to make the ecosystem hard,
But people do whatever they want. Some create packages, others star/clone/use them.
2) Making a taboo out of a normal itch, creating.
"hey you're a libdev? just stop, ok? stop"
"Are you a creative person? Do you know a way to solve a problem in an easier way than some famous package? it doesn't matter, don't you dare creating a new package."
I'm not gonna say the js world is perfect. The js world is frantic, savage, evolves aggressively.
You could say that it (accidentally) gives the middle finger to end users, but you could also say that it just sets the bar higher.
I liked writing jquery code in the past, but at the same time I didn't like adding features/fixing bugs on it. It was painful.
So I'm fine with a better framework coming along after a few years and stealing their userbase, as it happens almost universally in the programming world, the difference with js is that the cycle is faster.
Even jquery's creator embraced React.
This post explains also
https://medium.com/@chrisdaviesgeek...13 -
I overhauled an entire program, and everyone is really happy with the results. But the best part, I predicted that it would take 2 months to complete, and then I completed it in two months.
The overhaul was a beast, mind you; swimming through backend spaghetti code and having to redo the entire front end was tiresome, but I'm happy with the results.
More importantly, i'm really happy that people are no longer complaining about crashes. Our original program suffered from some really horrible crashes; some crashes that couldn't even be explained by stackoverflow. Whatever I did during the overhaul corrected for these weird errors.
Time to celebrate. Before more minor bugs are found by users. (i.e. Universe always makes a better idiot) -
Multi User, One Account, and other shit
I'm gonna rant about something as a user, and someone who makes stupid web stuff.
My bank has been updating their web banking over time and they decided that every individual on an account, should have their own login. They really want to push this on their users, I suspect specifically folks like me and my wife who share one login for the joint accounts we have at the bank together.
Why share one login, because it's the only sure fire way I know that I and my wife can see all the same shit no doubt about it.
The banks never tell you what you can see or can't with joint accounts, I doubt it is even documented on their end, but in every damn case something is hidden or different in some weird way.
Messages to the bank people? If I send it, my wife often can't. I get that for security reasons that's a thing, but it makes no sense for a joint account.
ANY difference to me breaks online banking ENTIRELY. Joint accounts are supposed to be... well one account that is the same.
Other banks we used where we had different logins for the joint account, each login actually had separate bill pay accounts per user. So if I went to bill pay and scheduled something to be paid, my wife had no idea, same if she did.
Right fucking there, banking is just broken entirely!
So no Mr. Bank, fuck you we're both logging in via the same login.
Fast forward to N00bPancakes making a thing.
So my employer has a customer (Direct Customer). Direct Customer wants a thing that makes communication with their customer (Indirect Customer) easier.
The worst thing about making something for your customer's customer is that Direct Customer always imagines that Indirect Customer is gonna be super ninja power users....
But no, that's not the case... in fact almost nobody is a power user, and absolutely nobody WANTS to be a power users.
Worse yet in my case the only reason this tool exists is because Direct Customer and Indirect Customer can't communicate well enough anyway... that should tell you something about the amount of effort Indirect Customer is willing to expend.
So with that tool, this situation constantly comes up:
Direct Customer thinks it would be great if every user from Indirect Company had some sort of custom messaging, views, and etc in of Cool Communication Tool. The reason is because that's what Direct Customer loves about Ultra Complex Primary Tool that they use ....
Then I have to fight the constant fight of:
NOBODY WANTS TO BE A POWER USER, NOBODY EVEN WANTS TO DO MUCH OF ANYTHING ON THE INTERNET THAT ISN'T SCREAMING AT OTHER PEOPLE OR POST MEMES OR WATCH SHITTY VIDEOS. THE MOMENT ANYONE AT INDIRECT COMPANY LOGS IN AND SEES ANY INFO THAT IS DIFFERENT FROM THEIR COWORKER THEY'LL SHIT THEMSELVES, FLOOD EVERYONE WITH 'OH GAWD SOME NON SPECIFIED THING IS WRONG' AND RESPOND TO EMAILS LIKE A JELLYFISH DROPPED OFF IN NEW MEXICO... AND NOTHING WILL GET DONE!!!
God damn it people.
Also side rant while I'm busy fighting the good fight to keep shit simple and etc:
People bitch about how horrible the modern web is and then bitch at web devs like we're rulers of the internet or something.... What really pisses me off about that is other devs who do that.... like bro, do you make policy at your company? You decide not to sell some info or whatever shit your company sells? Like fuck off with your 'man I miss html' because you got scared by some shitty JS error and ran back to your language of choice and just poked your head out of the the basement and got scared... and you shit on another developer about that? Fuck you.1 -
!!!rant
Most exited I've been about some code? Probably for some random "build a twitter clone with Rails" tutorial I found online.
I've been working on my CS degree for a while (theoretical CS) but I really wanted to mess with something a bit more practical. I had almost none web dev experience, since I've been programming mostly OS-related stuff till then (C). I started looking around, trying to find a stack that's easy to learn since my time was limited- I still had to finish with my degree.
I played around with many languages and frameworks for a week or two. Decided to go with Ruby/Rails and built a small twitter clone blindly following a tutorial I found online and WAS I FUCKING EXITED for my small but handmade twitter clone had come to life. Coming from a C background, Ruby was weird and felt like a toy language but I fell in love.
My excitement didn't fade. I bought some books, studied hard for about a month, learned Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, SQL (w/ pg) and some HTML/CSS. Only playing with todo apps wasn't fun. I had a project idea I believed might be somewhat successful so I started working on it.
The next few months were spent studying and working on my project. It was hard. I had no experience on any web dev technology so I had learn so many new things all at once. Picked up React, ditched it and rewrote the front end with Vue. Read about TDD, worked with PostgreSQL, Redis and a dozen third party APIs, bought a vps and deployed everything from scratch. Played it with node and some machine learning with python.
Long story short, one year and about 30 books later, my project is up and running, has about 4k active monthly users, is making a profit and is steadily growing. If everything goes well, next week I'll close a deal with a pretty big client and I CANT BE FKING HAPPIER AND MORE EXCITED :D Towards the end of the month I'll also be interviewed for a web dev position.
That stupid twitter clone tutorial made me excited enough to start messing with web technologies. Thank you stupid twitter clone tutorial, a part of my heart will be yours forever.2 -
This started as an update to my cover story for my Linked In profile, but as I got into a groove writing it, it turned into something more, but I’m not really sure what exactly. It maybe gets a little preachy towards the end so I’m not sure if I want to use it on LI but I figure it might be appreciated here:
In my IT career of nearly 20 years, I have worked on a very wide range of projects. I have worked on everything from mobile apps (both Adroid and iOS) to eCommerce to document management to CMS. I have such a broad technical background that if I am unfamiliar with any technology, there is a very good chance I can pick it up and run with it in a very short timespan.
If you think of the value that team members add to the team as a whole in mathematical terms, you have adders and you have subtractors. I am neither. I am a multiplier. I enjoy coaching, leading and architecture, but I don’t ever want to get out of the code entirely.
For the last 9 years, I have functioned as a technical team lead on a variety of highly successful and highly productive teams. As far as team leads go, I tend to be a bit more hands on. Generally, I manage to actively develop code about 25% of the time to keep my skills sharp and have a clear understanding of my team’s codebase.
Beyond that I also like to review as much of the code coming into the codebase as practical. I do this for 3 reasons. I do this because as a team lead, I am ultimately the one responsible for the quality and stability of the codebase. This also allows me to keep a finger on the pulse of the team, so that I have a better idea of who is struggling and who is outperforming. Finally, I recognize that my way may not necessarily be the best way to do something and I am perfectly willing to admit the same. I have learned just as much if not more by reviewing the work of others than having someone else review my own.
It has been said that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. This describes my relationship with software development perfectly. I have known that I would be writing software in some capacity for a living since I wrote my first “hello world” program in BASIC in the third grade.
I don’t like the term programmer because it has a sense of impersonality to it. I tolerate the title Software Developer, because it’s the industry standard. Personally, I prefer Software Craftsman to any other current vernacular for those that sling code for a living.
All too often is our work compiled into binary form, both literally and figuratively. Our users take for granted the fact that an app “just works”, without thinking about the proper use of layers of abstraction and separation of concerns, Gang of Four design patterns or why an abstract class was used instead of an interface. Take a look at any mediocre app’s review distribution in the App Store. You will inevitably see an inverse bell curve. Lot’s of 4’s and 5’s and lots of (but hopefully not as many) 1’s and not much in the middle. This leads one to believe that even given the subjective nature of a 5 star scale, users still look at things in terms of either “this app works for me” or “this one doesn’t”. It’s all still 1’s and 0’s.
Even as a contributor to many open source projects myself, I’ll be the first to admit that have never sat down and cracked open the Spring Framework to truly appreciate the work that has been poured into it. Yet, when I’m in backend mode, I’m working with Spring nearly every single day.
The moniker Software Craftsman helps to convey the fact that I put my heart and soul into every line of code that I or a member of my team write. An API contract isn’t just well designed or not. Some are better designed than others. Some are better documented than others. Despite the fact that the end result of our work is literally just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, computer science is not an exact science at all. Anyone who has ever taken 200 lines of Java code and reduced it to less than 50 lines of reactive Kotlin, anyone who has ever hit that Utopia of 100% unit test coverage in a class, or anyone who can actually read that 2-line Perl implementation of the RSA algorithm understands this simple truth. Software development is an art form. I am a Software Craftsman.
#wk171 -
Something I would like to finish :
- Learn server-side language so I can create more then front end. In my case I'm learning asp.net core.
- Finish a project called coffeeBreak. Users adds some web sites he likes to read and he reads them all in one page without opening multiple tabs.
- Finish a simple Reddit client for mobile, and make a desktop app out of it.
- Go through all the Pluralsight courses I have on my PC2 -
So I just got asked for a quote for developing an app for a client's friend. He wanted an app that requires me to build let's just say a combination of what you see on uber with the live tracking of your uber driver, seeing all cars around your location and determining the closest one (It wasn't necessarily cars) plus profiles and another app for another set of users (I can easily make this one and determine the logged in user and in turn tailor the features for that user but they wanted two). An admin portal also was included and I had to do various integrations with Google maps. In app purchases was also necessary. Logs as the app has to keep track of all activities basically. A wallet feature was also to be implemented, scheduling, rating and complains section was also something requested and finally a mini accounting system was also to be developed. I was going to do this singlehandly as a freelancer. Obviously this is a lot of work. I also gave them a timeline of about 3 months for development. Which meant I was going to be putting all my time into developing this. Front end and backend for the app and front-end and backend for the server and database architecture. I charged them $10,000 not only for the work but also because they were going to be making money off of the app. They go "wow and why does it cost so much"...Judging from their reactions I don't think they will move further with this with me because of costs...😂 I can't even begin to wonder why they think that isn't a fair price. I have learnt from previous work before that you always state a cost for which you are absolutely sure you would want to work for else you would start doing the work and once you see how little you are being paid for so much work you end up hating the work and completing it ends up being a difficult task.10
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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 -
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 -
Telling the users of my website that the only cookie being used is the cookie that says that you've read and agreed to usage of the cookie on the website.
Can this GDPR madness end now please.25 -
Hmm... Okay crazy deadlines. We hacked together a really makeshift application to handle streaming content to end users. The proof of concept was demonstrated to a partner company on a Wednesday. They said they wanted it on Saturday. Our CTO agreed. We didn't sleep.2
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Users have use cases, test cases, user manual etc documented material with them at the time of UAT.
But in the end users do only those things which they don't suppose to do..!! 😑😥1 -
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*.5
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This is my first rant, so here it goes:
Working with a functional SME who's "too busy" for end to end testing and, this is a direct quote, "I'm confident that the technical team can fix anything which inadvertanly gets broken by configuration/process changes". Then when the inevitable happens and he breaks something, he refers the irate users to my team. I really hate this guy.
Thanks for listening, fellow Ranters.1 -
I am going to rant about this here because there is nowhere else where I can "SCREAM".
My work process....
Working on a project that does not have mockups nor a plan. I am building as I go. Design, infrastructure, EVERYTHING. Because my boss is a "genius".
And the project goes like this....
1. Boss tells me to build something.
2. I tell him the functionalities and design.
3. Boss, "Figure out yourself and we will see how it goes".
4. Me, Builds something.
5. Boss does not like it and demands changes.
6. I make the changes.
7. Repeat.
1 year and a half for one project that is a simple e-commerce. Show the products, a search functionality, users sign in and can order and show their orders.
A simple page in which does not take time, but without a plan, without A FUCKING PLAN this project will go on forever.
I am losing my mind. I put on test and tell my boss to test it for bugs. He demands a meeting and tells me, "we need to add this".
OH FOR FUCKS SAKE. TEST THE SITE FOR BUGS YOU FUCKING USELESS THING. I WILL FIX THE BUGS AND THEN WE WILL TALK FOR NEW MODULES.
I am doing documentation, database infrastructure, front-end, back-end, testing (because my boss cannot do it. It took him 2 week to start testing for some things after asking him every fucking day "Did you test it", "Did you test it").
Maintaining out CRM for bugs and new modules and maintaining our company's website.4 -
The datepicker saga
Part one
So I begin work on a page where user add their details, project is late, taking ages on this page
Nearly done, just need a component to allow users to put in some date of births. Look for react components.
Avoiding that one because fuck Bootstrap.
Ah-ha, that looks good, let's give it a go.
CSS doesn't exist, oh need copy it over from npm dist. Great it applied but...
... WTF it's tiny. Thought it was a problem with my zoom. Nope found the issue in github.com and it's something to do with using REM rather than EM or something, okay someone provided a solution, rather I saw a couple of solutions, after some hacking around I got it working and pasted it in the right location and yes, it's a reasonable size now.
Only it's a bit crap because it only allows scrolling 1 month at a time. No good. Hunting through the docs reveals several options to add year and month drop downs and allow them to be scrolled. Still a bit shit as it only shows certain years, figure I'd set the start date position somewhere at the average.
Wait. The up button on the scroll doesn't even show, it's just a blank 5px button. Mouse scroll doesn't work
Fucking...
... Bailing on that.
Part 2
Okay sod it I'll just make my own three drop down select boxes, day, month and year. Easy.
At this point I take full responsibility and cannot blame any third party. And kids, take this as a lesson to plan out your code fully and make no assumptions on the simplicity of the problem.
For some reason (of which I regretted much) I decided to abstract things so much I made an array of three objects for each drop down. Containing the information to pretty much abstract away the field it was dealing with. This sort of meta programming really screwed with my head, I have lines like the following:
[...].map(optionGroup =>
optionGroup.options[
parseInt(
newState[optionGroup.momentId]
, 10)
]
)...
But I was in too deep and had to weave my way through this kind of abstract process like an intrepid explorer chopping through a rain forest with a butter knife.
So I am using React and Redux, decided it was overkill to use Redux to control each field. Only trouble is of course when the user clicks one of the fields, it doesn't make sense in redux to have one of the three fields selected. And I wanted to show the field title as the first option. So I went against good practice and used state to keep track of the fields before they are handed off to the parent/redux. What a nightmare that was.
Possibly the most challenging part was matching my indices with moment.js to get the UI working right, it was such a meta mess when it just shouldn't have taken so stupidly long.
But, I begin to see the light at the end of this tunnel, it's slowly coming together. And when it all clicks into place I sit back and actually quite enjoy my abysmal attempt at clean and easy to read code.
Part 3
Ran the generated timestamp through a converter and I get the day before, oh yeah that's great
Seems like it's dependant on the timezone??!
Nope. Deploying. Bye. I no longer care if daylight savings makes you a day younger.1 -
Amazing project I love working for and we're are the cusp of pushing out a big new update.
Suddenly Safari starts closing our SignalR web sockets the moment the page loads, and only Safari does it.
And our client has a hard on for Apple.
So it's considered a blocking change, even though Safari is only used by the client and none of our end users.1 -
The WordPress Gutenberg editor is now starting to hit unsuspecting users who havn't been following up with the preview phase. They mostly hate it, and the arrogance from the WP pricks is stunning.
My favourite quote from WP.org admin Otto: "This is the future editor in WordPress. It is happening. There's no stopping that train now. People thinking that they can somehow stop the train are people who are standing in front of a train. That never really ends well."
Yeah you little dipshit, do you know what did end FUCKING well? Not having put myself on your bloody track in the first place so that I can sit back and enjoy my popcorn! :-)13 -
I absolutely treasure the bug reports we get from users. Nothing helps bring the product closer to perfection than the informed critique of end-users.
Recently, however, this one dude is filing a new fucking report every time he encounters the same fucking bug. "X happens for operation Y on file A"
"X happens for operation Y on file B"
.
.
.
"X happens for operation Y on file Z"
Jumping Jesus Christ, man, I'm pretty sure we can identify a pattern after the first two!
I don't expect him to know about the work we do to reproduce a problem after one report but fucking hell, have some faith that we'll get the picture after two or three.
These are fully detailed bug reports too, so it's not like he's just being a troll. -
DevRant users (and my wife) are the only people that know that I have applied for 2 new jobs! I’ve already had a phone interview with each. Tomorrow I have a 2 hour in-person technical interview, and last night I completed a technical assessment/sample application for the other position!
Things are moving fast, but I don’t want to let friends and family know yet, until things get a little more certain.
It’s such a weird feeling going to work everyday knowing that my current job may be coming to an end!4 -
Got a pretty epic message yesterday:
"Hi, I just had a friend on phone and we got a rather "simple" idea for a website.
Just a user ID and a password users would pay for. Then they would get access to their videos.
We are willing to pay 350 bucks for a working version and up to 680 depending on the result at the end of the project.
Know anyone that could be interested? Or would you be?
Have a good night. "
Solid.5 -
I developed an Android app that authenticates users via HTTP. Because it's an internal use app for employees only, we are in charge of unsubscribe the users that have access to the app in case they leave the company; all we have to do is update a bit column in one DB table and that's it, nothing complicated. My manager thought it was a good idea to develop an entire "front-end" website to make this task "easier", and yes, I am the one he put in charge of doing this, even though I work in the company as an Android dev, not a web dev. Making this site would be really simple and it'd only take a few hours of effort, but I find it really stupid and a waste of time coding a whole website to achieve a goal that only takes one freaking SQL sentence and no real clients using it. I don't know if, in fact, this is a stupid and useless idea, or I'm being a dick and have no reasons to blame my manager and bitch about it.4
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JESUS FUCKING CHRIST
Working with google shit is a fucking nightmare.
WHY DO THEY HAVE TO REINVENT EVERYTHING ALL OVER AGAIN?
Javascript already have a very standardised way of handling env variables. It's called dotenv. It's simple. It's efficient. But of course google can't have it and must use their own version WITH ENV VARIABLES BEING SETTABLE ONLY THROUGH CLI. Because who would ever want some kind of end user friendliness. That's for the weak, like users of netlify.
Fuck you, google. I wish you could rot in hell.
5 -
So to test my server code that do calculations on large numbers that get above 10 digits 90% of the time.
The end users found a custom web page with basic javascript doing the calculations.
Now I get to explain why that doesn't work. -
In reply to:
https://devrant.com/rants/3957914/...
Okay, we must first establish common ground here. What do we understand about "showing"? I understand you probably mean displaying/rendering, more abstractly: "obtaining". Good, now we move on.
What's the point of a front-end? Well, in the 90's that used to be an easy answer: to share information (not even in a user-friendly way, per se). Web 2.0 comes, interaction with the website. Uh-oh, suddenly we have to start minding the user. Web 3.0 comes, ouch, now the front-end is a mini-backend. Even tougher, more leaks etc. The ARPAnet was a solution, a front-end that they had built in order to facilitate research document-sharing between universities. Later, it became the inter(national) net(work).
First there was SGML to structure the data (it's a way of making it 'pretty' in a lexicographical way) and turn it into information (which is what information is: data with added semantics) and later there was HTML to structure it even further, yet we all know that its function was not prettification, but rather structure. Later came CSS, to make it pretty. With its growing popularity, the web started to be used as a publishing device.
source:
https://w3.org/Style/CSS20/...
If we are to solely display JSON data in a pretty way, we may be limiting ourselves to the scenario of rendering pretty web pages using aesthetic languages such as CSS. We must also understand that if we are only focusing on making a website pretty with little to moderate functionality, we aren't really winning. A good website has to be a winner in all aspects, which is why frameworks came into existence, but.. lmao, let's leave that to another discussion.
Now let me recall back my college days.. front-end.. front-end.. heck, even a headset can be a front-end to a pick-order backend. We must think back to the essence, to the abstract. All other things are just implementations of it (yes, the horrendous thousands of Javascript libraries, lol).
So, my college notes say:
"Presentation layer: this is the UI.
In this layer you ask the middle tier for information, which gets that information from a database, which then goes back to middle tier, back to presentation. In the case of the headset, the operators can confirm an order is ready. This is essentially the presentation tier again: you're getting information from the middle tier and 'presenting it' as it were.
The presentation layer is in essence the question: how do I bring my application data to my end users in a platform-and solution-independent way?"
What's JSON? A way to transport data between the middle tier and the presentation tier. Is that what frontend development is? Displaying it in a pretty way? I don't think it is, because 'pretty' is an extra feature of obtaining and displaying data. Do we always have to display data in a pretty way? Not necessarily. We could write a front-end script (in NodeJS perhaps) that periodically fetches certain information from a middle-tier is serves a more functional role rather than a rendering one.
The prettification of data was a historical consequence of the popularity of the web (which is a front-end) (see second paragraph with link). Since the essence of a front-end is to obtain information from the back-end (with stress on obtaining), its presentation is not necessarily a defining characteristic of it, but rather an optional and solution-dependent aspect, a facet.4 -
Fellow iPhone users and broke bitches too cheap to get the battery replaced or buy a new phone, I have noticed that I get a lot smoother performance and a more gradual if steeper battery life with apples bullshit process slowing turned off. Now anything below 20% is a flip of a coin if the phone will turn off, but with it on it chews the top end of the battery much faster and seems to die more when idle.
PS don’t use fast chargers.5 -
Developing IoT prototype, from Linux platform, via Java servers to front-end web-ui has made me fear and praise all these JS developers.
On one hand they are the heroes of modern technology, on the other hand they are bat shit crazy sadomasochistic lunatics riding their frameworks through a sea of users complains and runtime errors1 -
I’m sooo excited when any new frontend JS framework is available. Angular, React, more recently Vue, Svelte. Bring ‘em on. I wanna try them all.
Just kidding…
As long as the tools at hand allow me to get the job done, keep clients and end users happy, I don’t give a fuck.
This meme is actually the epitome of what I hate with a lot of web developers I’ve encountered
2 -
The near future is in IOT and device programming...
In ten years most of us will have some kind of central control and more and more stuff connected to IOT, security will be even a bigger problem with all the Firmware bugs and 0-day exploits, and In 10 years IOT programmers will be like today's plumbers... You need one to make a custom build and you must pay an excessive hour salary.
My country is already getting Ready, I'm starting next month a 1-year course on automation and electronics programming paid by the government.
On the other hand, most users will use fewer computers and more tablets and phones, meaning jobs in the backend and device apps programming and less in general computer programs for the general public.
Programmers jobs will increase as general jobs decrease, as many jobs will be replaced by machines, but such machines still need to be programmed, meaning trading 10 low-level jobs for 1 or 2 programming jobs.
Unlike most job areas, self-tough and Bootcamp programmers will have a chance for a job, as experience and knowledge will be more important than a "canudo" (Portuguese expression for the paper you get at the end of a university course). And we will see an increase of Programmer jobs class, with lower paid jobs for less experienced and more well-paid jobs for engineers.
In 10 years the market will be flooded with programmers and computer engineers, as many countries are investing in computer classes in the first years of the kids, So most kids will know at least one programming language at the end of their school and more about computers than most people these days. -
best part about being a programmer. you hear people complain about all the main software solutions available for something and then you go and make your own with a roadmap driven by doing the opposite of what the others do and end up with happy users lol. love it1
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Without a doubt it has to be the internal company search engine/file finding tool @thewamz and I wrote.
The company has a wide UNC network with files scattered all over the place and they need a way to keep track of where the files get moved to (they can and do get moved). The original tool was written in Java/Tomcat and didn't use any frameworks or utilities beyond custom written ones, no orms, and the SQL was just raw strings. The program didn't take into account that files might be moved or deleted so it never removed anything from the database, it just kept adding files and never removing them.
It however never stores files itself, just links to files elsewhere on the UNC network.
It took six months to get it into what might be a stable beta or release candidate state. The user interface is good, very simple and intuitive, the whole thing was rewritten in python/django, there were issues with utf 8 (and mysql not fully supporting utf 8 in its own utf 8 mode), we added a regex search mode (which was sorely lacking), the search used to take up to fifteen minutes however we sped it up to less than a minute (worst case when a user simply puts "^$" as the regex search). It has a multi threaded design which does some checks to ensure it doesn't spawn too many threads and get stuck in constant Gil switching. Still some bugs to fix, like moving the processing of results returned by the server in a web worker so that the content widget doesn't lock up processing millions of search results and moving the back end to use asynchronous python might gain a performance boost. But on the whole I think the system is ready to replace the older system that all the users are frustrated with and constantly complain about.
However the annoying bit is... How to actually get the new system online, while I am responsible for the development of tools and their maintenance, I am not responsible for their initial deployment and that means I have no idea when (or even if) my new tool will even ever be released :/ -
Friend: "Heyyy, I want a custom IT solution. Can you make it for me?"
Me: "Okay sure."
Friend: "Heyyy I don't want the program to do it for me, I want to learn it myself."
Me: "What the fuck.. sigh."
I ended up giving them some third-party boilerplate solution and now they're happy. Peasants..1 -
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 -
I sent an e-mail to my friend containing new information about something we were discussing.
He said: "It's cumbersome for me to access my e-mail, could you take a screenshot of it to me and send it on Skype?".
I was appalled. The e-mail is full text and he wants a screenshot of text. E-mail's primary purpose is to send text content. This guy never heard of copy paste text (which is what I did)? And he works in helpdesk, which is even more ironic.3 -
This is the story of probably the least secure CMS ever, at least for the size of it's consumer base. I ran into this many years ago, before I knew anything about how websites work, and the CMS doesn't exist anymore, so I can't really investigate why everything behaved so strangely, but it was strange.
This CMS was a kind of blog platform, except only specially authorised users could view it. It also included hosting. I was helping my friend set it up, and it basically involved sending everybody who was authorized a email with a link to create an account.
The first thing my friend got complaints about was the strange password system. The website had two password boxes, with a limit of (I think) 5 characters each. So when creating a account we recomended people simply insert the first 5 characters in the first box, and the rest in the second. I can not really think of a good explanation for this system, except maybe a shitty way to make sure password are at least 5 characters? Anyway, since this website was insecure the password was emailed to you after the account was created. This is not yet the WTF part.
The CMS forced sidebar with navigation, it also showed the currently logged in users. Except for being unreadable due to a colorful background image, there where many strange behaviors. The sidebar would generally stay even when navigating to external websites. Some internal links would open a second identical sidebar right next to the third. Now, I think that the issue was the main content was in an iframe with the sidebar outside it, but I didn't know about iframe's back then.
So far, we had mostly tested on my friends computer, which was logged in as the blog administrator. At some point, we tried testing with a different account. However, the behavior of sidebars was even stranger now. Now internal links that had previously opened a second, identical sidebar opened a sidebar slightly different from the first: One where the administrator was logged in.
We expirimented somewhat, and found that by clicking links in the second sidebar, we could, with only the login of a random user, change and edit all the settings of the site. Further investigation revealed these urls had a ending like ?user=administrator2J8KZV98YT where administrator was the my friends username. We weren't sure of the exact meaning of the random digits at the end, maybe a hash of the password?
Despite my advice, my friend decided to keep using this CMS. There was also a proper way to do internal links instead of copying the address bar, and he put a warning up not to copy links to on the homepage. Only when the CMS shut down did he finally switch to a system where formatting a link wrong could give anybody admin access. -
This story happened to everyone, and i am sure that if i search, i will find dozens of similar stories, but the different here is, i tried, i really tried, in a hundred different ways to achieve my goal !
When you are stuck on a problem, let's say, that you have a program, project, website ... and need to achieve something technically weird (or hard) and need some help to save you time on experimentations. The first thing a lot of people do is : Google.com && put search dorks.
But, at a moment, google gets "dirty", you use it so often that he always think to know better then you what you are looking for.
It reminds of "Ted", the movie (for thows who know it) where they asked : "Hey ! Why does google always suggest us to look for black dicks ??"
It is exactly what happened to me, i got results who doesn't have anything to do with what i was looking for !
You can give it a try now : type "semantic web RDF to RDB"
You won't find anything, except results related to : NOSQL DBs, which is totally annoying.
Something else, i once google swift to get some updates, what results did i got ? Taylor Swift ... (musician)
I often get 2 or 3 results from google, which made me thinking that i somewhat reached the end of internet, or that people are so dumb that i will have spend hours trying to figure my solutions, but, before doing that, other solutions had to be tested.
1- TOR : Google tracks his users and uses its algos and bullshits to return results as close as possible to the user's demand (big fail ...) so how about moving to a different country ? DL TOR browser, open, setup, go to US, open google (got us version YAY !) enter my keywords, and, nothing, still nothing, more results for sure, but nothing related to what i was looking for.
2- VM
Pop a VM, launch TOR, use Hidden mode, delet all cookies and stuff (it is a new VM but who knows).
Use keywords (now in UK). Here they are !! my results !!! i finally found some decent results about my keywords !
But, i have the required knowledge to do this kind of stuff, but how about people who rely heavily on google ? they can't change country, clear everything, trick google to think you are a new user, they have almost biased and flawed results. I tried duckduckgo (i love them) but they are not that efficient.
Google says not to anything evil, but they ARE EVIL, miss guiding people, suggesting corrections who have nothing to do with the keywords, or results totally unrelated in any way to the keywords while results exist in other countries ???
Ever since, i don't pay attention to google at all, and started thinking that google's algos are manipulating people, i don't know if it is done on purpose or not, but the result is the same, people have biased results based on their country, on their tag, on their ID, and the recent keywords.
During that period i was cursing google every funcking day, and i am still doing it, too much trackers, too much manipulation, i will end-up enclosing myself in darknet.4 -
Note to self.. Check how your backup restore works before actually needing it...
Coworker got ransomware to his computer via targeted attack and managed to encrypt about 6000 files on Google Drive share... Which I have backed up. However there are a total of 100k files so total restore is not an option and with 60 users updating things can't do point in time restore either... And thanks to the backup softwares buggy cmd line interface I can't create command line script to restore the files one by one... So in the end I most likely need to restore via sluggish gui one by one...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 -
I'm currently in a bit of a predicament.
Here's the deal:
I want to separate my back-end from my front-end code a bit more (currently PHP code is mixed up with all the HTML, Javascript etc.. basically: front-end and back-end are one).
The question here is: how should I go about this?
In my current project, I have written some javascript code with jQuery that checks whether the user is logged in or not (checks for an auth token and UID to be present in the cookies).
However, this results in the page (in this case a dashboard that only logged in users should see) being visible for a moment before the user is redirected to the login page...
How could I go better about this (No, I won't use AngularJS for this)?7 -
my boss doesn't believe in AGILE-SCRUM, hence android and back end is always out of sync and I always end up having to rewrite the code in order make it compatible with the back end, even though i have to post a new binary to the app store and play store not to mention get the users to actually update the damn app. How do I get my boss to adapt SCRUM?3
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- ok so I said I had to touch little bit of nodejs. It's a messenger like chatroom. Users data and the rest are stored in mysql. Chat messages are stored in mongodb. Found a funny issue. (Funny as in annoying that you just bang your head with your head while laughing funny) one mysql query in the node app is giving different order by result when you run it. I thought it was async issue. Turn out it's not. Said query works fine when running on phpmyadmin and the likes.
- I watched end game yesterday. And I'm sad. It's an end of an era. But also hopeful for various possibilities Marvel can do for future films.
- have you ever had such a great sex that afterwards she got serious headache and had to vomit?7 -
Developer vs. user experience: it's 2024, tech is used by the masses, and still, every day, I see messages that something "failed", an "error occurred" or that I did something wrong trying to use something supposedly simple like entering a phone number or a bank account IBAN into a web form.
Worse, I remember being part of teams coding and releasing antipatterns like that, spending time in hour-long best practice discussions and still failing to deal with user "errors" in the end.
AI, the deus ex machina supposed to obsolete developers, does the exact opposite of development: fail and err, but always find some positive and polite words to gaslight its users and make them feel happy.
AI will replace developers just because it's better in being nice.6 -
I have a question, but first some background. When I got my first job, it wasn't clear cut what I would do, but I ended up doing frontend. I really liked doing frontend, so I continued doing so and I still do to this day. I even work alongside designers in a design studio, so I feel very much like a frontend developer.
Obviously, the term "frontend" these days implies someone, in some ways, writing a web, mobile or desktop app using javascript. For me, frontend is also about stuff like accessibility, design, code delivery, and understanding the end-users and the designers that may have prototyped something for you.
I have not been active in any other dev communities than this place, but it seems to me like a frontend developer is pretty much the lowest common denominator ( I guess in terms of skills). If I am right, I do not know why, which is why I'm hoping someone could explain.9 -
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 -
Why don't most products follow a minimalist approach right till the end? Most start ups start like that. But when things begin to fall apart or become better they tend to deviate. While the earlier reason is understandable (because no one likes to fail so they'll do anything to not fail), the second reason seems to me more of an organisational creation than what the users want.
From my understanding as the product becomes popular positions (managerial or product) created need to justify their presence. What do they do? So the breath of fresh air brings in a lot of garbage that may not be required and would be in deviance from the main product idea.
It is debatable that audiences would not accept such ideas that are being brought in, because hey audiences are smart. And they are. But the organisation in order to justify the original wrong decision tends to push their new features (through offers or marketing campaigns). This makes the organisation invested into a wrong direction and security of jobs of the new managers/product people. Win win situation, but lose lose for the organisation and the original product. -
A friend asked me to set up a system that allows them to see their desktop on their tv and use a remote to wirelessly control it.
Fine, so I set up a system that allows them to interact with their desktop on tv wirelessly with their phone. Once the desktop booted, all they have to do is click one single button to open the thing they need.
Guess what? They come tell me: "This is too much work". What, clicking on a single button is too much work? Now you want it to auto-load too? Right, so apparently this is better: when the users plomps their @#!* on the couch, the OS has to be already booted, the desktop has to be ready and the desired functionality has to be launched. How lazy can you be?
Users can be so lazy.. and I thought I was lazy for not wanting to debug Python to webscrape a website that asked for cookies.2 -
At my IT security job(yeah, it sucks sometimes. I want a dev job but that's another story).
Needed to help some end users use and install a toolbar and get it to download through a proxy so they can edit stupid government online forms, which only supports IE 11. Obviously it didn't work.
Wait a MOTHETFUCKING MINUTE.
It's 2017. What the fuck. Who the fuck uses fucking toolbars anymore.
How fucking retarded and out of touch with reality the government can be, when it forces its users to download a fucking toolbar(with admin priviliges!) and use fucking IE 11 just to access a basic feature of the website.
Another fucking proof that governments are cancer and we need Anarcho-capitalism ASAP.2 -
Meta, Microsoft, Google, and countless startups have been investing and growing, making devs crazy with incredible salaries, incomprehensible hiring processes, and toxic corporate culture. They tried to make masses of end users beta-test their MVP products and services, turning them into subscribers and regular customers. Then they laid off many engineers and now try to run their businesses using immature artificial intelligence instead.
AI, also known as "the one guy that can type real quick" can be very eloquent and replace some junior devs, marketeers and supporters, so it seems, but once someone has a problem that is not already documented unambiguously, then they have a real problem.2 -
How do you implement TDD in reality?
Say you have a system that is TDD ready, not too sure what that means exactly but you can go write and run any unit tests.
And for example, you need to generate a report that uses 2 database tables so:
1. Read/Query
2. Processor logic
3. Output to file
So 1 and 3 are fairly straightforward, they don't change much, just mock the inputs.
But what about #2. There's going to be a lot of functions doing calculations, grouping/merging the data. And from my experience the code gets refactored a lot. Changing requirements, optimization (first round is somewhat just make it work) so entire functions and classes maybe deleted. Even the input data may change. So with TDD wouldn't you end up writing a lot of throwaway code?
A lot of times I don't know exactly what I want or need other than I need a class that can do something like this... but then I might end up throwing the whole thing out and writing a new one one I get a clearer idea of what i or the user wants or needs.
Last week I was building a new REST API, the parameters and usage changed like 3 times. And even now the code is in feasibility/POC testing just to figure out what needs to be used. Do I need more, less parameters, what should they be. I've moved and rewritten a lot of code because "oh this way won't work, need to try this way instead"
All I start with is my boss telling me I need an API that lets users to ... (Very general requirements).10 -
I work with a few non-programmers on my team and after almost 2 full years of using our CMS one of them called me over because they were getting an error when trying to copy a hyperlink... I come over and everything looks fine, so I say "Have you right clicked on the hyperlink and clicked 'Copy Shortcut'?"... She says "Well no, I don't want a shortcut I want to copy the URL." .... ::face palm:: This is why the other countries are beating us!
-
Hey, I got this new web project, but to be honest I haven’t coded much web in a few years and I’ve heard the landscape changed a bit. You are the most up-to date web dev around here right?
-The actual term is Front End engineer, but yeah, I’m the right guy. I do web in 2016. Visualisations, music players, flying drones that play football, you name it. I just came back from JsConf and ReactConf, so I know the latest technologies to create web apps.
Cool. I need to create a page that displays the latest activity from the users, so I just need to get the data from the REST endpoint and display it in some sort of filterable table, and update it if anything changes in the server. I was thinking maybe using jQuery to fetch and display the data?
read full article at https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels...1 -
User: looking up anything in Google Help Center (support.google.com)
Google: (bunch of outdated or misleading answers)
Google: This question is locked and replying has been disabled.
To make it even worse: "Please note that this forum is run by volunteers known as Google Product Experts who are not Google employees and are merely advising on best practices and interpreting Google's policies based on their experience."
So Google uses the free work of volunteers dabbling workarounds for their bugs and misfeatures and, despite Google's reputation as a search engine, fails to present their end users helpful, up to date information.
Dear Google, why not just offer a paid version of your free service where users can actually expect quality of service? I remember the internet before Google and I can't wait for the internet after Google! Seriously!1 -
!rant, but funny
tl;dr I made something that was to protect me in case the customer doesn't pay, wanted to check if it's still there, messed up a little :D
>do an Android app project for almost 6 months
>issues with payment for it
> =.=
>firebase
>"Add new application"
>Remote Config
>add single integer variable
>back to app code
>if (integerFromFirebase != 0) navigateTo(new Fragment())
>mwahahahaha
>but they ended up paying me in the end
>huh...
>see another post on how to secure yourself if customer doesn't want to pay
>well, consider yours as more sophisticated
>hmm... wonder if they removed it
>firebaseconsole.exe
>change "enableJavaScript" (needed a legit name, so it can't be easily backtracked) to 1
>publish changes
>app still works fine
>mhhh... they removed it? really?
>can't fking believe it
>apkpure.com
>search for the app
>download apk
>unzip
>decompile dex file
>find the fragment
>can't find the code that navigates to blank fragment, but the config fetch is still there
>wtf
>look at the app
>restart it
>SHIT ITS NOT WORKING NOW XDDDDD
>changed the variable back to 0
>found out that the lambda in which I navigate to the blank fragment is in other .java file. New thing learned :v
>idk if I'm in trouble but I highly doubt it (console shows max 10 active users atm)
Was fun tho :v3 -
So I'm looking for a tutorial somewhere to manage auth with react.
I have passport local setup with jwt in express, but looking to manage users in the front-end, managing the user state app wide, logging out, protected routes etc.
I've done some searching around but I can't see anything to concrete. Any pointers or articles would be great.
I was thinking of localStorage but not sure how to go about setting that up with react.3 -
(I'm not completely sure of what I'm saying here, so don't take this too seriously)
Settling on a language to write the api for ranterix is hard.
I'm finding a lot of things about elixir to be insanely good for a stable api.
But I'm having a lot of gripes with the most important elixir web framework, phoenix.
Take a look at this piece of code from the phoenix docs:
defmodule Hello.Repo.Migrations.CreateUsers do
use Ecto.Migration
def change do
create table(:users) do
add :name, :string
add :email, :string add :bio, :string
add :number_of_pets, :integer
timestamps()
end
end
end
Jesus christ, I hate this shit.
Wtf are create, add and timestamps. Add is somehow valid inside the create, how the fuck is that considered good code? What happens if you call timestamps twice? It's all obscure "trust me, it works" code.
It appears to be written by a child.
js may have a million problems. But one thing I like about CJS (require) or ESM (import) is that there's nothing unexplained. You know where the fuck most things come from.
You default export an eatShit() function on one file and import it from another, and what do you get?
The goddamn actual eatShit function.
require is a function the same way toString is a function and it returns whatever the fuck you had exported in the target file.
Meanwhile some dynamic langs are like "oh, I'll just export only some lang construct that i expect you to specify and put that shit in fucking global of the importing file".
Js is about the fucking freedom. It won't decide for you what things will files export, you can export whatever the fuck you want, strings, functions, classes, objects or even nothing at all, thanks to module.exports object or export statement.
And in js, you can spy on anything external, for example with (...args) => debugger; fnToSpyOn(...args)
You can spoof console.log this way to see what the fuck is calling it (note: monkey patching for debugging = GOOD, for actual programming = DOGSHIT)
To be fair though, that is possible because of being a dynamic lang and elixir is kind of a hybrid typed lang, fair enough.
But here's where i drop the shit.
Phoenix takes it one step further by following the braindead ruby style of code and pretty DSLs.
I fucking hate DSLs, I fucking hate abstraction addiction.
Get this, we're not writing fucking poetry here. We're writing programs for machines for them to execute.
Machines are not humans with emotions or creativity, nor feel.
We need some level of abstraction to save time understanding source code, sure.
But there has to be a balance. Languages can be ergonomic for humans, but they also need to be ergonomic for algorithms and machines.
Some of the people that write "beautiful" "zen" code are the folks that think that everyone who doesn't push the pretty code agenda is a code elitist that doesn't want "normal" people to get into programming.
Programming is hard, man, there's no fucking way around it.
Sometimes operating system or even hardware details bleed into code.
DSLs are one easy way to make code really really easy to understand, but also make it really fucking hard to debug or to lose "programming meaning".7 -
Today is the last day of my placement.
Over the past year, I began working on small front end bugs, to becoming the sole front end developer on the project, to being full stack.
Back in July, I and the other dev on the project released the app into the wild. It now is reaching 100 users.
The app has a lot of external dependencies (10+), one of which could cripple it entirely should it cut us off (which they can do at any time, it's a free API).
I was given, effectively a week and a two days to do a complete handover/transfer of knowledge to the placement student that will be taking my place. They hadn't touched front end (like me) when starting, but also had no experience in node/js.
As of this, I can't leave feeling like I've fully completed my work, and I feel bad leaving the new guy with these clients. Undoubtedly I'll be doing some off-the-record help. -
Are emacs users really be like polishing their configs for years, for decades even? Emacs users of devrant, do you really end up with an ide that is more efficient than anything else? Is it worth it?2
-
Just wanted to add my two cents about the GDPR: while i sympathize with those that need to make their company comply (it can be really tough and complicated to both convince the guys upstairs and implementing everything) i have to say that as a simple end-user it really is an amazing acheivement in transparency and honesty :D its amazing to able to see what services really collect about you, and to have a clear way to opr out of things if need be :) the document seems very well researched from what little i read, and i think the gdpr it sends a very positive message about committing to transparency and protection of users rights to othe countrirs that are very known for very lax regulation *cough* Us *cough*.
Im interested in seeing how this whole thing pans out, best of luck to everyone out there dealing with this!1 -
Hughe amount of frustration here...when taking care of two students just at the end of their bachelor thesis plus doing a mayor system upgrade with lots of test users plus introducing a new management collaboration platform with trainings to the users...all in one month: you can't just do any of it the right way!!
-
Somebody please explain to Microsoft Win 10 team that normal usage of a computer should just work, home users don't have hours on end to spend on dealing with:
- BS sound drivers
- high CPU usage & diagnosing, log tracing from system processes
- many other crap you need to invest time constantly fixing or you don't have a useful machine
Windows 10 is a piece of shit6 -
Recently, Apple rolled out Push Notifications for PWA websites as a beta feature on iOS 16.4 devices. And let me tell you, it's a game-changer! But, when a client asked me to implement push notifications for their iOS users via web and service worker, I knew it wouldn't be a walk in the park.
Why, you ask? Well, their backend code base was written in Plain F*cking Vanilla PHP, which felt like I had time-traveled back to the 1980s! Plus, since the ios web push feature is still in its early stages, there were hardly any resources to guide me through the process of sending push notifications to Apple WebPush API using plain php.
Despite the obstacles, I managed to successfully send notifications to Mozilla and Google Chrome users. But Safari? Not so much. The client needed the task done within 24 hours, but due to delays, it ended up taking me three days to figure out the kinks. In the end, I had to refund the client, but I'm not one to give up easily.
In fact, I've created a public GitHub repo for a Quotes App in Flutter (https://github.com/GiddyNaya/...) that can send PN to iOS users via web. I'm diving down the rabbit hole to figure out how to make it work seamlessly, and I won't stop until I've cracked the code. Wish me luck!15 -
I am l̶a̶u̶g̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ crying at Gmail's confidential emails mode.
It gives end users an illusion of the ability of repudiation.
Does anybody know about Print Screen? 🤔3 -
Nothing much to ready today, keep scrolling..
I just asked you to keep scrolling, I am using this space to think out loud...
Damn you bloody rebel.. whatever..
Finally after a rough week, festivals, interviews, work stress, and pending tasks, I got a free weekend for myself to be with myself.
I managed to do bare minimum at work. My new line manager isn't quite pleased with how team and I am functioning but whatever.
On Fridays, I usually end the day early and start with personal tasks. I managed to finish some long pending activities.
Today, I was able to do a deep cleaning of digital housekeeping. Sorted some clashes with parents. manage to de-stress and relax my stiff neck muscles.
Apart from that I guess, I am all prepared to interview and get hired for a company on foreign land. I am confident that I can relocate to EU.
And for now, I am actively pursuing two of my hobbies, Music and Finances. I love managing my finances and learning more about technical aspects of audio and listening to more and more music.
I feel happier, relaxed, and calm. Having things under control is such a wonderful feeling.
And I am slowly building a framework to earn, manage, invest, and grow my finances. It's turning out really well. I have setup the base infrastructure.
For music, I have figured the fundamentals and now I will go out buy myself an DAC/AMP to build a portable rig.
This shit is so awesome and makes me happy. I am able to socialise at the end of each day so that keeps me going during the lock-down phase.
I have figured the top key and important things to do at work for my profile and I actually enjoy those.
1. Product discovery - talking to users/customers and finding their pain areas and opportunities to build the solution
2. Product vision/strategy - Dreaming on how the product would evolve and laying out a solid plan to materialise those dreams.
3. Roadmap and prioritisation - this should be self explanatory
4. Success metrics - I really want to get into data and I am getting opportunities to do so. This is super fun. This will help me analyse and show the impact of the what we are building and measuring it while making sure that LT recognises my and my teams' efforts.
I want to and I will excel these 4 keys skills of my profile and be more efficient at my job.
This will give me more time to pursue my hobbies (which will change over time and want to enjoy them the most while I am at them).
Guys, after a rough 2021, the end of the year seems promising with a lot of leaves and short vacation coming up.
Apart from all this, what is more important here is that I got the career and life clarity that I was struggling with for past few months.
For whoever has read till here, YOU ARE BLOODY AWESOME and thank you from the bottom of my heart for being there for me always.
I am grateful to be a part of this community and have awesome friends like you all who have been with me though my ups and downs since 2016.
LOVE YOU ALL :)3 -
So me and a couple of my teammates were developing a website for artists where all the things related to artists such as artworks, events, geolocation info etc. happen to live.
2 months down the line, the client comes up with another team who is supposed to develop iOS and Android apps to give the users the ability to leverage this data.
Now this team is so annoying that they want the API according to the specifications they provide. That's really weird. API should be generic, right?
But no, this doesn't end here, the PM of mobile app team comes up with a specification document for the API and what does it contain, a few endpoints which go as below:-
/home - To bring all the home screen data
/events - To bring all the event screen data. But here is a twist, on Event screen, they have defined different sections for Upcoming Events, Workshops, Talks etc. And for each event type they don't want a filtered API but just this single endpoint which will contain all event types data in their own JSON keys.
FML
:/4 -
I'm trying to improve my email setup once again and need your advice. My idea is as follows:
- 2-5 users
- 1 (sub)domain per user with a catchall
- users need to be able to also send from <any>@<subdomain>.<domain>
- costs up to 1€ per user (without domain)
- provider & server not hosted in five eyes and reasonably privacy friendly
- supports standard protocols (IMAP, SMTP)
- reliable
- does not depend on me to manage it daily/weekly
- Billing/Payment for all accounts/domains at once would be nice-to-have, but not necessary
I registered a domain with wint.global the other day and I actually managed to get this to work, but unfortunately their hosting has been very underwhelming.. the server was unreachable for a few minutes yesterday not only once, but roughly once an hour, and I'd really rather be able to actually receive (and retrieve) my mail. Also their Plesk is quite slow. To be fair for their price it's more like I pay for the domain and get the hosting for free, but I digress..
I am also considering self hosting, but realistically that means running it on a VPS and keeping at secure and patched, which I'd rather outsource to a company who can afford someone to regularly read CVEs and keep things running. I don't really want to worry about maintaining servers when I'm on holiday for example and while an unpatched game server is an acceptable risk, I'd rather keep my email server on good shape.
So in the end the question is: Which provider can fulfill my email dreams?
My research so far:
1. Tutanota doesn't offer standard protocols. I get their reasons but that also makes me depended on their service/software, which I wouldn't like. Multiple domains only on the business plans.
2.With Migadu I could easily hit their limits of incoming mails if someone signs up for too many newsletters and I can't (and don't want to) micromanage that.
3. Strato: Unclear whether I can create mails for subdomains. Also I don't like the company for multiple reasons. However I can access a domains hosted there and could try...
4. united-domains: Unclear whether I can create mails for subdomains.
5. posteo: No custom domains allowed.
I'm getting tired.. *sigh*21 -
Why does #Devrant (idk if #'s are a thing here) not have a confirm password field?
Come on... I doubt it annoys users and it saves people a lot of hassle, especially when we are logging in on multiple devices :/ I know lots of people who type their password wrong the first time and later on they can't login and get frustrated and confused then end up resetting via email.
Also why no login with Google etc~ that's kinda annoying too...3 -
TL;DR When talking about caching, is it even worth considering try and br as memory efficient as possible?
Context:
I recently chatted with a developer who wanted to improve a frameworks memory usage. It's a framework creating discord bots, providing hooks to events such as message creation. He compared it too 2 other frameworks, where is ranked last with 240mb memory usage for a bot with around 10.5k users iirc. The best framework memory wise used around 120mb, all running on the same amount of users.
So he set out to reduce the memory consumption of that framework. He alone reduced the memory usage by quite some bit. Then he wanted to try out ttl for the cache or rather cache with expirations times, adding no overhead, besides checking every interval of there are so few records that should be deleted. (Somebody in the chat called that sort of cache a meme. Would be happy , if you coukd also explain why that is so😅).
Afterwards the memory usage droped down to 100mb after a Around 3-5 minutes.
The maintainer of the package won't merge his changes, because sone of them really introduce some stuff that might be troublesome later on, such as modifying the default argument for processes, something along these lines. Haven't looked at these changes.
So I'm asking myself whether it's worth saving that much memory. Because at the end of the day, it's cache. Imo cache can be as big as it wants to be, but should stay within borders and of course return memory of needed. Otherwise there should be no problem.
But maybe I just need other people point of view to consider. The other devs reasoning was simple because "it shouldn't consume that much memory", which doesn't really help, so I'm seeking you guys out😁 -
I am thinking about working on an app using which users will be able to create a survey or a set of multiple choice or sorting in a particular order questions amongst their friends or colleagues and at the end would get a response about which option received the most votes or which is the most preferred order.
The responses will be anonymous even to the creator of the questionnaire.
Is this idea good enough to work on? -
You know what grinds my gears?
When someone complains about an issue, then bypasses it and ruins your ability to test. Sure, you can recreate it to the best of your ability, but if the issue is very specific, you're screwed (browser, data in prod, etc). -
!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 -
Relatively often the OpenLDAP server (slapd) behaves a bit strange.
While it is little bit slow (I didn't do a benchmark but Active Directory seemed to be a bit faster but has other quirks is Windows only) with a small amount of users it's fine. slapd is the reference implementation of the LDAP protocol and I didn't expect it to be much better.
Some years ago slapd migrated to a different configuration style - instead of a configuration file and a required restart after every change made, it now uses an additional database for "live" configuration which also allows the deployment of multiple servers with the same configuration (I guess this is nice for larger setups). Many documentations online do not reflect the new configuration and so using the new configuration style requires some knowledge of LDAP itself.
It is possible to revert to the old file based method but the possibility might be removed by any future version - and restarts may take a little bit longer. So I guess, don't do that?
To access the configuration over the network (only using the command line on the server to edit the configuration is sometimes a bit... annoying) an additional internal user has to be created in the configuration database (while working on the local machine as root you are authenticated over a unix domain socket). I mean, I had to creat an administration user during the installation of the service but apparently this only for the main database...
The password in the configuration can be hashed as usual - but strangely it does only accept hashes of some passwords (a hashed version of "123456" is accepted but not hashes of different password, I mean what the...?) so I have to use a single plaintext password... (secure password hashing works for normal user and normal admin accounts).
But even worse are the default logging options: By default (atleast on Debian) the log level is set to DEBUG. Additionally if slapd detects optimization opportunities it writes them to the logs - at least once per connection, if not per query. Together with an application that did alot of connections and queries (this was not intendet and got fixed later) THIS RESULTED IN 32 GB LOG FILES IN ≤ 24 HOURS! - enough to fill up the disk and to crash other services (lessons learned: add more monitoring, monitoring, and monitoring and /var/log should be an extra partition). I mean logging optimization hints is certainly nice - it runs faster now (again, I did not do any benchmarks) - but ther verbosity was way too high.
The worst parts are the error messages: When entering a query string with a syntax errors, slapd returns the error code 80 without any additional text - the documentation reveals SO MUCH BETTER meaning: "other error", THIS IS SO HELPFULL... In the end I was able to find the reason why the input was rejected but in my experience the most error messages are little bit more precise.2 -
So I was wondering what was going on with Recall. Heard it would take screenshots without permission and send to MS. No idea if that is completely true. This continues to confirm that Windows 11 is a complete shit show. As I was looking I found a discussion of copilot being forced on users. Huge threads at Microsoft support saying it is a piece of shit (and that was a one of the nicer comments). So even before Recall comes out copilot is destroying the desktop experience. Is this the end? Will this force users to Linux or Mac? I am actually in shock how incompetent Microsoft is becoming.
I run games and support clients with Windows 10. I absolutely do not ever want to run Windows 11. It just keeps getting worse and worse.7 -
I'll have to make some tough choices over the next 6 months. With my tech career beginning and my college education ramping up, time is of the essence, and the skills I develop now will be at the forefront of my future. So what does this have to do with Microsoft?
Well, the story begins in the Spring of 2016. Social Forums was about to turn a year old, Trump's campaign was ramping up, and I had just found my love for technology. With all my friends having phones, I had to get a phone and get working on development. The year before, Windows 10 was launched, and I was psyched. I found Microsoft's products to be underrated with potential. That day, I purchased a Lumia 640, upgraded it to Windows 10, and immediately began working. After another year-and-a-half gone by, I went from loving Microsoft, to defending Microsoft, to tolerating Microsoft. I could go on and on about the lousy structure, the privacy issues, the forced upgrades, the redundant developer platform, and other such issues that is leading me away from them. But if there is one thing they have proven over the years, is that the they are completely out of touch with its developers and its customers. They spent years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their semi-annual OS updates. They failed. So why did they fail? It's not that they made the wrong prediction out of chance. They legitimately don't care about feedback. It's their way or the highway. This sounds vaguely familiar. They have been spending a decade ignoring feedback from the community because they want to become just like Apple. Right now, Apple LIVES off of brand loyalty and its stable, useful ecosystem. This cannot work for Microsoft as they don't have a lot of brand loyalty. But most of all, they don't have a working ecosystem. They have Windows Insiders, which provides them with hundreds of feedback messages per day. These include suggestions, bug reports, and constructive criticism. The feedback is public. You can have several pages of the same complaint, and they still won't do anything about it. They say they have a good relationship with their community, and that this Beta program helps Windows become better for all. But in the end, we are nothing more than a glorified unpaid labor force. They fired hundreds of professional debuggers just before the Insider Program took off. We are only here to provide bug reports for free. Now that their phones, AR headsets, browser, online services, and VR headsets are failing for all these reasons, I see little reason to develop for Windows anymore. I don't just mean their UWP and App Store platforms, I mean Windows as a whole. I'm definitely not a Mac guy either. I never see myself going to Mac either, as they are really no different in terms of how they treat their Developers and PC users. If things continue down this route, I will leave the platform all together. I've always wanted to be a Systems Programmer, so I don't really need an established paid platform to be successful. Even now, I'm not certain about leaving Windows altogether but as a developer, I need to find my place. Time is of the essence in my life, and I need to find out my place in the software world. Now I think it isn't on the Windows platform like I had dreamed it would be. But where do I go?10 -
I find it really annoying I'm so bad at designing applications, I always have to resort to CSS frameworks as when I try to design applications it looks awful and inconsistent. And also as I'm in secondary school still (high school) when I'm making stuff I have to work on front end as I'm the only person making it and normal users don't like using the terminal. The usage of some CSS frameworks, like bootstrap, is sometimes frowned upon.3
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Working on a project for myself and to put in my portfolio. Talking about it with a (non coding) co-worker and discussing where I am in the project as I've been really excited about my progress since I'm working from scratches with no frameworks for the back-end(the only side I've worked on so far). I was talking about the registration page and getting ideas as to what I should let users put on their profiles and she chimes in, "This would actually be better as a mobile app. That would be much easier to use." Well yeah, probably, but I'm a web developer, not a mobile app developer. Plus making it a web app means users will be able to utilize it through any medium rather than just their mobile phone. I can (probably) make it responsive enough that users don't mind it being a web page rather than an app.
I'm still learning, I know PHP, Python and a little JavaScript, not really enough to build a mobile app. Yeah I'd love to make this an app, but then I gotta support multiple products across several hundred different devices in multiple languages and I'm just not ready for that. Let's get the back end finished and we can go from there.1 -
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." -
This article about the types of legacy code bases you will have to deal with just made my day!
Not only do I have every one it describes but somehow it even made me laugh at thought of each of the std riddled petri dishes of code that I reluctantly maintain... My "Happy Place" is a folder dedicated to reliquary projects I like to look at when I feel sad to lift my spirits and restore hope that one day things will be better.
Do you have any definitions to add or know where to find more? I'm hooked.
Link: https://medium.com/@dylanbeattie/...
Excerpt:
The Reliquary
The reliquary is that one repository full of really good ideas. Clean code. Brilliant algorithms. The OpenID implementation that you optimised until it shone. Classes so beautifully designed and perfectly documented that they’d make a senior architect weep.
You remember the big rewrite? The project that was going to fix everything, only you never worked out how to actually launch the thing, or get any revenue from it? The reliquary is where you’ve preserved it, pickled in revision control like a fabulous museum specimen. A treasury of good code and good ideas; maybe even an entire codebase that was “a couple of weeks” away from shipping before somebody finally looked at the number of critical features the team had somehow forgotten to include and discovered — to everybody’s surprise — that validated XHTML, normalised data models and 95% test coverage are not actually features any of your end users cared about.
Like Buran or the Spruce Goose, the surviving artefacts stand as a testament to the quality of your engineering… and a poignant reminder of just how much fun engineers can have building high-quality stuff that nobody actually wants to use. -
Stupid moderators in some server tells users to "stop adding oil to the flame" but isnt they're not even helping to mute/ban him/her. The best logic is that at the end of the day whether I argue or not, Im still at fault.
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Why in the hell does everyone have to have a different fucking CMS and why do they all make it so goddamn difficult to put a simple javascript in the head?
it's 2016 fuckers, sometimes the end user hires a dev to do things and I can't do shit in your fucking site-builder. I want to add a tiny javascript specifically for fb pixel, but frankly this is how most analytics work and it shouldn't be a complicated task for someone to perform if you built a halfway functional fucking CMS.
One simple function is all it would take to let users put a little bit of js in the head, fuck you could even name it something scary to keep idiots away or hide it behind a developers options in the settings or something that would allow someone with the IQ of a dolphin or higher to install some goddamn tracking code on the fucking shitstorm of a site your "builder" came up with.
your SEO practices suck too, but that's a rant for another time2 -
Last weekend I started a project with a Angular front end and a WordPress backend.
The front end is for me so I can do the work faster. The backend is for the client that is slow at learning new technology. It's easiest to keep her WordPress setup
It's been a lot of fun setting up the jwt authentication but creating users has been a pain. I'm determined to work through it though.
Has anyone here else tried this? Any tips?4 -
Being a webdev has ruined my ability to use any website/online service. Does this happen to anyone else? I invariably end up sending the developer a stack of feature requests and suggestions as I'm sat there thinking "I could do this better!"
Ofc in truth I may be able to do that one part better (usually bits around making the experience as simple and fluid as possible for users), but I wouldn't be able to do other parts half as well. I wonder if I built services like that I would have some annoying git emailing me with all the things they think I've missed... ;-)1 -
!Rant
New to the whole front end world so pardon me for such a question.
I have a huge set of data about 5-10k records flowing in which needs to be displayed in a tabular form with sorting, filtering, selection addition and deletion.
Is it wise to sort and filter in the front end? Or make multiple calls to backend and perform the operations there?
If in front end what is the best way to perform these operations?
The application is going to be loaded on a screen and left there for users to view. So even local storage could be am option.
Using polymer for frontend so any special tool for this in polymer?3 -
Why are end users so braindead? "omg I deleted the whole db" turns out they wanted to delete one entry but pressed the wrong delete button.
Especially older people who are braindead. Same with self service systems that braindead people have problems using because they are not "user friendly" (read: n00bed down so a 1 year child can use it)7 -
Ya'll on Signal yet? Now that they are on the rise, they'll need funds and a revenue model. You can't depend on donations unless you're Wikimedia. I don't really see how would they scale up both in terms of manpower and number of users. What's the guarantee that Signal won't end up like it's counterpart WhatsApp?7
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How unprofessional is it when a professional car tow:er don't understand he needs to put the car in tow mode? (If you look on some tesla review videos, the "Tow mode" button is on the same screen as the neutral button)
https://youtu.be/qoOBWK6TEUc
He said: "Its too much computish, bananas" and had to call the Tesla support line.
LOL like a programmer that don't know any programming language. -
Not a rant, but seeking advice...
Should I abandon 2 years' worth of work on migrating a personal project from SQL (M$) to a Graph database, and just stick to SQL? And only consider migrating when/if I need graph capabilities?
The project is a small social media platform. Has around ~50 monthly active users.
Why I started the migration in the first place:
• When researching databases, I read that for social media, graph is more suitable. It was, at least in terms of query structure. It was more natural, there were no "joins", and queries were much simpler than their SQL counterparts.
• In case the project got big, I didn't want to have to panic-deal with database issues that come with growth. I had some indexing issues with MSSQL, and it got me worried that at 50MAU I'm having these issues, what would happen if I get more?
• It's a personal project, and the Gremlin language and graph databases looked cool and I was motivated to learn something new.
----
Why I'm considering aborting the migration:
• It's taking too damn long. I'm unable to work on other features because this migration is taking up all my free time. Sunk cost fallacy is hitting me hard with this one.
• In local testing within docker, it's extremely slow. I tried various graph engines (janusgraph, official tinkerpop, orientdb), and the fastest one takes 4-6minutes to complete my server tests. SQL finishes the same tests in under 2 minutes, same docker environment. I also tried running my tests on a remote server (AWS neptune) and it was just as slow. Maybe my queries are bad, but can I afford to spend even more time fine tuning all queries?
• I now realise that "graph = no scalability issues" was naïve of me, and 100% wishful thinking. Scalability issues don't care what database I use, but about how well tuned and configured the whole system is.
• I really want to move on. My tech stack is falling behind and becoming outdated. I'm unable to maintain dependencies.
• I'm worried about losing those 50 MAU because they're essential to gaining traction once I release the platform. I keep telling them about the migration but at some point (2 years later) they're going to get bored I feel.
I guess partially it's a rant because I feel like I shouldn't stop now having spent 2 years on this, but at the same time I feel like I'm heading towards a dead end.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading:)10 -
Fucking taiga wasting my day.
Client asked to set up a private taiga (taiga.io, some open source Jira alternative).
All goes fine and dandy until you need to link domain user creation to taiga user creation.
Seems I have to choose between having public registration (allows to programmatically create users, but also randoms to sign up) or use their private registry API that asks for a fucking token that is supposed to be returned from their membership/invitation API, that, guess what, doesn't return any bloody token. You can only get the token on the Django admin control panel.
Guess I'll have to end setting up LDAP or integrating with their existing gitlab, but this gig is already starting to smell, and we are close to the weekend 😡1 -
Visualize the entire complexity of the content within the project so that you know what data users will need to access, and compartmentalize those in to separate modules that you can build on over time. Think about any limitations with accessing that data (does the user have that role, what if the data is accessed simulateously, how to handle the same user accessing from different devices etc).
Think about the devices being used - is it going to be a website, an app, both? How best then to access the data? Direct access to a database, or an API system?
Then think about the front-end design and how to simplify the view right down as much as you can. Again, break it down in to modules.
Then decide on the technology you want to use, and what libraries would help simplify things.
These days I like to use JSON API's to access DB content because app and web technologies change quite often but the API will be accessible to whatever I use to build it.
For websites I love using Laravel, which simplifies the back-end tasks, and mdbootstrap which simplifies the front-end tasks and looks "appy". -
Vivaldi browser is shit.
Simple isntructions on how to make most shitty browser ever:
1. Force users to use "really-fucking-long" password that will not match to any of their existing ones.
2. Invent some useless stupid "encryption password" (why does any normal browser work fine without that shit) and most ridiculous - automatically set it to be the same as the main password.
3. Of course you forget the pass you set because you dont remember what symbol you added 5 times in the end of your normal pass to fit their stupid rules.
4. You have to reset it
5. "Encryption password" does not reset with it, so you still dont remember it
6. Sync is not working!
7. If you think this is shitty enought, you are not right - they went futher. To reset that fucking "encryption password" you have to... ERASE ALL YOUR CLOUD DATA.
Fucking retarded piece of shit - never, never trust those morons who made this shit browser to sync any of your sensitive information.17 -
Just finished connecting my task manager (to-do list basically)using(angularjs,php)to my back end(it used localstorage previously now uses php and MySQL) now I can login ,register new users,create new tasks, set as priority.
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QA (Quality Assurance) software testing https://aimprosoft.com/services/... is a process of verifying and validating software products to ensure that they meet certain standards of quality. This process involves testing software applications for defects, bugs, and errors to ensure that they function as intended and meet the needs of end-users.
There are different types of QA software testing, including:
Functional Testing: This type of testing involves checking the functionality of the software to ensure that it performs as intended.
Performance Testing: This type of testing involves checking the performance of the software under various conditions to ensure that it meets performance requirements.
Security Testing: This type of testing involves checking the security of the software to ensure that it is free from vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers.
Usability Testing: This type of testing involves checking the user interface and user experience of the software to ensure that it is easy to use and meets the needs of end-users.
Compatibility Testing: This type of testing involves checking the compatibility of the software with different devices, operating systems, and browsers to ensure that it works as intended on different platforms.
Overall, QA software testing is an essential part of the software development process, as it helps to ensure that the software is of high quality and meets the needs of end-users.2 -
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 -
In the dynamic realm of software development, where the user interface meets the complex machinery behind the scenes, Back-End Expertise https://sombrainc.com/expertise/... emerges as the unsung hero. As businesses increasingly rely on digital platforms to connect, engage, and transact with their audience, the prowess of back-end development becomes paramount.
At its core, Back-End Expertise refers to the specialized knowledge and skills required to architect, build, and maintain the server-side of applications. While the front end dazzles users with intuitive interfaces and captivating designs, the back end silently weaves the intricate tapestry that ensures seamless functionality, robust security, and optimal performance.
The Back-End Symphony: Orchestrating Digital Harmony
Imagine a symphony where each instrument plays its part to perfection, creating a harmonious melody. Similarly, in the world of software, the back end orchestrates a symphony of databases, servers, and frameworks, ensuring that data flows smoothly, operations execute seamlessly, and applications respond promptly to user commands.
Back-End Experts are the virtuosos who write the code that makes applications tick. They delve into the intricacies of databases, crafting queries that retrieve and store data efficiently. They architect server-side logic, meticulously designing algorithms that power functionalities ranging from user authentication to complex business processes.
Security as the Forte: Safeguarding the Digital Fortress
In an era where data breaches loom as potential threats, Back-End Expertise becomes a formidable fortress. These experts implement robust security measures, safeguarding sensitive information and ensuring the integrity of digital ecosystems. Encryption, authentication protocols, and secure API integrations are the tools of their trade as they create digital bastions against cyber threats.
Optimizing Performance: The Need for Speed
User experience hinges on speed, and Back-End Experts understand the importance of optimizing performance. Through efficient coding practices, load balancing, and server-side optimizations, they strive to minimize latency and ensure that applications respond swiftly, even under heavy user loads.
Future Trends: Back-End Evolution
As technology evolves, so does the landscape of back-end development. Cloud computing, serverless architectures, and microservices are shaping the future of back-end expertise. Back-End Experts must adapt to these trends, embracing new tools and methodologies to stay at the forefront of innovation.
In conclusion, Back-End Expertise is the backbone of digital experiences. While users interact with the front end, the magic unfolds behind the scenes, where Back-End Experts craft the architecture that defines the reliability, security, and performance of applications. Their alchemy transforms lines of code into seamless digital experiences, leaving an indelible mark on the ever-evolving landscape of software development.1 -
Obviously the top item on the table is NN, the "end users" from both sides of the connection on the net are for the saving it, and the middlemen that only own the "cables" want it to be repealed.
We have the solution to end this issue forever. It wont be easy, nor will it be fast.. unless certain "entities" team with us in secrecy. (There's a reason why certain "entities" have stayed silent regarding NN, due to agreements to not get involved due to the risk of backlash. AND if NN is repealed Those Entities cannot fix the problem as their hands are tied to continue to provide content to the end users.) Read between the lines you will understand it will all make sense later.
I will make The Official Public Statement within 24 hours of the FCC Vote. That statement will be how to get involved, help, get us jump started in your area, funding, the ENTIRE details of the plan, goals, and timeline. AS WELL as how to contact us. This will take time and we are not a magic solution that will fix the problem overnight.
We are however THE solution to the underlying problem with ISPs of today. We have been researching for quite a while and digging deep into the entities that have caused us to get where we are now. The further you go digging into 'THEM' the more pissed off you become as you truly realize whats going on and has been on among the ISPs its MUCH deeper than you are being told.
OUR solution will remove all of "them" from the equation completely as well as being faster, and cheaper than the Tier 1 as you wont be paying for the connection or speed, you would be paying for the hardware/overhead cost. AND we will be bringing you closer to the content providers than EVER before.
AND we will be the only solution capable for competing in the current Tier1 Monopoly zones, I promise you they cannot match our plan's price, IF they did it would be only as a loss leader and NOT a sustainable long term solution for those competing with us at are for-profit....
In order for our solution to work, and to keep the internet service non-bias, well non-bias from OUR members :) this will need to be a collective effort, focused one clearly defined vision. WE WILL AND WE MUST ALL set "profits" aside on this as profits in selling nothing other "connection" to the internet has gotten us in the mess we are in now. AND YES we realize profits help maintain and upgrade the infrastructure, BUT that isn't true in this case...Overhead from our view includes those anticipated costs.
Smaller ISPs will need to make a decision, give up profits, become one with us, and be apart of the mission OR they will be left to suffer at the mercy of the ISPs above them setting the cost of bandwidth eventually leading to their demise.
This will happen because we wont be bound by the T1s .... WE would be the "Tier 0" that doesn't exist ;)
This sounds crazy, impossible, BUT its not, it will work WILL happen, regardless of the FCC's vote. as if the FCC choices to keep NN, its only a matter of time till the big lawyers of the ISPs find some loophole, or lobby enough to bring us back to this.
Legistlation is NOT the solution its just a band-aid fix as the cancer continues to grow within.
PLEASE understand that
Until the vote is made, and we release what we are doing, stay put, hang in, it will all be explained later, we are the only true solution.
BIG-ISPs WILL REGRET WHAT THEY HAVE DONE!
What needs to be understood by all is with net neutrality inplace the ability to compete aginst the Tier 1s directly over customers and reinvent the internet to lower or remove costs completely, increase speeds AND expand to underserved/unserved communities ITS NOT POSSIBLE WITH NN
NN REPEAL is the only way to the fixing the problem for good... yes the For profit BIG ISPs will benefit but not forever.. as repealing it opens the doors for outside the box big picture innovators to come in and offer something different, the big ISPs have clearly over looked this small detail being the possibility of a “NonProfit CoOp TIER 1 ISP” entering into the game thru end users and businesses working together as one entity to defeat them... THE FOR PROFIT ISPs over looked this because they are blinded by the profit potential of NN Repeal, never did they consider our option as a possible outcome because no one has attempted it....
We will unite as one
Be the first to know! -stay updated
SnapChat: theqsolution -
Telling the customer it's not a system problem but their end users network problem over and over with proof and still making a fuss over it. What the hell do I do next?1
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me vs my job at mnc laggard part 9/n . previous @ https://devrant.com/rants/6602068/...
====
I think i have now realised why working at corporate MNC sucks: they are reluctant to make a good product for their end users.
- they first come up with feature without a proper planning and research.
- then they are in a rush to release it to live audience by ignoring the possible issues that could arise
- when they see it fail, they are like, okay with that and blame it as a failed experiment
- instead of removing/disabling it, they are okay to keep it remain alive in the app, even if it causes customer inconveneience.
- meanwhile, they put false reports for their higher managers as a success and when an enhancement/modification comes for that feature from the higher up, they again start the loop by pushing a new feature without proper planning and a rush
as a dev, it fuckin kills me. I joined in the middle of one of these ugly loops. The app has a camera feature where the camera will generate voices to take pictures and record video , like "goto next car view" , "close the bonnet and focus", etc while the user follows instructions.
the ticket for me was to just add a flash button to this camera. But the more i dive into it, the more i hate it:
- the existing camera implementation provides api for toggling a camera flash, but when i attached it with a ui button, it would not work
- the existing implementation will send images /videos as direct payload data, resulting in generating very large payload curls . our app has a curl logger and it starts crashing.
- the existing implementation also crashes at uploading videos.
So where does it trouble me?well, I have a ticket to add just a fucking button, but i will have to replace the whole camera module and start from scratch. also the crash causing loggers will need some workarounds, otherwise i could not check the apis. and my manager will be like "why are you taking so long to add a flashlight?" and i would be like "coz i wanna put this flashlight up your -2
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